2022: More Stupidity, More Arrogance, More Evil, More Rebellion

 I wish a Happy New Year to the people and friends who read my blog. More than entertain, I try to provide food for thoughts and look for the truth in a world trying hard to strip the meaning from the word.  I also welcome feedbacks and ideas as it is by listening and debating that we enrich each others.

Chaos will reign as the future upends the past. Chaos doesn’t lend itself to prediction.

Post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Stupidity, arrogance, and evil ultimately destroy themselves, but their rampage was unabated in 2021. A group of stupid, arrogant, and evil people are using a virus and its variants to shepherd the world into a scheme of totalitarian global governance. This was conspiracy theory when the virus first surfaced; now it’s nakedly obvious reality. The one redeeming feature of the year was that more people saw the light.

The self-impressed and self-anointed rule not by claim of divine right, but by claim of superior intelligence and virtue. Real intelligence and virtue hope to find the same in other people; our commissars prey on human weakness. Fear and panic are their allies, truth and rationality their enemies.

As word leaks out of Covid outbreaks on 100 percent vaccinated college campuses, sports teams, naval vessels, and cruise ships, and as fully vaccinated athletes drop incapacitated or dead in front of stadiums full of people and millions of TV viewers, the truth that can’t be hidden is grasped by anyone with a shred of intellectual integrity. The vaccines have failed their ostensible purpose, to protect against the virus and its variants. They have, however, admirably fulfilled their real purpose: a totalitarian grab for power and control.

The coming year will see attempts to institute the rest of the agenda: mandatory vaccination, implanted vaccine passport microchips, fully digitized money, a social credit system, and segregation or elimination for those who refuse to play along. The coming year will also see the inexorable progress of the Doom Loop described in “The Means Are The End.”

The vaccines and their perpetual boosters are an intentional attack on the human immune system. They will continue to produce their adverse effects, including impaired natural immune system functionality, which increases susceptibility not just to Covid and variants, but to many other maladies as well. Early indications are that the omicron variant is more likely to strike the vaccinated than the unvaccinated.

Because it’s essentially the common cold, Omicron has been hailed as the usual downward viral mutation that either burns itself out or becomes an endemic but low-level threat. Covid, therefore, is over. The optimism is misplaced and betrays either ignorance or deliberate obfuscation of the true aims of the Covid commissars. Covid has never been about health and safety, it’s been about power and using vaccines to insidiously and inexorably degrade the true frontline health defense, the immune system. The commissars would insist on vaccinations and boosters even if Covid developed a beneficial variant (see “The Oopsilon Variant,” SLL, 9/1/21).

The gap between excess deaths and baselines will continue to widen in highly vaccinated areas. That makes blaming the steadily shrinking pool of unvaccinated scapegoats problematic, so the deaths will be blamed on breakthrough Covid even though its downward mutations make it less lethal.

Any actual science that might point the finger at vaccines, particularly autopsies, will continue to be discouraged or banned. The surprisingly few autopsies that have been conducted indicate that the spike proteins the vaccines prompt the body to produce end up in virtually every human tissue, organ, and system and cause persistent, long-term damage (see here and here). Real science will be ignored, as it has from the beginning, and the commissars will continue to chant: “Get vaccinated and booster, booster, booster forever.”

The Covid and vaccine charade is an excellent distraction from the mess they’ve made of the world, particularly the U.S. government and its satraps. In government nothing succeeds like failure and they continue to double-, triple-, and quadruple-down on failure.

No country has ever fiat-debted its way to prosperity, and many have done so to their ruin, but the last two years have seen an unprecedented explosion of such debt. While it initially produces an increase in demand from those who receive it, that sugar high soon runs into an iron law of reality: pieces of paper and computer entries don’t conjure real goods and services.

With more demand and the same or less supply, fiat-debt inflation conjures only rising prices as both producers and consumers catch on to the currency debasement. Count on prices ratcheting higher as those responsible for it continue to blame the phenomenon on everything but their currency debasement. It will continue as government debt “monetization”—exchanging government fiat debt for central bank fiat debt—remains essential to financing governments.

