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Altruism is not dead. I am sorry that in a moment of gloom I wrote that it was, but what I should have said was that the neoliberal capitalism doctrine of reliance on the hidden hand of the market, takes no consideration of altruism. But there are many examples in local communities that in fact altruism is thriving.
Also I have somewhere also said that the other big problem about trying to mandate vaccination where staff are under stress and there is a shortage, may lead to even bigger staff shortages due to resignations and difficulties in recruitment of the appropriate level of qualifications.
Of course it is best to vaccinate by consent and we do know that under the present government, legislations will be used for the benefit of money over people.Clark
“One of these (rules) requires you not to impugn other people’s motives”
The “antivaxxer” & “conspiracy theorist” labels insinuate that the ‘motive’ behind a person’s comments are ideological & misinformed, therefore not rational or valid, effectively ‘impugning’ it.
I asked the question because, in the comments on the open (?) comment pages of Murray’s blog, I’ve been noticing a worrying prevalence of the use of these labels in pithy & formulaic responses to anyone expressing ideas contrary to the ‘official’ COVID/vaccination narrative.
These labels seem to conforms to a pattern over the past year of closing down debate & forcing the adoption of a narrow political agenda, at least in main stream media & online discourse.
This is not healthy & I think that’s reflected in the number of thoughtful commentators, high & low profile, who have been terrified away from expressing a dissenting or counter argument, except in whispered conversations between trusted & close confidants, or in more openly ‘rabid’ & polemic circles.
However, this does seem to be the ‘trend’ of the year, exemplified in attacks on people having opinions not officially sanctioned by the ministry of ‘woke’, in regards to gender, race, sexuality or any number of ‘isms’.
Only that, in relation to the corona virus conversation, not being ‘woke’ enough implies you are a potential murderer. I know that sounds melodramatic, but that does seem to be the inference & very strongly held. If you don’t “toe the line”, you are a potential ‘killer’.
Which is not a new put down, either. When the official narrative was that Saddam was 45 minutes away from bombing the country, to question the mainstream was to support terrorism and the “enemy at the door”. To condemn the destruction & looting of Libya or to question the support of ‘moderate’ terrorism in Syria was to condone murderous tyranny.
What has most struck me over these 12 months, viewed from afar, is the degree of hatred & name calling on both sides, which I have honestly found more horrifying than the perceived health crisis.
Yelling “anti vaxxer” seems no different to yelling “Covidiot”. The only difference being that the former adheres to the ‘official’ line of the day & is given a sheen of respectability, but both serve only to stifle debate & assume that motivations are ideological rather than possibly relevant.I’m not suggesting that moderators need to adopt this into their “conventions” of permissible dialogue. Just exploring what feels like an inconsistency.
btw, I’m not “…an employee of a foreign government agency..” blah, blah, blah. Just in case anyone was wondering 🙂
Clark,
By “supporting ourselves”, I’m merely referring to putting food on the table, today & tomorrow, for oneself/one’s family and keeping a roof over their head. Nothing so existential (if that’s the right word?) as “taking orders from some …. power structure”.
“..in the real world..” being the world people are waking up to today & tomorrow, not the world as it ought to or could be.
I would not disagree with your thoughts on how those two concepts could & most probably should be challenged. But in terms of care workers being able to exercise the strength of their convictions by simply abandoning the jobs they hold, in the short term, the idea of reimagining & changing “the current political-economic environment” is a luxury people do not have. Hence making the “mandatory” vs “punitively coercive” point as regards ‘get jabbed’ or ‘get sacked’.
“Let’s turn towards each other rather than against.”
A very laudable sentiment but there seems to be little room for ‘we can agree to disagree’, it feels more like ‘get on board or get to fk’ (not how I’m interpreting your comment, simply how the wider discourse seems to have been shaped).Clark,
“calm down?”
I’m sorry Clark, but these issues don’t inspire me to feel calm when considering them directly.
I think that current events conform too readily to a pattern that is utterly redefining the world we live in, in an existentially & detrimental fashion that is hard to understate – the ‘wood for the trees’, if you will.“….should I not ignore your comments too?”
By all means, do so. We all skim through the plethora of opinions & information presented to us by all and sundry, picking up on some thoughts & discounting others. Part of critical thinking, surely?
& on this particular subject I am entirely unqualified, so please don’t give any undue credence to what you see on your screen simply because I typed it.As I mentioned previously, I look to inform myself through more qualified sources, wherever possible, whilst still being interested & concerned to know what any other people are thinking.
But personally, I have no interest in spoon feeding anyone else with how they should think. I am drawn to those who supply footnotes, references & professional expertise for truly informative writing, as I would imagine most other people are. I am not such a writer and that is not what I expect to contribute or get from a chat forum or comments section, although admittedly it can sometimes pop up in these places.“There..is conspiracy theory and anti-vax propaganda”
Yep, without a doubt there is. There is also ‘pro-vax propaganda’, although it’s more usually called managing the narrative, or perception management.
As with those that Murray lists on his blog posts, the likes of Integrity Initiative & Brigade 77 are explicitly tasked with this job.I’ve no idea what became of these discussions back in September 2020:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FegSq6wBZZg
but I think that’s a case in point (I almost felt sorry for BoJo watching this?!? He looked decidedly uncomfortable).
