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The average American, including conservatives, being people of good
faith, complied, thinking that this was a common-sense measure that
would save lives in the wake of a new and mysterious pandemic.
No longer was it enough to “flatten the curve.” Now we were to be locked down until there was a cure.
Even the cure was not enough for some figures like the lionized-by-liberals Dr. Anthony Fauci — we would continue to be locked down even after a vaccine
had been rammed through the approvals process with limited testing.
When would we be allowed out by our masters? No one could answer this.
Second, there was an intensification of the authoritarian measures. Some states, aided by Big Tech, introduced “contact tracing”
where people had to sign in with extensive personal information if they
wanted to, for example, eat out at a restaurant. This was so that, in
the event of infection with COVID-19, the state health department would
be able to track and trace everyone you had contact with.
By the fall of 2020, the facts became clear: While COVID-19 was
dangerous for select populations, it had an extremely low death rate
among the young and healthy.
The generous or naive might say that the COVID-19 health measures are
misguided attempts to protect the population. A more hard-nosed or
cynical person likely thinks that these measures are a deliberate
attempt to enact totalitarian measures leveraging public panic.
We believe that COVID-19 measures are little more than a cynical
power grab. We also believe that they have no basis in “the science”
often breathlessly invoked by the toadies of this power grab.
In this article, we will make a compelling case that there is nothing scientific about this attack on the individual civil liberties of Americans. As Canadian Dr. Roger Hodkinson, a top pathologist, virologist, and CEO of a biotech company manufacturing COVID tests said, “this (COVID-19) is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public.”
Who Is Hurt By Lockdowns… And Who Isn’t?
Before launching into specifics about “the science” of lockdowns, it
is worth discussing who was impacted by lockdowns and who wasn’t.
Despite the rhetoric from the political and media class about how “we
are all in this together,” there is clearly no “we” and there are
different impacts on different people.
First, let’s discuss the American and international media elites.
These jobs are largely done remotely and, where they are not customarily
performed so, can easily be transitioned to be done remotely. Then
there is the small matter of the political class of bureaucrats who
receive their paychecks whether they perform any ostensible “work” — to
say nothing of obtaining results — or not.
Unsurprisingly, these are two groups heavily invested in both lockdowns and in policing the behavior of ordinary citizens.
Compare with the working- and middle-class Americans who do not see a
dime unless they actually show up to work, work which often cannot be
done under the restrictive and arbitrary rules of the lockdowns.
While one can write clickbait articles about how anti-mask and
anti-lockdown protesters are agents of white supremacy from the comfort
of one’s own home, the same cannot be said for tasks like construction,
manufacturing, many forms of retail sales or hospitality.
This isn’t just a matter of a few people missing out on a few weeks
of work. CNBC host Jim Cramer has noted that the Chinese Coronavirus
pandemic led to one of the biggest wealth transfers in all of American history. Wall Street cleaned up at the expense of Main Street.
This is emblematic of the massive transfer of wealth from small Main
Street businesses to Big Tech and the financial sector. Indeed, the tale
of the Chinese coronavirus in total might well be described as a massive upward consolidation of power.
The point of all this is to point out that there is a massive social
and economic cost to the lockdowns that is borne entirely by the
plebeians and not at all by the political and media elites who push the
lockdowns hard.
People’s lives have been ruined by the lockdown. And while the projected increase in suicide rates has thus far failed to materialize, why does someone have to kill themselves for us to be concerned about how COVID-19 has impacted their lives?
Further, we have evidence that people die of “despair”
— effectively giving up on life and failing to perform adequate
self-care, overdosing on drugs or other similar types of deaths — at an
alarming rate during the pandemic lockdowns.
Delayed cancer screenings were another problem during the lockdowns.
The United Kingdom, which has socialized medicine, believes that there
are tens of thousands of deaths related to delayed treatment because of COVID alone.
Conservative news and opinion website Revolver has conducted an extensive study
of just how impacted American quality of life has been by COVID
lockdowns, in terms of actual months of life lost. They concluded that
over 10 times as much life has been lost due to COVID lockdowns than due
to the disease itself.
The Revolver study is largely based on “back of the envelope” type
calculations, but is still worth reading to get a sense of the scope of
how COVID-19 lockdowns have negatively impacted the lives of Americans
significantly more than the disease itself.
The Great Barrington Declaration,
signed by over 7,000 scientists, virologists, and infectious disease
experts believes that lockdowns are destroying “at least seven times as
much life” as the disease itself and that in the United States and the
United Kingdom, there is “irreparable damage” being done.
The declaration notes clearly that “seven times as much damage” is the absolute minimum, putting a more realistic figure at 90 times.
There is another metric worth mentioning in our quest to quantify how
bad the lockdown has been for non-sick people. Global debt has
ballooned, growing by $20 trillion since the lockdowns began, according
to the Institute of International Finance. This is thought to be the biggest increase in debt in the world’s history
Perhaps worst of all, none of this is ever explained to the public as
being necessary. It is simply not acknowledged at all. It is an article
of faith in the COVID cult that any measure that will prevent even a
single death is worth it no matter what the social or economic
consequences.
Like it or not, the COVID-19 pandemic with its veiled threat of
forced vaccinations, contact tracing, and genetically encoded vaccines
is propelling humanity at warp speed into a whole new frontier—a
surveillance matrix—the likes of which we’ve only previously encountered
in science fiction.
Those who eye these developments with lingering mistrust have good
reason to be leery: the government has long had a tendency to unleash
untold horrors upon the world in the name of global conquest, the
acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and
technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.
Indeed, “we the people” have been treated like lab rats by government agencies for decades now: caged, branded, experimented upon without our knowledge or consent, and then conveniently discarded and left to suffer from the after-effects.
You don’t have to dig very deep or go very back in the nation’s
history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace, making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins.
Now this same government—which has taken every bit of technology sold
to us as being in our best interests (GPS devices, surveillance,
nonlethal weapons, etc.) and used it against us, to track, control and
trap us—wants us to fall in line as it prepares to roll out COVID-19
vaccines that owe a great debt to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency for its past work on how to weaponize and defend against infectious diseases.
This is all part of Operation Warp Speed,
which President Trump has likened to the Manhattan Project, a covert
government effort spearheaded by the military to engineer and build the
world’s first atomic bomb.
There is every reason to tread cautiously.
There is a sinister world beyond that which we perceive, one in which
power players jockey for control over the one commodity that is a
necessary ingredient for total domination: you.
By you, I mean you the individual in all your singular humanness.
Remaining singularly human and retaining your individuality and
dominion over yourself—mind, body and soul—in the face of corporate and
government technologies that aim to invade, intrude, monitor, manipulate
and control us may be one of the greatest challenges before us.
The groundwork being laid with these vaccines is a prologue to what
will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted,
frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic,
biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.