Creditors will express their dissatisfaction with microscopic yields in a world of non-transitory, persistently rising prices by selling the debt instruments that are handing them negative real yields (nominal yields minus the inflation rate). Interest rates being the inverse of bond prices, falling bond prices will cause interest rates to rise, which would put pressure on all debt-supported financial and real asset prices as well.

Creditors will express their dissatisfaction with microscopic yields in a world of non-transitory, persistently rising prices by selling the debt instruments that are handing them negative real yields (nominal yields minus the inflation rate). Interest rates being the inverse of bond prices, falling bond prices will cause interest rates to rise, which would put pressure on all debt-supported financial and real asset prices as well.

Rising interest rates will make it increasingly difficult for governments to fund themselves. Central banks will continue to fill the every-increasing gap in demand for government fiat debt, a financial Doom Loop of fiat-debt inflation met with more fiat-debt inflation that eventually becomes hyperinflation. It will be hard to blame this Doom Loop on the unvaccinated, although attempts will be made, but there is another set of all-purpose scapegoats available: Russia and China, the leaders of an Eurasian-centered multipolar axis.

They have seen this train wreck coming and have been “dedollarizing,” a polite term for getting out of crappy fiat debt before it gets even crappier. They’ve also been stockpiling “Real Money” (gold and silver). On current trend the Russians and Chinese will have most of the world’s real money when the American block’s currencies collapse. They will of course be blamed for that collapse, which bears a startling resemblance to blaming the unvaccinated for refusing dangerous vaccines that don’t protect the vaccinated. Like probity at a frat party, logic is always in short supply among collapsing governments.

If it weren’t, our collapsing government wouldn’t be trying so hard to antagonize the governments of Russia, China, Iran, and the rest of the Eurasian block. Vladimir Putin has issued an ultimatum. Perhaps he’s bluffing and the high-tech weapons he and his Chinese buddies have been bragging about are fictional. Perhaps they’re not, but don’t expect American policymakers to even acknowledge the possibility.

Good poker players always reckon the cost of being wrong before they call a bluff, but nobody in the Biden administration seems to have any recognition of the downsides. They include losing a world war against a powerful alliance. The American political establishment floats on an arrogant bubble of belief in a military that just lost Afghanistan, wastes much of its appropriations on boondoggles like the F-35, and whose leadership is more interested in woke doctrine and Covid orthodoxy than defending the country. Even victory would be Pyrrhic: a few more Americans than Russians and Chinese left standing after global nuclear annihilation.

The bright spot of 2021 can be summed up in three words: Let’s Go Brandon! Just as the Trump election had much wider significance—as much a vote against those who presume to rule as a vote for Trump—Let’s Go Brandon! encompasses the entire presumptuous class, not just the increasingly despised Biden. Their dirty secret is that they’ve been at war with the 99 percent since FDR. Their greatest fear is that the 99 percent catch on, which they increasingly are.

Once enlightened, they don’t go back to sleep. They don’t watch CNN or take out subscriptions to the Washington Post or New York Times. Instead, they turn to the alternative media, a hydra that continues to defy the many efforts to suppress or eradicate it. They make Robert F. Kennedy’s take down of Saint Fauci the number one Amazon bestseller and Let’s Go Brandon! a viral cry of rebellion. Never underestimate the power of great memes, which can be more powerful than blockbuster disclosures and incisive commentary.

The Internet is home to much of the world’s remaining vitality. Governments want to kill the vitality without killing the Internet, which is essential to commerce, finance, production, infrastructures, governance, and armed forces. It can’t be done. China offers a test case. By the government’s own falsified statistics its economic debt-fueled “miracle” is faltering as it stifles the Internet and enacts other totalitarian measures.

Vitality’s root word is vital, and the vitality and dynamism that flow from freedom are vital for economic, social, and political progress. If the presumptuous class thinks docile automatons and a state-approved, bulletin-board Internet will produce anything but regress they’re deluded.

And evil. Their ultimate aim is to kill millions or billions, and whatever remains of the human spirit. Ultimately they are cowards, as are their praetorian military and police who they think will protect them. Their loyalty only extends to their next payday and the opportunities their positions give them to extort and terrify the citizenry.

There is abundant docility, but the human spirit is unquenchable and animates the growing rebellion. The rebels already greatly outnumber the miserable mélange of rulers, hangers-on, and the praetorian guard. Most of the docile will meet the fate evil has in store for them. The graveyards will be filled with Darwin awardees who didn’t think or act for themselves. However, the hell this evil is bent on creating for us will assuredly be its own as well.

