Thinking Errors and the Coronavirus
Martin Cohen
“The end of everything we call life is at hand and cannot be evaded”
H. G. Wells (1946)
The coronavirus doesn’t just make individual people ill – it threatens the whole of society too. Measures used to control the virus destroy people’s livelihoods, trample basic freedoms and, if prolonged, could eventually bring about wholesale societal collapse.
However, thus far, talk about the virus has been focused on the medical and epidemiological facts – about which there seems to be an astonishing lack of agreement. We still have no real idea of how dangerous the virus is, nor how easily it spreads, nor how many people at the moment have it. Yet, the absence of real information hasn’t caused governments to move extra cautiously. On the contrary, it has encouraged them to take ever more radical steps.
To understand why, requires an appreciation of how all knowledge, most definitely including scientific facts too, is socially constructed, and how human beings, for all the philosophers’ assurances to the contrary, are at heart, irrational animals. We are fearful and gullible creatures whose response to crises is governed by deeply entrenched cognitive biases.
On January 11 2020, China announced its first death from the virus, a 61-year-old man who had purchased goods in a seafood market. For the following two months the world followed the story essentially as spectators.
But then, on March 7, an American public looking forward to the weekend instead woke to the grim news from Dr. James Lawler, a University of Nebraska Medical Center professor, that about 96 million Americans could become infected with coronavirus. Of these, Lawler calculated 4.8 million would be hospitalized and nearly half a million – 480,000 – would die!
For the Western world, watching the virus was no longer a spectator sport. Worse news followed only days later when British experts in London published their research. This seemed to show that without drastic action, not half a million but two and half million Americans faced an imminent and nasty end at the hands of the mystery virus. The detailed and apparently authoritative assessment by Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College in London predicted at least half a million deaths in the UK alone.
Soon after, in London, the usually jocular Boris Johnson, the politician who had hung from a zip wire waving a union jack to the delight of the media, took unsmilingly to the airwaves to address the nation. “I must level with the British public,” the Prime Minister said. “Many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.”
The broadcast was followed hours later by emergency regulations shutting down many aspects of normal life and announcing plans to quarantine all elderly people for a period – just to get started – of four months.
At the same time, even as President Donald Trump ‘hesitated’, over in the US, state legislatures began to rush out their own emergency plans. A bill in Alabama called on individuals to ‘fist bump’ rather than shake hands; New York suspended some mortgage payments for small businesses and Rhode Island formally requested that Trump ‘declare a National Emergency for the coronavirus Pandemic’.
The TV and newspapers lapped it up. Years of exaggeration plus a new internet-fueled appetite for ‘clickbait’ headlines and tantalizing images had left the press no longer minded to separate fact from fiction. Instead, all over the world, media, politicians – and health experts too – combined forces to convince the world that it was facing imminent doom.
The result was what social scientists call ‘an information cascade’. A radical shift in ideas and beliefs driven not by carefully assessed and evaluated data but rather by uncritically embraced observation and reinforcement of the views of others. In an information cascade, the actions and decisions of everyone else become more important than evidence you are directly acquainted with let alone your own judgement.
In this way, a particular view ‘cascades’ down the side of an ‘informational pyramid’ – like a waterfall.
How many waterfalls really cascade down pyramids? Not many. But that is not the point. Rather, the insight is that it is often easier for people, if they do not have either the ability or the interest to find out for themselves, to adopt the views of others. This is without doubt a useful social instinct.
As the economist Pierre Lemieux has put it, cascade theory reconciles ‘herd behavior’ with rational-choice because it is often perfectly rational for an individual to rely on information passed on to them by others. Often… but not always!
And in the grim spring of 2020, the news and media coverage, academic research and computer models and, above all, actual policy announcements all became a swirl of self-reinforcing misinformation.
A Reuters summary March 18, 2020 headed: ‘Factbox: Latest on the spread of coronavirus around the world’ [1] accidentally hinted at a kind of herd panic. Under the heading: DEATHS, INFECTIONS, it announced:
- All 50 states in the United States have reported cases, with the total number of known infections surging past 6,400. The Senate is expected on Wednesday to vote on a multibillion-dollar coronavirus bill that passed the House of Representatives over the weekend.
- Chile’s president declared a 90-day state of catastrophe on Wednesday.
- Ukraine, where a lawmaker tested positive, has imposed a state of emergency in the region around the capital Kiev.
- Indonesia’s death toll jumped on Wednesday from five to 19 and Malaysia warned of “a tsunami” of cases if people did not follow new restrictions as infections surged across Southeast Asia.
In a highly mediatized age, there is a bias towards seeing normal amounts of illness and death as exceptional. Perspective is lost. The seasonal toll of flu (or “flu like illness”), the virus everyone agrees is much less serious than the new corona one, is between 290,000 and 650,000 people.
Worldwide, every year, between four and fifty million symptomatic cases in Europe alone, with a death toll there estimated at between 15,000 and 70,000 each winter.
By comparison, as of March 16, 2020, a date at which a good proportion of Western Europe had entered ‘lockdown’, there had been 2,337 deaths in Europe overall from the coronavirus with the first recorded European death, in France, on February 15.
Put another way, by mid-March, amid peak political concern, the coronavirus had not killed exceptionally high numbers of people. And since in some countries (like China, Taiwan and Hong Kong) the numbers of deaths had peaked and then fallen back, it was surely speculative to predict huge increases in the future.
Speculative? But that’s where news stories and computer models played their part. As Yoram Lass, a former Director General of the Israeli Health Ministry, has put it, the coronavirus was an illness with top-flight public relations. PR which propelled politicians to draw up drastic measures; while the measures themselves drove academics and journalists to view the situation ever more apocalyptically.
Soon, in America, television anchors broke down in tears reading the news while The Guardian ran a characteristically self-serving feature about the ‘strain’ journalists were under.
Now, of course, illnesses are terrible things, and bring in their wake many personal tragedies, this virus no less than any other. But this story rapidly spun out of control with the result that a crucial element of perspective along with accuracy was abandoned early on.
One kind of cognitive bias is ‘Rear-view mirror syndrome’. This occurs when we evaluate a crisis by trying to find parallels with the past. But the parallels chosen in this case were not, for example, the Swine Flu fiasco, where terrible prophecies came to naught – but rather the great flu epidemic of 1918 and even the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Neither journalists nor politicians seemed to make even the quick trip to Wikipedia where they could have read that:
“Coronaviruses are a group of related viruses that cause diseases in mammals and birds. In humans, coronaviruses cause respiratory tract infections that can be mild, such as some cases of the common cold (among other possible causes, predominantly rhinoviruses), and others that can be lethal, such as SARS, MERS, and COVID-19.”
Fewer still tried to read even short pieces by specialists like Stanford’s Professor of Public Health, John Ioannidis, to discover that: ““mild” coronaviruses may be implicated in several thousands of deaths every year worldwide, although the vast majority of them are not documented. Instead, they are lost as noise among 60 million deaths from various causes every year.[2]
On the face of it, it’s quite an information failure when policymakers don’t appreciate the difference between terrifying science fiction scourges that can wipe out entire species and coronaviruses that actually infect many people every year, and are common especially in the elderly and in hospitalized patients with respiratory illness in the winter.
In a normal year, coronaviruses infect millions of people and kill thousands. However, this year every even a solitary case and every early death became headline news. Amazing, high magnification images of the virus exploding out of a human cell added a final ghastly, science fiction aspect to the tale.
Long, long ago, Aristotle, the man who said the Earth is fixed at the centre of the universe, proclaimed that Man was a rational animal, but In 2020, instead, the crisis revealed human beings as hopelessly irrational creatures whose thinking is driven not by calm consideration of ‘the evidence’ but rather by various kinds of deeply entrenched thinking errors and cognitive biases.
Here are some that throw light on the otherwise inexplicable worldwide response to the coronavirus.
First of all, there’s the bias caused by overconfidence. Overconfidence results from a false sense of your skills and capabilities. And governments are particularly prone to it.
One common manifestation is an illusion of control in matters over which you actually have no control – things like the spread of an essentially airborne virus for example, or the ‘contact tracing’ of tens of thousands of people.
Illusions of control prompt people to talk with over-optimism about events and timings, such as that the ‘curve of the epidemic will be flattened in two weeks or that a vaccine will be ready by September, or that virus spores will only travel a fixed distance of two meters. It is all linked to infantile delusions of control rooted deep in our reptile brain that something will happen because we want it to.
The flipside of overconfidence is ‘Loss Aversion’ and fear, things that with the coronavirus lead people to prioritise the threat of illness over concerns about writing off trillions of dollars of business and undermining the structures of society.
And, of course, fear is also at the heart of the phenomenon called ‘Herd Mentality’. The classic instance of this is finance, but herds rush about in many areas, from management innovations to everyday consumer fashions for clothes or foods. When people opt to follow others on the sole basis that if so many people are doing something, well, ‘there must be a good reason for it’, you have the potential for collective suicide.
Indeed, as many people including Stanford biophysicist Michael Levitt fear, the public health measures that have shut down large swaths of the economy could cause their own health catastrophe, as lost jobs lead to poverty and hopelessness. “What we need is to control the panic,” Levitt has said, adding reassuringly that in the grand scheme, “we’re going to be fine.”
Likewise, John Ioannidis, professor of Public Health at Stanford, says, that if you project the evidence of the mortality rate from the virus from the only real ‘case study’ of the virus that we have so far, the infamous cruise ship the Diamond Princess, onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%. A death rate that is, in fact, rather similar to flu.
Unfortunately, since deaths drive clicks, much of the media instead plays the role of “availability entrepreneurs”, as Edward Chancellor has put it for Reuters Breaking Views, placing excessive weight on images that are particularly vivid – such as halls full of grim-looking beds inside emergency hospitals or workers clad in full biohazard gear lowering coffins into graves.
And just as herd thinking means everyone must join the rush. Groupthink requires everyone to defer to authority and individualism to give way to imitation. Because shared ‘social facts’ reduce anxiety by offering a sense of order and control. Indeed, as Edward Chancellor also says, in a crisis, contrarians are swiftly attacked by “mind guards”,. A quick trip to Twitter will illustrate this.
Here, people I’ve conversed with for years there have told me in no uneertain terms, to “just stop“ disputing the consensus, while even well-entrenched commentators like Peter Hitchens of Britain’s Daily Mail and Simon Jenkins of The Guardian, used to thousands of grovelling, approving comments on their articles, are attacked for daring to suggest that governments might be reacting inappropriately to the coronavirus.
Tolerating ambivalence and ‘not knowing’ plays a key role in maintaining openness to new information.
In contrast, anxiety during a perceived crisis leads to over-commitment to preferred narratives, and a failure to recognize their provisional nature.
It blocks out certain facts, such as that, for example, a surely noteworthy 99% of Italian Covid-19 fatalities had several co-morbidities, to use the now prevalent jargon term. (Research into 355 deaths found that just three of the victims, 0.8 per cent, had been clear of illnesses before they were infected.)
Yet reports didn’t make a clear distinction between deaths “precipitated” by the virus and those “caused” by it.
Above all, Groupthink suppresses and distorts the collective memory. Even though very recent history records multiple times when viruses sparked ‘pandemic scares’ in the West, and how each time the evidence for them was twisted to fit various agenda including the interests of Big Pharma – but lessons from past cannot be benefited from.
This kind of collective amnesia is very convenient for certain people. It would otherwise be notable that Neil Ferguson of London’s Imperial College, one of the leading voices calling for radical social distancing and lockdown measures to combat the ‘threat’ of the coronavirus, was likewise pressing very similar strategies, based on very similar arguments during earlier epidemics, such as Swine Flu, which in the event turned out to be much less dangerous than his models predicted, as well as the ‘Foot and Mouth’ one in which he insisted that all the cows not only from infected farms but neighbouring farms too had to be slaughtered.
Which they were, at a cost of many millions of pounds, producing apocalyptic scenes of vast funeral pyres. There never was a good argument for the policy and in due course it was seen as a dreadful fiasco.
After such ‘false alarms’, the world was supposed to have become more skeptical, and the WHO, in particular, to have changed its approach to pandemics.
Instead, only a decade after the ‘Swine Flu’ fiasco, it is striking how much the public and political coverage has again coalesced around certain myths and misunderstandings of the virus and how dissenting voices, even of specialists like John Ioannidis, have been marginalised (meaning confined to specialist publications) while a false ‘consensus’ of ‘all the experts’ is created.
In a world in which scientists with computers have replaced priests with crucifix as the sources of unchallengeable truth and wisdom, the history of science shows, in Thomas Kuhn’s phrase, that scientific progress is not and has never been solely and calmly about facts – far less, Platonic truths – at all, but is instead, a brutal fight in which the dominant view (or paradigm) invariably seeks to suppress its rivals.
Kuhn’s theory of so-called paradigm shifts should remind us how easily faulty reasoning can flourish and become entrenched. But it doesn’t.
For better or for worse, the philosophy of science should remind us that individuals can influence the way we see the world. For better, Louis Pasteur did it by challenging Aristotle’s thousand-year dogma that life is continually springing out of everyday chemicals in the air, mud and water, discovering germs and microorganisms.
For worse, activist researcher Ancel Keys managed to persuade governments and populations alike in the 1960s and 70s, that ‘fatty foods’ like cheese and butter really were killing everyone. And now it seems that a handful of activist mathematical modellers of epidemics have managed to change the way we view viruses – the invisible other halo the human biome, essential to life.
The problem is, as Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, those iconic figures in the study of human cognitive bias and the handling of risk, have pointed out[3], that there are really two kinds of human thinking: fast and slow. ‘Slow’ is when you work things out. ‘Fast’ is what we use in a crisis. We have evolved in desperate times to jump to conclusions, ignoring gaps in information and data. This leap before you look mindset may have had evolutionary advantages ago.
However, in the face of societal crises such as the coronavirus, it is careful, slow thinking that is needed. Alas, it is ‘fast thinking’ that it gets.
Take the work of the computer modelers, for example. These, just as much as members of the public, freely admitted ‘knowledge gaps’ and relied on ‘fast thinking’ – plugging in easy assumptions – instead. Unfortunately, as Maggie Koerth, Laura Bronner and Jasmine Mithani asked in an article for 538 Magazine, called ‘Why It’s So Freaking Hard To Make A Good COVID-19 Model’[4]:
“Every variable is dependent on a number of choices and knowledge gaps. And if every individual piece of a model is wobbly, then the model is going to have as much trouble standing on its own as a data journalist who has spent too long on a conference call while socially isolated after work.”
Academic point? Not at all. Take that influential model of Imperial College, the one said to have influenced particularly the UK and US responses to the virus.
In an interview [5] with Jemima Kelly of the Financial Times, Neil Ferguson, the academic in charge of the team behind it, seemed to reveal that the recommendations that included taking away millions of people’s basic rights and in some cases livelihoods too was based on… shifting sand. Or as Ferguson told Kelly:
…there is no master plan in the background being followed here. There is a lot of research being done in real time, which is feeding into policy, to try and work out: is there in some sense an optimal strategy which keeps the NHS functioning, allows more economic and social activity to continue than is going on at the moment and gets us through the next, frankly, 18 months? I don’t know quite what that will look like or even if it’s completely feasible. We don’t have a clear exit strategy at the moment.”
Crucial figures, like that for the ‘Case Fatality Rate’ for the virus were simply plucked from the general swirl of misinformation.
Recall the real-life case study of the spread and deadliness of the coronavirus that came about because several passengers on the cruise ship, ‘The Diamond Princess’, had contacted the virus – turning the whole ship, into a kind of giant, awful, experimental test-tube. The virus quickly spread through food service workers, particularly those cooking for other members of the crew.
Eventually, of the 3,711 passengers and crew aboard, some 700 tested positive. Seven people died. This was rapidly adopted as the benchmark ‘case fatality rate’ – 1.0% – (Ferguson uses 0.9%) but doing so ignored the crucial fact that the this was not a normal mix of people but instead a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 was bound to be much higher.
As John Ioannidis also pointed out, right from the start of the crisis, “Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%” – only one eighth as high.
Indeed, while other media ‘experts’, and academic ‘modelers’ were plugging in figures as high as 10% for coronavirus fatalities, Ioannidis calculated that a reasonable lower bound figure for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population was a mere from 0.05%!
However, it seemed that even with life and death issues of public health, the strategy for computer modellers and governments alike was, in the words of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau centuries ago on social life in general, to start by saying: “Let us begin then by laying facts aside, as they do not affect the question”.
All of which highlights the thinking error dubbed, GIGO, for ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out, which is that of according the pronouncements of computers (and computer models) far more weight than anything produced by a human being – even though, in reality, what the computer says is determined by the information fed into it by humans.
As early as 1964, in an era when computers didn’t have any of the aura that they do today, the researcher Joseph Weizenbaum warned that even “extremely short exposure to a relatively simple computer program could produce powerful delusional thinking in normal people” [6]. And unfortunately, we are not talking about normal people in this case, but politicians.
For these, the fact, so cheerfully acknowledged by Ferguson in interviews, that the data he fed his computer models was largely provisional and debatable, did not detract from the enormous authority given to the computer’s eventual pronouncements.
And, what the computer models suggested, in their unchallengeable way, was that so-called self-isolation and social distancing was the universal solution. The ‘Italian model’ for dealing with the virus was to be backed up by medical staff in cumbersome protective clothing; soldiers patrolling the streets; and legally enforced, profound changes to the lives of the whole population.
The strategy was to be adopted by many other countries even though, in Italy, it didn’t seem to have worked. Indeed, the figures from that unfortunate country were so bad, that it looked if anything as if it was making things worse.
But then another cognitive bias is the so-called ‘Narrative Fallacy’. With things like the coronavirus, we have been offered many stories, but one of the most compelling is that about people going out, passing the virus on, and killing other people. Notice too, that we are subliminally wired to expect this kind of three-part story – the beginning, the middle and then the end.
In the U.K., the Prime Minister gave public addresses with not one but three messages strapped to his podium: ‘Stay home / Protect the NHS / Save lives’. Advertisers know the power of triples, but so do political advisors.
Newspapers described the virus as a tiny, streamlined machine, which engulfs the cells deep in the tiny air sacs of the lung, hijacks their command and control mechanisms, before finally killing them and spewing out more of the infectious virus.
In a mediatised age, storytelling is doubly important. The bias recognises that humans are story-telling animals who naturally try to arrange facts and events in a sequence. Alas, sometimes the story takes on greater authority than it really deserves, propelling us towards a supposed ‘conclusion’.
Speaking of storytelling, a harrowing series of tweets by a health official in the Obama administration outlined how the largest US cities and hospitals would be overrun with coronavirus cases by 23 March and a million Americans would die. The tweets by Andy Slavitt, the former acting administrator of Medicare and Medicaid under President Barack Obama, helped shift public opinion in the US.
How much expertise is there in a tweet? Not maybe enough to take world-changing decisions on. But it didn’t seem to matter. Like the man shouting “FIRE!” in the cinema, Slavitt’s words had an effect.