The term “matrix” was introduced into our cultural lexicon by the 1999 film The Matrix
in which Neo, a computer programmer/hacker, awakens to the reality that
humans have been enslaved by artificial intelligence and are being
harvested for their bio-electrical energy.
Hardwired to a neuro-interactive simulation of reality called the
“Matrix,” humans are kept inactive and docile while robotic androids
gather the electricity their bodies generate. In order for the machines
who run the Matrix to maintain control, they impose what appears to be a
perfect world for humans to keep them distracted, content, and
submissive.
Here’s the thing: Neo’s Matrix is not so far removed from our own
technologically-hardwired worlds in which we’re increasingly beholden to
corporate giants such as Google for powering so much of our lives. As
journalist Ben Thompson explains:
Google+ is about unifying all of Google’s services under a
single log-in which can be tracked across the Internet on every site
that serves Google ads, uses Google sign-in, or utilizes Google
analytics. Every feature of Google+—or of YouTube, or Maps, or Gmail, or
any other service—is a flytrap meant to ensure you are logged in and being logged by Google at all times.
Everything we do is increasingly dependent on and,
ultimately, controlled by our internet-connected, electronic devices.
For example, in 2007, there were an estimated 10 million sensor devices
connecting human utilized electronic devices (cell phones, laptops,
etc.) to the Internet. By 2013, it had increased to 3.5 billion. By
2030, it is estimated to reach 100 trillion.
Much, if not all, of our electronic devices will be connected to
Google, a neural network that approximates a massive global brain.
Google’s resources, beyond anything the world has ever seen, includes
the huge data sets that result from one billion people using Google
every single day and the Google knowledge graph “which consists of 800 million concepts and billions of relationships between them.”
The end goal? The creation of a new “human” species, so to speak, and
the NSA, the Pentagon and the “Matrix” of surveillance agencies are
part of the plan. As William Binney, one of the highest-level
whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA, said, “The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control.”
Mind you, this isn’t population control in the classic sense. It’s more about controlling the population through singularity,
a marriage of sorts between machine and human beings in which
artificial intelligence and the human brain will merge to form a
superhuman mind.
The term “singularity”—that is, computers simulating human life
itself—was coined years ago by mathematical geniuses Stanislaw Ulam and
John von Neumann. “The ever accelerating progress of technology,” warned
von Neumann, “gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”
Advances in neuroscience indicate that future behavior can be
predicted based upon activity in certain portions of the brain,
potentially creating a nightmare scenario in which government officials
select certain segments of the population for more invasive surveillance
or quarantine based solely upon their brain chemistry.
Case in point: researchers at the Mind Research Center scanned the
brains of thousands of prison inmates in order to track their brain
chemistry and their behavior after release. In one experiment,
researchers determined that inmates with lower levels of activity in the
area of the brain associated with error processing allegedly had a higher likelihood of committing a crime
within four years of being released from prison. While researchers have
cautioned against using the results of their research as a method of
predicting future crime, it will undoubtedly become a focus of study for
government officials.
There’s no limit to what can be accomplished—for good or ill—using brain-computer interfaces.
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have created a
brain-to-brain interface between lab rats, which allows them to transfer
information directly between brains. In one particular experiment,
researchers trained a rat to perform a task where it would hit a lever
when lit. The trained rat then had its brain connected to an untrained
rat’s brain via electrodes. The untrained rat was then able to learn the
trained rat’s behavior via electrical stimulation. This even worked over great distances using the Internet, with a lab rat in North Carolina guiding the actions of a lab rat in Brazil.
Clearly, we are rapidly moving into the “posthuman era,” one in which
humans will become a new type of being. “Technological devices,” writes
journalist Marcelo Gleiser, “will be implanted in our heads and bodies,
or used peripherally, like Google Glass, extending our senses and cognitive abilities.”
Transhumanism—the fusing of machines and people—is here to stay and will continue to grow.
In fact, as science and technology continue to advance, the ability
to control humans will only increase. In 2014, for example, it was
revealed that scientists have discovered how to deactivate that part of our brains that controls whether we are conscious or not.
When researchers at George Washington University sent high frequency
electrical signals to the claustrum—that thin sheet of neurons running
between the left and right sides of the brain—their patients lost
consciousness. Indeed, one patient started speaking more slowly until
she became silent and still. When she regained consciousness, she had no
memory of the event.
Add to this the fact that increasingly humans will be implanted with
microchips for such benign purposes as tracking children or as medical
devices to assist with our health. Such devices “point to an
uber-surveillance society that is Big Brother on the inside looking
out,” warns Dr. Katina Michael. “Governments or large corporations would have the ability to track people’s actions and movements, categorize them into different socio-economic, political, racial, or consumer groups and ultimately even control them.”
All of this indicates a new path forward for large corporations and
government entities that want to achieve absolute social control.
Instead of relying solely on marauding SWAT teams and full-fledged
surveillance apparatuses, they will work to manipulate our emotions to
keep us in lock step with the American police state.
Now add this warp speed-deployed vaccine to that mix, with all of the
associated unknown and fearsome possibilities for altering or
controlling human epigenetics, and you start to see the perils inherent
in blindly adopting emerging technologies without any restrictions in
place to guard against technological tyranny and abuse.
It’s one thing for the starship Enterprise to boldly go where no man has gone before, but even Mr. Spock recognized the dangers of a world dominated by AI. “Computers make excellent and efficient servants,” he observed in “The Ultimate Computer” episode of Star Trek, “but I have no wish to serve under them.”
The Panic of 1873 is one of those events that was important at the
time, but gets little discussion today. One reason is it does not fit
modern narratives, as the villains and victims are not familiar today.
It is one of those events that just seemed to happen and all of these
years later it is not clear why it happened. There are lots of possible
causes, but not one obvious cause. The resulting decades long
depression, however, setup the 20th century and the two great industrial
wars.
Another important event that gets little attention these days is the
Great Fear that preceded the French Revolution. This was a period of
panic, fear and conspiracy theories that swept rural France. Rumors
circulated about various plots by the King and the aristocratic classes.
For reasons no one has been able to explain, the peasants became
increasingly sure the First Estate was about to overthrow the Third
Estate, which eventually led to the revolution.
One of the many interesting things about the Bolshevik Resolution is
the parallels between it and the French Revolution. Lenin was supposedly
a student of the latter, so the lessons of it informed his decisions.
Whether this is true or not is like so much else about our history. No
one can say for sure now. One clear parallel, however, was the fear and
panic preceding the February revolution. Suddenly, no one could trust
anyone, so everyone was willing to believe the most outlandish tales.
The one thread that runs through economic panics, periods of civil
unrest and great social upheavals like revolutions is the collapse in
trust. It is not just the trust in individuals like a king or rich
people. Human societies have been dealing with dishonest rulers for a
long time. Monarchs come and go and people quickly adjust. When everyone
knows the problem is a man or group of men, the solution to the problem
is always at hand. No man, no more problems.