One bothersome detail dramatically ups their fear-and-loathing quotient: most of the U.S. enlightened own firearms. Imposing totalitarianism is going to be a whole different kettle of fish than in the EU, Australia, and New Zealand, although many of their unarmed citizens are commendably taking to the streets. Whatever bravado cowards demonstrate disappears when the other side starts firing back.

Beyond the continuing stupidity, arrogance, and evil of the presumptuous class and the intensifying resistance to it, predictions about 2022 are a fool’s errand. The centrifugal forces of decentralization and autonomy are overwhelming the dying forces of centralization, command, and control. The process is bloody and chaotic. Chaos doesn’t lend itself to prediction.

The obvious advice is to do the best you can to stay prepared financially, logistically, and emotionally. The only other nugget is to think and act for yourself. There’s no guarantee that will keep you out of the graveyard, but failure to do so guarantees a spot.

Happy New Year to The Burning Platform!

The Covid narrative is insane and illogical…and maybe that’s no accident

 I find this post quite amazing. 

Just think: What if this was true?

Guest Post by Kit Knightly

“Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.”
George Orwell, 1984

The “Covid pandemic” narrative is insane. That is long-established at this point, we don’t really need to go into how or why here. Read our back catalogue.

The rules are meaningless and arbitrary, the messaging contradictory, the very premise nonsensical.

Every day some new insanity is launched out into the world, and while many of us roll our eyes, raise our voices, or just laugh…many more accept it, believe it, allow it to continue.

Take the situation in Canada right now, where the government has enforced a vaccine mandate on healthcare workers, meaning in British Columbia alone over 3000 hospital staff were on unpaid leave by November 1st.

How have local governments responded to staff shortages?

They are asking vaccinated employees who have tested positive for Covid to work.

Whether or not you believe the test means anything, they notionally do. In the reality they try to sell us every day, testing positive means you are carrying a dangerous disease.

So they are requesting people allegedly carrying a “deadly virus” work, rather than letting perfectly healthy unvaccinated people simply have their jobs back.

This is insanity.

But could anything more perfectly illustrate the priorities of those running the game?

We already know it’s not about a virus, it’s not about protecting the health service and it’s not about saving lives. Every day the people running the “pandemic” admit as much by their actions, and even their words.

Rather, it seems to be about enforcing rules that make little to no sense, requiring conformity at the price of reason, drawing arbitrary lines in the sand and demanding people respect them, making people believe “facts” that are provably untrue.

But why? Why is the story of Covid irrational and contradictory? Why are we told on the one hand to be afraid, and on the other that there is nothing to be afraid of?

Why is the “pandemic” so completely insane?

You could argue that it’s simple happenstance. The by-product of a multi-focused evolving narrative, a story being told by a thousand authors all at once, each concerned with covering their own little patch of agenda. A car with multiple drivers fighting over a single steering wheel.

There’s probably some truth to that.

But it’s also true that control, true control, can only be achieved with a lie.

In clinical psychology one of the diagnostic signs of the psychopath is that they tell elaborate lies, compulsively. Many times they will tell a lie even if the truth would be more beneficial.

Nobody knows why they do this, but I have a theory, and it applies to the swarming groups of little rat minds running the sewers of power as much as it does any individual monstrosity.

If you want to control people, you need to lie to them, that’s the only way to guarantee you have power.

If you are standing in the road, and I yell “look out, there’s a car a coming”, and you move just as a car whips past, I will never know if you moved because I said so, or because there actually was a car.

If my interest is in making sure you don’t get hurt, this would not matter to me either way.

But, what if my only true aim is the gratification of watching you do what I say, simply because I said it?

…well, then I need to scream out a warning of a car that does not exist, and watch you dodge an imaginary threat. Or, indeed, tell you there is no car, and watch you get run over.

Only by doing this can I see my words mean more to you than perceivable reality, and only then do I know I’m truly in control.

You can never control people with the truth, because the truth has an existence outside yourself that cannot be altered or directed. It may be the truth itself that controls people, not you.

You can never force people to obey rules that make sense, because they may be obeying reason, not your force.