There’re also conspiracies hinted at on both sides (a conspiracy simply being 2 or more people planning something bad or illegal out of the public eye), such as ‘foreign agent/state’ instigated disinformation campaigns, backed up by spurious reports from intelligence sources who’ve often been known to be ‘wrong’ (?), replete with unconvincing terms like “we judge”, “we assess”, “probably” & “likely”, echoed endlessly through the MS atop a ticker tape of discredited but horrifying statistics.
And let’s not forget confirmed conspiracies, such as deciding & planning to bomb a sovereign nation and it’s population back into the stone age, regardless of legality or international condemnation. Or discredited conspiracy theories such as OBL perpetrating the attacks on 911 in cahoots with Saddam Hussein.
And whilst conspiracy theories or theorists abound on both sides of the argument, almost to the point of obscuring that which is useful to know, there may be points of relevance buried away in the seemingly outlandish commentaries. A further instance where critical thought & an open mind is crucial.
“…references to Event 201 and the Great Reset…”
Event 201 happened. It was specifically aimed at preparation & planning for a viral epidemic. It’s not unreasonable to imagine that it is of interest, one way or another.It named the very virus that was to later consume our world for 12 months; discussions held there on managing online & social media information/disinformation paved the way for the decisions we’ve seen play out ever since.
Simply mentioning it should not cause you to reach for the “antivaxxer” cut off switch.
The WEF are not shy about the Great Reset, with Klaus extolling the virtues of their proposal & releasing glossy PR videos of how we’ll all be ‘happy’ in his new world.
These ideas didn’t materialise out of nowhere & the implications should be somewhere near the forefront of all our minds, were we not ‘distracted’. Again, merely seeing those 2 words need not be a reason to fall into pigeon holing & dismissing a person.However such events are discussed, I think it’s hard to argue that they should not feature in the discussion somewhere, whichever ‘side’ you’re presumed to be on.
“…your apparent denial of the dangers of SARS-CoV-2,..”
I gave up a long time ago trying to work out how dangerous COVID is or isn’t, it’s an exercise well above my paygrade. As such, I wouldn’t state definitively how dangerous it is, one way or another.But there are other dangers associated with the response to COVID that are more readily digestible, whether that be the horrific increase in global poverty; the abrogation of basic human rights & freedoms; the reported fears of an ‘epidemic’ of child suicides; the almost predictable increase in wealth inequality, looting & profiteering; the unsurprising fiddling & misrepresenting of statistics, etc. etc. etc.
“So what does it take to get you to calm down?”
Thankfully, when the world closed its borders, I ended up stranded in a country where we can smile at one another freely, where we can potter about freely, where there are apparently no frightening numbers of corona virus fatalities, where we can socialise and do not keep one another at an anti social distance. So outside of this individual thread, my life is quite calm.
But we did lock down twice last year, for a month each time, so I got a taste of that horror.
And people here are exposed to all the global reporting on the subject that everyone else is so there is a degree of fear & anxiety. And as the economy crumbles, I have friends losing all their savings, homes & family land, their businesses, unable to eat properly or send their kids to school.
But I am relatively unscathed, at most inconvenienced, so ‘calm’ is not a difficult state for me, day to day.But as I see this seismic & unprecedented event play out, as the inconsistencies & omissions become apparent, as the narrative becomes unquestionable ideology & dissent is quashed, as nefarious & long established objectives become realised by our benevolent ruling minorities under cover of protecting our well being, I worry that keeping ‘calm’ will come back to haunt us in the years to come.
“Keep Calm & Carry On” over the past 20 years of a fraudulent war on terror has left scars of death, destruction & horror across this planet that I am utterly incapable of comprehending in their fullness.
To consider that, in addition to endless military and economic aggressions, we must now accommodate an endless biological war is a bit disheartening.“…it is exhausting and unenlightening…”
I couldn’t agree more. Opinions in many discussions on our current state of affairs, but by no means all, seem utterly & completely entrenched. Not something I’ve really encountered before & I can only surmise that it is down to the unprecedented levels of fear involved, fear of tyranny vs fear of death.I don’t imagine either one of us is likely to be swayed by what is shared here. As I said, more meaningful information is unlikely to be found on a virtual face, twittering into the ether or on an online forum for people who only know what they’ve heard from other sources, which is most everybody (myself most definitely included).
I tend to imagine that the main difference between our positions is that you are convinced you are right and I just hope I am wrong. In this, I envy you.
Glenn,
you’re quite right about ‘verbosity’, hopefully I can do better.
“…if you actually have a point..”
I’m fairly confident that any point I might have to make would be entirely lost on you, sorry, just a gut feeling.“A small introduction…would have been polite”
Human being, planet earth, that’s about all you need to concern yourself with.
This isn’t Tinder, is it.And having come across any number of comments that seemed far from polite and which had your moniker attached, I’ll not be taking lessons on good manners from your good self 🙂
“…coming across as you have done so far – and I’m far to polite to say what that is.”
And I return the favour.Josh R
Thank you for your detailed explanation of your position. You are quite right about the polarization that has beset society and has divided people who otherwise should be fighting the corrupt system that has been thriving on lies and on the support of the billionaire-controlled media. Most of those writing in this blog agree with you on the extremely dangerous creeping surveillance, disinformation and militarization. There is an overall prevailing narrative that is controlled by the system of world rule that favours the rich and the powerful, and governments that are simply working for these vested interests of the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex.