Panics are different. The fear is driven by the sense that nothing
can be trusted, even one’s own assessment of events. In the case of
economic panics, when a big powerful bank fails, impoverishing its
clients, how can one trust anything about the financial system at that
point? If all of a sudden the currency loses a big chunk of its value,
how can anyone trust the economic system itself? In times when the
foundations of the system lose credibility, no one can trust anything in
the system.
A simple example makes this clear. If in your place of work, the
software system used by the company suddenly produces errors, everyone
raises an alarm. Work stops until the people in charge of the software
either explain why the unexpected result is, in fact, correct or they
find the cause and repair it. The software system holds the business
rules of the company, so when those rules appear to be to failing, the
logic of the business is called into question. The users begin to panic.
The reason people panic is that trust is built on predictability and
predictability relies on rules and the orderly enforcement of those
rules. When the rules stop making sense or their enforcement becomes
arbitrary, it becomes impossible to predict the outcome of one’s
actions. When you cannot trust the rules, you cannot trust the results
of your own decisions, which means you cannot trust even yourself. When
people can trust nothing they are willing to believe anything.
America appears to be in one of those moments when the people are
suddenly thrust into a world in which they can no longer trust anything.
The extraordinary events of the last election have caused tens of
millions to question the system itself. Even those who voted for Biden
are coming around to the idea that it was not on the level. Now we are
seeing wild claims rocketing around the internet about what is happening
to various people and what is happening behind the scenes.
The new rumors and claims are a bit nutty, but the fact is this has
been building for a while, going back to before the prior election.
Think back and there were all sorts of rumors about Hillary Clinton.
People were willing to believe them because she is a terribly corrupt
person and a notorious liar. You cannot trust anything that is said by
her, her associates or anyone aligned with her. Today, everyone views
the system the same way we have viewed Hillary Clinton for decades.
Another interesting aspect to this time of rumor and panic is the
fact that the political class has not learned from the economic class.
The lesson the bankers learned from the depression of 1929 is that one
tool in their arsenal had to be a form of shock and awe as they
addressed the crisis. The display of power by the central bank would
fill the void of trust and quell the panic. This has proven to be highly
effective, as we saw with the mortgage crisis in 2008. Everyone trusted
the Fed.
Looking back at the French and Russian revolutions, there were points
when the ruling class could have restored some trust in themselves and
the system. They had opportunities to change the dynamic and bring
people back into a political process they could trust. They failed to do
so, often choosing a path that further eroded what little trust the
people had in them. We’re seeing similar failures today, as the ruling
class carries on as if nothing is happening outside their mansions.
This is how suspicious minds become radical minds. When people get
suspicious over something like the election anomalies, they are looking
for an explanation from a source they want to trust. When that natural
authority mocks or dismisses their suspicion, that becomes part of a new
narrative to explain both the anomalies and the unexpected reaction to
it. That why the rumors are flying. Suddenly, tens of millions are in
the market for a new narrative to explain what they are seeing.
Just as important, tens of millions of American are moving from a
mode where they think the government has bad elements to a mode where
the suspect the government itself is the bad element. When public trust
in the system sharply declined a generation ago, the system had a
solution. Reagan channeled that distrust into a reform effort that
restored trust in the system. Today, the Pretender Biden and his coterie
of flunkies and door holders is channeling that distrust into
conspiracies.
In short, the ‘Iron Curtain’ descends when supposedly private
enterprises (Big Digital) mutually inter-penetrate with – and then
claim – the State: No longer the non-believer facing this coming metamorphosis is to be persuaded – he can be compelled.
Regressive values held on identity, race and gender quickly slipped
into a ‘heresy’ labelling. And as the BLM activists endlessly repeat: “Silence is no option: Silence is complicity”.
With the advent of Silicon Valley ideology’s ubiquitous ‘reach’, the diktat can be achieved through weaponising ‘Truth’ via AI, to achieve a ‘machine learning fairness’
that reflects only the values of the coming revolution – and through AI
‘learning’ mounting that version of binary ‘truth’, up and against an
adversarial ‘non-truth’ (its polar opposite). How this inter-penetration came
about is through a mix of early CIA start-up funding; connections and
contracts with state agencies, particularly relating to defence; and in
support for propaganda campaigns in service to ‘governmentalist’
narratives.
The blatant attempt by Big Tech platforms and MSM to write
the narrative of the 2020 Facebook and Twitter U.S. Election – coupled
with their campaign to insist that dissent is either the intrusion of
enemy disinformation, ‘lies’ coming from the U.S. President, or plain
bullsh*t – is but the first step to re-defining ‘dissenters’ as security
risks and enemies of the good.
The next step is already being prepared – as Whitney Webb notes:
A new cyber offensive was launched on Monday by the UK’s signal
intelligence agency, GCHQ, which seeks to target websites that publish
content deemed to be “propaganda”, [and that] raise concerns regarding
state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccine development – and the multi-national
pharmaceutical corporations involved.
Similar efforts are underway in the U.S., with the military
recently funding a CIA-backed firm … to develop an AI algorithm aimed
specifically at new websites promoting “suspected” disinformation
related to the Covid-19 crisis, and the U.S. military–led Covid-19
vaccination effort known as Operation Warp Speed …
The Times reported that GCHQ “has begun an offensive
cyber-operation to disrupt anti-vaccine propaganda being spread by
hostile states” and “is using a toolkit developed to tackle
disinformation and recruitment material peddled by Islamic State” to do
so … The GCHQ cyber war will not only take down “anti-vaccine
propaganda”, but will also seek to “disrupt the operations of the
cyberactors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they
cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.”
The Times stated that “the government regards tackling false
information about inoculation as a rising priority as the prospect of a
reliable vaccine against the coronavirus draws closer,” suggesting that
efforts will continue to ramp up as a vaccine candidate gets closer to
approval.
This larger pivot toward treating alleged “anti-vaxxers” as
“national security threats” has been ongoing for much of this year,
spearheaded in part by Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, a member of the UK government’s Steering Committee on Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force, which is part of the UK government’s Commission for Countering Extremism.
Ahmed told the UK newspaper The Independent in July that “I would
go beyond calling anti-vaxxers conspiracy theorists to say they are an
extremist group that pose a national security risk.” He then stated that
“once someone has been exposed to one type of conspiracy it’s easy to
lead them down a path where they embrace more radical world views that
can lead to violent extremism … Similarly, a think tank tied to U.S.
intelligence argued in a research paper published just months before the
onset of the Covid-19 crisis that “the U.S. ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement
would pose a threat to national security in the event of a ‘pandemic
with a novel organism.’”
Just to be clear, it is not just the ‘Five Eyes’ Intelligence
Community at work – YouTube, the dominant video platform owned by
Google, decided this week to remove a
Ludwig von Mises Institute video, with more than 1.5 million views, for
challenging aspects of U.S. policy on the Coronavirus.
What on earth is going on? The Mises Institute as
‘extremist’, or purveyor of enemy disinformation? (Of course, there are
countless other examples.)