“What are mayors, governors and their staffs reporting?” he asked. “That people are jamming the bars. I get it. Home from work. Cooped up. Crisis mentality. We need to let steam off. Shared experience. But stop that. All the bars and restaurants are closed now across Europe.”
Describing the situation in Italian hospitals in particular, and what it might mean for the US, he tweeted [emphasis added]:
“EVERY REPORT describes this as a tsunami. And if it happens like a tsunami, in major cities we will have tens of thousands more cases than we have beds and we will have one ventilator for every eight people who need one.”[7]
And there again you have the tell-tale fingerprint of an information cascade. The policy was right because “every report” says it is right. Another clue as to the quality of his diagnosis came in his final tweet about the origins of the crisis. It was a Republican President’s mismanagement that had caused it.
“The original sin is Trump’s months long denial and his dismantling of public health and response infrastructure.”
Thus politicians cannot help but play their usual games even as the world teeters on the brink of disaster. Which without doubt, it was doing. Only not because of the health crisis that Slavitt and so many others foresaw, a crisis caused by a biological virus – but because of a social and economic rupture caused by rash actions and misinformation.
But let’s not deceive ourselves that it is only politicians who misread information and rush about like fools. Consider two small stories making up the big virus tale.
One was the rumor that it was being transmitted by people with no symptoms. A report documenting transmission by an asymptomatic individual had been published in the New England Journal of Medicine on January 30. Of course, transmission by people without symptoms would be a huge problem.
A few weeks later, however, it turned out that the specific patient did have symptoms, it was just that the researchers had er… not asked.
Similarly, the respected medical journal The Lancet published on February 24 a shocking account by two Chinese nurses about their front-line experience fighting the coronavirus.[8]
Only it turned out that the account was not quite what it seemed: it was not a first-hand account. The authors soon retracted their contribution which was as a letter. Such examples show how sensationalism affects even the most prestigious scientific journals.
Or take an influential early report of the Case Fatality Rate figures, widely quoted, had been produced by the World Health Organization (WHO) [9]. Their really rather outrageously high figure of 3.4%, was arrived at by simply dividing the number of deaths by the number of documented cases as of early March.
But of course the number of documented cases was far less than the real level of illnesses. In Germany, for example, where testing for the virus was being carefully done, the CFR was… 0.2%.
A further reasoning error occurs when people trust information they have read in several places, without appreciating that the views may feed off each other. Journalists, for example, read each other’s reports and feel reassured to be part of a consensus. Politicians read the reports and shift policies to fit the journalists expectations.
In the coronavirus crisis, many journalists felt it was their duty to direct readers thinking in one direction only. In the case of ITV’s Robert Peston, their senior political editor, his obligations even involved controlling the way people walked.
Robert Peston @Peston
Among the many emails I receive with brilliant ideas to suppress and conquer #Covid19, I really like this simple one – that supermarket aisles should be made one-way lanes to reduce the risk of accidental proximity to other shoppers. Is this happening anywhere?
And don’t even mention statistics. Newspapers AND experts would endlessly note sudden surges in the number of cases, without ever linking that to the numbers of people tested. (If you text ten times as many people one day, then the number of cases is bound to go up.)
Objectively, all the shocking figures printed in counters everywhere for the ‘number of cases’ were meaningless. The elephant in the statistical bathroom was that most people avoided becoming a statistic – and if they had only mild or no symptoms – would stay away from doctors or hospital and thus never be tested or reported.
Nearly one-fifth of the passengers on the Diamond Princess who in fact turned out to be infected with the virus had no symptoms. When passengers were tested:
There were so many infected people with no symptoms onboard. They even surprised themselves. For example, there were spouses—the husband had a test, due to having the symptoms of the flu, while the wife, who did not have any symptoms, also had the test, just because she was in the same room with him—he was negative, but she was positive.” [10]
This lacuna was convenient because everywhere the political solutions offered revolved around ‘social distancing’ and the shutting down of all but ‘essential’ services. We were supposed to imagine only a few thousand people had the virus, not a quarter or a third of the population.
Bottom line: the computer modeling of the virus, that seemed so detailed and comprehensive, and fed fears of the disease, was based on very shaky assumptions.
For example, according to Professor Ferguson’s model, fewer than 5% of people are infected, but according to researchers at Oxford’s Evolutionary Ecology of Infectious Disease lab, it could be ten times that, higher than 50%. Unfortunately, as logicians say, any conclusions at all follow – perfectly logically – from false premises.
In an article for STAT Magazine[11], John Ioannidis explained: “If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3%…” (which he says is only the ‘mid-range’ estimate from Diamond Princess analysis) “…and 1% of the U.S. population gets infected… this would translate to about 10,000 deaths.” This sounds a huge number, but is “within normal flu toll”.
However, such voices were drowned out. Instead, terrifying predictions and lack of actual data were was the context for near universal calls for a strict policy of social isolation, and for medical systems to move quickly to reorganize and prioritize resources ready for the expected mass epidemic.
The immediate result was radical lockdowns of whole populations – actions that were unprecedented in peacetime. The longer term result was that the global economy and society sustained serious damage from an epidemic that, as Ioannidis also put it, otherwise accounted for “less than 0.01% of all 60 million annual global deaths from all causes and that kills almost exclusively people with relatively low life expectancy”.
And all the time, even as media and politicians rushed frantically from rash idea to rasher policy, the facts were there in plain sight – only no one was prepared to look at them.
No one even attempted to explain how long social distancing measures and lockdowns could be maintained for months, even years potentially, without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health. Let alone how unpredictable effects including financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war, and a ripping of the social fabric could be avoided. Instead, what people were fed were soundbites. Like this one from London’s otherwise ‘liberal’ radio station, LBC:
@LBC If you’re still planning to go out this weekend despite bars being closed, first listen to this remarkable call from an intensive care doctor who warned: “If you go out, it’s going to kill people.”
Lockdown was the most disastrous part of a policy taken by many countries and American states supposed to ‘slow down’ the spread of the virus, yet we must accept it had popular support. Even though, the idea was to discourage people from leaving their homes, for walks or cinemas or cafés, and to require them to stay in claustrophobic proximity with each other in their homes for weeks on end.
In France, President Macron made long, emotional appeals to his ‘compatriots’ to join in a national struggle against ‘an invisible enemy’, before listing respectfully those who had fallen already.
All public spaces were closed and citizens (like myself) were forbidden to leave their homes for weeks on end, except to buy essential foodstuffs in approved shops. And to do this, they had to clutch an official document downloaded from the government website, setting out their reasons for leaving their house.
The interior minister, Christophe Castaner, ordered 100,000 military police to spread around the country to enforce the lockdown. Of course, such people are immune from the virus – and can’t spread it either. (Such a thought was no more irrational than the rest of the government’s plans.)
Writing in The Guardian [12], Tobias Jones, that paper’s Italy correspondent, described his family’s life under lockdown. He recalled how some of his friends had started to neurotically wash their hands every half-hour and put on surgical gloves before doing everyday actions like opening doors. “It’s hard not to begin to doubt your own sanity and wonder whether it’s rational to be following all these restrictions and rituals”. Quite.
Public bodies too were neurotically washing things. Lorries sprayed streets with disinfectant, workers in rubber gloves and face masks stood by escalators wiping down the handrails, and of course everyone doing it wore facemasks. Yes, the ones that protect other people from your germs.
In the US, President’s Trump’s decision to close America’s borders made no scientific sense (and nor does health screening at borders as it cannot pick out people who may carry viruses but not yet have symptoms), even if in partisan political terms is seemed to reinforce his campaign themes of a strong fortress America – the one with a wall along the Mexico border. Rechristening the virus “the Chinese virus” seemed to underline this xenophobic message.
Tying together all the plans however was the central conviction that we had to ‘Flatten the Curve’. That is, to spread out the load of virus cases and relieve pressure on health services. This had rapidly become the One Thing Everyone Agrees. Yet even that simple relationship – lots of cases, overloading health services, so better to spread them out – is not entirely straightforward.
Because spreading infections out over a longer period of time can just as easily mean that instead of being overwhelmed during a short, acute phase, health services remain overwhelmed for a more protracted period. When health services are overwhelmed, people die. Because destroying livelihoods, disrupting social life and locking people in their homes for months kills people too.
In the absence of data, prepare-for-the-worst reasoning leads to extreme measures of social distancing and lockdowns. Unfortunately, we do not know if these measures work [13].
School closures, for example, may reduce transmission rates. But they may also backfire if children socialize anyhow, if school closure leads children to spend more time with susceptible elderly family members, if children at home disrupt their parents ability to work, and more. School closures may also diminish the chances of developing herd immunity in an age group that is spared serious disease.
So perhaps it is worth taking a moment to look at the background of one of the experts whose call for a swift clampdown on all social contact led to dramatic shifts in policy in both the UK and the US.
Professor Neil Ferguson, as I say, hails from Imperial College London – a university with a consolidated income of £1,033.0 million in 2017/18 including profitable links to the pharmaceutical industry.
Just days after the paper was published, Ferguson’s department of biomathematics announced it was sharing in £20 million of emergency coronavirus research investment courtesy of the UK government. Not bad for one paper! But the most revealing thing about Neil Ferguson and his department is that they had exactly the same concerns and exactly the same policy advice during the so-called ‘Swine Flu’ crisis back in 2009.
Flashback to June 11 that year, and the World Health Organization was declaring a ‘six-level alert’ – its grimmest ever – for a new pandemic sweeping the world.
This was the so-called Swine Flu or H1N1 virus, and despite having in previous years been found to have been wrong about the dangers of several other viruses, the WHO once again, sounded the deathly warning that ‘this early pandemic and flu is somewhat similar to the 1918-1919 pandemic swine flu that killed millions’.
Exactly what this strain would do in the Fall and Winter of 2009 and into 2010 was unclear, the WHO said, but ‘everyone needs to be prepared.’
Naturally, governments everywhere respected the advice of the World Health Organization, a U.N. agency which after all does so much good work combating disease and guiding research related to public health. And so, after the Swine Flu warning, where necessary, they promised, schools and offices would be closed.
Facemasks were bought in the millions, and vaccines were stockpiled. And also as part of their response, as I reported in my earlier book Paradigm Shift: How Expert Opinions Keep Changing on Life, the Universe, and Everything (2015), a fount of ‘advice’ was offered to the public.
For example, people were told, when back at home in the evening, to disinfect dishes, cups and utensils by thoroughly soaking in detergent and washing and rinsing thoroughly everything by hand or in the dishwasher. Everyone was to wash their hands frequently. And if, despite staying away from work ordering the shopping by phone and disinfecting the dishes, they still fell victim – there was advice on ‘the symptoms’. Fever, chills, coughing, fatigue, congestion, muscle and bone ache, and vomiting and intestinal upset. And then death.
No wonder governments spent so much to combat the threat. No wonder, more specifically, that governments swiftly came up with large amounts of money to buy huge amounts of vaccine from pharmaceutical companies.
Yet, at the end of the day, Swine Flu proved to be a paper tiger, just as the skeptical doctors had indicated. A year on, annoyingly, for the governments and their advisors, almost no people could be found to be said to have died from ‘H5NI’, even though ordinary ‘flu regularly kills several tens of thousands of people each winter. However, for a while, each of these viruses was the public health concern, we could say the fashion.
Quite possibly more people, suffering from other complaints, died from the ‘emergency precautions’ surrounding the virus, such as being refused entry to doctors surgeries or from being injected with the vaccine. But these could hardly be added to the statistics. And all over the (rich) world, millions of germ masks and vaccines began to deteriorate in storage, unused and unusable.
Back then, an erroneous piece of expert advice cost an unknown number of lives and enormous sums of money.
Not long after, two independent reports, one by the Council of Europe and another that appeared as a paper for the British Medical Journal (3 June 2010) put a belated spotlight on the fact that three of the crucial experts arguing for expensive programs of vaccine preparation by companies like Roche (the makers of Tamiflu) and GlaxoSmithKiline (the makers of Relenza) – were also paid consultants for the companies.
Now I don’t myself believe that individual researchers are knowingly skewing research reports in order to make money, either for themselves or their institutions. But the structural pressures are there and they can create the same effect. Research is a business and so its conclusions are skewed towards the ‘needs’ of the paymasters.
And you may well ask, how big a business is an epidemic? The answer is that they can be a very big deal indeed. In the US alone, Congress had appropriated $7.65 billion in June to fight the 2009 pandemic[14].
In the UK, in order to deal with the Swine Flu threat, the impressively titled and ennobled Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, said that a £1 billion ($1.5 billion) emergency program of vaccination was needed. If it sounds a lot for a small country, remember, without it – up to 65 000 people would die!
The most ‘optimistic assessment’ was for 19 000 deaths. His fears were confirmed by virologists such as one Dr. John Oxford, who added that without immediate action he had calculated that soon half the population could be infected. Imagine, tens of millions of people dying – and only the government able to save them.
But the funds made available for the coronavirus were on a totally different scale. Even with the number of cases globally still relatively tiny, in March 17, 2020, the World Bank had set aside $14 billion to help its members to respond to the threat [15].
What sort of things was the money to be spent on? One component was to pay for everyone in the population to be tested for the virus. Vaccines make for profits, but testing is a great earner too. Often in this case tests were to be followed by the isolation of anyone who tested positive. Even though, as Galli, Prof. at Milan, warned, in a rare note of rationality, carrying out mass tests on the asymptomatic population could be useless:
The contagions are constantly evolving, a man who tests negative today could contract the disease tomorrow.”
Governments wouldn’t wish to implement pointless and even dangerous polices though, would they? Alas, the herd memory is short and nor are herds known for their willingness pause and reflect.
Otherwise they might have learned lessons from 1976, when President Gerald Ford’s administration reacted at speed to the swine flu outbreak, ignoring the World Health Organization’s words of caution and vowing to vaccinate “every man, woman and child in the United States.” After 45 million people were vaccinated, the flu turned out to be mild.
Worse, researchers discovered that some of the vaccinated — roughly 450 in all — had developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks the nerves, leading to paralysis. At least 30 people died.
Or from 2017, when a rushed campaign — endorsed by the WHO — to vaccinate nearly 1 million children for mosquito-borne dengue in the Philippines was halted for safety reasons. The Philippine government indicted 14 state officials in connection with the deaths of 10 vaccinated children, saying the program was launched “in haste”.
But back to the earlier Swine Flu outbreak in the UK, the one where the Chief Medical Officer swept aside skeptical voices, and instead advised the British government to order without further delay 32 million face masks to go with that £1 billion-plus worth of vaccines.
In France and other European countries, a similar story had played out – another billion-dollar supply of vaccines stockpiled here, another mountain of unused face masks there.
With hindsight it seems just silly – and expensive.
Yet it’s worth recalling thought that for a few months the Swine Flu pandemic was also genuinely terrifying everyone. Like the coronavirus, it had appeared around March and rapidly spread throughout many places on the planet, (invitation for luridly colored world maps on websites) all doubtless helped by sniffling travelers on airplanes.
The Center for Disease Control in the US started a website page to keep track of the death toll for 50 U.S. states and territories: by June 2009 the HTML counter registered 6,506 cases and 436 deaths. The next month, a special counter on the World Health Organization website registered total cases already at 177,457 with a toll of 1,462 deaths.
Admittedly, the figures were not yet exceptional, but the question everyone was asking was how many more might die soon? Basing their view on U.S. statistics, and the lack of a jab for swine flu experts thought there would be ‘about 300 million’ at risk initially: ‘typically, anyone who has not had the vaccine’.
For a few weeks back then too, it had seemed to a terrified public that the only real way to avoid dying was to ‘Get vaccinated as soon as possible’. Advice, in other words coming from the drugs industry funded labs that certainly suited the industry. Unfortunately, the vaccines would be available only in … early October. Just as in the spring of 2020, there were endlessly repeated helpful hygiene tips, such as to:
- Avoid putting fingers and hands to the mouth or eyes since these are portals of entry for microbes.
- Stay away from large crowds, and all infected people.
- Remember to wear a face mask. Certainly if going out of the house.
- Wash hands regularly, before eating or drinking and after visiting the restroom.
With Swine Flu, much of the advice related to safety at school. But with the coronavirus, even though school-age children were recognised as very low risk, schools were immediately shut down.
We should be suspicious of experts recycling old advice. After all, they may be guilty of two more cognitive biases: the phenomenon known as ‘one model thinking’ whereupon only evidence that fits the model is visible. There is either a duck, or a rabbit [16] but not both, to use the example that Wittgenstein made famous, but originated in 1892 issue of Fliegende Blätter, a German humour magazine.
And there is Confirmation Bias, which is the idea that people seek out information and data that confirms their pre-existing ideas while ignoring contrary information however potentially significant for the decision. The almost non-existent political and media examination of the range of views and strategies for the coronavirus shows that this is one of the most dangerous biases of them all.
Martin Cohen (Twitter @docmartincohen) is a writer, lecturer and researcher who specialises in social science whose books have been translated into twenty different languages. His doctoral research involved looking at social and psychological myths constructed around the power of computers and his books, including, Paradigm Shift: How Expert Opinions Keep Changing on Life, the Universe, and Everything (2015) have explored key issues in philosophy of science including food myths and previous pandemic scares as well as the groupthink that enabled them.
NOTES:-
[1] ‘Factbox: Latest on the spread of the coronavirus around the world’
[3] Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman (Farrar, Strauss and Girous, 2011).
[4] ‘Why It’s So Freaking Hard To Make A Good COVID-19 Model’
[5] “Imperial’s Neil Ferguson: ‘We don’t have a clear exit strategy’”
[6] For example, see Pulse: The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things
by Robert Frenay (Bison, 2008)
[7] ‘Ex-Obama official warns US health system faces ‘tsunami’ over coronavirus’
[8] ‘Lancet withdraws Chinese nurses’ letter on COVID-19 after they say it was not first-hand’
[9] ‘3.4% Mortality Rate estimate by the World Health Organization (WHO) as of March 3’
[10] ‘The High-Risk Work of a Cruise-Ship Crew Member Under Coronavirus Quarantine’
[12] ‘Orderly, dour, cowed: how my beloved Italy is changed by coronavirus’
[13] ‘Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses’
[14] ‘Congress approves $7.65 billion for pandemic flu response’
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Good piece! Thank you!
This article is about 15 times longer than it needed to be and so all over the place that I don’t know where to start, really. One thing I will say is that ‘the Guardian’ doesn’t have a capital t.
No wonder, its written by a Jew. (They are alle Jewed here!)
please note this comment and similar is why we are forced to put a few contributors here, including Helge, on pre-mod. – ed
The best possible thing that could result from this whole sorry episode, other than the outing of the elite satanists behind it, is the overturning of the germ theory of disease, by final refutation of the existence of ‘viruses’. There is no virus. Quite literally. e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=259&v=fpTUlPLVtE0&feature=emb_title
This is an EXCELLENT video by forensic psychiatrist, Andrew Kaufman, on the fraudulence of papers published on SARS-CoV viruses 1 (2003) and 2 (2019). He points out systematically how the researchers haven’t followed the correct protocol and how their conclusions are meaningless.