True power lies in making people afraid of something that does not exist, and making them abandon reason in the name of protecting themselves from the invented threat.

To guarantee you have control, you must make people see things that are not there, make people live in a reality you build around them, and force people to follow arbitrary, contradictory rules that change day by day.

To truly test their loyalty, their hypnosis, you could even tell them there’s nothing to be afraid of anymore, but they need to follow the rules anyway.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the story isn’t supposed to be believable. Maybe the rules aren’t meant to make sense, they are meant to be obeyed.

Maybe the more contradictory & illogical the regulations become, the more your compliance is valued.

Maybe if you can force a person to abandon their judgment in favour of your own, you have total control over their reality.

We started with an Orwell quote, so let’s end with one too:

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

Isn’t that what we’re seeing now? What we’ve been seeing since the beginning?

People being mind broken into being afraid of something they told isn’t frightening, following rules they are told are not necessary, taking “medicine” they are told does not work.

Maybe forcing people to believe your lies, even as you admit you are lying, is the purest expression of power.

How the Endless Boosters Will Destroy Immune Function

 This essay from Mercola is technical but a rather convincing fit with the numbers we see currently. The most important question with the mRNA vaccines is their effects on the immune system. At this stage, there are a lot of speculation and alarming reports but the fact is that nobody truly knows for the simple reason that long term tests have not been conducted yet. Should we nevertheless have deployed the vaccines on such a large scale? Were the risks worth the costs? We certainly would not have done it until very recently. And I find it frightening that pharmaceutical companies are feeling so powerful in their control of the narrative that they took these risks... 

Via Mercola

Story at-a-glance

• The COVID shots reprogram your immune system to respond in a dysfunctional manner. Aside from increasing vulnerability to infections, this can also result in autoimmune diseases and cancer
• A paper published in early May 2021 reported the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID jab “reprograms both adaptive and innate immune responses,” causing immune depletion
• Antigens in vaccines have been shown to induce defects in the immune system that can raise the risk of autoimmune diseases
• Leaky or nonsterilizing vaccines can also trigger the evolution of more hazardous viruses, and the COVID jabs are among the leakiest “vaccines” ever created
• According to health authorities, the vaccine-evading Omicron variant necessitates a third COVID injection, but this recommendation will only perpetuate mutation

A number of medical experts, scientists and published studies now warn that the COVID shots reprogram your immune system to respond in a dysfunctional manner. Aside from increasing vulnerability to infections, this can also result in autoimmune diseases and cancer.

Pfizer Shot Reprograms Both Arms of Your Immune System

A paper¹ posted May 6, 2021, on the preprint server medRxiv reported that the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID jab “reprograms both adaptive and innate immune responses,” causing immune depletion.

While they confirmed the jab “induced effective humoral and cellular immunity against several SARS-CoV-2 variants,” the shot “also modulated the production of inflammatory cytokines by innate immune cells upon stimulation with both specific (SARS-CoV-2) and nonspecific (viral, fungal and bacterial) stimuli.”

In other words, we’re looking at a horrible tradeoff. You may get some protection against SARS-CoV-2 and its variants, but you’re weakening your overall immune function, which opens the door wide to all sorts of other health problems, from bacterial, fungal and viral infections to cancer and autoimmunity.

After the injection, innate immune cells had a markedly decreased response to toll-like receptors 4, 7 and 8 (TLR4, TLR7, TLR8) ligands, while cytokine responses induced by fungi were stronger. According to the authors, defects in TLR7 have previously been linked to an increased susceptibility to COVID-19 in young males.

People who were “fully vaccinated,” having received two doses of the Pfizer shot, also produced significantly less interferon upon stimulation, and this can hamper the initial innate immune response against the virus.

Repeated Vaccinations and the Risk of Autoimmunity

Pathogenic infections and cancer are but two potential outcomes of this kind of reprogramming. Previous research, for example, has linked defects in the immune system to a higher risk of autoimmune diseases. What’s more, it’s been shown that antigens in vaccines, specifically, can induce this kind of immune system dysfunction.² As reported in the paper in question:³

“Repeated immunization with antigen causes systemic autoimmunity in mice otherwise not prone to spontaneous autoimmune diseases. Overstimulation of CD4+ T cells led to the development of autoantibody-inducing CD4+ T (aiCD4+ T) cell which had undergone T cell receptor (TCR) revision and was capable of inducing autoantibodies.