Well, in a word, it is ‘China’. Maybe it is about fears that China
will surpass the U.S. economically and in Tech quite shortly. It is no
secret that the U.S., the UK and Europe, more generally, have botched
their handling of Covid, and may stand at the brink of recession and
financial crisis.
China, and Asia more generally, has Covid under much better control.
Indeed, China may prove to be the one state likely to grow economically
over the year ahead.
But 40%-50% of Americans say they would refuse vaccination. They are concerned about the long term safety for humans of
the new mRNA technique – concerns, it seems, that are destined to be
rigorously de-platformed to make way for the “required” saturation of
pro-vaccine messaging across the English-speaking media landscape.
There is no evidence,
yet, that either the Moderna or the Pfizer experimental vaccine
prevented any hospitalizations or any deaths. If there were, the public
has not been told. There is no information about how long any protective
benefit from the vaccine would persist. There is no information about
safety. Not surprisingly there is public caution, which GCHQ and Big
Digital intend to squash.
The digital Iron Curtain is not just about America.
U.S. algorithms, and social media, saturate Europe too. And Europe has
its ‘populists’ and state ‘deplorables’ (currently Hungary and Poland),
on which Brussels would like to see the digital ‘Curtain’ of denigration
and political ostracism descend.
This month, Hungary and Poland vetoed the EU bloc’s €1.8
trillion budget and recovery package in retaliation for Brussel’s plan
effectively to fine them for violating the EU’s ‘rule of law’
principles. As the Telegraphnotes,
“Many European businesses are depending on the cash and, given the
‘second wave’ of coronavirus hitting the continent, Brussels fears that
the Visegrád Group allies” could hold a recovery hostage to their
objections to the EU ‘rule-of-law’ ‘fines’).
What’s this all about? Well, Orbán’s justice minister has introduced a
series of constitutional changes. Each of them triggering ‘rule-of-law’
disputes with the EU. The most contentious amendment is an anti-LGBT one, stating explicitly that the mother is a woman, the father is a man.
It will add further restrictions for singles and gay couples adopting
children, and it will confine gender transition to adults.
Orbán’s veto is yet more evidence of a new Iron Curtain descending down the spine of – this time – Europe.
The ‘Curtain’ again is cultural, and has nothing to do with ‘law’.
Brussels makes no secret of its displeasure that many Central and
Eastern European member-states will not sign up to ‘progressive’ (i.e.
woke) values. At its root lies the tension that “whilst Western Europe is de-Christianising, Europe’s central and eastern states are re-Christianising –
the faith having been earlier a rallying point against communism”, and
now serving as the well-spring to these states’ post-Cold War emerging
identity. (It is not so dissimilar to some ‘Red’ American conservative
constituencies that also are reaching back to their Christian roots, in
the face of America’s political polarisation.)
These combined events point to a key point of inflection
occurring in the western polity: A constellation of state and
state-extended apparatuses has openly declared war on dissent
(‘untruths’), foreign ‘disinformation’ and opinion unsupported by their
own ‘fact-checking’.
It takes concrete form through Big Digital’s quiet sanctioning and
punitive policing of online platforms, under the guise of tackling
abuse; through nation-wide mandatory re-education and training
programmes in anti-racism and critical social theory in schools and
places of work; by embedding passive obedience and acquiescence amongst
the public through casting anti-vaxxers as extremists, or as security
risks; and finally, by mounting a series of public spectacles and
theatre by ‘calling out’ and shaming sovereigntists and cultural
‘regressives’, who merit being ‘cancelled’.
In turn, it advances an entire canon of progressivism rooted in critical social theory, anti-racism and gender studies.
It has too its own revisionist history (narratives such as the 1619
Project) and progressive jurisprudence for translation into concrete
law.
But what if half of America rejects the next President?
What if Brussels persists with imposing its separate progressive
cannon? Then the Iron Curtain will descend with the ring of metal
falling onto stone. Why? Precisely because those adhering to their
transformative mission see ‘calling out’ transgressors as their path to power –
a state in which dissent and cultural heresy can be met with
enforcement (euphemistically called the ‘rule of law’ in Brussels). Its’
intent is to permanently keep dissenters passive, and on the defensive,
fearing being labelled ‘extremist’, and through panicking fence-sitters
into acquiescence.
Maintaining a unified western polity may no longer be possible under such conditions. Should
the losers in this struggle (whomsoever that may be), come to fear
being culturally overwhelmed by forces that see their way-of-being as a
heresy which must be purged, we may witness a powerful turn towards
political self-determination.
When political differences become irreconcilable, the only
(non-violent) alternative might come to be seen to lie with the
fissuring of political union.
The Club of Rome in 1972 was prophetic with their early model predicting a social crash in the 2020s. Later the 4th turning authors tried to add a veneer of theory to the raw numbers in the late 1990s.
Now, peter Turchin is adding meat to the bones. But the results are the same: Decline and crash are at this stage unavoidable. This is less and less Casandra and more and more modeling and science.
A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news...
Peter Turchin, one of the world’s experts on pine beetles and
possibly also on human beings, met me reluctantly this summer on the
campus of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where he teaches.
Like many people during the pandemic, he preferred to limit his human
contact. He also doubted whether human contact would have much value
anyway, when his mathematical models could already tell me everything I
needed to know.
But he had to leave his office sometime. (“One way you know I am
Russian is that I cannot think sitting down,” he told me. “I have to go
for a walk.”) Neither of us had seen much of anyone since the pandemic
had closed the country several months before. The campus was quiet. “A
week ago, it was even more like a neutron bomb hit,” Turchin said.
Animals were timidly reclaiming the campus, he said: squirrels,
woodchucks, deer, even an occasional red-tailed hawk. During our walk,
groundskeepers and a few kids on skateboards were the only other
representatives of the human population in sight.
The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin, for many of
the same reasons it has been hell for the rest of us. Cities on fire,
elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—to a normal
American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working.
(“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”) He
has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political
trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than
most Americans have experienced.
In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious
around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and
political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and
early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.
The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social
maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around;
declining living standards among the general population; and a
government that can’t cover its financial positions. His
models, which track these factors in other societies across history, are
too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication. But they’ve
succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications, and have
won him comparisons to other authors of “megahistories,” such as Jared
Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat had once found Turchin’s historical modeling unpersuasive, but 2020 made him a believer: “At this point,” Douthat recently admitted on a podcast, “I feel like you have to pay a little more attention to him.”
Diamond and Harari aimed to describe the history of humanity. Turchin
looks into a distant, science-fiction future for peers. In War and Peace and War(2006), his most accessible book, he likens himself to Hari Seldon, the “maverick mathematician” of Isaac Asimov’sFoundationseries,
who can foretell the rise and fall of empires. In those 10,000 years’
worth of data, Turchin believes he has found iron laws that dictate the
fates of human societies.