But we need to separate facts and truths from how these are used by rulers and manipulated. The problem is now so serious that it is difficult for individuals to recognize these facts as absolute truths but to question everything. The major problem with SARS cov-2 is that from the outset, an essentially public health and medical issue has been heavily politicised. In many ways I agree with you, it is as if instead of the world uniting to fight the epidemic, the rulers have used this unprecedented opportunity to carry out a major consolidation of market capitalism in its ugliest form.
It is therefore important to separate a real event: a true pandemic, its implications and how it is usually handled, from the mismanagement of the pandemic. For example Event 201 was a real exercise which was meant to plan for a future pandemic. This is important to note, there is no conspiracy in planning such an event. What is appalling, is that certain governments, like the British Government for example, have reassured the population that they were fully prepared for the pandemic in January when they knew fairly well that they were not. Moreover, the answer suggested when the epidemic came, was to take it on the chin and wait for herd immunity. Later the government exploited the severe shortage of PPE to enrich its cronies under cover of dealing with an emergency which was ‘unprecedented and could not be predicted’. This is utter tosh, the fact is that this was all inevitable because that is the way the market capitalism that is the overriding system works, light government will inevitably lead to weak infrastructure, poor central professional coordination, and disaster. And we know from all previous disasters that that is what makes the rich richer. For example, the crash of 2007-2008 did not lead to reigning in of the banks, but bankers getting richer and the rest of us facing austerity.
Sorry for all this long expose, but what I am trying to say is that instead of Event 201 becoming interpreted in a conspiratorial way, much as 911 and the war on terror, the events were real but exploited by the establishment. Part of the exploitation is to get us all to fight each other rather than draw attention to the deliberate mismanagement. I would hope that indeed when there is an enquiry about the management of the pandemic, that it has sufficient integrity to actually quote event 201 as evidence of how the UKG ignored warnings and how criminally culpable all of them were in the way they reacted, too little too late.
Meanwhile, let us keep the science and ‘facts’ as much as they can be ascertained separate from politics and the way these have been manipulated.Josh R, thanks for making matters clearer and a whole lot calmer. The fields you’ve mentioned are very diverse, which is appropriate because the pandemic has affected every aspect of everyone’s lives, globally. So to keep discussion manageable we’ll have to be disciplined in our approach. I suggest something like Wikipedia rules, which work well for subjects that have overwhelmingly large quantities of verifiable information available to the public eg. science, though they fail dismally when the only public information consists of brief and unverifiable assertions from often anonymous political and secret service sources, relentlessly amplified, exaggerated and recirculated by corporate “news” media.
What I’m suggesting is that we attempt to categorise the overall problem into subjects, working towards consensus within each, estimating the limits of what we can know as we go along, and cross-referencing between subjects to progressively narrow those limits. Also we should trace back through the “news” and social media echo-chambers to check against original sources. We’re not going to get it all done today!
Some words of introduction:
– “Thankfully, when the world closed its borders, I ended up stranded in a country where we can smile at one another freely, where we can potter about freely, where there are apparently no frightening numbers of corona virus fatalities, where we can socialise and do not keep one another at an anti social distance. So outside of this individual thread, my life is quite calm. But we did lock down twice last year, for a month each time, so I got a taste of that horror.”
I envy you. Most of the world did not close its borders, and that’s what turned an emergency in China into a global crisis. Here in the UK our first lockdown was implemented too late and consequently was prolonged for months. Eventually restrictions were relaxed somewhat, and we had two or three months before the pattern was repeated – “those unwilling to learn from history are condemned to repeat it” – infection prevalence again began to rise, the government again dithered permitting infections to soar, hospitals again overloaded as hundreds of thousands became seriously ill, and tens of thousands died, several of them connected to people I know.
– “I tend to imagine that the main difference between our positions is that you are convinced you are right and I just hope I am wrong. In this, I envy you.”
I am unusually fortunate in having a very close friend who has been an avid global catastrophe data-junkie for decades. Among his other interests he had been following virus-tracking web forums etc. long before this pandemic started. He is practised at finding good information and verifying it from diverse sources. He alerted me late January 2020; I didn’t pay enough attention until the 28th, the day that Wuhan locked down. From there he tracked its progress province-to-province and then Asian country-to-country, and I saw it do the same thing over and over again, so I was less surprised than most when it started doing the same in Europe. The UK government’s complacency and inaction were also depressingly predictable.
Covid spreads fast, and that’s a key characteristic in understanding its impact upon populations. It catches authorities unawares and under-prepared, and they let it get out of hand.
– “I gave up a long time ago trying to work out how dangerous COVID is or isn’t, it’s an exercise well above my paygrade. As such, I wouldn’t state definitively how dangerous it is, one way or another.”
The linked section of the COVID-19 Wikipedia page (above) seems very consistent with what me and my data-junkie friend have found for ourselves. I have linked to a specific revision rather than the main article so that my link in the context of this thread remains unchanged even though the Wiki page will get updated. I’ll explain and link the evidence I base my trust upon if you wish.
But the Infection Fatality Rate IFR really only conveys the personal, individual risk. The risk to and effects upon society as a whole are more to do with how fast covid-19 spreads. If we take a lower value from that link, say 0.5% as a convenient number, that equates to about 335,000 people in the UK. That’s around half the total usual number of deaths per year in the UK. Unrestricted, covid could kill that many over the course of a month or two, ie. for a month or two the death rate would be several times its usual rate. But almost certainly it would be worse than that. From the introduction of the Wiki page:
– “Of those people who develop noticeable symptoms, most (81%) develop mild to moderate symptoms (up to mild pneumonia), while 14% develop severe symptoms (dyspnea, hypoxia, or more than 50% lung involvement on imaging), and 5% suffer critical symptoms (respiratory failure, shock, or multiorgan dysfunction).”