Finally! Was going thru slightly older articles trying to find a comment from you.
Hope your day is going relatively good and you are okay? By the way, RobG was wondering where you’ve got too.
Question for you Petra – can you give me the names of a few sites or blogs that you think are genuine and above board, and are not ‘controlled opposition’ as I saw you put it a wee while ago.
As I have an entire day of spare time (and tomorrow, and the next day) will check them out, and let you know what I think, Cheers.
I’ve posted quite a few comments Gezzah so not sure why you and RobG haven’t found me. Also, bear in mind that if you want to find a commenter using the Find function (Ctrl+F) where the article has lots of comments you have to continue clicking the Load More Comments button at the bottom of each page until the end of the comments and then press Ctrl+F to search through all comments. The Find function only finds comments on one open page.
Your question is a very good one, Gezzah, and not an easy one to answer. If you asked me a year ago I would have put forward far more sites than I’m prepared to do now. My perception now is that practically all opposition is controlled whether it be paid people or genuine people whose thinking has been controlled by the paid people – I know my own thinking is not free from control despite waking up to a large degree. It’s kind of impossible for it not to be because your thinking is either in opposition or acceptance mode when you should be thinking of something else entirely! Some people are probably far less controlled because they are – to a large degree – able to and choose to live their lives outside the realm of media and politics.
The quote at the top of my home page is from Salman Rushdie:
What controlled opposition does so well is control the level of truth we get to – they ensure there is a prevailing sense of taboo among the university-educated critical class (although not among the nobody “conspiracy theorist” YouTubers who have no problem at all coming out and calling “Hoax!”) at the ineffectual level of truth. The truth will stop RIGHT HERE where it is completely useless. It’s all levels of gatekeeping except among the complete nobodies to whom no one in the university-educated critical class pays the slightest attention. It’s the Crimestop from 1984 that the university-educated critical class are so familiar with in theory but nevertheless, seemingly unconsciously, completely obey themselves.
YouTubers – used to be loads but dropped off massively since massive censorship started in early 2018. Very disappointing as some videos were works of art. I watched them over and over. YouTubers will have their channels pulled down so they often just rename with a different number or slightly different name.
— Mayortwilleger
— Anaconda MaltLiquor 17
— Peekay Censored
— Woodrow Wobbles (who, sadly, recently died)
— John Le Bon
— Matrix Breakout 8 (basically only does the Masonic coding of these events – you should see the 777s for this pandemic – guess what 777 is code for? Order out of Chaos)
— Jerry Mills (only a few relevant videos but good for Checklist: 50 Tips for Recognising a False Flag)
Video website 153news dot net (where the YouTubers also post)
— UK Critical Thinker
Even though I believe the YouTubers are very good analysts in many ways I certainly don’t agree with them about everything. For example, most, if not all, do not accept the science on man-made climate change and believe we didn’t land on the moon whereas I recognise the evidence for AGW and the astounding achievement of the moon landings. There are people who are inclined to disbelieve anything from authorities and where that disbelief may generally be correct it won’t always be – maybe Gezzah you’re with the YouTubers on AGW and the moon. If so, so be it.
Websites (.com)
— Josh ?? – cuttingthroughthefog
— Allan C. Weisbecker – blog.banditobooks
— Simon Shack – fakeologist (dubious about this guy but worth checking out)
— Miles Mathis – milesmathis (dubious about this guy but worth checking out)
I’m sure there are quite a number more but can’t think of them at the moment – will let you know if I do. There are many people that I get tidbits from but it’s just the odd tidbit here and there. And YouTube comments can be a great source of info. One YouTube comment pointed out that the famous photo of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot couldn’t be matched against a still in the ShotOnLiveTV video (love that fact), indicating multiple takes and another pointed out that “went in” refers to implosions due to the buildings falling in on themselves (what a golden nugget). This term is used by newscaster Brian Williams in the following conversation with FDNY EMS Lieutenant, David Restuccio, indicating they were both in on 9/11 and is yet another indication that death and injury were staged – it is unthinkable that so many people would be in on the cold-blooded murders of their fellow citizens.
“Can you confirm it was No 7 that just went in?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you guys knew this was comin’ all day.”
“We had heard reports that the building was unstable and that eventually it would either come down on its own or it would be taken down.”
Ironically, this snippet is from a great music video based on Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’ made by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth who, while giving us so much great information on controlled demolition, are nevertheless controlled opposition because we can see their whole purpose is to distract us from the pivotal truth of 9/11: staged death and injury.
See Point 1 on this webpage for video:
https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/collapse-of-wtc-7.html
To me it’s like Russian dolls – you think you’ve got to an honest person but nope you need to keep going. Of course, you don’t need to rely entirely on others anyway. You can always apply the two trusty tools …
1. They always give us the clues
2. They never fake anything so well that a believer of their story can use it in defence of it …
… to the media stories themselves and see if those two criteria apply. I anticipated that when I searched for “coronavirus patients” on YouTube that, according to psyop rules, none shown would be convincing. And they aren’t. If any had been, I’d have had to put on my thinking cap and question my hypothesis.
Maybe I need to go to Specsavers? No, I avoid the mainstream media like you would avoid an angry Rottweiler with rabies!
I try and boycott all media, however do check the headlines on ABC News 24 to see if something big has happened.
I almost never have TV on. Total retarded brainrot, which is exactly what it was designed to do: dumb us down.
Was just watching a film then on the fraud that is greentech and renewable energy, that the proponents of never mention the huge environmental damage caused in achieving this ‘renewable energy’. And the billionaire psychopaths and huge banks and mining companies investing in it and John and Jane Public are sold more lies and bullshit.
Smoke and mirrors everywhere to prop up the system Petra. As you know.
Never heard of any of those names you mentioned – will check them out in the next day or two and get back to you.
Have 21 gigabytes of data on my phone, so can afford to watch a few videos, tho money is tight – 4 weeks without income, and my dithering specialised job agency ( they help over 50s and long term unemployed find work) don’t seem in a great rush. I told them I’m happy to even clean toilets. Can’t afford to be proud – it’s paid work.
I don’t have internet connection in my flat, so my phone is the only access I have to watch videos or come on sites like OffGuardian or connect with others. Have a good evening Petra…
Petra. 2 words: Thank you!
Okay, there’s more than that…
I’ve checked out nearly all of those links you provided, and very pleasantly surprised that Mayortwilleger, Anaconda MaltLiquor 17, Jon Le Bon, and Peekay Censored are all Aussies.
I thought nearly everyone here was fast asleep and busy snitching on their neighbours. Jon Le Bon just sent me a message I think, but will reply to you first before checking.
My god…. the censorship is going Full Monty now. Even OffGuardian early today was under heavy attack apparently; videos increasingly being deleted from YouTube, Facebook and Twitter accounts removed. We know it’s going to get a lot worse.
A long time ago (in a much different time in my life) I learnt the phrase: ‘take what you want, and leave the rest behind’. So am applying that adage too those links also.
Parts of what I heard, strongly agreed with, other things went… WTF? For example, Peekay in one of his videos said the Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews is a communist!! No – he’s a Neoliberal ideologue, eg Neoliberalism = financialised Capitalism.
I liked the Cutting Thru The Fog site, but didn’t seem a great deal on it tho.
153 news.com was a good source for heaps of videos, and thru it discovered the London Real YouTube channel, and actually watched a 31.54 minute segment of an interview Brian Rose did with David Icke called ‘Look Your Children in the Eye’ which I found very powerful.
Two quotes Icke made: “fear is their currency of control” and “this cult has every single one of us in its gunsights – all of us”. Okay, a lot of people have very strong views on Icke, but I just listened with what he said, and he made a lot of logical sense.
Okay, Petra… I fully agree with you about WTC7. Yes, 9/11 was an inside job. And they have names and addresses.
I also agree with you about climate change, and the causes, and to just make it a trifecta, I agree with you about the moon landings also.
No, I don’t agree with the YouTubers!
Have you seen a talk on YouTube by Daniele Ganser on WTC7? Another commenter here linked it to me a couple weeks ago, and thought Ganser was excellent. Have a good evening…
Daniel Andrews a communist? That’s a good one. Yep, Peekay can say ridiculous things but his video on the presaging of this alleged pandemic at 2012 London Olympics is gold. It’s just insane.
https://archive.org/details/2012-london-games-predictive-programming-1
I’d tend to suspect that Daniele Ganser is controlled opposition although what he says about WTC-7 is probably perfectly good … but I know enough about WTC-7, Gezzah. Done that to death. I’m sure there’s so very much more to know but I know enough. WTC-7 was given to us on a platter, Gezzah. WTC-7 wasn’t needed for the terror event, it was provided for those who are skeptical of the official story to put their noses in and keep them there, distracting them from the most important lie of 9/11: that 3,000 people died and 6,000 were injured. If Daniele came out and exposed that lie then I’d certainly pay attention.
Great piece. Just one very minor thing I’d like to point out: Pasteur was a big fraud and a plagiarist of the work by brilliant chemist, biologist and doctor Antoine Bechamp. Unfortunately Pasteur was not a good enough cheater and his theory of germs as the cause of infectious disease reflects his poor understanding of Bechamp’s deep
Talking about paradigm shifts, it seems that one is long overdue: the absurd view of infections being the result of a fight between Evil (invasive parasitic micro-entities out there) and Good (the inmune system of our bodies). Just how culturally determined (biased) can a scientific theory be!
Greetings from sad, physically and mentally enclosed Spain. Your work (and readers’ comments too) has been, and continues to be, so precious to me.
* Bechamp’s deep discoveries.
He was a fraud, his notes revealed that – in the 1970s! This is how long it takes to reveal cheating in science, and by then, of course, history books have been written and the facts no longer count for very much. “On the other hand”, he was right that life doesn’t spring magically out of nothing but a few chemicals.
Excellent read! Thanks!
Where I shop the public totally ignored the “Peston” suggested one way lanes in the supermarkets, and quite reasonably so too.
It’s hard enough finding things you want on supermarket shelves without being told you have to go round the block again if you missed something, especially if you’re an old and not terribly fit person who has difficulty getting to the shops at all, and walking round the now huge supermarkets which can often be a very tiring experience even before this lockdown madness.
Great article. Couldn’t help but roll out the ‘calling it by it’s place of origin is omfg xzeonfobic!’ trope though. By the same logic the terms SARS and MERS are those things too. Lazy. Aside from that, very good read.
From The Grundian Coronavirus live feed:
This sort of thig makes my blood boil!!! I don’t particularly agree with much of what Icke has to say, but WTF are these ARSEHOLES who decide what can and can’t be said … or thought?
Views with the potential to cause serious harm to viewers. You couldn’t make it up.
Ofcom are a bunch of cnuts.
OfCom have always been the Establishment’ s Thought Police.
Hehe, no wounder the, I cant help it to use profanitys, dumb f…. hates OffG, when you come up with this, witch is abolutelly an home run, and if you dont get that, they have an problem, not OffG and as another person wrote it, its excellent, rips thru it all.
And hats of for BigB, I cant brag of much, say intellegence while my wife hears it she would roar of laughter, but I am good in some few arenas, and one of the is Objectivity, I have learned that a long time ago, to dissect whatever I get in front of me, and look for ways to build up an narrative that dont indulge into whats wrong, like some people, whom reads this in the light of trying to find one inconsistency or something wrong, anything matters and use that to deseccret an entire atricle, and then whines about how bad it is, while de facto ignoring the entire line of objective reasoning.
It may inpress other f…. but I am not that, when the few faults I find is techincal, not to the story we are reading, again, its not much to add, but I smiled because this is the sledgehammer to the insane amount of total nonsense we are feed every hour this days.
Again, if they want to point out where its an fault in the overall senario displayed in the article, the best way of telling us all this are “trolls” is their refusal to debate the issue more detailed, but just throws out an one liner, typical of the packs of HasbaRats witch I am used to, not lately since I have backed out more or less, but occationaly encounters them, and never forget they are payed to crash debates, not giude nor educate, but just crash or divert the attention into bullshit, but like pimples on the ass, witch makes me certain God as humor, an part of life, no matter how inconvinient they are or becomes.
The thing is. this is the same MSM, whom have lied, faked and invented propaganda for decades, the same use of experts, to people like HRW/AmnIn, to create the path of propaganda the Gov need to justify whatever they want against anyone they seem fit to attack, etc, and in the comentary field along with countless sites, echoed since the masses are like this epidemic precontitioned to think, by the MSM and Politicians whom echoes the same consencusses, and after months of indictrination, of course belives what they read, just take the hate propaganda against China as their latest stunt, and Libya as one, witch as far I know, the worst one among a long line of propaganda and spewing total bollocks, and since then I simply dont belive them anymore, the same way of organise the propaganda is again used in this Virus epidemic, the same script, etc, and after months of indoctrination people think and resonate the events precisly in the line of what have been hammered into their minds for months.
Nothing new.
Another thing is, how some sites have crashed their credibility, amazing, and again, either be consent or payed to do this, for me its irrelevant, when I am case oriented and follows that more than sites in them self, but this hysterical senarios I am just glad they have dropped their masks, and I am not that intrested in where it came from, have the so called Swine flu in the back of your mind, its irrelevant apart from creating hate propaganda as tool, and now the Germans also have jumped on this bandwagon, but I am not the slightest surpriced, since the Germs have been obidient bitches for the Banana republic for decades, and have become an nation witch is more or less riddicilous, pitty, but thats where we stand to day.
And to me, OffG have risen like the phoenix, and is an shining ligh in an otherwise dungeon of manure.
Yeah, kick ass.
Have an nice day and take care, and why not an pinte to.
peace
In England Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, on 10 April 2020, at the Coronavirus Daily Update press briefing, admitted that the government had not considered how many people would die as a result of the government’s anti-coronavirus measures. This was an admission that the government had adopted an irrational approach to policy-making. Yet, hardly anyone seemed to notice. https://viewsandstories.blogspot.com/2020/04/coronavirus-policy-making.html
Personally, I think when the author puts this irrational approach to policy-making down to thinking errors, he is being too kind. It is more than mere susceptibility to cognitive biases: the elites have gone collectively mad; and their madness has infected many, many ordinary people, who lack either the time or inclination or ability to find out for themselves and therefore take at face value what appears to be a unified, authoritative, scientific position.
Excellent essay. I think Michael and I are very much on the same wavelength. In fact: I wrote something a bit similar earlier today (yesterday) on the Ed Curtin forum.
The entire human knowledge-base kinda all hangs together: as an inter-relational society of knowledge (the socio-cultural nomos). Each part informs the other (domains are said to transact meanings that are polysemous and context-relative). Even seemingly diverse and autonomous knowledge domains – such as the medical and the legal – might seem paradigmatically incommensurable …but they all share the same set of ontologically primitive categorical constructivisms: Being (self); Time (spatio-temporality); Number (commensuration); Agency and Intention (which together yield determinate cause and effect). These are the basic archetypes of the architecture of socially constructed knowledge – named by Aristotle as the Episteme.
Paradigms are themselves are cultural-created constructivisms of the foundational Episteme. Which are heuristic sets of assumptive beliefs and Rules of Thumb (RoT) that help explain events and facts. They are riddled with errors, biases, and metaphysics: but that does not matter to the post-positive methodological model. Because absolutely no one would dust off a 13 year old computer model, not update it, and pass it off as recent research – even without active data from Wuhan. Nor would they refuse to submit it to peer-review; then forget to publish the data and parameters; and then just passively aggressively justify their evidence free beliefs. No one: except Neil Ferguson. Because that would not be science: but fact-free uncorroborated opinion.
No one takes their first parse as verbatim. It is only the very beginning of what has become known as the Hermeneutic Circle or Cycle. Of multiple iterations and evaluations of parsing and updating of data. After literally decades: you might get something approaching a fact. Might.
No do not get me wrong. Science and the hermeneutic cycles of naturalised and social sciences can produce a reliable knowledge-base …but not at the first attempt. The first iterations are barely more than opinionated. These social and scientific brute facts are actually very few and far between …a designation reserved for and confined to our best theories that have stood the test of time. The rest – which accounts for pretty much everything we believe today: especially politically – is GIGO. Decoherent GIGO. Yet we are simply incapable of admitting the compounding error creep of our cumulative thinking.
Apart from ontological Time: more or less everything we now know about the way we think totally refutes the inherited traditional, canonical, and philosophical Cartesian model of man …as a putative fully conscious, fully rational, fully autonomous being that is radically individuated – each as an unrelated individual …and radically separated from his environment. The naturalised Folk Psychological model of naïve realism is almost totally wrong about almost totally everything. Especially its individual Self. According to its own empirical neuroscience.
Mind the explanatory gaps between mind; body; and environment. If you have such a false model of your basic categorical unit – of rational man himself (the androgenic principle is definitively a masculinised authoritarian ordinate model) – the rest of your sociological and scientific knowledge-base is going to be a bit shit. An actual totalitarian clusterfuck of shitfuckerry demanding certaintised order.
But so convinced are we of the veracity of the constructivist lexical Cartesian model – of which every aspect is provably wrong – convinced individually of our certain individuality, that is …we keep on keeping on as the eternal return of the Cartesian self; of philosophical Being; of the semanticised constructivist and objectivated order of things we totally made up to maintain our mythological individuality. That is the true nature of the cataclysmic socialisation and concretisation of the wrong Order that afflicts us.
Which has about as much to do with viruses as Snow White had to do with eating Daddy bears porridge.
We stopped making sense a long time ago. We started using truth, power and knowledge for order – rather than for knowing, explaining, and understanding – a long time before anyone reading this was born. The problematisation of the knowledge-base is an inherited problem. Inherited from generations of subjectified choices and Cartesian methodological scientific and philosophical thinking errors …in an epigenetic and epistemological drift of habitual dispositions in infinite regress into deep ontological time. Not something that happened four weeks ago. We made this faery tale up a long, long, time ago …in a land that is far, far, away from anything that can be called real. Only now are the historically habituated thinking errors becoming apparent.
Ferguson is but a physical node in a biological network of biases and error creep that is built on biases and error creep and epigenetic drifts of arational heuristic and RoT judgements that are at least trans-finite. Yeah, he fucked up: but so did we all. The hierarchical dominative overpower of the pseudo-scientific paradigm is a consensual domain. If you have to have a self: it has to be an objectively certain and rational self …not a virtual or abstract or socially constructed self. Individuality is scientifically rational objective reality: ordered from foundational epistemic certainty …not metaphysical semantic constructivism. Or so I keep being told.
To have individualism: you have to have the historic transcendent metaphysical order of individualism. You cannot have one without the other. It all kinda hangs together as a (nomological) processual self-verificationism: based on the cardinal order of categorical thinking errors of the historical Cartesian Episteme.
You cannot have or be an individual individual. It all kinda hangs together from the Episteme up. Knowledge is massively distributed throughout the social order. No one person can access even a fraction. I doubt if everyone alive could house all the socialisation of entire historical knowledge-base (most of it redundant: including the Episteme itself).