The fate of our own society, he says, is not going to be pretty, at least in the near term. “It’s too late,”
he told me as we passed Mirror Lake, which UConn’s website describes as
a favorite place for students to “read, relax, or ride on the wooden
swing.” The problems are deep and structural—not the type that the
tedious process of democratic change can fix in time to forestall
mayhem. Turchin likens America to a huge ship headed directly
for an iceberg: “If you have a discussion among the crew about which way
to turn, you will not turn in time, and you hit the iceberg directly.”
The past 10 years or so have been discussion. That sickening crunch
you now hear—steel twisting, rivets popping—is the sound of the ship
hitting the iceberg.
“We are almost guaranteed” five hellish years, Turchin predicts, and likely a decade or more. The problem, he says, is that there are too many people like me. “You are ruling class,”
he said, with no more rancor than if he had informed me that I had
brown hair, or a slightly newer iPhone than his. Of the three factors
driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite
overproduction”—the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow
faster than the number of positions for their members to fill. One way
for a ruling class to grow is biologically—think of Saudi Arabia, where
princes and princesses are born faster than royal roles can be created
for them. In the United States, elites overproduce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility:
More and more people get rich, and more and more get educated. Neither
of these sounds bad on its own. Don’t we want everyone to be rich and
educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do.
In the United States, Turchin told me, you can see more and more
aspirants fighting for a single job at, say, a prestigious law firm, or
in an influential government sinecure, or (here it got personal) at a
national magazine. Perhaps seeing the holes in my T-shirt, Turchin noted
that a person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an
economic one. (He doesn’t view himself as a member of either. A
professor reaches at most a few hundred students, he told me. “You reach
hundreds of thousands.”) Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites
do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever
have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the
country. “You have a situation now where there are many more
elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will
convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said.
Donald Trump, for example, may appear elite (rich father, Wharton
degree, gilded commodes), but Trumpism is a counter-elite movement. His
government is packed with credentialed nobodies who were shut out of
previous administrations, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes
because the Groton-Yale establishment simply didn’t have any vacancies.
Trump’s former adviser and chief strategist Steve Bannon, Turchin said,
is a “paradigmatic example” of a counter-elite. He grew up
working-class, went to Harvard Business School, and got rich as an
investment banker and by owning a small stake in the syndication rights
to Seinfeld. None of that translated to political power until
he allied himself with the common people. “He was a counter-elite who
used Trump to break through, to put the white working males back in
charge,” Turchin said.
Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and
counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living
standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they
had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start
oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners’ lives grow
worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat
are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final
trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state
insolvency. At some point rising insecurity becomes expensive. The
elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and
when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people.
Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was
heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.
Turchin’s prognostications would be easier to dismiss as barstool
theorizing if the disintegration were not happening now, roughly as the
Seer of Storrs foretold 10 years ago. If the next 10 years are
as seismic as he says they will be, his insights will have to be
accounted for by historians and social scientists—assuming, of course, that there are still universities left to employ such people.
Peter Turchin, photographed in Connecticut’s Natchaug State
Forest in October. The former ecologist seeks to apply mathematical
rigor to the study of human history. (Malike Sidibe)
Turchin was born in 1957 in Obninsk, Russia, a city built by the
Soviet state as a kind of nerd heaven, where scientists could
collaborate and live together. His father, Valentin, was a physicist
and political dissident, and his mother, Tatiana, had trained as a
geologist. They moved to Moscow when he was 7 and in 1978 fled to New
York as political refugees. There they quickly found a community that
spoke the household language, which was science. Valentin taught at the
City University of New York, and Peter studied biology at NYU and
earned a zoology doctorate from Duke.
Turchin wrote a dissertation on the Mexican bean beetle, a cute,
ladybuglike pest that feasts on legumes in areas between the United
States and Guatemala. When Turchin began his research, in the early
1980s, ecology was evolving in a way that some fields already had. The
old way to study bugs was to collect them and describe them: count their
legs, measure their bellies, and pin them to pieces of particleboard
for future reference. (Go to the Natural History Museum in London, and
in the old storerooms you can still see the shelves of bell jars and
cases of specimens.) In the ’70s, the Australian physicist Robert May
had turned his attention to ecology and helped transform it into a
mathematical science whose tools included supercomputers along with
butterfly nets and bottle traps. Yet in the early days of his career,
Turchin told me, “the majority of ecologists were still quite
math-phobic.”
Turchin did, in fact, do fieldwork, but he contributed to ecology
primarily by collecting and using data to model the dynamics of
populations—for example, determining why a pine-beetle population might
take over a forest, or why that same population might decline. (He also
worked on moths, voles, and lemmings.)
In the late ’90s, disaster struck: Turchin realized that he knew
everything he ever wanted to know about beetles. He compares himself to
Thomasina Coverly, the girl genius in the Tom Stoppard play Arcadia,
who obsessed about the life cycles of grouse and other creatures around
her Derbyshire country house. Stoppard’s character had the disadvantage
of living a century and a half before the development of chaos theory.
“She gave up because it was just too complicated,” Turchin said. “I gave
up because I solved the problem.”
Turchin published one final monograph, Complex Population Dynamics: A Theoretical/Empirical Synthesis (2003),
then broke the news to his UConn colleagues that he would be saying a
permanent sayonara to the field, although he would continue to draw a
salary as a tenured professor in their department. (He no longer gets
raises, but he told me he was already “at a comfortable level, and, you
know, you don’t need so much money.”) “Usually a midlife crisis means
you divorce your old wife and marry a graduate student,” Turchin said.
“I divorced an old science and married a new one.”
Turchin’s prognostications would be easier to dismiss as
barstool theorizing if they weren’t playing out now, roughly as he
foretold 10 years ago.
One of his last papers appeared in the journal Oikos. “Does
population ecology have general laws?” Turchin asked. Most ecologists
said no: Populations have their own dynamics, and each situation is
different. Pine beetles reproduce, run amok, and ravage a forest for
pine-beetle reasons, but that does not mean mosquito or tick populations
will rise and fall according to the same rhythms. Turchin suggested
that “there are several very general law-like propositions” that could
be applied to ecology. After its long adolescence of collecting and
cataloging, ecology had enough data to describe these universal laws—and
to stop pretending that every species had its own idiosyncrasies.
“Ecologists know these laws and should call them laws,” he said. Turchin
proposed, for example, that populations of organisms grow or decline
exponentially, not linearly. This is why if you buy two guinea pigs, you
will soon have not just a few more guinea pigs but a home—and then a
neighborhood—full of the damn things (as long as you keep feeding them).
This law is simple enough to be understood by a high-school math
student, and it describes the fortunes of everything from ticks to
starlings to camels. The laws Turchin applied to ecology—and his
insistence on calling them laws—generated respectful controversy at
the time. Now they are cited in textbooks.
Having left ecology, Turchin began similar research that attempted to
formulate general laws for a different animal species: human beings.