The 0.5% figure for IFR is obtained mostly from populations for whom hospital treatment was available, but there is no way you can get 5% to 14% of any population into its hospital system, all in the same month or two. Without that treatment, at least twice as many would die, and quite probably the entire 5% suffering critical symptoms.
There are also the societal and economic consequences of so many falling ill at the same time and, with healthcare overloaded, people tending their loved ones instead of going to work. Infrastructure would probably start breaking down, leading to further disasters. We really can’t withstand widespread breakdown of systems such as electricity, gas, sewage, water supply, communications etc., each of which can adversely affect all the others.
Of course all the above assumes that the population would attempt to carry on precisely the same as usual, even as increasing numbers fell ill and started dying among them. They wouldn’t. They’d start avoiding infection; they’d effectively impose their own versions of lockdown conditions, slowing the spread and thereby mitigating my worst-case figures above. But having government and media is supposed to be an advantage, though I know the opposite proves true depressingly often, especially when they start bombing far away people. Governments are meant to serve populations by gathering data and understanding, making preparations, and informing the population. Locking down ahead of the arrival of the virus, while we change the way we do things to greatly impede its spread, would be a massive advantage to the people. If the UK government and media had done that, I might have experienced only two months of lockdown same as you.
This comment has so far taken me a couple of hours to compose, so I’ll just touch on one other thing you mentioned and then I have things I must get done. I was concerned about what you wrote regarding Event 201:
– “It named the very virus that was to later consume our world for 12 months”
That seemed too much to be coincidence, so I sought out the original source. The Wayback Machine at the Web Archive is a wonderful resource, and it started archiving the Event 201 website about three months before the pandemic started. At the top of the page, and encoded into the web address, you can see that the “snapshot” below was captured on 26 Dec 2019:
Wayback Machine capture of Event 201 publicity page
They were close:
Archived scenario page (Jan 2020)
They got the bat origin and relationship to SARS right, but they had the original human outbreak at a pig farm in South America, overestimated the time until vaccine development, and didn’t predict the name of the virus. But the scenario presented to business and government people was prepared by a section of the scientific community, and they’d been warning us about potential pandemics for decades – which is precisely why my data-junkie friend had been following the virus tracking forums. What immense tragedy that our governments are far less vigilant.
Quoting SA:
– “it is as if instead of the world uniting to fight the epidemic, the rulers have used this unprecedented opportunity to carry out a major consolidation of market capitalism in its ugliest form.”
Yes. That is precisely what neoliberal capitalism is entirely and deliberately set up to do – to capitalise upon any occurrence, disastrous or otherwise – but disasters can be particularly profitable, because they demand action, and action is “economic activity”, from which the richest always derive a percentage.
Conversely, civil society was woefully under-prepared – cuts to the public sector being another feature of neoliberalism, ironically further boosting profit when some disaster, any disaster, inevitably arrives.
To what extent capitalism is united, that’s what I’m interested in.
Today I received the first stage of Sputnik V. Before, I searched detailed info on it.
Its development was funded by the Russian Investment Fund, whose head is a graduate of Stanford and Harvard, ex-employee of Goldman&Sachs and McKinsey.
This Russian foundation has joint projects with Italy, France, Japan, China, Saudis and so on.
What made me think that “politics” is a kind of tip of the iceberg, a performance for ordinary citizens. In fact, for capitalism, the friendliness or hostility of states does not matter.
Amazing.
I believed that Russia is isolated, that no one was investing here, that we were really substituting imports with domestic goods – because of politics and sanctions.Capitalism is a doctrine and subscribers only care for advancing the cause of money as the only route to prosperity and advancement. Subscribers to the doctrine have no allegiance to any state or country or any other human grouping. They are quite happy to ditch their own if they are no longer useful. Capitalism also evolves and its latest invention, globalisation, is made to sound glamorous and inviting, but globalisation is only for those who can afford it and can benefit from it. There is no freedom of movement in this brand of globalisation, just freedom of movement of capital and for those who can afford it.
You mention Russia, yes the Russian state is the enemy because it will not obey the rules of market capitalism, the most recent form of rampant capitalism, and the state still practices a managed economy to an extent and Putin is hated because he saved Russia from the total claws of the market capitalists, yet manages to keep the oligarchs in check. Some of these oligarchs are favourites of the west as long as they can buy and develop football clubs and invest in the British housing market and contribute with donations to the Tory party. You understand that this really has nothing to do with ‘The Russian people’.Tatyana – ‘“politics” is a kind of tip of the iceberg, a performance for ordinary citizens. In fact, for capitalism, the friendliness or hostility of states does not matter.’
Very true!
I saw this coming several decades ago. Corporations grow by buying and thereby subsuming their smaller competitors. States cannot do this very much; they sometimes attack weaker states and then install a compliant government, or take over much smaller states, or grab a little territory or some small islands, but small states are allied to bigger states, the top of that hierarchy being the five Nuclear Weapons States and Permanent Members of the UNSC. Corporations are not restrained in this way, so the biggest can grow and grow, and are now as economically powerful as the nuclear weapons empires.