We are socialised as a myopic, narrow focus fragment. Hyper-complexity of hierarchical social relations demands consensus and collectivity of divisional labour. Hyper-individualism is actually and paradoxically a regularised behavioural order of conformity, consent, and collectivity. The antimony is that every individual shares the same core cognitive epistemological belief set: irrespective of the seeming difference. Individuality is a collectivity of epigenetic and epistemological certainty: in which there is no true individuality.
If the individual is a seeming certainty: the behavioural order has to be a seeming certainty. The aporia is that there can be no individual individualism: not without the certainty of the behavioural hierarchical ordering and the control descriptions thereof. It’s all co-constituted; correlative, and consensual. Being individual is being ordered: by someone else’s – possibly long dead – philosophical order. The fully conscious, fully rational, fully autonomous being that is radically individuated is the philosophical invention of the collectivised behavioural order of Being. Which is maintained by consent …mostly. Though most choose to complain that they do not consent. Thus the sectarian conflicts and nascent decoherence.
If we want to talk about paradigmatic thinking errors: we have to look at the construction of paradigms. Then examine the core cognitive beliefs unconsciously held in the collective Episteme. These are the foundational beliefs that produce the paradigmatic beliefs that act as a heuristic conceptual framework to explain facts and events. If we make the same Cartesian assumptions of a certain Epistemic foundation: then we are just compounding the habitual thinking errors that precipitated the crisis. You cannot use the same thinking model that precipitated the crisis to think your way out of the crisis. It is the model itself that is in crisis. Only a new systematic thinking model of methodological holism and post-Cartesian paradigmatic thinking can analyse the old evolutionarily redundant model and parse the errors in thinking.
Which begins with the most basic assumptions that produce the thinking about the thinking – the meta-thinking. The thinking errors are in the very protocols we use for thinking – the Cartesian Error Protocols of the epistemological dualistic paradigmatic thought. It was GIGO from the very foundational Episteme on.
One very important point is that the facts remain when a paradigm changes. Not all of the knowledge-base is corrupted: just the explanatory frameworks. The shifting of which is no mean feat. But the consequences of continuing the same old error protocols are plain to see. For those who can think systematically and holistically (ecologically): and are not limited to the methodological individualism of ascribing fault to individual actors: or taxa of actor relations (class structures). It all kinda hangs together: tenuously and contingently.
The whole damn system is corrupting the interpretation and describing of facts and events. Not the individuals. They are just a production of the system. The thinking errors are compounded by only considering individual agents: and not looking at the entire historically contingent systematic production of autonomous agencies. It all kinda hangs together: until it starts to fall apart. Trust me: when the entire participatory sense-making mechanism falls apart as error prone and coercively biased GIGO …you don’t want to be around. Whoops!
According to tweet https://twitter.com/Femi_Sorry/status/1251816874712739840
Neil Ferguson called for a lockdown by sending a report to the government on 24th January, the day of its first Emergency Cobra meeting on Coronavirus, a meeting Boris Johnson didn’t even attend.
The first reported case was on January 11 in Wuhan.
This is a psyop, BigB, that Neil Ferguson is in on just as he was in on the swine flu, Zika, MERS and Ebola psyops.
You know the only thing it’s got under Personal Life on Neil Ferguson’s Wikipedia page? Take a guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Ferguson_(epidemiologist)#Personal_life
Ferguson reported on 18 March 2020 that he had developed the symptoms of COVID-19, and self-isolated.
Does he get a massive performance bonus from the Gates of Hell Foundation every time he pushes their control and dominate agenda forward I wonder?
Thanks for that very true description of the Gates Foundation!!! LOL!!!
I know all about Neil Ferguson. I read the Imperious report when it was published. I was commenting on it weeks ago.
That’s not the point. Our thinking errors are deeply flawed: but not from the point Ferguson published …or the nature of the deceit – from at least two and a half millennia ago …from what some call the Axial Age.
To use the GIGO metaphor: you can’t just factcheck the facts or ”error codes”, or ”debug the script”. Facts and events mean nothing individually. Sense-making and meaning emerge from putting facts and events in meaning structures – via protocols, paradigms or theories – and making sense of states of affairs with coherent narratives. Which validate the paradigm and make sense of the fact.
Facts are easy: explanatory paradigms, models and theories are harder to construct. That is why we take so much for granted as ”paradigmatic”: so we do not waste all our time working from first principles. Paradigms are generic assumptive Rules of Thumb that generate their own biases and cumulative error creep.
Making everything fit the dualist paradigms that are in turn constructed from the Cartesian Episteme has long become dogmatic and doctrinaire. And one element in particular – consciousness – does not fit the historicist Episteme. A cosmography without consciousness is quite an omission, wouldn’t you agree?
I know about Ferguson, I know about Gates, I know about GAVI and CEPI and all that stuff. So we parse all that, ”debug the script”, and move on …with a socialisation without a valid model of consciousness. That’s just another car crash waiting to happen.
We lurch from crisis to crisis and never check the protocols of information assimilation. Every self-referential language has to categorise to prevent ”information cascades” …ie sensory overload and system meltdown. We have to reduce complexity (information entropy) by categorical attenuation – sense-making and signification. We can only deal with a very small amount of information that is cognitively pre-categorised as significant. Our best theories involve something called ”Free Energy Minimisation”. The point being: we need to sort information into paradigmatic categories of significance and value in order to assimilate it efficiently. And to communicate. Too much info cascading (Bayesian ”surprise” in the lingo) causes stress, anxiety, fear and eventually neuroses and psychoses.
We are really very simple: all of us. Everyone relies on an enormous set of social relations to do anything. Cognition is shared and distributed. Underlying all this are the common cognitive categories we use as a common cultural ground of participatory sense-making. In cognitive linguistics: it is referred to as the Cognitive Unconscious …which I am loosely equating with the Episteme. If it is not common and collective – there can be no signification and communication …and no behavioural order of complexity.
If the categories of Being, time, agency, etc are flawed …the culture is fucked. Thinking errors manifest in every domain. Every domain multiplies the meaning crises by ”transacting” with every other. Sense becomes non-sense. Meaning becomes meaningless. This has nothing to do with any one individual. The thinking error is categorical. Our core conceptual cognitive categories are corrupt. It all has to kinda hang together.
If the mass of information is attenuated through corrupt categories: the greater the complexity of meaning we try to achieve …the less sense it makes. Language is in fact conceptual metaphor and conceptual blending across ever greater degrees of ever more abstract domains [Lakoff; Faulconnier]. The core cognitive categorical conceptions cannot extend to hypercomplexity and infinity. The things that really matter do not make any sense any more.
If we are going to think about thinking: we gotta think about thinking about thinking …from the categorical linguistic protocols; binary encoding; binary logical formalism of self-referential languages; etc which is meta-linguistics. If we just assume the psycholinguistic thinking is correct; and can correctly identify and objectify causal entities; assuming away a more radical and fundamental thinking error …participatory sense-making – and with it mental wellbeing – will continue to degenerate rapidly.
This is no hoax; this is no psyop; this is real life. And it is about to get ugly. Coming through that with compassion and understanding is probably the last thing on any one’s mind right now: but looking for individuals to blame won’t help. The whole linguistic protocol of communication is corrupted from the start: it’s just a pity relatively so few saw the error codes on the wall these past 2,500 years. And were unable to do anything about it.
I think I kind of get what you’re saying, BigB, but as I’ve said before I’m a prosaic, logical thinker – if philosophers such as yourself can work out a better way to think I’m all for it. Let me know when you work it out.
At my basic level this is what I think: pointing out lots of anomalies in a story is a worthless exercise when you can take off the coat-rack an hypothesis that fits perfectly – no need to take up the hem or adjust waistline – it fits perfectly and that hypothesis is that this alleged pandemic is, in fact, Trauma-based Mind Control Psychological Operation in the form of a pandemic exercise that exhibits the characteristics of the strictly rule-governed psyops they perpetrate on us with great regularity:
1. They tell us with clues above and beyond the naturally occurring anomalies.
2. They never present a piece of faked evidence so well that someone who believes the story can brandish it in support.
The Emperor’s New Clothes is said to date from 1100’s Spain although I cannot believe more ancient cultures did not have their own version.
The Emperor’s New Clothes was worked out at least centuries ago and yet still we still see clothes on the Emperor even when one of the cunning tailors’ representatives himself spells it out exactly in those words – Dr Wolfgang Wodarg said those very words although he got the part about fraudulent scientists driving this psyop wrong. They’re not driving it they’re just part of it and he knows that of course because he’s controlled opposition.
The Emperor’s New Clothes needs an updated version because the Emperor these days is usually in on it and the cunning tailors are the intelligence assets employed by the power elite.
What’s interesting is that while in YouTuber land analysts point out the really over-the top anomalies revealing clearly that this pandemic is a psyop, above the line in OffG they play a very straight bat and simply point out the anomalies in the figures and similar – exactly what the perps want the skeptics to be doing, of course – keep our noses in the figures, pointing out the anomalies. You speak of consciousness – yes we need to be conscious of how others are trying to focus our minds. Very important.
No one above the line will point out this anomaly: a patient being filmed against protocol in an ICU flashing her cannulated wrist and saying very, very oddly:
“They had to sew that into my artery.”
They don’t point out these anomalies that only fit psyop above the line they just keep their noses in the figures and similar … exactly where the perps want the skeptics to have their noses.
Similarly, in Australia, the cruise ship, Ruby Princess, docked and, against protocol, let passengers off without being tested or quarantined or some such nonsense. Everyone’s all upset about this failure of protocol just like everyone jumped up and down about failure of protocol of interception on 9/11. Of course, there was no failure of protocol in either case, it’s all staged. It’s a little reminiscent of that dualist thing you mention I think, the Hegelian dialectic – distract everyone with (completely staged) failure of protocol. This alleged driver of a passenger who ended up in hospital is completely unconvincing.
Just to add to the Emperor’s New Clothes theme:
What writers above the line on OffG do is look at the alleged gossamer threads and point out that there’s issues with their gossameriness rather than simply say straight out, “There are no gossamer threads, the Emperor is naked.” A slight change in perception but massive in significance.
Just noticed in the first video above that the alleged patient has tubes clipped together at her neck and they look quite tightly clipped (8 seconds in is best view). This seems odd to me, especially if someone is having trouble breathing. Any medical opinion out there on this? Also, why would she have a catheter?
I guessed auto-eroticism, but I was wrong. Maybe it’s wikipedia that’s wrong though …
LOL. No doubt the MI6 editors of Neil’s page know things about him that they’re keeping to themselves.
The phenomenon of the global mass hallucination known quaintly as Covid19 brings instantly to mind ~for minds that have achieved in its throes an event-specific “sartori”~ that first truly unspeakable event, one like this, of the Hiroshima A-bomb.
Articulation from a void. Hence, per Thomas Merton’s sense, unspeakable, as in “how can a void speak?”
And it is the kind of “object” (the virus and panic) around which fascist minds can coagulate, like a global fetish.
For those who have, on their worst days, an inversion of values by prizing thoughtlessness as some kind of “manly” accessory, such things can be perfectly weaponized, and take on lives of their own, like a perpetuum mobile.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff were proposing a nuclear strike on Cuba to a clearly shocked JFK, who realized the line being drawn between his rational analysis and their fascist unchecked impulses and lack of rational critique.
This past month has been the realization of a “light” alternative to Nuclear Holocaust.
Something in the irrational side of the cultures longs and lusts to see this kind of thing unfold, since it has been robbed to date of the Strangelovian alternative. A kind of psycho-drama of global ritual cum intrinsic catharsis. Now that the full dress rehearsal for Armageddon has reached something like its breaking point…
It is up to cooler heads to prevail….
Hmmmmm
A long but excellent article, which I would have endorsed wholeheartedly but for this line:
“Herd immunity” is a ridiculous concept. It is dependent on totally unproven and illogical beliefs, namely:
1. That the disease under question can only affect one person once. This assumption is false in the case of most diseases. It is almost always untrue for RNA viruses, especially coronaviruses, which mutate constantly. That is why everyone gets colds multiple times in their lives and influenza on more than a few occasions.
2. That in the age of mass air travel and will almost no isolated populations, except possibly the Sentinelese in the Andaman Islands, herd immunity is possible or even means anything. If by “herd” immunity one means the idea that if enough of a population of immune to a disease the rest won’t get it, then that population had better be isolated from the rest of the planet, or it will inevitably re-import the disease agent from elsewhere.
Note that this has nothing to do with how lethal or otherwise the disease causing agent is. It is entirely different from that question.
On the question of corrupt scientists, I am in full agreement. So many scientists have sold out so often – for example, Neil DeGrasse Tyson on GMOs – that nothing that any individual scientist says can be trusted any more than what anyone else says about their respective fields. And if a scientist says something that accords exactly with the wishes of the political and economic establishment, you know for certain that the statement requires deep scrutiny before any legitimacy whatsoever is bestowed on it.
Herd immunity is an absolutely basic, standard concept of epidemiology which makes perfect sense and is perfectly apt for many situations. Your criticisms of it seem rather perverse. Yes, there are situations in which herd immunity has less effect, such as rapidly mutating viruses, but even in those cases it s herd immunity that usually slows and limits the spread of particular forms before new ones evolve. Granted, immunity can be limited in duration. So what?
As for your comment about isolation, that one is just flat out incorrect. It’s precisely the inevitability of reintroduction, whether from distant communities, from animal reservoirs or whatever, that makes herd immunity important. When there is a reintroduction, it is the presence or absence of a level of herd immunity that determines whether the reintroduced pathogen spreads as a renewed epidemic or not.
Would it make you feel better if it were termed “population immunity” instead?
“Epidemiology” is mostly a pseudoscience. By your logic, smallpox should have disappeared long ago without any need for a vaccine – and it’s a large, stable, DNA virus. Your contention is ipso facto laughable.
No, you are misusing the term. The term was coined precisely to explain the effect of rising partial population immunity in slowing the spread of an epidemic. It does not, or did not originally prior to the use of vaccines, at all mean complete immunity and therefore elimination of a pathogen in a population, and using that idea in the way you try to here is basically a straw man.
Thanks Mark, for the clarity.
I’m only an armchair epidemiologist, but long experience gives that the ring of truth. And the other does seem on its face “perverse”. As stated.
Without wanting to join the epidemologists on their grand plinth looking down on the rest of us, I understand that (for example) cold and flu viruses do tear through remote communities for example, when Western missionaries arrive bringing them, and are realtively innocuous in countries where resistance has evolved. Secondly, and related, is that it seems immune systems respond faster and more effectively to viruses that have been encountered before, and to viruses ‘similar’ to one encountered before. With the coronavirus, there is a lot of media chatter about people who have had it no longer having antibodies, hence being vulnerable “to getting it again”, or maybe “spreading” the disease, and less interest in the possibility that viral resistance is not just antibodies by things like T-cells too. But now I see I am climbing halfway up the plinth!
This article was over-long and full of proofing errors, by OffGuardian’s usually high editorial standards. But I will share it with the unenlightened anyway, as it’s another useful contribution to perhaps getting them to engage their brains. However, I do this in hope rather than in expectation.
Many of my recent ones have been error strewn due to panic over this recent COVID coup. Indeed it is a positively Lovecraftian panic. cf. the end of “Dagon”:
Ph’nglui mgwl’nafh COVID-19 Media wgah’nagl fhtagn! Iä iä COVID-19 fhtagn!
How about:
“Iä iä COVID-19 fhtagn, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Bollocks!”
J. Colin: I knew it. That’s a little known dialect of the Black Speech of the Nazgûl. Right?
So has this panic been engineered to cover an economic collapse caused by political decisions?
According to the article, which makes perfect sense to me, no. Much of the blame can be laid at the door of Professor Neil Ferguson, a repeat offender.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
Indeed not. One takes advantage of the situation in which one finds oneself.
Ferguson is only in Britain. He has no influence on the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, he does. Other scientists applied the same models to their populations and cascade theory took control.
Strong wiff of Mr. Colin being a troll (really Jihadi??) time to stop feeding the troll
There is this thing called the Internet and another great device– a phone. Let me make this clear for you– Mr (sic) Ferguson publishes in my local Toronto paper– sorry you were saying? Wake up Colin
That has been my belief from the start and what I had said in my first article on the subject well over a month ago.
What an excellent article. I have just read on Sputnik that the British cabinet is split on the lockdown exit strategy. Gove and Sunak favour exiting sooner while Cummings and Hancock favour the long haul as do the public. The policy is now self-perpetuating. As Mr Cohen points out ” all over the world, media, politicians – and health experts too – combined forces to convince the world that it was facing imminent doom.” Now they have to somehow convince the world that it’s safe to come out again, in fact, they have to convince the world it’s imperative they come out again.
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”
― George Orwell, 1984
To me a very important thinking error present in most discussion of the alleged pandemic is not investigating the most obvious hypothesis and to keep pointing out errors in the “official story” hypothesis which consumes masses amounts of energy and time that is, effectively, wasted.
Loads of anomalies in the “official story” hypothesis. And? What are you going to do with these anomalies?
If the “official story” hypothesis contains so many anomalies then the scientific approach would be to not waste time continuing to point them out but to look at competing hypotheses that better fit the evidence. Surely, we should be more interested in what explains the evidence rather than what doesn’t explain it.
On Day One the most obvious competing hypothesis is that the alleged pandemic is, in fact, a Trauma-based Mind Control Psychological Operation (psyop) in the form of a “live pandemic exercise” following Event 201, a tabletop pandemic exercise, held in October 2019, partnered by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
We know psyops happen, they’re not just things written about on conspiracy pages. They have them listed in Wikipedia – of course, we don’t get a comprehensive description of them there but we know from looking at the long continuum of psyops perpetrated upon us they contain two characteristics:
1. They always give us signals that they’re psyops above and beyond naturally occurring anomalies.
2. They never fake anything so well that a believer of the “official story” can brandish it in support of it.
Should be a pretty straightforward exercise to prove that this alleged pandemic is a psyop, shouldn’t it?
It is.
On Day One they told us snakes and pangolins among other animals were reservoirs of this virus with zero evidence of this claim along with the fact that it is a very odd claim to make. Immediately, we switch from “official story” hypothesis to investigation of the most obvious hypothesis: psyop. From here on in if everything is consistent with psyop hypothesis and there is nothing that favours any other hypothesis over the psyop hypothesis then that’s the one we choose.
Every single piece of evidence supports psyop, none favours any other hypothesis and some really only fits psyop. It would be very difficult to shoehorn a significant amount of evidence into any other hypothesis than psyop where they give us the signals.
Beyond the examples of the animal reservoirs there are the following pieces of evidence that fit psyop where clear signals are given but don’t fit any other hypothesis without assumptions or questions raised:
1. We are told empty buildings in China were converted into a hospital in 48 hours with no evidence of this amazing feat.
2. We are shown alleged sufferers falling flat on their faces and laid out on the pavement and in hospital.
3. An alleged hospital patient flashes her cannulated wrist, saying the very odd thing, “They had to sew that into my artery.”