He’d long had a hobbyist’s interest in history. But he also had a
predator’s instinct to survey the savanna of human knowledge and pounce
on the weakest prey. “All sciences go through this transition to
mathematization,” Turchin told me. “When I had my midlife
crisis, I was looking for a subject where I could help with this
transition to a mathematized science. There was only one left, and that
was history.”
Historians read books, letters, and other texts. Occasionally, if
they are archaeologically inclined, they dig up potsherds and coins. But
to Turchin, relying solely on these methods was the equivalent of
studying bugs by pinning them to particleboard and counting their
antennae. If the historians weren’t going to usher in a mathematical
revolution themselves, he would storm their departments and do it for
them.
“There is a longstanding debate among scientists and philosophers as to whether history has general laws,” he and a co-author wrote in Secular Cycles (2009).
“A basic premise of our study is that historical societies can be
studied with the same methods physicists and biologists used to study
natural systems.” Turchin founded a journal, Cliodynamics, dedicated to “the search for general principles explaining the functioning and dynamics of historical societies.” (The term is his coinage; Clio is the muse of history.) He had already announced the discipline’s arrival in an article in Nature,
where he likened historians reluctant to build general principles to
his colleagues in biology “who care most for the private life of
warblers.” “Let history continue to focus on the particular,” he wrote.
Cliodynamics would be a new science. While historians dusted bell jars
in the basement of the university, Turchin and his followers would be
upstairs, answering the big questions.
To seed the journal’s research, Turchin masterminded a digital
archive of historical and archaeological data. The coding of its records
requires finesse, he told me, because (for example) the method of
determining the size of the elite-aspirant class of medieval France
might differ from the measure of the same class in the present-day
United States. (For medieval France, a proxy is the membership in its
noble class, which became glutted with second and third sons who had no
castles or manors to rule over. One American proxy, Turchin says, is the
number of lawyers.) But once the data are entered, after vetting by
Turchin and specialists in the historical period under review, they
offer quick and powerful suggestions about historical phenomena.
Historians of religion have long pondered the relationship
between the rise of complex civilization and the belief in
gods—especially “moralizing gods,” the kind who scold you for sinning.
Last year, Turchin and a dozen co-authors mined the database (“records
from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions
around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures
of supernatural enforcement of morality”) to answer the question
conclusively. They found that complex societies are more likely
to have moralizing gods, but the gods tend to start their scolding
after the societies get complex, not before. As the database expands, it
will attempt to remove more questions from the realm of humanistic
speculation and sock them away in a drawer marked answered.
One of Turchin’s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies
arise through war. The effect of war is to reward communities that
organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones
that are simple and small-scale. “No one wants to accept that we
live in the societies we do”—rich, complex ones with universities and
museums and philosophy and art—“because of an ugly thing like war,” he
said. But the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex
societies because they kill off simpler ones. The notion that
democracy finds its strength in its essential goodness and moral
improvement over its rival systems is likewise fanciful. Instead,
democratic societies flourish because they have a memory of being nearly
obliterated by an external enemy. They avoided extinction only through
collective action, and the memory of that collective action makes
democratic politics easier to conduct in the present, Turchin said.
“There is a very close correlation between adopting democratic
institutions and having to fight a war for survival.”
Also unwelcome: the conclusion that civil unrest might soon be upon us, and might reach the point of shattering the country.
In 2012, Turchin published an analysis of political violence in the
United States, again starting with a database. He classified 1,590
incidents—riots, lynchings, any political event that killed at least one
person—from 1780 to 2010. Some periods were placid and others bloody,
with peaks of brutality in 1870, 1920, and 1970, a 50-year cycle.
Turchin excludes the ultimate violent incident, the Civil War, as a “sui
generis event.” The exclusion may seem suspicious, but to a
statistician, “trimming outliers” is standard practice. Historians and
journalists, by contrast, tend to focus on outliers—because they are interesting—and sometimes miss grander trends.
Certain aspects of this cyclical view require relearning portions of
American history, with special attention paid to the numbers of elites.
The industrialization of the North, starting in the mid-19th century,
Turchin says, made huge numbers of people rich. The elite herd was
culled during the Civil War, which killed off or impoverished the
southern slaveholding class, and during Reconstruction, when America
experienced a wave of assassinations of Republican politicians. (The
most famous of these was the assassination of James A. Garfield, the
20th president of the United States, by a lawyer who had demanded but
not received a political appointment.) It wasn’t until the Progressive
reforms of the 1920s, and later the New Deal, that elite overproduction
actually slowed, at least for a time.
This oscillation between violence and peace, with elite
overproduction as the first horseman of the recurring American
apocalypse, inspired Turchin’s 2020 prediction. In 2010, when Nature surveyed
scientists about their predictions for the coming decade, most took the
survey as an invitation to self-promote and rhapsodize, dreamily, about
coming advances in their fields. Turchin retorted with his prophecy of
doom and said that nothing short of fundamental change would stop
another violent turn.
Turchin’s prescriptions are, as a whole, vague and unclassifiable.
Some sound like ideas that might have come from Senator Elizabeth
Warren—tax the elites until there are fewer of them—while others, such
as a call to reduce immigration to keep wages high for American workers,
resemble Trumpian protectionism. Other policies are simply heretical.
He opposes credential-oriented higher education, for example, which he
says is a way of mass-producing elites without also mass-producing
elite jobs for them to occupy. Architects of such policies, he told me,
are “creating surplus elites, and some become counter-elites.” A smarter
approach would be to keep the elite numbers small, and the real wages
of the general population on a constant rise.
How to do that? Turchin says he doesn’t really know, and it isn’t his
job to know. “I don’t really think in terms of specific policy,” he
told me. “We need to stop the runaway process of elite
overproduction, but I don’t know what will work to do that, and nobody
else does. Do you increase taxation? Raise the minimum wage? Universal
basic income?” He conceded that each of these possibilities
would have unpredictable effects. He recalled a story he’d heard back
when he was still an ecologist: The Forest Service had once implemented a
plan to reduce the population of bark beetles with pesticide—only to
find that the pesticide killed off the beetles’ predators even more
effectively than it killed the beetles. The intervention resulted in
more beetles than before. The lesson, he said, was to practice “adaptive
management,” changing and modulating your approach as you go.
Eventually, Turchin hopes, our understanding of historical
dynamics will mature to the point that no government will make policy
without reflecting on whether it is hurtling toward a mathematically
preordained disaster. He says he could imagine an Asimovian
agency that keeps tabs on leading indicators and advises accordingly. It
would be like the Federal Reserve, but instead of monitoring inflation
and controlling monetary supply, it would be tasked with averting total
civilizational collapse.
Historians have not, as a whole, accepted Turchin’s terms of
surrender graciously. Since at least the 19th century, the discipline
has embraced the idea that history is irreducibly complex, and by now
most historians believe that the diversity of human activity will foil
any attempt to come up with general laws, especially predictive ones.