Corporations’ operations are subject to the laws of the states in which they operate, but by straddling the globe they play off states against each other, eg. US Apple manufactures in China to pay low wages and bypass unions; Google’s UK operations pay tax in the Republic of Ireland because the tax rate is much lower, etc. This way, the corporations hold the states to ransom, forcing down wages, tax and protection of workers. Unless all the states were to elect socialist governments at the same time, the corporations can always penalise the more socialist states by moving their operations elsewhere.
SA, I agree with all of your comment, but would add this:
– “Capitalism is a doctrine and subscribers only care for advancing the cause of money as the only route to prosperity and advancement”
Yes, but capitalism is also a system. “Macrocosm dominates microcosm”, ie. species adapt to the environment. In companies whose stocks are traded on the stock exchanges, there aren’t really even any “subscribers” who “care” about anything much. The “investors” just put money into portfolios, and software does the trading, because it has much faster reaction times than humans.
Clark
” Unless all the states were to elect socialist governments at the same time..”
I hate to be gloomy but I think this door has been shut as we saw in UK and US and movements that show some semblance of paying lip service to socialism or even wish to maintain welfare elements in their governance are under constant attack on all sides. Even in the interwar years capitalism has survived because it adapted by tinkering and went along with the powerful swell of demand for a welfare state, partly because at the time this also helped capitalism recover because it needed consumers. The open hostilities became obvious when workers and trade unions got too powerful for the interests of capital.
The situation will only get worse because of not only globalisation making corporations above national laws, but because computerization and advances in robotics will make many jobs redundant and those few who can afford it will have vast powers. The only use for the 99% will be as consumers of the products that will keep the 1% getting richer. Maybe the focus of the new industry will be to manufacture robotic consumers to replace the consumption by the then unemployed and useless to capital majority.
Unless there is a new revision and someone can reverse these trends I can see no easy way out of this gloomy future of market capitalism.my country tried to build socialism. From the experience of my parents, who were born in the end of 40s, the task was to feed people and educate children. Teachers and doctors were highly respected. The meals for the children were organized in the most careful way. Permanent medical supervision, annual health improvement of children at resorts at the expense of the state. Many schools had gardens, or the school was patronized by a factory / collective farm. I saw the echoes of that system myself as a child.
I felt the care of adults and understood that I also need to become useful to society, if I want to be treated on an equal footing.I am terrified of commerce in modern schools. Parents pay for school lunches, and those simply suck. Ugly, unhealthy overpriced food delivered through a chain of agents, each of whom adds their share to the price. The teaching job is no longer about developing children, but about preparing them for the final test. Paid services, paid competitions, and paid textbooks are constantly being imposed. Recommended school uniform manufacturer. Preferred events to attend. This is a real manifestation of capitalism. Competition among children.
They are already growing up without a sense of real care. They already understand that they will have to gnaw and punch their way in adulthood. The model of society is different, much more indifferent.Tatyana, that is similar to my own experience in the UK. The utility companies – electricity, gas, telephone, railways etc. were owned by the government. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher began selling them off in the 1980s. And as you say, it has changed people’s attitudes, for the worse.
It was the people who changed things after WWII, but bit by bit they have been changed back. And the people can change them again. They have to be changed; we have only twenty years before the Arctic has no ice in summer, first time in 130,000 years, and species are becoming extinct at hundreds of times the usual rate. The world is racing to disaster.
Clark, by the way, about that.
I remember much more freedom as a child, we were allowed to go anywhere and adults willingly interacted with us. Of course, there were fenced-in areas like a military facility or a factory, but you could go to any place, including the city administration, theater, museum, trolleybus depot – and adults smiled at us and willingly told us about what they were doing, often trying to treat us. This activity was our favorite on our children’s city walks. We were free to take fruits growing right on the streets. There was a great sense of community, freedom and the feeling that this city is ours.Now every piece of land and every building is in private hands and access is closed. Even older children and teenagers feel like guests and prefer to spend time safely at home. Today it’s impossible to spend several hours on the street without money, since a child will have nothing to eat and to drink.
Where did the free water go?!
We had a standpipe in residential areas and drinking fountains in public places!Clark
Some hope that capitalism will deal with climate change. It may be the ultimate opportunity to get rid of the then useless workers who just live on state funds. The robots will do all the essential work in your rich man’s atmospheric bubble.Socialism in Russia and the USSR did not work. It had from the outset too many enemies, and even then the west, fresh from the 1st world war, sent troops and weapons to help the white army. The Russian revolution, having just won control with a programme of socialism, had to fight a few more years of bitter fighting. There was a robust debate between Lenin who felt that Communism in one country will not succeed and hoped that the Russian revolution would ignite similar revolutions in Europe, but it was not to be. Later the fight intensified between the internationalists and the localists and ended up with Stalin as a winner, and the rest as they say is history. The tragedy of socialism is that this one go at trying it has failed, and although China has turned into a success story, it is now becoming very much a capitalist society to survive this rampant market capitalism.
Please show me where the hope of this new socialism is going to come from?SA
I would agree completely, on your points regarding the politicisation of these events, the failings it exposed in the decades long policy of crippling the NHS and ignoring health professionals in favour of ludicrously remunerated “consultants”, & most all of the other wider issues you refer to in regards to the skewed political & corporate landscape that has played such a part in our collective misery.
“But we need to separate facts and truths from how these are used by rulers and manipulated. The problem is now so serious that it is difficult for individuals to recognize these facts as absolute truths but to question everything.”