4. An alleged sufferer told us that he thought “his days were done” but through the advice of a friend took anti-malarials and underwent a miraculous recovery. (Even if the alleged sufferer believed this to be true it would be very irresponsible for the media to tell us this as it would mislead sufferers into trying to try this method.)
5. We are told an alleged 82 year-old sufferer underwent a miraculous recovery through a course of antibiotics. (Even if the alleged sufferer believed this to be true it would be very irresponsible for the media to tell us this as it would mislead sufferers into trying to try this method.)
I’m sure there are numerous other similar examples.
If anyone has a skerrick of evidence that doesn’t support the psyop hypothesis or favours any other hypothesis please reply in a comment.
My case for psyop below:
https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/blog/coronavirus-hoax-jan-2020
I favour the null hypothesis.
It’s a rather solid chain of science reasoning, Petra, but this Event (y’all know the one!) has become such a lightning rod for so many things, my inclinations suspect psyop, but there is a lot more to it. In all fairness to the little Bug.
Although psyop looks a lot like the seed out of which it all grew. Or perhaps it just hitched a ride. (Like someone commented, never let a good crisis go to waste. And how!)
To wit, I do believe there is psyop(s) as key component(s), but that doesn’t yet exclude other explanations/hypotheses.
Ever?
I think by definition it will be hard to say for this baby.
9/11, 7/7, WMD: PROVEABLE Psyops.
This one, it is so baroque, it may be hard to ever prove. Even when all the votes are counted (if by hand, that is!).
I will nominate you for the original blue ribbon if events ~somehow~ prove you right.
I am nothing if not a Conspiracy Realist.
If you can suggest alternatives/extras, John, please do. I don’t claim there aren’t extras but I do claim most emphatically that the alleged COVID-19 pandemic is an exercise, not a real pandemic or an exaggerated claim of a virus problem.
Of course, this psyop has multiple and significant agendas about which I have virtually no understanding (the agendas – while being the most important aspect, of course – are not my baby I can only manage the psyop part).
There is no evidence whatsoever of a specific virus causing sickness out of the ordinary. I’d like to claim there is no specific virus but I won’t because my knowledge is not authoritative enough but the point is whether there is a virus or not is irrelevant because what we do not see are:
— any mortality figures that show a mortality rate beyond normal
— any alleged patients convincingly showing sickness in the visuals presented which is completely against expectations if there were a specific virus causing illness.
Then there are all the highly anomalous problems of extremely unreliable testing and ascribing COVID-19 as cause of death to people in whom co-morbidities are present, etc, not to mention the reasonably compelling evidence that the alleged virus has not been isolated nor shown to cause infection.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that a specific virus is causing problems beyond the ordinary. We can perfectly explain all sickness and death with general respiratory illnesses and other health problems.
QED.
Slow to get back, but I read your post several times and appreciate the very well-measured and scientifically chaste boundaries you place on your focus, regarding the Psyop “component” of this indescribable global extravaganza we are all sharing.
And an excellent choice it is, since it would appear more and more from evidence piling up over the last twenty years, especially, but interestingly, long long before that, that all humanity’s interests and security are most vulnerable, practically, at the various levels of the aggressive psyop “assault”, for which this virus baby looks good as our age’s “poster child”.
And on a practical level, any worthwhile input that people give on that aspect is extremely useful to us all. Few studies could be more so? If we can find some therapy, let alone cure, for that, we may be back in business….
I’m going to give more time to considering your points before I can add anything AS useful, but it’s incentive enough to see all your conclusions thus far are indeed QED.
I “feel” that whatever agency is behind what clearly is this global psychological “Ponzi scheme” is exploiting pointedly, strategically and “with malice aforethought” opportunities that exist in structures broadly.
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself, so I’ll get back when I’m not!
Thanks again for the posts!
If you extend the idea of the psyop, you have the ‘Matrix’ – but this operates AS IF something ALIEN has subjected and control of your will.
An alien will is by definition – NOT ours – but set apart and in opposition to it.
The idea of a thought set apart from the mind of its own thinking IS alien to the Mind that embraces All That It Is, but THROUGH such a glass darkly – Life can destroy its own means of support by alienating the very Life that lives it. Such is the mind of dissociation running AS IF a thing in and of itself – and as a decontextualised ‘lockdown’ in self-isolating ‘defences’.
To undo the error by which we run off in mis-idenification, requires willingness to question the premises from which we act or react. The old story has it than only when we cant even find enough to eat in the pig-trough of a prodigal wasteland, do we suddenly remember Source, and accept service to the whole for any sense of true connection. In extending the connection is the renewal of our true identity. This is to say remember the dance by dancing or song by singing – as a true movement of being instead of a masking mimicry that ‘tries to be real’ but expresses a sense of lack that in truth is alien to our nature.
I took the movement that came to me. I could have answered biologically.
It’s not a bug – its a feature.
Petra specialises in calling ‘Them’ out as the total cause of a totally fake event that has no basis in reality and in my opinion this undermines critical thinking by setting up an extreme position.
Regardless the ‘source or agency’ of deceit, the only correction lies in our own vigilance to our own thinking and emotional invested reaction.And then living and giving witness from a corrected or un-baited freedom to relate, communicate, listen and respond in a movement of shared worth.
Fear breaks communication – if we give it that power.
I do not see my position as extreme, binra, simply a position that takes the evidence by the horns, checks it for fitting various hypotheses and ensures it can only fit one. Why other people do not do the same I do not know. It’s so straightforward.
Event 201, a tabletop pandemic exercise, occurred in October 2019 and on January 11, 2020, allegedly, the first case of COVID-19 was recorded. So you think that’s a coincidence, binra? You see, I don’t and because I don’t then it’s only natural that I’d think there is no special virus causing a problem, isn’t it? It would have to be a pretty big coincidence that a VIP tabletop exercise occurred just 3 months before this earth-shattering pandemic started and I’m not buyin’ it when there is zero evidence of this alleged pandemic. Of course, they know skeptics are going to go – “Hey, Event 201, just before alleged pandemic – highly suspicious” but then where do the skeptics go from there? They just point out more and more anomalies … and more and more anomalies … and go nowhere.
Every single piece of evidence supports the psyop hypothesis and a lot of it doesn’t support any other hypotheses we can think of. It’s just that simple. So what we should do is call this event out as what it clearly is, a psyop, not, ineffectually, keep pointing out the anomalies in the story.
You put all your eggs in one basket – and for what?
THEY DO IT?
Where do you go with that?
I’m not unaware of the narratives being engineered.
I wrote about self deceit as the primary factor.
Because self responsibility is transformational.
Regardless what THEY do or don’t do.
I don’t subscribe to germ theory – as currently held – and see that WE participate in all kinds of self-illusion.
One way to maintain self-illusion is to set it against exposing that of others.
So you are starting to see the deconstruction of what was and may still be clung to as real. But if you really see, then the spell is broken and you can seek the truth it was made to hide or divert – yes?
So many woke people persist in focusing on a stepping stone as some sort of consummating self vindication.
People use stories to justify themselves to themselves and others, and some of these become insane and tragic.
I do see viral code as part of the biology of life support on the Planet – and I cant rule out the hacking of this code by those who seek to install proprietary operating systems under mandate.
So if I said extreme I didn’t mean an extremist, so much as a one trick pony – and if you are ok with that – what more could you want?
I touch on just a few points that are lost to running a denial script of – “its all fake”. The idea of the ‘deceiver’ is not new. Seeing it ONLY as out there – is a fallacy. the mind makes stories.
Of course the ‘controllers’ are desperate to maintain their position while crashing civilisation as we have known it. And this pattern is being replicated in the minds that effectively feed the Beast.
I disagree, Petra performs very valuable service, suspiciously too absent elsewhere, by taking such events as psyops , training exercises, and then trying to disprove that, not the other way around.
Coroners approach a death that may look like a suicide and BEGIN by assuming homicide, until they are confident they have eliminated that verdict. If unobstructed.
Sometimes it takes years, especially if the victims are politically, financially entangled.
A great example and I’ve presented it here in several posts, is my own father’s demise. It was *implied* to me it was a suicide, he was cremated the next day, before I could see the body, i was 2000 miles away, then I found out 20 years later that LAPD still considered it an open case, though bitter cold.
(Robin Williams was cremated the next day. Can you say, very slowly, “destruction of evidence”? )
Anyone who tries to steer Petra off course from all that may be in the same league.
Although it’s very very tempting to to make a direct connection between Event 201 and this, that could be another psyop feature, not a smoking gun.
Oh I have no doubt in the basic premise of lies and deceit and nor need I doubt your appreciation of finding a sense of support in meeting her post. You are perhaps also somewhat binary in your reaction and took nothing in of what I wrote – only seeing me as a potential ‘dark operative’ or perhaps ‘sheeple’.
I don’t try to change anyone’s course, but petra has been posting here a long while – and has a web site and is free to operate what I see as a one trick pony. That goes around the same arena.
I have NO doubt myself that the covid19 is a pretext for leveraging not just the minds of the many but the world we live in – BY our own reactions. It is part of a long line of such ‘conditionings’, drills, and live acting out.
To some, this is a shocking possibility that breaks their world to consider. And perhaps then think that they only need tell others and the culprits will be held to account.
Psyops go off in the mind of a psyoperative.
That is to say you have to address the narrative identity reaction of your own mind, to release the hack and restore wholeness.
The deceiver may tempt, but you have to take the bait.
You will not out-think the deceiver but will feed the beast.
Coroner’s, like scientists, may have ideal codes of practice but in practice all kinds of distortions come into effect. Being ‘suicided’ is a common expression these days.
I wrote a post yesterday on cock up or conspiracy. Which comes first or are they versions of each other, as plausible deniability and attempt to hide?
If you are releasing the ‘mainstreamed mind’, I congratulate you. But reaction does not make independence. We have to learn to question from a true desire to know and heal, else we only ask for what we already want to hear.
I readily admit I’m a one trick pony, binra, all I know is psyops and even there only the actual psyop part, not the agenda part (the most important aspect) but the fact that I point out endlessly – absolutely endlessly – that the power elite let us know that they’re psyopping us, means my point is that we LET them psyop us and, in fact, collaborate with them in psyopping us by insisting on being blind – so I’m not making it all about “them”, I think we’re responsible for letting them do to us what they do.
For those who don’t know that they let us know, who, when they see a woman with tubes up her nose flashing her cannulated wrist and saying, highly anomalously, “They had to sew that into my artery,” just wave it away as an anomaly (as I used to) fine. I don’t expect people who don’t know to work it out (as I didn’t myself) but when you tell people, “Hey, here’s a clear sign here and a clear sign there and, in fact, there actually is no evidence to support their story because they are meticulous in engineering their story that way – in this case by not showing any alleged patients who are convincing,” then I expect people to wake up and respond with, “Yeah, I see that. I see that there are no convincing patients and I can see that the “miracle survivor” stories don’t make sense, and the people falling flat on their faces are not consistent with “virus illness”, etc, etc, etc.” No one can present a case for either:
— A real pandemic
— A virus spread “blown out of proportion” situation.
This alleged pandemic must be something, binra, it must be something. It’s not a pandemic and it’s not a “blown out of proportion” situation so what is it?
All we have to do is go to our toolbox and check against “Psychological Operation” which, by definition, includes the two characteristics:
1. They tell us with clues above and beyond naturally occurring anomalies
2. Nothing is faked so well that a believer of the story can brandish it in support.
Does it fit? With bells on. It fits with bells on. It fits perfectly and it is the only thing that fits. There are zero anomalies in the psyop hypothesis but there are many things that don’t fit for any other hypothesis.
I simply do not understand why on OffG I need to keep repeating myself. While I might seem the outlier here there are a number of YouTubers and others who think exactly the same way.
Shouldn’t we be identifying EXACTLY how they’re screwing us over big time, how they are going to transfer money to themselves. Shouldn’t we identify it where we can?
Interview by Tracey Grimshaw of A Current Affair with former Qld premier, Anna Bligh, now CEO of the Australian Banking Association letting us know how they’re going to transfer the money from us to them.
Comment on this video:
Ben Lee song “We’re all in this together”.
Ben Lee song “Catch my disease”.
Both songs on the Ben Lee album “Awake is the new sleep”.
Released 2004.
I just posted reply to John in this thread.
Why do you include yourself in:
‘We keep on falling for it’ ?
Do you?
You persist in telling people they are being deceived by ‘Power’ that doesn’t really try to hide that it lies.
Is this not because many choose to align in or under ‘Power’ and don’t really care to question why, or what for?
Pulling the wool over our own eyes is choosing to align in narratives that keep us hidden and work as a social masking in which to gain or bolster personal identity in the face of losing it.
Fear and control.
It takes different forms. But is one coin with two sides that can flip back and forth in incredibly complex patterns of mind. Mind can operate as incredibly fast complex of fear and control – but can NEVER more than believe it true. So once you question, from true desire, it starts to unravel. The watchdogs of guilt and fear will then be activated to restate allegiance to fear’s ‘protection’. At first these may be so effective as to only be questioned a long way down the line, but bringing curiosity and willingness for true relation present, has to bring the active narrative into conscious awareness – and thus restored to the status of a choice – instead of automatically identified habit.
The Established structures of control fear losing it to Change, but structure is not alive and has already robbed them.
Those who believe they have little, fear they will lose even the little that they have. This is the alliance of ‘rich and poor’ in fear and resistance to Change – which is the very nature of life in Expression.
Love of life is a true currency – and this also means truly current or present. Being with what is, as participance in its unfolding of shared Meaning.
Thinking errors, given identification and protection, make a whole world of error – because mind is fundamental. The attempt to then force the farce into a narrative assertion from which all else must be excluded or submit, is the realm of fig leaf thinking, Emperor’s robes or All the king’s horses and all the king’s men.
That is its JOB function – at least until Job releases it from service by waking in a greater love.
The timing of the release of the curtain to a greater participance is part of the unfolding of our self to our Self – which also unfolds like a community bus service that seems to go everywhere else before bringing us to our destination – which never was a ‘place’ or a symbol of perfection made real, but a rich and moving wholeness of being that ‘getting there’ or ‘getting’ from a self-isolating sense of lack-step as power of protection, inherently denies us. Short-cuts operate delay. Recognising this saves time from wasting and being wasted. For we cannot be ahead or behind ourselves except in a split off thinking – given priority.
We suffer our defences – by reaction that flags the cause Out There.
We all have this elitist, self-special mindset. It generally operates exactly where our blind spot is.
In many ways the evolution and development of consciousness can be seen as the patterning and structures arising from our blind spot, identified in and given priority.
I do not accord ‘Them’ more power than I give them, allowing I am living within many contexts that I am part of and not separate from.
The spiritual revelation is (wordlessly) All Power is of God. But this immediacy of innocence is lost to the judging mind that sets apart and over (and makes god, self and reality in its own image as objects of mind made to matter).
So consider that a wholeness of being is always communicating to us – from a place we have discarded, covid over and marked out as no-go area, and so are trained NOT to hear or recognise – but rather to fear and demonise.
By such means are we entranced to a drama from which no exit seems possible without releasing invested identity.
A forced dream falls apart.
What then calls to a fresh and true alignment in life?
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men?
No – but while (fear of) brokenness and lack are held and protected as our source of identity, they are serving the purpose given them.
If an ‘Angel’ were to appear and trumpet that life set in death is but an illusion and all our fears are ill-founded – what purpose would it serve?
The erecting of Mighty Defences against spoilers?
The most successful psyop of all time has been run by the Coca Cola Company and then copied by advertising agencies and governments everywhere.
That is: Keep repeating your lies until the plebs are saturated.
We work.
We buy.
We die.
What else is there?
What a masterpiece of investigative reporting, someone finally put it all together succinctly. I was sorry to finally reach the end. Thank you. I just bought your 2015 book on Kindle, think I’ll be up late tonight:) Kudos!
Thanks, Daniel. Positive comments are relatively rare (I understand why, we all tend to focus on what is NOT quite right!) but much appreciated. Hope you enjoy the book!
Martin, I think you did a great analysis, however, I can’t see the point of a great analysis without making the obvious conclusion where it exists.
You point out anomalies in previous events. You point out the anomalies in this one. Will you do the same for future events? Where does it get you?
I’d argue that the evidence clearly shows that these events are all psychological operations (psyops) displaying typical psyop characteristics: obvious anomalies above and beyond any naturally occurring ones; no evidence faked so well it can be used to defend the event’s reality – in this case all the alleged patients they show us are not convincing. In addition, mortality figures are no higher than normal so there is absolutely zero to support any kind of pandemic or even virus spread “blown out of proportion”.
What do you conclude is the actual nature of this alleged pandemic?
Hi Petra, well, the general aim is to ask people to look behind the psychological smoke and mirrors stuff and evaluate both the problem and the solutions more rationally. With an emphasis on social justice. The scary thing is that ‘herd effect’ where arguments let alone policy recommendations are ignored (not so much thinking of commentaries by people like myself but indeed many people who have made a speciality of advice on epidemics – like the experts Off Guardian has brought together – in favour of what become, I agree, very like psyops. You will have noticed the news now of the UK government using NHS staff prfiles to tweet out scary messages, and also supposedly samizdat billboards in cities and the ‘clap for the NHS’ routines. In such a climate the detail of what needs to be done seems to me to need to be preceded by a change in the way policy is being evaluated and decided. So that’s where the piece is at really, ‘stage one’.
OK, I’ll make my question more specific.
Do you believe that there is clear evidence there is no pandemic?
Certainly there is a ‘pandemic’. But the term is just irrelevant to the real issues. My own reading of the evidence is that threat from Covid is similar in nature and scope to that from flu, and like flu, it will hang around for many years. It needed a response in terms of healthservice provision, not in terms of dismantling society.
I came to this “event” with a different understanding from yours, Martin. Six years ago I woke up to the Emperor’s New Clothes / Big Lie world we live in after watching the film by British historian, Francis Richard Conolly, JFK to 9/11: Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick, on YouTube. After a further four years of study of 9/11 I woke up to the pivotal truth of that event: death and injury were staged, making 9/11 the psyop that people often refer to it as but incorrectly when they believe death and injury to be real – a psyop is not a psyop when you kill 3,000 people and injure 6,000 you have no desire to harm. That is not a psyop but 9/11 was indeed a psyop in the correct sense of the term, specifically a Trauma-based Mind Control Psychological Operation.
My case for 9/11 being a psyop in the correct sense of the word is on my website – no one has contradicted it so far.
What I’ve also learnt in six years is that psyops (of which there are many) contain two characteristics that at first sight (but not when you consider the power of power so to speak) seem counterintuitive:
1. Underneath the propaganda, the truth of the event being a psyop is clearly pushed out in gratuitous anomalies and other signs.
2. No evidence is faked so well that a person who believes the story can use it to defend its reality.
The above two characteristics are always present without fail.