(As Jo Guldi, a historian at Southern Methodist University, put it to
me, “Some historians regard Turchin the way astronomers regard
Nostradamus.”) Instead, each historical event must be lovingly
described, and its idiosyncrasies understood to be limited in relevance
to other events. The idea that one thing causes another, and that the
causal pattern can tell you about sequences of events in another place
or century, is foreign territory.
One might even say that what defines history as a humanistic
enterprise is the belief that it is not governed by scientific laws—that
the working parts of human societies are not like billiard balls,
which, if arranged at certain angles and struck with a certain amount of
force, will invariably crack just so and roll toward a corner pocket of
war, or a side pocket of peace. Turchin counters that he has
heard claims of irreducible complexity before, and that steady
application of the scientific method has succeeded in managing that
complexity. Consider, he says, the concept of temperature—something so
obviously quantifiable now that we laugh at the idea that it’s too vague
to measure. “Back before people knew what temperature was, the best
thing you could do is to say you’re hot or cold,” Turchin told me. The
concept depended on many factors: wind, humidity, ordinary human
differences in perception. Now we have thermometers. Turchin wants to
invent a thermometer for human societies that will measure when they are
likely to boil over into war.
Eventually, Turchin hopes, no government will make policy
without reflecting on whether it is hurtling toward a mathematically
preordained disaster.
One social scientist who can speak to Turchin in his own mathematical
argot is Dingxin Zhao, a sociology professor at the University of
Chicago who is—incredibly—also a former mathematical ecologist. (He
earned a doctorate modeling carrot-weevil population dynamics before
earning a second doctorate in Chinese political sociology.) “I came from
a natural-science background,” Zhao told me, “and in a way I am
sympathetic to Turchin. If you come to social science from natural
sciences, you have a powerful way of looking at the world. But you may
also make big mistakes.”
Zhao said that human beings are just much more complicated than bugs.
“Biological species don’t strategize in a very flexible way,” he told
me. After millennia of evolutionary R&D, a woodpecker will come up
with ingenious ways to stick its beak into a tree in search of food. It
might even have social characteristics—an alpha woodpecker might
strong-wing beta woodpeckers into giving it first dibs on the tastiest
termites. But humans are much wilier social creatures, Zhao said. A
woodpecker will eat a termite, but it “will not explain that he is doing
so because it is his divine right.” Humans pull ideological power moves
like this all the time, Zhao said, and to understand “the decisions of a
Donald Trump, or a Xi Jinping,” a natural scientist has to incorporate
the myriad complexities of human strategy, emotion, and belief. “I made
that change,” Zhao told me, “and Peter Turchin has not.”
Turchin is nonetheless filling a historiographical niche left empty
by academic historians with allergies not just to science but to a
wide-angle view of the past. He places himself in a Russian tradition
prone to thinking sweeping, Tolstoyan thoughts about the path of
history. By comparison, American historians mostly look like
micro-historians. Few would dare to write a history of the United
States, let alone one of human civilization. Turchin’s approach is also
Russian, or post-Soviet, in its rejection of the Marxist theory of
historical progress that had been the official ideology of the Soviet
state. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, so too did the requirement
that historical writing acknowledge international communism as the
condition toward which the arc of history was bending. Turchin
dropped ideology altogether, he says: Rather than bending toward
progress, the arc in his view bends all the way back on itself, in a
never-ending loop of boom and bust. This puts him at odds with American
historians, many of whom harbor an unspoken faith that liberal
democracy is the end state of all history.
Writing history in this sweeping, cyclical way is easier if you are trained outside the field.
“If you look at who is doing these megahistories, more often than not,
it’s not actual historians,” Walter Scheidel, an actual historian at
Stanford, told me. (Scheidel, whose books span millennia, takes
Turchin’s work seriously and has even co-written a paper with him.)
Instead they come from scientific fields where these taboos do not
dominate. The genre’s most famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997),
beheld 13,000 years of human history in a single volume. Its author,
Jared Diamond, spent the first half of his career as one of the world’s
foremost experts on the physiology of the gallbladder. Steven Pinker, a
cognitive psychologist who studies how children acquire parts of
speech, has written a megahistory about the decline of violence across
thousands of years, and about human flourishing since the Enlightenment.
Most historians I asked about these men—and for some reason megahistory is nearly always a male pursuit—used terms like laughingstock and patently tendentious to describe them.
Pinker retorts that historians are resentful of the attention
“disciplinary carpetbaggers” like himself have received for applying
scientific methods to the humanities and coming up with conclusions that
had eluded the old methods. He is skeptical of Turchin’s claims about
historical cycles, but he believes in data-driven historical inquiry. “Given
the noisiness of human behavior and the prevalence of cognitive biases,
it’s easy to delude oneself about a historical period or trend by
picking whichever event suits one’s narrative,” he says.
The only answer is to use large data sets. Pinker thanks traditional
historians for their work collating these data sets; he told me in an
email that they “deserve extraordinary admiration for their original
research (‘brushing the mouse shit off moldy court records in the
basement of town halls,’ as one historian put it to me).” He calls not
for surrender but for a truce. “There’s no reason that
traditional history and data science can’t merge into a cooperative
enterprise,” Pinker wrote. “Knowing stuff is hard; we need to use every
available tool.”
Guldi, the Southern Methodist University professor, is one scholar
who has embraced tools previously scorned by historians. She is a
pioneer of data-driven history that considers timescales beyond a human
lifetime. Her primary technique is the mining of texts—for example,
sifting through the millions and millions of words captured in
parliamentary debate in order to understand the history of land use in
the final century of the British empire. Guldi may seem a potential
recruit to cliodynamics, but her approach to data sets is grounded in
the traditional methods of the humanities. She counts the frequency of
words, rather than trying to find ways to compare big, fuzzy categories
among civilizations. Turchin’s conclusions are only as good as his
databases, she told me, and any database that tries to code something as
complex as who constitutes a society’s elites—then tries to make
like-to-like comparisons across millennia and oceans—will meet with
skepticism from traditional historians, who deny that the subject to
which they have devoted their lives can be expressed in Excel format.
Turchin’s data are also limited to big-picture characteristics observed
over 10,000 years, or about 200 lifetimes. By scientific standards, a
sample size of 200 is small, even if it is all humanity has.
Yet 200 lifetimes is at least more ambitious than the average
historical purview of only one. And the reward for that ambition—in
addition to the bragging rights for having potentially explained
everything that has ever happened to human beings—includes something
every writer wants: an audience. Thinking small rarely gets you quoted
in The New York Times. Turchin has not yet attracted
the mass audiences of a Diamond, Pinker, or Harari. But he has lured
connoisseurs of political catastrophe, journalists and pundits looking
for big answers to pressing questions, and true believers in the power
of science to conquer uncertainty and improve the world. He has
certainly outsold most beetle experts.