Yes, there are those who feel cast adrift in their inability to trust those who we would hope were competent & honest in the administration of the state. Just as there are those who feel securely anchored in their inability to conceive of the idea that those people charged with the administration of the state may be incompetent and/or dishonest.
In both instances, “question everything” is probably preferable to believe/disbelieve everything. But that would be in an ideal & unrealistic world. In our day to day lives, we’re kind of stuck with having to trust in those who know a bit more than ourselves, and “trust” is the key.
I get the impression that much of the maligning of people who are squarely questioning the narrative as it is portrayed, rests on the idea that they are blithely & ignorantly basing their objections on Facebook memes and conspiratorial propaganda, that they get labelled & dismissed under the catch all term “anti vaxxer”.
But much of the dissent stems from consideration of information presented as “facts and truth” by a whole host of knowledgeable & qualified professionals who are just as plausible as those paraded by the MS media & establishment.
In fact, their apparent lack of ‘conflict of interest’ lends them a degree more credibility due to the well practiced self interest evident in establishment circles. To discount dissent as simply ignorant & poorly informed reactionary bloody mindedness fails to do justice to the honestly & quite legitimately informed concerns.I’m not saying that you yourself are discounting that dissent, just that that seems to be a pervasive theme in public discourse. As it also seems to be a theme on the other side of the conversation as opinion has become polarised.
Saying all that, I can think of no solution other than letting people decide for themselves. And that’s where the sticking point seems to lie.
“….there is no conspiracy in planning such an event (Event 201).”
It doesn’t strike me as conspiratorial either, convenient or curiously coincidental at best. But that might be my cognitive dissonance at being unable to imagine that this horrific sh!tshow was deliberately engineered as a pre-emptive effort to impose a whole rash of authoritarian controls on the world :-)))) But I honestly cannot conceive of that being the case.
I know that a few hundreds of thousands or a few millions of dead Arabs, a few tens of thousands of dead austerity poor, a few hundreds of thousands of starving Yemenis or sanctioned Iraqi toddlers, or the millions of ‘others’ if you want to go back further than 30 years, I know these “dead” don’t cause our policy makers any sleepless nights.
And I know that “overpopulation” and eugenicist sentiments aren’t unheard of amongst the great & the good.
But even with all that, I still can’t imagine that this COVID crisis was deliberately manufactured.However, in regards to Event 201 being part of some nefarious pre-emptive effort, I wouldn’t say definitively that it was or it wasn’t, it simply falls into the category of “I’ll never know, one way or another,” so I’m not inclined to spend any mental energy wondering.
I don’t know precisely what “theories” abound on the subject as those aren’t conversations I am privy to nor do I seek them out. However, I can perhaps sympathise with those who would latch on to this planning exercise. Norad’s Vigilant Guardian on 9/11 & Visor Consultants’ simulation drill on 7/7 have attracted a lot of attention & intrigue over the years, along with the “first you simulate, then you go live” concept. So I’m not surprised that Event 201 has attracted such speculation.
As an aside, I don’t think Gates did anyone any favours when he appeared on BBC Breakfast (in April 2020, I think) & indirectly suggested that the event hadn’t even occurred, BMGF having been involved in the Event itself:
“…We didn’t simulate this, we didn’t practice, so both the health policies and economic policies, we find ourselves in uncharted territory.”But like I say, I don’t put much stock in the outright conspiracy idea, although as Vidal succinctly put it, I’m not averse to ‘analysing’ events which are bundled up in conspiracies. As such, I do find Event 201 interesting, because of what it can reveal about the decision making once the ‘pandemic’ had been categorised as such.
The only thing I’ve been particularly drawn to was the exercise where participants ‘gamed’ narrative management during a pandemic, in relation to MS media & tech (Event 201 Pandemic Exercise Segment 4-Communications) and how that later played out in 2020.
Admittedly, I did find it ‘spooky’ that the participants had been involved in a simulation based on a hypothetical virus that they apparently identified using the acronym “nCoV-2019”. With the WHO subsequently adopting the acronym “2019-nCoV” in January and how that has come to dominate our lives, I’m sure that even the participants themselves found it “peculiar”, to use Peter Power’s 2005 terminology.
Regardless of what COVID is or isn’t, my primary concern is that it has been mismanaged, misrepresented & exploited by individuals, corporations & institutions whose motives I am very sceptical of.
I am very much not convinced by the solutions they propose or the justifications they give, not out of bloody mindedness or a selfish sense of my own personal integrity, but out of a fear of the very real & assorted horrors that may, & in some instances most definitely will, be unleashed.You mentioned in an earlier post that “experimental gene therapy vaccine, sounds very much like…antivaccine teachings.”
I hadn’t realised that was a contentious term, but I’ve just googled around and it seems the various ministries of truth/fact checkers seem to have taken exception to it too, so I see where you’re coming from.
But, in my defence:
YouTube (4m 4s) – American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy: mRNA Vaccines for COVID-19
The American Society of Gene + Cell Therapy (ASGCT) announced “COVID-19 Vaccine Candidates Show Gene Therapy Is a Viable Strategy,” noting that:
“Two COVID-19 vaccine trials, both of which use messenger RNA (or mRNA) technology to teach the body to fight the virus, have reported efficacy over 90 percent.