When the alleged pandemic first came to my notice I immediately checked Wikipedia as I know it always gives you the clues. (According to Swiss Propaganda Research an active and influential English Wikipedia administrator called “Slim Virgin” was, in fact, a former British intelligence informer. https://swprs.org/wikipedia-disinformation-operation.)
Instantly, I suspected that the alleged COVID-19 pandemic was a psyop because in the first paragraph it said that the SARS virus affected birds and mammals while in the fifth paragraph there was mention of two unrelated species of snake, the Chinese cobra and the many-banded krait, being reservoirs (the page has changed substantially since and I cannot find this version). Further research revealed in an article in Wired that a Chinese research team came up with the snakes theory and had had a peer-reviewed article published in the Journal of Medical Virology. We are told, however, that a biosecurity specialist based at Sydney University, Edward Holmes, said of this claim, “It’s complete garbage.”
Everything about this story perfectly fits the psyop characteristic No. 1 of gratuitous anomaly pushed out underneath the propaganda undermining the reality of the story and is hard to shoehorn into “real pandemic”. Obviously, of course, if evidence came along that showed convincingly there was a pandemic then we would have to somehow wave away this anomaly as just that. However, no evidence has come along that says there is a real pandemic while much fitting psyop has.
According to psyop characteristic No. 2 any alleged patients they showed us would not be convincing and this is exactly what we see. We might also expect to be told ludicrous miracle survivor stories that we see in other psyops including 9/11.
I present examples of the above below.
Videos of unconvincing patients:
— 40-year-old Ulster pastor not showing signs of symptoms
— 41-year-old Italian not showing signs of symptoms
— 3 Americans, showing zero signs of symptoms
— Australian hire-car driver not showing symptoms convincingly
Re this patient:
We wonder why the footage of her is such poor quality – devices don’t take such poor quality footage these days. She said that her passenger had letters on her saying she was OK. We wonder why the driver didn’t check the letters and if the passenger did have letters how she got them because we are told that the passengers were let off simply because they were considered low risk. We are not told elsewhere that they were given letters.
— 39-year-old London patient in ICU.
Re this patient:
1. Filming in ICU against protocol.
2. She says she’s 10 times better than before and doesn’t seem massively ill so you’d think she’d be out of ICU by now.
3. She flashes her wrist with what looks like taping of tubes and says, “They’ve had to sew that into my artery.” This is against reality.
4. She mentions she has a catheter. Why would she have a catheter?
5. There are two tubes that look quite tightly clasped under her neck. Why would this be when she has breathing difficulties?
Unconvincing miracle survivor stories:
— 82 year-old North Staffordshire grandfather makes miracle recovery – with antibiotics. How is this possible if antibiotics are said not to be a cure?
— 90 year-old Washington grandmother makes miracle recovery from “death’s door”, potato soup being her secret weapon. No images of her suggest she is ill. A 52 year-old MIami man, “gaspin'”, “on the brink of death” and thinking his “days were done” recovers miraculously with anti-malarial, chloroquine. Of course, the media is simply reporting what the alleged sufferers feel has helped them … but surely for such a serious problem if potato soup and chloroquine have not been scientifically proven to help sufferers shouldn’t the media be warning viewers?
Then we have the dancing of the medical staff in various hospitals that is so reminiscent of the dancing of medical staff (or performers acting as medical staff) at the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics and there are a number of other things we can see that presage the current situation in the opening ceremony. Of course, that we should see dancing medical staff in hospitals while a pandemic is going on is massively anomalous. You cannot get much more anomalous than that.
Links to above and more are on my blog post:
https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/blog/coronavirus-hoax-jan-2020
All the evidence I see supports the hypothesis that this event is a massive, globally orchestrated Trauma-based Mind Control Psychological Operation in the form of a “live exercise” pushed out as real, following Event 201, a tabletop pandemic exercise held in October 2019, partnered by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
I claim based on the evidence:
There is no pandemic and any illness and death are not due to anything out of the ordinary. If, indeed, SARS-CoV-2 is out there causing illness it is not causing any illness other than what we expect from viruses normally. Massive fraudulence is responsible for figures indicating that alleged illness COVID-19 is playing any particular role in death and illness figures and is all part of this globally orchestrated psyop.
If you have a skerrick of evidence that supports genuine pandemic or if you think there is anything wrong with my critical thinking, Martin, please let me know.
I don’t really see why people think they have to be suspicious of ‘everything’ here. The thesis I have outlined is that there are a series of new viruses, each one is presented in hysterian terms as global pandemics and each one is in fact within the range of normal, natural virus behaviour. The thing that is remarkable about the new corona virus is not that it kills a certain amount of people, I am sure it does, and your suggestion that I need ‘evidence’ implies a vast number of people in a ‘conspiracy’ which makes no more sense than, well, things like contact tracing.
So I stick to my position that there is indeed a corona virus, it has some new characteristics over previous corona and flu ones, but that it has been deliberately inflated in significance by people with various agenda, all of which are against the public interest.
The distortion of the case fatality rate, the suppression of evidence that the virus has already spread widely (but largely harmlessly) and the creation of a state of fear are to me the real conspiracy. But even that is an informal one.
By the way, I had some direct conacts with Slim Virgin, who told me about their interest in philosophy and certainly appeared to be a rather bored ‘professional’ editing Wikipedia as a job. They abruptly blocked me from the site on a specicious reason. You should be aware that a great deal of past editing is removed by adminstrators, the claim that the content or the event record (that X edited the page on date Y) for previous edits is preserved is false.
Very interesting about your experience with Slim Virgin. I noticed after I posted that the quote contained the word “former” in relation to “intelligence officer”. I don’t believe in ex-intelligence generally speaking. They’re always telling us about ex-CIA agents spilling the beans – it’s just a method of pushing out more propaganda or seducing others into revealing their secrets. Edward Snowden is definitely not ex and the three statues of him, Chelsea and Julian in Berlin are pretty funny as only Julian is genuine.
See https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/wikileaks-controlled-opposition.html
Martin, the number may be eye-watering and it may seem to make no sense, however, it’s the evidence that counts. Also, when people are “involved” in a conspiracy their level of involvement can be simply “going along with”, “turning a blind eye”, “not asking questions”, “thinking they’re just doing their job”, “keeping their job” and the like which is a whole different kettle of fish from “actively being part of”. Also, it can be justified to those involved. Medical staff can be told “we need to do this to get the requisite funding” or some such. After all, how did the Holocaust happen? What size of conspiracy was involved there? Even though I absolutely 100% think this pandemic is a psyop I am forced to go along with it myself … and that’s because everyone else is, including the vast majority of my friends and family. It’s actually not easy not to go along with a conspiracy and you can be sure the organisers know exactly how to get people to fall in line. They ensure the people at the top everywhere are willing conspirators and then those people tend to employ people like them which makes it so much easier to get those who wouldn’t normally want to go along, go along. Also, of course, loads of those involved simply won’t realise.
I accidentally went into a testing centre a few days ago thinking it was a medical centre and I said to the people that I didn’t believe there was a virus. One of them said, “You’re not the only one who says that.” What they thought themselves I do not know but their attitude towards me certainly didn’t seem to be one of judging me to be a nut.
The reason I ask you for evidence is that to debunk my hypothesis you need it. I have put forward an hypothesis that this is very much a planned, globally orchestrated psyop displaying the typical hallmarks I mentioned above. I claim that all the evidence favours Trauma-based Mind Control Psychological Operation over any other hypothesis. What say you? I do not accept the “too many people” argument. We could say that falls into the logical fallacy, Argument from Incredulity or perhaps Argumentum Ad Speculum – to be a conspiracy fewer people would be involved. 9/11 was a monumental conspiracy too. They happen.
This is a video showing fakery of both Ebola and Corona.
https://153news.net/watch_video.php?v=5O5S44R54H3X
To pin you down a little more in your response, Martin. If the conspiracy is an informal one how do you explain the fact that all alleged patients shown to us do not convincingly display signs of sickness and either things they say or other things about them are against expectations?
Do you agree that this evidence better supports planned psyop featuring the characteristic that nothing is faked so well it can be used by someone who believes the story in defence of it better than it supports “informal conspiracy” or similar?
Martin, you haven’t responded to my last comment which doesn’t in the least surprise me because when you apply critical thinking the only hypothesis that perfectly fits this “event” is Trauma-based Mind Control Psychological Operation in the form of a “live exercise” that evinces two psyop hallmarks:
1. We are given the clues above and beyond any naturally occurring anomalies.
2. Nothing is presented so convincingly that a believer of the story can brandish it in support.
And you don’t want to go to that level of truth, you wish to stay safe at “blown out of proportion” or similar. You see, how it doesn’t work to talk about level of conspiracy being too great. By not responding to my last comment you are showing that you are willing to be part of the conspiracy. For the power elite, getting the population to participate in their conspiracy at whatever level is a piece of cake, it truly is.
How many people prominent in the “critical of government space” are calling out this event for what it is? Not a single one. Whether paid or unpaid the opposition is massively controlled.
Perhaps it’s time to disconnect.
Dump our compulsive, neurotic, digitalised behaviour and float free.
We can’t stop the psychopaths, because they can fool most of the people most of the time.
Let’s just sit back and watch the world self destruct.
Mother Earth will see us off with a sigh of relief.
Rather than the popular planetary petulance that is a feature of so many discussions, we are referred to Sarah, in the Book of Tobit, chapter 3, and Susanna in Daniel 13, just to name two exemplars of people who are “sad at heart”, in the distress of extremity, offering up supplication like tea kettles beginning to whistle and sing more or less right on schedule…..
As the Bard once remarked (tis rarely quoted):
‘Better the petulance of the plebs, than the flatulence of fools’.
Well, Fair…. Metinks you’re taking it too hard.
This pleb takes it too hard, m’self. But I hope to move on.
I was wondering when this phenomenon, which I first noticed about ten years ago, would finally explain itself. The version I am thinking of is when the media state something like this: “Scientists say that this is the first time such an overwhelmingly dramatic change has occurred in the field of ( supply your own scenario here…) since – wait for it . . . wait for it . . . since last August!“, when we were all expecting, of course, “since 3,000 years before Christ”… This has happened often enough to cause me great amusement, followed by a serious questioning of the sanity of the reporters who say such things.
Now we not only get statistics in this vein thrown at us on a daily basis, but most of them are outright falsehoods, demonstrating that a new age of hysteria is upon us. I haven’t seen such hysteria in the media since – wait for it . . . wait for it . . . five hours ago.
Sweet Lord, seriously, help us!
[please forgive my English as it is not my native language] I think that all the fuzz about this “new” coronavirus, and not at all fuzzy consequences of lockdowns worldwide, which most people are tragically suffering from right now especially in poor countries, is due to a particular view about disease in general, which is not new. There is an interest (guess from whom) in depicting disease as something that should not occur and therefore as something that must be “fought” at all cost; that our lifes should be devoid of dis-ease. The reason is simple, workers in the medical profession and in related activities need to eat like the rest of us, but people, if left alone, don’t need medical treatment often enough for the simple reason that most inconveniences of life are of no major consequences and could be taken care of without medical assistance by the immune system, which always tends to maintain homeostasis, even if your health is only average. So it is important to train the public to view every disease as something to be afraid of, to get rid of, to consult before the slightest symptom. “Skin reddening? It could be a skin cancer”, “A headache did you say? A stroke may be around the corner”, “A bellyache? Watch out for cancer” and so on.
These messages are transmitted from the medical institutions, because, they say, it is better to prevent than to cure. Of course, but then the message about the headache must include “and you are over 70 with sedentary lifestyle”, and the same for the other messages. But as they are transmitted, even a 20 year-old with a headache is induced to think that he/she might have a stroke shortly. An old-fashioned doctor consulted about cold-like symptoms after having to walk 30 minutes under a cold rainy night will prescribe rest, just rest and some days to allow the storm to pass through the body. A modern doctor will ask a lot of questions about specific things to give the impression that he is a master of his art and will prescribe exactly according to the answers given. The first doctor lost a patient because the latter knows what to do if he/she ever had a cold again. The second doctor secured himself a new patient because he got the impression that colds are not always identical and slight differences may call for different prescriptions and thus medical advice is always needed.
To put it in a nutshell, medical professions and institutions work in the same manner as other businesses in a society under a monetary system. People need money to eat and will do everything imaginable to obtain it. The trouble is that the medical profession deals with our health and if it is infected with the vicissitudes of money driven economy, which obviously it is, it is no surprising that we consume such a huge quantity of drugs and consult for the slightest headache. Did not the head of WHO call the coronavirus “public enemy No 1”? What a silly childish thing to say specially by someone who heads an international institution supposed too look after the health of world’s population! He might just as well have applied this to mosquitos, tigers, germs, microbes, crocodiles, etc. Does not he know that viruses, microbes, germs, are all acquaintances of the human body who knew them very well for thousands of years? How does he think that our species survived all the millennias before medicine came about if it is not because the human body has always interacted and maintained equilibrium with all aspects of life, interior and exterior, as it should be, be it viruses or other supposed enemies? They want us to perceive ourselves like sealed recipients the insides of which have no common measure with its surroundings, and always must be on the look out for threats from the outside; like frail defenceless beings. Does not he know that our essence is the same as that of any other form of life?
Viruses need to reproduce like ourselves but need a host to be able to do that; humans are among suitable environments that allow them to do that. It is not as though they want to attack and kill us! They just happen to stumble on us! They don’t think, and don’t choose, we do. Viruses are forms of life just as we are and if seemingly significantly more people are dying from them than if should be, we ought to look closely at the conditions the people who died were living in and their age and health conditions at the time. These health conditions are likely to be chronic ailments products of our so called civilized life but we pin it on the poor virus whose behaviour has not and cannot change. “Waging a war” against viruses is as stupid, silly and useless as “waging a war” against mosquitos. We just have to live with them. What we should we wage a war against is poor and unhealthy conditions of living for huge number of people, product of the present economic system, not viruses or germs.
Viruses, germs, microbes, tigers, crocodiles don’t frighten me; what frightens me is when policy makers make decisions on the ground that life itself is an enemy and induce unthinking people to believe so. That IS scary. From that point, to believing that the human being is the enemy, there is only one step.
[Links fixed. A2]
Viruses are not forms of life. They are intermediate between not life and life.
Right. Let’s say that I meant by “life” existence, the same sense Wells gave it in the quote above.
Like Tories?
Yes, I agree with you. Children should be taught not to fear viruses, but to realise that half our genome is necessarily made up of these fellow ‘life froms’ (why not call them that, Steve? They would count for life if found on Mars!). A virus free world is a dead world.
Because Martin they are not life. Life has the capacity to reproduce. Viruses do not. They reproduce by getting a living organism to reproduce them. A further reason not to call them life is because facts matter, and inaccurate facts are falsehoods.
Well, sure, but maybe we can have a bit of a philosophical debate here. Firstly, viruses do reproduce, as you yourself say, and you are surely ‘alive’ but you can’t reproduce yourself either. (You need another, female, living organism.) Okay, second argument is if viruses are not alive then as I mentioned, half of the human body is not alive either, which sounds odd doesn’t it? But worse, if you took away all the bits of the human body that are viruses, what remains cannot survive. So saying viruses are not lifeforms requires you to redefine ‘life’ to exclude pretty much all lifeforms.
Martin, Biology is not Philosophy: you cannot just sit in an armchair and invent stuff. Viruses are not self replicating, but all life forms are. These are just facts.
You can’t keep the philosophy at bay so easily, Steve!
Try this:
https://microbiologysociety.org/publication/past-issues/what-is-life/article/are-viruses-alive-what-is-life.html
It is not a Philosophical question; it is a matter of Biology. And the argument in the link that attempts to argue that viruses are alive is not only flawed but obviously flawed, as it is based on the misuse of language to pretend that viruses are capable of self replication: they aren’t.
Don’t mind him Martin, you are talking at cross purposes. Steve talks of Philosophy and Biology as divisions of the Formal Sciences and Life Sciences respectively; bodies of knowledge taught in educational institutions with their respective axioms, postulates, formalisms, definitions, divisions and discoveries; whereas you are talking of philosophy with a humble p, as I would, as every human attempt to understand himself and the universe.
Exactly. It’s the division of expertise that leads ‘epidemologists’ to offer pronouncements on policy without actually knowing much about the medicine, the sociology or the economics. I wouldn’t even ask them to consider a bit of ethics and philosophy!
An excellent analysis! Many thanks.
There is another angle to the Covid-19 story worth considering: all NATO governments planned to treat the outbreak commonsensically, as Martin Cohen suggests: as an element of the regular ‘flu season. There is abundant institutional history for this approach: previous attempts to control novel Coronaviruses, like 2008’s H1N1, were expensive, humiliating failures.
That’s why Anthony Fauci announced, on January 26, “The American public shouldn’t worry about the coronavirus outbreak in China. It’s a very, very low risk to the United States. But it’s something that we as public health officials need to take very seriously… It isn’t something the American public needs to worry about or be frightened about. Because we have ways of preparing and screening of people coming in [from China]. And we have ways of responding – like we did with this one case in Seattle, Washington, who had traveled to China and brought back the infection.” President Trump repeated his assurances and clearly expected the matter to end there.
A month later, all the NATO governments adopted the policies Martin Cohen rightly criticizes. Why?
I suggest that China’s response forced their hand. By mounting the most spectacular, successful civil defense operation in peacetime history, it drove the national death rate to negligible levels and sent a powerful message to the world, “We care, even for vulnerable people. No-one will die before their time.”
This resonated with parents and grandparents everywhere and forced NATO governments, cursing China, to alter course 180º, and set sail towards another, more expensive and even more humiliating failure.
As an admirer of Chinese governance, I like to think that this was a carefully prepared plot, hatched in anticipation of a US bio-attack. Even if it was not, its effect on world perceptions–not to mention NATO economies–has handed world leadership to China, without a shot being fired.
Vaccinated, tagged, branded,microchipped, tracked, shackled to a “Social Credit Score” . . . No, thanks, Godfree. You can keep your Utopia. Let me know if, in that paradise of yours, you can write books that make people question things around them, music that burns into your soul like the blues, art that rips through the mask society wants you to wear, innovation that comes from just curious minds tinkering in a garage, and – this is important – change that comes from people coming together to protest against a tyranny. I’ll give you the answer because I KNOW the answer. It’s NO. Because in your land of milk and honey, anyone outside the norm is an agitator. And the agitator has to be taken out. Fuck me, I’m astounded you can’t see where this is going.
Vaccinated, tagged, branded, microchipped, tracked, shackled to a “Social Credit Score”?
Vaccination is a problem in a population of 1.4 billion people living in close quarters?
Tagged? Nope. Nobody in China is tagged.
Branded? Nope.
Microchipped? Nope.
Tracked? Nope.
Shackled to a Social Credit score? Participation is voluntary for individuals, but not for government officials and departments or businesses. It’s 90% carrot and 10% stick for individuals and 90% of Chinese are in favor of it. IF that puzzles you, ask a Chinese friend to explain its unique appeal to them.