If he is right, it is hard to see how history will avoid assimilating
his insights—if it can avoid being abolished by them. Privately, some
historians have told me they consider the tools he uses powerful, if a
little crude. Cliodynamics is now on a long list of methods that
arrived on the scene promising to revolutionize history. Many were fads,
but some survived that stage to take their rightful place in an
expanding historiographical tool kit. Turchin’s methods have already shown their power.
Cliodynamics offers scientific hypotheses, and human history will give
us more and more opportunities to check its predictions—revealing
whether Peter Turchin is a Hari Seldon or a mere Nostradamus. For my own sake, there are few thinkers whom I am more eager to see proved wrong.
Sometimes data is simply not enough to grasp what is happening. So here is a direct witness on the Covid Front-line...
Front Line at a Nursing Home– an in Person Report
Guest Post by Javelin
I work jointly at a hospital and it’s adjoining Skilled Nursing
Facility. The SNF has long term patients occupying 2/3rds of the
building and a short term wing which acts as transitional care for
hip/knee replacements, falls, cardiac rehab and various NeuroMuscular
pathologies ( strokes, Parkinson’s, MS, brain injuries etc.) The
building has 132 beds with an average census of 110-120 residents at any
given time.
The population of long term residents runs the gamut of post-stroke
pts, COPD, CHF, dementia etc to general issues with aging. The average
age at this bldg is 80+ with the oldest resident at 101 years of age.
The rehab/transitional wing of 30 pts or less are generally younger with
many of them ending up their post-rehab as long term residents pending
outcomes, family support and functional status/independence.
Our SNF in March issued protocols different than the death-dealer
Cuomo. Although we were not allowed to block Covid patients from
entering the building, we transformed the wings so that the locked wing
for dementia patients with elopement risks was changed into an isolation
Covid unit and the dementia patients were moved into the semi-lockdown
East wing with “slightly confused” and higher skilled patients reside.
From March until the final week of October we had ZERO covid positive
patients and just 3 staff ( none caregivers.)
Even without Covid positives our administrator issued an in-room
lockdown for all patients. The building is locked down from vendors,
visitors and only employees and emergency teams allowed. So for 6+
months these elderly patient’s days consist of 24 hours in rooms 10×20
with 2 patients per room. They transfer from bed in the morning to sit
at a table in-room while in their wheelchairs, they watch TV, eat, read,
puzzle books, color and then back to bed for 12-16 hours. This has been
their “life.”
Our SNF averages 15-20 fatalities per year. This includes palliative
care, hospice, care and comfort patients -the general population of long
term are in the building to live until they pass. This year from March
until October there were 41 deaths of patients, NONE from Covid. It is a
vision of human sadness. Alone, bored, increase in bed sores,
functional decline, no visitors, no music groups, no families, no weekly
services/sermons. Sunday, Tuesday, Friday.. it doesn’t matter or change
the routine of isolated drudgery.
The final week of October we had a Patient Zero. Initially sent to
the hospital for a suspected UTI secondary to “altered mental status”
the patient returned to the SNF two days later and tested positive from
her weekly testing. To cut to the chase, she was moved to the Covid wing
but her roomate and another patient were positive the following week (
as were two GNA’s.) The 3 positives became 9 the following week. The
following week the 9 became 32 and now there are 39. Wings had to be
changed because of the Dementia Unit only having 12 beds–now there are 2
Covid wings.
This past week we had our first “covid death.” A 90+ year old patient
who was already on hospice passed while also positive with Covid. Now
we have had 6 more in the past 3 days with 10 additional patients in
very severe condition. Remember, these are VERY old people with 40% of
the entire population on continuous O2 through nasal cannula or
concentrators. There can be no doubt that Covid ( like flu or a viral
pneumonia outbreak) is a very serious multiplier to the co-morbidities
that ALL of these people suffer from.
It is worth noting that 12 staff have had positive tests to date and
NONE of them were sick beyond headache complaints or reduced taste– most
have already returned to work and the post-Covid staff are perfect to
treat in the Covid units.
My final observation is this. Covid is a multiplier, especially for
serious medical issues. Covid x COPD/CHF = a fight for life. Covid x
ZERO co-morbidities = 0 issues. Yes it is real and appears to be quite
contagious. However there is no full-proof way to prevent contact;
masks, distancing are a joke unless someone is sneezing or coughing
covid in your face. We touch door handles, cans and produce, countertops
in Walmart, target and grocery stores. Hands are still the #1 spreader
of viral agents. If you are young and healthy it appears to be almost
better to contract the virus and allow your body’s leukocytes/T cells to
build a template to recognize and fight any future strains.
I work in a Covid positive environment. I gown, glove, goggle and
mask all day. I wash my hands and change clothes after work before I go
anywhere. I have ZERO fear of catching Covid and if I test positive I
will enjoy my two weeks of time off to catch up on leaf raking, felling
and chopping dead trees and finish turning the vegetable garden– but I
guarantee that I won’t be bedridden or incapacitated. I am over 50, no
health issue history ( never even had the common cold) I sleep from 11-6
every night and I eat fruit and veggies and take Vitamin C and B
complex suppliments.
However as healthy as I am and with virtually no risk of succumbing
to Covid, my government has restricted my life and may threaten to
restrict my movement, travel, my job in healthcare and even my ability
to buy/sell unless I am injected with their RNA altering vaccine when it
arrives. I won’t be getting the vaccine so I am already preparing for
some major life changes–We have to draw the line somewhere.
The head of the World Health Organization has suggested that
coronavirus restrictions will continue even after a vaccine has been
made widely available.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made the comments on Twitter after news
broke of several new vaccines said to be effective in fighting COVID-19
coming closer to fruition.
“Since the beginning of the #COVID19 pandemic, we knew that a vaccine
would be essential for bringing the pandemic under control. But it’s important to emphasise that a vaccine will complement the other tools we have, not replace them,” said Ghebreyesus.
He
went on to add that quarantines, surveillance, contact tracing and
other measures would all be continued even after vaccine uptake becomes
widespread.
As
we have exhaustively highlighted, numerous other prominent individuals
have asserted that rolling lockdowns, mask wearing, social distancing
and other restrictions are here to stay after the pandemic is over.
In his book Covid-19: The Great Reset, World Economic Forum globalist Klaus Schwab asserts that the world will “never” return to normal, despite him admitting that coronavirus “doesn’t pose a new existential threat.”
A senior U.S. Army official also said that mask wearing and social distancing will become permanent, while CNN’s international security editor Nick Paton Walsh asserted that
the mandatory wearing of masks will become “permanent,” “just part of
life,” and that the public would need to “come to terms with it.”
Commenting on the issue, Joseph Massey said Ghebreyesus’ statement
re-affirmed the fact that COVID lockdowns are more about “social
engineering” than ending a pandemic.
“I’m not a conspiracy theorist, nor am I a COVID denier, but people
like this make it difficult not to believe that lockdowns are more about
social engineering than they are about stopping the virus,” he tweeted.
“A vaccine is not a “complement” to being isolated and muzzled like an animal.”