These findings, announced by Moderna on Nov. 16 and by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech on Nov. 9 demonstrate that gene therapy is a viable strategy for developing vaccines to combat COVID-19.
Both vaccine candidates use mRNA to program a person’s cells to produce many copies of a fragment of the virus. The fragment then stimulates the immune system to attack if the real virus tries to invade the body.”
[ASGCT.org November 17, 2020]“Moderna … describes its product not as a vaccine, but as ‘gene therapy technology’ in SEC filings. This is because neither Moderna nor Pfizer … make any claims about their products creating immunity or preventing transmission.” Additionally, Moderna’s SEC filings specifically state that “Currently, mRNA is considered a gene therapy product by the FDA,”
[David Martin Ph.D. + US SEC Moderna June 30, 2020]I guess as new technologies develop & these tools/products need to conform to indemnity, regulation & marketing requirements, then definitions can change. But, as they stand, I don’t think they qualify as ‘vaccines’ under the medical definition, although ‘branding’ is obviously another field.
Vaccine, medical definition:
“A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.”
[CDC.gov Immunizations: The Basics, Definition of Terms]mRNA injections do not impart immunity. Moderna and Pfizer both admit that their clinical trials aren’t even looking at immunity. As such they do not fullfil the medical and/or legal definition of a vaccine.
Neither do they inhibit transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 infection. As such they do not fullfil the medical and/or legal definition of a vaccine.Dr Tal Zaks (chief medical officer at Moderna Inc) was a bit more candid in his 2017 TED talk (The disease-eradicating potential of gene editing) when this wasn’t such a “hot” issue & mandatory compliance wasn’t on the cards.
I also understood that the FDA had only granted the jabs Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) and that they will remain in trials through 2023, hence the reference to “experimental”. “Permitted” for emergency use rather than “Approved” in the usual sense of the word is obviously not a distinction the marketing department likes to draw attention to.
I guess it will get ‘less’ experimental as time goes on. If Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla’s comments on NBC back in February are any indication, folk will have plenty of time to get used to regular jabbing:
“Every year, you need to go to get your flu vaccine…It’s going to be the same with Covid. In a year, you will have to go and get your annual shot for Covid to be protected.”
Of course, that’s assuming their product doesn’t turn out to be another Protonix, Prempro, Chantix, Depo-Testosterone, etc. etc. oh! no matter, I guess they’re indemnified for that now.
If they manage to keep the gravy train rolling, it will be interesting to see how they handle pricing in light of the Epipen rip off & the few billion $$$ in criminal fines they’ve racked up since the turn of the century.
………I’m loathe to add this last link because I did not come across it myself & have not looked into it. Worse still, I came across it chatting to an Aussie over breakfast who showed me it on his phone. So if anything has the potential to be ‘conspiracy’ claptrap, then this will be it. But the claims and the supposed CV of the man making them would be, if both those things checked out, something worth sharing.
I did google the name briefly & the Google algorithms & various ministries of truth (for whatever they’re worth) did seem to throw up a lot of dismissive stuff.
So, massive caveat, I only came across it a few days ago, from a completely unknown source & I haven’t made any efforts to verify it’s authenticity or plausibility:
YouTube (11m 15s) – Del Bigtree (The Highwire): mRNA Jab – Watch Geert Vanden Bossche, PhD, DVM
(additional) warning: the interview is introduced by quite an excitable presenter, or perhaps just very Ameri……… sorry
Clark,
“It named the very virus that was to later consume our world for 12 months”
Sorry Clark, I didn’t mean to suggest they’d predicted all the details you fastidiously unearthed, merely that they’d used the acronym “nCoV-2019” and that the WHO later adopted a very similar designation, “2019-nCoV”.
Thank you for sharing the Wikipedia page & for taking the time to go into some statistical analysis/explanation.
But to be honest, I’ve trudged through more medical/scientific writing over the past 12 months than I would have wished upon myself in 100 lifetimes and, as I mentioned a couple of times in the overly ‘verbose’ comments earlier, I look elsewhere for comprehensive & authoritative information so don’t pay much attention to “comments” other than for opinion.I don’t mean to be dismissive or pompous (although I realise it does sound very pompous & dismissive), it’s just that when I wrote that “I gave up a long time ago trying to work out how dangerous COVID is or isn’t”, it wasn’t out of difficulty grasping the literature, it was more out of a lack of confidence in the data & an understanding that science quite invariably has competent & convincing voices on either side of research & I was best out of it.
Funnily enough, it was a paper by Dr Brown (published in August 2020 – Public Health Lessons Learned From Biases in Coronavirus Mortality Overestimation) & specifically focusing on IFR & CFR data such as that with which you seem familiar, that probably convinced me to find something less taxing to read :-)))
Although peer reviewed & published, I’m sure there’ll be equally qualified people expressing a contrary opinion, such is the nature of science. Incidentally, his conclusions were quite different to those that you cite.To my simplistic layman’s mind, there were 2 particular features of the COVID data collection & presentation that have made me disinclined to trust the ticker tape of terror.
Firstly, the changes to the procedure involved in processing the Medical Certificates of Cause of Death (MCCD), implemented as part of the March 25th 2020 Coronavirus Act, seemed destined (if not specifically designed) to result in a substantial over reporting of COVID fatalities. It went much beyond the common “with/from COVID” death reporting concerns that were being voiced more widely at the time.