Your personal preference is for an extroverted, individualistic lifestyle but that’s just you. To me it sounds adolescent.
Oh dear, you really are blind. No, little Godfree, it doesn’t puzzle me whatever the Chinese want to think and do. Great people, by the way. They are free to do things their way, we are free to do things ours. Hard for you to grasp, I know. And the fact that you want Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Tech and Bill Gates to decide what goes in your bodies and how you’ll fall in line tells me you’re unsalvageable. This crush of yours for top-down control is going to blow up in your face, boy.
Godfree, I guess you haven’t seen this about modern China. They will release this announcement to the world in a few days, on 25th April.
https://coingeek.com/china-gears-for-global-domination-with-national-blockchain-network-rollout/?fbclid=IwAR1WvZYJSaD3I0vMv3o6Z-_ZE2ajMijzP4fXVLXhV0KyY2NAJ9cOZh30wvM
I, for one, welcome our new masters…
Thanks!
Why would you welcome ANY masters?
It’s a line from an old sci-fi movie
Still he asked a valid question, though.
To imagine that we are masterless is the height of adolescent delusion.
The US is the master (it sounds clunky, I know) of the NATO countries: it occupies them militarily and dictates their foreign policy. The US also kidnaps, assassinates, and tortures people every day. That is a kind of ‘mastery’. IT dictates the use of its currency, regardless of where it is used, etc., etc.
So in that sense, I meant the joke to also be taken seriously: I would prefer that China, rather than the US, to exercise hegemony because I expect it to be far more benign.
Nor am I alone in this. President Macron recently, and publicly, said that China’s vision for the future (a shared future for all humanity) is more attractive than America’s.
Why? Because it offers a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence; and it offers Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind
I see you point but I find the term “adolescent” unnecessarily insulting. The notion of NOT having masters is part of our delusional self image which has been carefully nurtured. It is therefore a delusion which most of us have. But here is where it gets complicated. It is a “promising” delusion i.e. it has a revolutionary potential. As Terry Eagleton says somewhere, we should constantly measure bourgeois propaganda up against the reality. It promises liberty, freedom etc. and we should be consistently attacking it when it doesn’t deliver. The ideal of NOT having a master is an ideal we should be pushing towards.
Like adolescents who wants to borrow their mothers’ car but ignore her terms for doing so, our society is ambivalent about dependence and independence.
Our relationship to authority is unresolved because we do not, as a society, practice self-mastery–the development of the will–nor teach it, nor have exemplary models for it. Indeed, our media encourage both self-indulgence and bombastic ‘resistance to authority.’
But another world is possible.
We can master ego, mind, and desire and willingly submit to legitimate authority.
One of the many things we are about to learn from China has obsessed them for 2500 years: how to be a mature human being, or what they call a junzi. Such people practice the five Confucian virtues–Benevolence, Rightness, Propriety, Wisdom and Trustworthiness–all the time.
Such people are social models and parents inculcate those virtues in their kids when they turn two, using the Three Character Classic, their version of our reading primer, Fun With Dick and Jane.
The core of Confucian governance isjunzis because, if they’re running things, everybody gladly cooperates with them and things work smoothly–as China is doing today.
Our Republic is collapsing and we will soon have to reconstitute America. Part of that task will be outgrowing childish and adolescent life strategies and embracing the discipline of growing up. Building that into America v. 2.0 will be crucial to its success.
I would say that every society has different ideas on dependence and independence. Furthermore that these things are changing all the time anyway. “Self-mastery” is another shifting matter. As is “authority”. To put it one way: the Western ideal of the self-made individual is ideology. No-one can create themselves out of nothing. Everyone depends on what is already there – both materially and socially. Everyone inherits a notion of “right conduct” that has evolved with their people’s economic and cultural history. The West right now is a product of the affluence and consumerist ideology of our favourable post WW2 situation. You might say that we are the “spoiled brats” of the globe. But I think all that is about to change severely.
Their work with blockchain and digital currency is going to shock a lot of folks, I suspect
Most brainwashed Westerners seem to believe that the Chinese are ‘backward’, and that the West is superior in all ways. The most ludicrous racist and Orientalist self-delusion ever.
About time-the 500 year reign of terror of the West over humanity is ending. Surely you should be happy at the prospect.
China has always laid much more emphasis on social harmony than on individualism.
I think there’s a quote from Joseph Needham -I’m paraphrasing -that in Chinese culture, as opposed to the West, there was no necessary conflict seen between the individual and the social.
That’s the Chinese way perhaps,and if that’s what Chinese people want, then fine, if it works for them.
But it’s not our way. Chinese and Western cultures developed under different conditions produced different values, different societies, different people.
Societies, like individuals, play best when they play to their strengths.The art, the literature, the science of Europe since the Renaissance, going back to ancient Athens, is built on the idea that the individual has the right to be the architect of his own life.
Vive la difference.
I always enjoy reading your articles Godfree. We need a counterbalance to all the China-hating that’s going on, but you’re wrong here.
‘The art, the literature, the science of Europe since the Renaissance, going back to ancient Athens, is built on the idea that the individual has the right to be the architect of his own life.’ You seem to have missed such things as the extermination of the Cathars, the Inquisition, the witch hunting, the centuries of oppression, exploitation, torture and murder, often all over nothing more than mere differences of opinion.
Steve, I’m just responding to your point about “are viruses alive”. I’m not going to argue it any more, but if you look at any number of standard sources, you’ll see people considering them to be just that. All you are doing here is offering your preferred ‘definition’ of life, saying I think rather arrogantly that what life is is “not a philosophical question” and then on the strength of the assumptions YOU have made in that definiton saying that x and y follow. But as I already argued, there are some pretty odd implications in your assumptions about what is and is not ‘alive’. Picking a definition and insisting everyone else must use a word exactly the same way as you do it called ‘Humpty Dumptying’. Yes, it’s a thinking error. At least, it is given my definition of the term!
Wrong about China’s leadership? Objectively, no. They’re ahead in money, technology, alliances, human rights, science, having their act together, and money. And, of course, money.
We’re ahead in bullshit, cruelty and having the world’s reserve currency.
Ahead in cruelty? You are delusional and truly lost.
Define cruelty. Enjoying your lock down? Do you have a relative that has died because they cant get medical treatment for their health condition due to the BS that a lock down can help? Hmmmm who is cruel?
Never heard of the genocide in Iraq? Never heard of the US prison-industrial complex with its two million plus inmates, 100,000in the Hell of solitary? Never heard of the masses of homeless in the USA and Uk? Never heard of the 200,000 murdered by Tory austerity since 2010? Never heard of the Western controlled World Bank that just made a pittance of ‘aid’ to the poor world contingent on further privatisations, particularly in health? Never heard of the US ‘health’ industry, where diabetics die because they cannot afford insulin, tens times more expensive than in Canada? Etc. The West is nothing if not the Empire of Sadism.
Well said, Godfree, but the Sinophobes will not listen. Racism is hard-wired in the Right, part of their generalised xenophobia. Living in ‘societies’ where Sinophobic hate-mongering is ubiquitous and relentless, they have little chance and less inclination to learn the facts.
Your racist arrogance is nauseating. You see the Chinese as untermenschen, below the level of White Herrenvolk like yourself. And I can see where this is going-deranged racists living in self-delusion in a crumbling hell-hole where the poor and elderly are left to die(THAT ‘burns into the soul’)just itching for a Great Race War against the despised ‘Yellow Devils’.
Fuck me, you’re a demented moron. You have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about.
Temper temper –try reason Reg
Nah, I prefer the “Fuck me, you’re a demented moron” approach. Expressive, and more fun for us spectators. 🙂
Just re-read your original ‘contribution’ and I stand by my every word. You made very clear what you are talking about-the Chinese have no music, art, innovation or souls. And you seem unaware of your racist contempt.
Absolutely. While China protects and saves, if possible, all its people, in the USA and UK they are left to die, on the streets, in ‘nursing homes’ where unattended bodies pile up, and among the uninsured and the despised minority underclasses. At the same time several trillion is created ex nihilo and handed to Wailing Wall Street, and the peasants and small business get crumbs that have already run out, as the banksters looted the program. Hence the mounting frenzy of Sinophobic, warmongering, lying by the eighth-rate psychopaths of US politics and MSM, aped by Imperial stooges throughout the West.
This would seem to suggest that the lockdown was in response to public pressure. That’s the bit I find hard to swallow. Our governments and the entire political class have never shown the slightest interest in following the public demand. Nor do they have to since the media, under the control of the ruling class, can spout whatever image of public demand they want i.e. present the wishes of the leaders as “public demand”.
Yes, I’m still puzzling about that. I haven’t analyzed the media yet but suspect that our media hyped and excoriated the Wuhan outbreak in apocalyptic terms then when it hit us they had to abandon their plan to ignore it.
I assume that your position is that the situation we were in before the pandemic (or, if you prefer, “pandemic”) was unsustainable anyway. That capitalism – or, at least, the capitalism that the West has been following – has to be changed. However, if the ruling class has sanctioned this lockdown, then it is clear that they will have their own ideas about restructuring. Which will not bode well for us.
or you could just call it what it is –a seasonal flu. Not even a real epidemic by definition.
Hence the scare quotes.
I find Roy Unz’s take compelling, and that of some of the commenters even more. The USA launched a bio-warfare attack, the latest of several (ie bird flus and African Swine Fever)unleashed in the last year or so, designed to ‘bring China down’. The attributes of low lethality, easy transmission, and symptomless transmission during an extended incubation period, are perfect to cause a vast epidemic, hard to toss off and causing maximum economic damage.
As Unz notes, the current crop of psychopaths running the US are reckless imbeciles, and they are driven by Messianic ‘Christianity’ and Judaism. So they did not expect the ‘mere Asiatics’ those Godless Carmnists, to successfully suppress the disease, so plainly spread at New Year in the transport hub, with a bio-lab nearby for plausible misattribution.
Then, as should have been expected, it spread, first, amazingly, to that other US target, Iran, hitting its Government elites hard, then to Europe and the USA. There Unz sees a great blowback, exacerbated by the USA’s social decay and ruthless inequality. But, as one commenter noted, perhaps they ain’t so dumb, and the disease can clean up the US underclass, open the way for elite looting in the trillions, and hide the debt implosion. A win, win, win, win for the blood-suckers.
Thanks, Godfree. I’m sure you’re right that had not China made “conceivable” this kind of totalitarian control of millions of people, the Western governments would not have dared go so far. What struck me about China, though, is that given the size of that country, they were always following a kind of ‘localized’ quarantine approach. Italy too responded only be ‘”region”. Somehow European leaders in their zeal to ‘act decisively’ found it absolutely necessary to lock down regions with almost no cases of the virus along with those cities where there were significaint numbers of people needing treatment. So yes, China made thinkable what should have remained unthinkable. but the West then went even beyond the unthinkable.
To us Romans, what China did looks like totalitarian control to millions of people. Our monarchic style of governance hasn’t changed much in 2000 years and it has always pitted us, the plebs, against them, the equites and nobiles. Western governments didn’t go so far because they couldn’t. We don’t trust them sufficiently.
But it doesn’t look like that to Confucians. They’re a family and they expect their government to be motivated by ren, compassion which, as every metric demonstrates, it is. China’s government is the most trusted on earth so when they say, ‘lockdown,’ everyone thinks, well, you know best so we’ll cooperate.
The West’s heterogeneous response is a reflection of its heterogeneity more than anything, I think. That plus the difference strains of Covid-19 they were dealing with.
The Chinese Renaissance is nothing if not syncretic. It has imbibed of Marxism, Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism and countless other philosophies and ideologies. The West, in contrast, is driven by the cult of ‘The Market, ie the power of money, that turns everything into a commodity for sale to the highest bidder, and replaces the spiritual dimension of life with various fundamentalist, God-bothering, cults of mass stupidity and ruthless xenophobic hatred.
Sorry Godfree: Zhen-Shan-Ren …
…Ren = renminbi.
I’ve been studying Chinese Cha’an and Yogacaran texts for 40 years. If you think that China is a harmonious Tianxia community uniting Heaven and Earth …as an exponential metastasisation of growth; mega-extractivist; and globalist expansionist order …all I can do is vehemently disagree.
Compassion has nothing to do with it.
When natural creative patterning – Li – becomes ritualised and naturalised created order …compassion is lost. The greater commitment to the Earth and the Way decays. What we have today is not the harmony of man and nature – but the opposite.
Filial piety to sustainable globalism? Please.
🙁
The opposite? Do you mean the harmony of nature and man? The Chinese are the only great power striving to create an ‘ecological civilization’. If they fail, no-one else will succeed.
Mmm… I know China has extended its social net now, but in the year I visited, about 15 years ago, you could see lots of abandoned people begging in the streets – people with no legs for example. And most of the time, if you got ill, you had to pay for treatment. I’d say it was really a feudal system with the Communist Party replacing the aristocracy. (That’s why political power there is handed down from father to son, as with the current leadership.) As for the West not going too far – you’re in the UK I guess, but I’m in France. I am not allowed to leave the house with my small childfor a walk down the street (it must be done “alone”) and with a piece of of official paper stating the time at which I left the house and “for what purpose”. I can go no futher than 1km, no longer than 1 hour. Shopping trips are restricted to “essentials” and only one person can go on them. Once a week. Similar story over the border in Spain, but quite different in Fermany. However, I think that is more the moemories of Nazi controls is too strong, they dare not experiment with absolute state power as people like Mr Macron so quickly do.
Fifteen years ago incomes were 30% of current levels. Beggars and homeless people disappeared in 2016.
Children’s healthy life expectancy is better than American kids’ and, by next June, everyone in the bottom 50% income bracket will own a home and have an income, plenty of food and clothes, better education than Americans, safe streets, health insurance, a pensions, and old age care.
By then, 300,000,000 urban Chinese will have higher net worth and more disposable income than the average American, their mothers and infants will be less likely to die in childbirth, their children will graduate from high school three years ahead of American kids and live longer, healthier lives and there will be more drug addicts, suicides and executions, more homeless, poor, hungry and imprisoned people in America than in China.
China abandoned feudalism thousands of years ago and the only aristocracy was the imperial family, whose function was largely ceremonial and spiritual. The Party replaced their function as keepers of the purple flame of Chinese civilization and exemplars of Confucian virtue.
Political power has never been handed down from father to son. China has been increasingly meritocratic for 2200 years. In the 12th century, of the official families we know, less than 20% had relatives in government prior to their appointment. Today, it’s 8%. Xi is a special case, for reasons that have become obvious since 2012. None of his colleagues in the Steering Committee, or anywhere close to that level, have senior positions and landing an entry-level government job now means graduating in the top 2% of a good university–an IQ of 140+, in other words.
If this sounds idealized or exaggerated, look at the results they’re getting in every area, and at the people’s relationship to government.
Which makes the stinking chutzpah of psychopaths like Pompeo or Bannon speaking as if THEY, the White Bosses, represented the true interests of the Chinese people against the Evil CCP, more than normally villainous and nauseating.
You seem to have China mixed up with the DPRK. China has now abolished all extreme poverty, unlike the USA, UK or Israel. The lack of universal health insurance, which is now being introduced, was a Dengist policy to force the public to save, rather than consume, to amass capital for economic expansion. It’s not really necessary now, although the Chinese still have one of the highest rates of savings in the world.
I think I mentioned I was referring to my observations from a trip 15 or so years ago now. I do believe strides have been made in this area, as you suggest. However, you DO have to be very careful with claims by totalitarian regimes to have aboloished poverty! Just as you have to be sceptical with claims by Western governments to have mastered the spread of viruses through massive invasion of privacy and curtailment of movement rights.
This is some ideological storytelling which supports the very fear narrative which has made it all possible, in an ironic catch 22 kinda way, and very possibly represents exactly the socially-conditioned level of double think we have become accustomed to. There is as yet no published evidence that this virus is anything more than a manageable strain of coronavirus, similar to the many flu-like pathogens we deal with constantly, as the Diamond Princess, Iceland, Vo and, most recently, the Stanford test population samples all support.
Basic epidemiological protocol has been flouted, leaving us utterly in the dark about WHAT we are dealign with, if anything, and still people insist on reasoning backwards to justify the narrative which the propaganda could well have originated in the first place, all the time thinking that creating a different, less plausible scary origin story is somehow digging out the REAL truth. No, in terms of basic facts, one could be forgiven for concluding right now that everyone went mad during flu season, locked people in their homes and terrified them all to death.
Other than being a good Tom Clancy plot, I have yet to see any reason why a bio-attack makes ANY SENSE. It is an unnecessary indulgence at best, and utterly, utterly self-defeating!
Except that we know the USA has launched bioattacks on China before
This is a straw man argument. This is not necessary to explain the behaviour of this virus which, looking at the statistics, would have to be the shittest bioweapon ever created, to be quite honest. A discerning person should require FAR MORE evidence than actually exists to ever justify assisting the narrative and buying into the fear porn in such a counterproductive way. Right now, Occam’s Razor must rule that out.
Also, I’m not familiar with the evidence for the above statement, so please could you post a link?
You said, ” I have yet to see any reason why a bio-attack makes ANY SENSE” so my observation that it was US policy is hardly a straw man argument. It is an observation about our MO. See The Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China. Sir Joseph Needham, Lead Author
Good bioweapons wound and sick people tie up 10x more resources than corpses, and Covid-19 does that extremely well, as we are seeing.
There is far more evidence available and I suggest you start here: https://www.unz.com/article/the-hunt-for-patient-zero/
I do not see why a bioweapon is necessary to make sense of this scenario. Replying that it IS necessary because Post hoc ergo proctor hoc is a straw man argument. It’s presence contributes nothing except raise more questions, hence occam’s razor. It also ties in with the scare narrative which does more harm than good. Also this link isn’t establishing any prior evidence of US bio attacks. It is speculating about Covid.
I was after some links for this.A2.
There is no link to The Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China., since every copy of the Report was destroyed and every witness threatened with imprisonment. I have a copy which I am preparing for publication but it’s 490 pages long with tables and illustrations, so it’s hard work.
Ron Unz summarized my suspicions well, “It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires.”
I suggest beginning with the work of Thomas Powell, here: https://www.opednews.com/articles/Biological-Warfare-in-Kore-by-Thomas-Powell-Germ-Warfare-190915-398.html.
And in Korea, Cuba and against their own people.
Soon, the weather will be lovely. The outdoors beckon. Young people out of school, out of work. Out of patience at being locked indoors. Cabin fever sets in. People frantic about losing their jobs, business, out of money. The smarmy liberal media talking down to them. As the rich, bailed out, sail on.
People will go out. To visit, party, play sports. To hell with it. The cops will issue tickets, make arrests. There will be protests. Police will beat, shoot and kill. As sure as God made little green apples. Hell will break loose. Pandora’s Box opens.
The weather here in Australia is ‘lovely’ most of the time (except for the 40+days in Summer) and the people are still doing what they’re told by the fear mongers.
Beautiful, sunny weather here in Oz and we’re not allowed to go to our beaches! Locked down and Locked out – or be locked up!