The guidance by the Chief Coroner a day later was also very ominous, suggesting that s/he could not “envisage a situation” where any coroner would speak publicly about these changes. Thankfully, some brave handfuls of professionals, in the UK & abroad, did express their concerns and the OffGuardian did quite a comprehensive report on the detail & implications of these MCCD changes, on 5th May.
These changes to reporting, invariably under the onus of necessity & expedience in an emergency, was duplicated across Europe & US. I think the simultaneous adoption of these policies simply dates back to the 2005 WHO International Health Regulations & the subsequent emergency powers Acts adopted by individual states. Thus everyone acts in ‘lock step’ under the requisite ‘circumstances’. Unfortunately that applies to ‘bad’ directives as much as ‘good’ ones.
I imagine most of us are familiar with politicians fudging the numbers: juggling troop deployments between ‘theatres’ of engagement, discounting mercenaries & “off the books” forces, in order to mislead reporting of particular military involvements; or shuffling the jobless from one ‘training’ scheme or ‘waiting’ period to another, to misrepresent unemployment statistics. So the changes to MCCD reporting didn’t inspire confidence…..in actual fact, it felt more like fraud if I’m honest.
Secondly, the PCR test debacle just completely delegitimised all the case reporting figures. Again, this was an issue that was raised quite comprehensively in those first few months of the ‘crisis’ but was sidelined & maligned. I imagine that was even before there was a slur in our vocabulary for people who raised such concerns.
The inventor of the test, Kary Mullis, had been quite forthright in stressing that his Nobel Prize winning invention was not a diagnostic tool and that had been a discussion in the scientific community decades ago; even clinicians were separately reminding authorities that clinical diagnosis does not come from a test alone; and, perhaps worst of all, concerns were rife over the Corman-Drosten paper, which initially proposed the rt-PCR COVID test, due to its rapid publication one day after it was submitted (without peer review), in a journal for which 2 of the paper’s authors declined to mention that they were also editors (?!?), & which was immediately endorsed, before publication, by the first non-medical doctor DG of the WHO.
rt-PCR tests & hence COVID case statistics have thus stunk for a long time.
The President of Tanzania (Chem. Ph.D?), getting positive COVID tests on pawpaw & goat samples seemed humorous at the time (love how the MS swarmed his dead self with denigration & false claims about his passing to suggest that he got some kind of comeuppance – not very ‘Woke’).
The Lisbon Appeal Court ruling that rt-PCR tests were unreliable was nice for Portugal.
The Borger report which finally exposed Drosten to peer review was damning.And, incredibly, the WHO itself finally came out and tacitly admitted that rt-PCR tests with a cycle threshold over 35 were invalid, in new guidance issued exactly a year after adopting the dubious test in the first place & scaring the bejesus out of everybody, day in, day out for 12 months.
With the new WHO ‘guidance’ released on 20th January 2021, the number of cases predictably plummeted. Of course, the decline in numbers is supposed to be due to the wonders of vaccination, despite the fact that this tremendous decline in case numbers happened across regions & states irrespective of how many or how fully people had been vaccinated.
So on those 2 points alone, even if I could bring my self to trawl through another stack of papers analysing the dangers of COVID, and assume that I’m in any way qualified to understand what they’re going on about, I’m not particularly inclined to because the very source data seems compromised, fudged, massaged, politicised or whatever.
Geert Vanden Bossche’s open letter. After the letter he explains his reasoning.
Not sure what I think about this as yet.As far as Event 201 goes I think too much is read into it. It was the fourth such exercise carried out by the John Hopkins University over the years. Previously the had used a flu pandemic and small pox as their scenarios.
“Similar to the Center’s 3 previous exercises—Clade X, Dark Winter, and Atlantic Storm—Event 201 aimed to educate senior leaders at the highest level of US and international governments and leaders in global industries.”
In terms of naming a new virus there are agreed conventions on that as there are with new chemicals etc. Coronaviruses have long being considered a likely candidate for a pandemic. If I were going to give a name to a fictitious car for a scenario I might call it “Etesian 3.0 GTI 16 valve” names of winds being very fashionable.
Josh, I know what I make of Geert Vanden Bossche’s letter and I have some specific questions about it, but before I go into that, what do you make of it?
Tatyana, exactly the same has happened here. Public drinking water has just started to be returned; I think it’s due to public pressure about having to buy and dispose of plastic bottles all the time, but there are nowhere near as many public water points as there were. And all commercial activity is to some extent secret, whereas companies and organisations used to be proud to show the public their operations. I used to be able to walk into any university in the country and just start talking to people. Now, it’s all “papers, please” at the campus gates.
SA – “Please show me where the hope of this new socialism is going to come from?”
The big, hopefully massive UK Kill the Bill demo in London and everywhere else will be on Saturday. Coming?
And Josh, you are indeed very verbose, but I have actually encountered most of the arguments you present, and I still think there’s a genuine pandemic, with an IFR of at least 0.5% if everyone needing hospital can get in, and several times that if no one can. And I think that not because of the opinions of experts, but because I’ve been reading the graphs; they really don’t leave much room for doubts, and certainly not the ones you’ve raised here. If you’re interested in the reasoning that has led to this conclusion, just say and I’ll explain.
E.T.
I am always wary of these Casandra like supposedly eminent scientists who come from nowhere with visions of gloom and doom which of course is invisible to all the other scientists. I have skimmed through his paper and found one or two odd statements but meanwhile look at this:Vaxopedia – Who is Geert Vanden Bossche?