You don’t have big conurbations (the firewood) or many of a certain ethnic type (the fire accelerant) in Oz…to get real firestorm going ..We do.
Yeah-we all live in villages.
The media is hardly liberal. It’s corporate and only about making money. Stop with the polital divide that pits people against each other.
This article is an excercise in damage control. Acknowledging what OffG audience have already come to understand about this hoax already, but covering more malevolent aspects such as corporate media comlicity as “information cascade”. I expect the discerning readers here to see through this obfuscation.
IMO, the article was good but way too long winded. Can you elaborate on what you are saying?
Essentially the author is explaining away the mendacity of mainstream media and government in their purveying of hysteria as simply an “information cascade’. When we clearly saw an effort to push one narrative.
Surely if this was an organic reaction, eventually the 30 experts who have featured on OffG would have found their compelling interpretations at least entertained on MSM. Instead we had articles for example on the BBC titled “Why intelligent people believe in coronavirus myths”. The headline alone speaks volumes.
This insidious article like the post Iraq invasion remorse narrative is setting up the failure of intelligence type angle where good intentions and poor due diligence lead to disastrous war. When it was media and government mendacity and calculated influence shaping that set the war footing. Just like Iraq, millions will suffer and many will die and it is not ok to be philosophical when we should be holding those responsible accountable.
I agree with you. Thanks.
As mentioned in another comment above, the problem isn’t the people who seem to have a cunning strategy to exploit the EVENT for selfish purposes (the “Bootleggers”), but the vastly greater numbers of people who have been persuaded that the new policies are both necessary and somehow virtuous (the ‘Baptists”). The MSM is staffed by thousands of people who are not so much wicked as deluded. How otherwise smart, principled people can be manipulated and how a view can spread beyond even the intentions of its originators is what the article is seeking to explain. In no way is it exonerating individuals.
How smart or principled can one be without seeing the obvious truth of this nefarious hoax, especially when one has a hand in it? No quarter for these whores. Thanks for spurring discussion with the article.
The problem is not the small number of plotters, but the large number of followers. People like the nurses pleading with everyone to “stay at home”! These people are not following some secret agenda in which they become rich. Nor are most of the journalists. They actually imagine they are performing a virtuous service when they pen an attack on dissident experts. Sociologists recognise the power behind a political movement when it manages to co-opt not just the people whose practical interests they serve, but also those who may act directly AGAINST their own interests believing themselves to be doing the “right thing”! This is what sociologists call a Baptist and Bootlegger coalition. It’s the ‘Baptists’ who are the most dangerous at the present time!
Yeah yeah
That’s a long scroll down!
Glad i gave up paying any serious attention when getting to
“On January 11 2020, China announced its first death from the virus”
We know China had already announced it to the WHO before the end of December. So a simple fact wrong. The rest is the same, leaping from the wrong January date to denying anything significant happening until March.
It seems like more of the same and relying on the foundation man Ionnades.
Next!
Have a problem reading? ahhhhhh– you fit the type of “follower” he outlines in the article. That is if you read down far enough.
Whatever.
You don’t deny the fake news by the author, that i identify in my post.
The latest refutation of the racist lies that ‘China lied’ is the fact that Americans at the WHO were contacting officials in the USA, in the CDC etc, warning of the virus from mid-January at least.
Maybe you’re confusing announcements of ‘cases’ with ‘deaths’. The date is standard and agreed.
https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/coronavirus-pandemic-timeline-history-major-events-2020-3
Cognitively the Great Virus Hoax does also rely on the negativity bias.
And that people have become “believers”especially when their weakened brains have been( deliberately) shut down by fear ( the freeze response) .The first thing these believers do is look to authority for what to do (and ” experts” as to what to think).
Medically “any Covid19 deaths” are just medical fraud as the CDC test even says testing positive is not even cause of disease let alone deaths! quoting Jon Rappaport CDC quote
“Positive [test] results are indicative of active infection with 2019-nCoV but do not rule out bacterial infection or co-infection with other viruses.
The agent detected may not be the definite cause of disease.” CDC on the PCR test
RE The test Do you know how can they differentiate between SARS-CoV( global spread 2002-2003) and SARS-CoV-2 ( 89.9% nt identity with SARS-CoV) ? The PCR test does not differentiate, they are just testing for only 100 nucleotides and SARS-CoV-2 has nearly 30,000 nucleotides . So they very well may testing people if they have in their body the rna of the common cold( corona)or another corona.
You know all the measures were ineffective. As any alleged virus already would’ve had since Dec 2019 to spread through the whole population before the lockdown.
Fact No one except Drs wear eye protection + most masked are ineffective. The 2m rule is not obeyed by alleged exhaled viruses, viruses don’t stay in a 2m bubble, that in the air you can walk through 3 hours later. Oh and the bullshit about Tigers and dogs transmitting bogeyman virus then in that case you would have infected dogs sniffing other dogs feces breathing it in and passing it on to people and dogs and cats too.
I agree entirely, but look at how well the “test, test, test” line (started by the WHO) has gone down! That’s surely because we are in thrall to “science”. People simply can’t grasp that scientific knowledge is fallible and invariably open to revision.
This is only The Metro, but hey, it quotes “scientists” so it must be true:
https://metro.co.uk/2020/04/18/coronavirus-may-started-september-scientists-say-12576961/
Judge Chamberlain Holler: That is a lucid, intelligent, well-thought out objection.
Vinny: Thank you, your honor.
Judge Chamberlain Holler: Overruled.
So the blame game has started. Let’s start that I am not buying anything in as if ‘we’ were dumb, by letting ‘our’ fast mind work instead of thinking ‘slowly’. If I would have had the power to lock down a country because of Covid19, I wouldn’t have done it. and if I would have the power to open up a country, I would do it straight away. So it is definitely not ‘me’. If anyone is to blame it is ‘them’, not ‘we’.
What happened is this: First it was concocted how the orchestra (the media, the experts, the politicians, the population at large) would play when a ‘deadly’ virus caused a pandemic, and only when it was absolutely clear how the orchestra would play ‘they’ catalyzed the event and let the orchestra play.
Now the historian, the investigative journalist, the scientist, the psychologist and the population at large has plenty to find from this event of who in the orchestra let his or her mind run wild and caused so much misery for what was nothing more than seasonal flu. And some justice may be found there.
But the true problem is the overture; the thing that catalyzed this event.
And that overture is 40 years of neoliberalism, summarized by Gordon Gekko/Michael Douglas (in the movie Wall Street) as “Greed is Good”. As long as that motto defines how societies are run, we are doomed to witness synthethic/hybrid events like Covid19 over and over again, as it is a perfect cover for the planners of such events to sheer the sheep without running any risk that they will be held accountable for anything.
My theory is that there were at least two scams being played. There was the Bill Gates, Event 201 scam, and there was the vulture capitalism scam (mega-wealthy Trump supporters). There may be some overlap, but in general they are different groups of elitists.
This is NOT CORRECT!
The correct way is:
“The contagions are constantly evolving, a man who tests negative today could contract the virus tomorrow.”
And this is another PROBLEM! When even those that can use Critical Thought in times like these use the wrong words, the Ignorant & Irresponsible aren’t able to perceive the errors!
It’s like the propaganda slogan “Tested positive for COVID-19″… just another moronic thing to say, but almost everyone is saying it!
Reject Ignorance…
“Most people, including ourselves, live in a world of relative ignorance. We are even comfortable with that ignorance, because it is all we know. When we first start facing truth, the process may be frightening, and many people run back to their old lives. But if you continue to seek truth, you will eventually be able to handle it better. In fact, you want more! It’s true that many people around you now may think you are weird or even a danger to society, but you don’t care. Once you’ve tasted the truth, you won’t ever want to go back to being ignorant“
Geez total semantics– get over your breathless self!
Yes… ignorant people always enjoys a good dose of semantics! It’s entertaining…
The key passage:
A false dichotomy. ‘Man’ is a being capable of rationality, even if it is argued that this capability is realised only sporadically or rarely. The further ‘Man’ is driven from his/her own self-reflective thinking, the less capacity and readiness for rational thought he/she has.
For me, the acknowledgement that our information systems ‘encourage thinking errors and cognitive biases’ does not sit easily with the ‘cock-up theory’ described in this article. If it serves those in power to alienate the populace from their capacity for critical rational thought, and they have the means to do exactly that, then it seems likely that this is actually what is happening. Anyone who reads John Taylor Gatto’s work on public schooling or Bernays’s writing on propaganda, will see that those with power have been quite explicit in their intentions being just these- it can barely be referred to as ‘a conspiracy’, as they have been quite candid.
Someone, somewhere decided that they were going to promote failed people like Fergusson and decided to use his models that had been proven to not work in the past. Why ?
I know some pretty smart people who cannot think rationally about this matter, they cannot form coherent thoughts about it, they cannot offer an argument. Their minds are scrambled (perhaps even their brains damaged physiologically) by the information warfare of the schooling and media systems under which we all live.
No easy way out of that, that I can think of.
crank,
“I know some pretty smart people who cannot think rationally about this matter, they cannot form coherent thoughts about it, they cannot offer an argument. Their minds are scrambled ”
Yeh, I get that too, and its really pissing me off, but I can’t verbalise my reaction, though they may be able to see it in my eyes, how shocked I am at their reaction. It’s like someone you know and have massive respect is having a nervous breakdown. They simply can’t handle what is happening, so all you can do is empathise with them, and not tell them it will probably get 100 times worse, though I haven’t tried that technique yet,cos now we are not allowed to meet (snif, snif, atishoo, all fall down). Still in a state of terror.
God knows what happens next, but I am frightened too.
Tony
I know some pretty smart people who cannot think rationally about this matter, they cannot form coherent thoughts about it, they cannot offer an argument. Their minds are scrambled (perhaps even their brains damaged physiologically) by the information warfare of the schooling and media systems under which we all live.
in what sense would such people qualify as “smart”? that sounds much more like the dictionary definition of “stupid”.
In the sense of they have studied and worked in fields that require some serious cognitive involvement : medicine, engineering, architecture. They have well demonstrated (to me at least) the ability to delve into concepts and to critique, and they have taken on responsibilities of a profession where their judgement has impacted the lives of others.
They are ‘smart’ in the sense that in certain instances they definitely can think rationally, can form coherent thoughts and can offer arguments (which they realise need to be substantiated). In the case of this (covid) and other current events however, these abilities seem to evaporate. That is the point I was trying to make.
What you’ve just described is the Dunning-Kruger Effect (DKE). Most people have a completely ill-formed understanding of what DKE is, so it’s worth clarifying (note that’s not being directed at you, but people further up the thread who think that truly smart people are immune to ignorance outside their domain).
The study cohort for the original Kruger-Dunning paper wasn’t made up of dummies. It was made up people around 1.8σ north of the median.
It was a group of Cornell undergraduates.
The average SAT score for admission to Cornell is 1470 (on the 1600) – i.e., 96th SAT percentile.
Kruger and Dunning found their ‘metacognitive’ effect (being unskilled outside your domain of competence, but unaware of it) in all but the top quartile of their subjects (the top quartile for Cornell admissions is 1570 – the top 0.4% of SAT).
Let’s assume that K&D’s subjects were a distributed ‘dumber’ than Cornell; it still means that the top quartile kiddie in their class would be in the top 1 or 2 percent of the SAT herd.
.
In a world where 3rd-decile talent likes to pretend that the world runs on ‘zingers’, DKE has been reframed into “Dummies Don’t Realise They’re Dumb herr derr” – that’s just totally wrong.
Ironically the reframing is largely due to gig-economy ‘journalists’ (i.e., clickbait Gawker-style midwits) who are
① too dumb to realise that the herp-a-derp definition is not what the actual K-D paper says;
② too innumerate to understand the K-D paper themselves (i.e., incapable of correcting their error);
③ unaware of their cognitive shortcomings.
If your friends are domain-competent but have ‘blind spots’, all it means is that it’s unlikely they’re in the smartest couple of percent of human beings – there’s no shame in that. It takes discipline to examine every new controversy with fresh eyes, and to refuse to hew to media-generated public opinion (literally the most profoundly stupid type of opinion).
I do like ‘midwit’. The Midwit Cuckoos would be a good name for a political party.
Kratoklastes:
You perhaps overlooked the main implication of DKE. That it takes multiple linguistic competences over multiple domains – acting as communicative behavioural order – to create and sustain the behavioural diversity and hypercomplexity of modern societies. All those domain competencies have to connect and communicate in subordinations of superventions of systematic order. They are not all horizontal and equal: they can’t be …otherwise you’d have no order.
If you got a group of people with different linguistic competences: all you got is a group …with no social relations or order. Only when the begin to communicate can they align mental states and coordinate behaviours. Social order emerges from communication, the coordinated behavioural relations, and shared participatory sense-making. Only then can you say there is a social unit …which may not be that unified [See Bruno Latour: sticking the word ‘social’ in front of something only implies semantic unity …not actual unity].
Importantly: and this seems to be the one that is confusing people …subjectivity arises from communication: not communication arises from subjectivity. It’s difficult: because we were conned by socialisation to believe that the world is revolving around the subject. It is not. Society – such that there can be said to be such – co-emerges from co-participatory sense-making. Which is correlational across consensual domains of linguistic competetences: from which individual subjects are reductive and analytical fallacies. There are only neural networkings of subjective and objective couplings in participatory communication of behavioural and psychical alignments. Which, as we will surely see: is a barely stable (metastable) ordinate order.
Because all this rational analytic cause and effect bollocks cannot sustain the hypercomplexity. And we are to inter-relationally DKE dumb to model the entire globalised universe of discourse and see its systematic fragility and incipient failure due to any turbulent perturbation …such as a butterfly stretching its wings. We built hypercomplex chaos from the natural order: because we are too DKE dumb to know the difference.
“compete-tences” was a typo that works better than competences. The order is not that ordered and competition makes it frail and decoherent – not competent. The sociologists have created a false orderly order which is anything but.
I give this comment many hundreds of up votes! (And so would like to build on its observations, or perhaps look beneath them…)
Part of the logic of hierarchical rule requires domination of the narrative for reasons of survival: cohesion of the system over time. Any large, complex, hierarchical social system requires ‘propaganda’ – or a vision that needs constant fine tuning – of some sort. Without that binding ingredient – “religion” means, etymologically, a story that binds us – large groups of people split up into smaller groups.
Hierarchy means top-down rule, ownership, control, etc. The perennial problem is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The trick is sustaining a workable transparency that can be trusted. In extremely complex societies, the degree of specialisation is also extreme. This means we need to trust strangers who are expert in important things we don’t have the time to learn. Trust, as ever, is pivotal. So much for the core logic.
To my mind, it’s the base value system the modern world has that makes ‘endless’ ‘wealth’ accumulation possible. By extension, this value system enables power to also accumulate to itself, continuously. Value, or wealth, is understood primarily as money, which means value and wealth are reflexively understood as numbers, numbers that can contain or store wealth. But wealth is in fact a network effect, as is health, not a linear progression towards infinity. And we don’t own health, we tend to it, permit it, encourage it.
Should we begin to want to learn how to have a far more nuanced cultural sense of wealth, see it instead as health – as in a healthy rain forest or ecosystem – we would start to take ourselves away from the dynamic trap we are in. It’s a trap that increasingly constricts us for as long as we struggle to escape within its defining tenets. Only new thinking can lead the way out.
At least, that’s my thinking on this topic.
Nope. The perennial problem is that only corrupt people seek power in the first place.
Acton’s famous phrase is a misdirection. It’s designed to make the mouth-breathers believe that the political class – like the priest-hood – enter full of noble aims but are led astray.
That’s hogwash: with virtually no exceptions in the entire history of manknd, people go into politics because they want to force people to behave in ways that the political class wants but the average person doesn’t want.
Another one is the one attrubited to (but never actually said by) Abraham Lincoln: “you can fool some of the people [snip] etc”… a parasite only needs to fool about 30% of the people twice in 4 years, in order to be a 2-term president.
I agree. Though in keeping with my choice of the concept of health as a wiser guiding principle for governing human societies, I would say only sick/unhealthy people hunger for power. In the end though, that’s a relatively unimportant distinction. The point I make in my comment stands one way or the other. For people to hunger after power, power – whether ‘illusory’ or ‘real’ – is an object ‘out there’ that is part and parcel of how corruption operates. Health, in the full sense I mean – emotional, environmental, societal, etc. –, dissolves power, or rather transcends any need for it in the negative sense of manipulation, control of others via fear, secrecy, subterfuge, FUD, etc.
Toby:
New thinking = biological systems theory
New subjectivity = subjectless subjects
New relations = neural network relations
(network effects = co-participatory, co-emergent synergies)
New communications = ecological communication
All effects and properties – including subjectivites – emerge from the interdependence of relational properties ….not from intrinsic determinate attributes. In other words: the biological system determines (not via determinate strict lawful cause and effect relations) the properties of its subsystemic parts and processes to align with the purpose (autonomous self-production: not a metaphysical teleology (of infinite growth)) of the system.
In plain English: the system produces the people: not the people produce the system. Sure, there is a causal feedback loop created: but it’s inter-generational and epigenetic and linguistically heritable. The people who made the system are deader than DoDoes.
As we will be if we cannot break out of this rational linear cause and effect reductive analytical bollocks and identifying individual actors to act as the transference objects (Fetishes) of creative energies we need to sublimate – not dissipate.
The manufacture of hysteria has been glaringly obvious. As in that computer generation of someone infecting someone else by a cough from behind a shelf and standing 20 feet away. I can’t believe that the button pushers behind that one did not see the inevitable and futile panic that would cause. Everyone in a supermarket who hears someone coughing even from a distance will go into headless chicken mode. Not only is all this deliberate but it is screamingly obviously deliberate. But does this panic mode just completely destroy everyone’s critical faculty? Or did they have no critical faculty to begin with?
The button pushers are busy while most people are under house arrest. They are planning a nightmare world of super digital control, and this is just the first step.
“We are being conditioned to accept that there will be repeated campaigns of vaccination tied to future outbreaks. Remember, this is meant to be a “permanent crisis.” Pay for success demands it. It is the crisis framework that legitimizes intrusive surveillance framed as a public benefit. In this way social systems can be regulated to conform to the expectations of global technocrats.”
Look at what is behind the manufactured hysteria. How could so many fall for it and will they continue their delusion. If so, we are stuffed, as our future techno-hell depends on the continued fear of the masses. And the button pusher are about to get much, much richer.
Waves of crises and disasters, often engineered, have made it hard for most to see the sweeping changes the Fourth Industrial Revolution has in the works. Namely the billionaires’ plan to hand entire job sectors over to robots and algorithms, forcing millions into poverty. Dispossessed of their means of economic support the masses can be more readily transformed into “social impact” data commodities, compelled to navigate an augmented reality police state “game,” otherwise known as “smart” cities.
https://wrenchinthegears.com/2020/04/19/silicon-valley-leverages-pandemic-induced-poverty-to-advance-pay-for-success-finance/
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