The aiCD4+ T cell was induced by de novo TCR revision but not by cross-reaction, and subsequently overstimulated CD8+ T cells, driving them to become antigen-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL).

These CTLs could be further matured by antigen cross-presentation, after which they caused autoimmune tissue injury akin to systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Systemic autoimmunity appears to be the inevitable consequence of over-stimulating the host’s immune ‘system’ by repeated immunization with antigen, to the levels that surpass system’s self-organized criticality.”

Fast-forward to mid-May 2021, when a study⁴ in the Journal of Clinical Investigations reported that “SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines induce broad CD4+ T cell responses that recognize SARS-CoV-2 variants and HCoV-NL63.” HCoV-NL63 is a human coronavirus associated with the common cold.

“Interestingly, we observed a 3-fold increase in the CD4+ T cell responses to HCoV-NL63 spike peptides after vaccination,” the authors stated, adding, “Our results suggest that T cell responses elicited or enhanced by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines may be able to control SARS-CoV-2 variants and lead to cross-protection against some endemic coronaviruses.”

What they did not address was that excessive CD4a+ T cell responses could also result in the development of autoantibodies and autoimmune disease.

COVID Shots May Also Cause More Hazardous Variants

We’ve long known that leaky or nonsterilizing vaccines can trigger the evolution of more hazardous viruses.^5,6,7,8 So far, SARS-CoV-2 variants have mutated into less dangerous versions, which is fortunate, but the risk of the COVID shots creating a “monster” still remains.

In a February 9, 2021, article,⁹ NPR highlighted this risk, stating that “vaccines could drive the evolution of more COVID-19 mutants.” According to NPR science correspondent Richard Harris, “the virus is always mutating. And if one happens to produce a mutation that makes it less vulnerable to the vaccine, that virus could simply multiply in a vaccinated individual.”

The Omicron variant appears to have significant resistance against antibodies produced by the original COVID shots, which is why Omicron infection is being primarily reported in those who have received the injections.

In 2018, Quanta Magazine detailed how vaccines drive the evolution of pathogens.¹⁰ I’ve referenced that article on previous occasions, as have many others. In response, the editor of Quanta Magazine added a “disclaimer” dated December 6, 2021, to the article, stating:

“This article from 2018 discusses how leaky vaccines — vaccines that do not reduce viral replication or transmission to others — can drive the pathogens they target to evolve and become more virulent. These concerns do not apply to COVID-19 vaccines, because COVID-19 vaccines significantly reduce coronavirus replication and transmission, reducing the chance that mutations occur and variants arise …”

That statement is clearly false, as studies have repeatedly shown the COVID shots are in fact leaky. They do not “significantly reduce” viral replication or transmission, as the editor claims. Quite the opposite.

People who have received one or more COVID shots have been found to harbor higher viral loads than the unvaccinated, and Israel (which appears to have the best tracking and monitoring) reports that the worst COVID cases are in those who are fully vaxxed.

December 6, 2021, Newsweek¹¹ reported a COVID outbreak among “fully vaccinated” hospital staff in Spain. After a Christmas dinner with more than 170 fully vaxxed health care workers in attendance, nearly 70 of them tested positive for COVID. Some reported mild symptoms. Daniel Horowitz pointed out the editor’s false note in a December 9, 2021, Blaze post:¹²

“Leaky vaccines are worse than no vaccine at all. That is the unmistakable conclusion one would derive from a May 2018 article in Quanta magazine, a top scientific publication, about the unsuccessful attempts to create vaccines for HIV, malaria, and anthrax that aren’t leaky and don’t run the risk of making the pathogens more dangerous.

Yet now that we are seeing such a microbiological Frankenstein play out in real life and people like Dr. Robert Malone have been citing this article to raise red flags about the leaky COVID shots, Quanta magazine took the unprecedented step of slapping an editor’s note on an article three and a half years later to get people to stop applying it to the leakiest vaccine of all time.”

COVID Shots Stop Working Within a Few Months

A study in the New England Journal of Medicine, published December 9, 2021, also confirms that whatever protection you get from the Pfizer COVID shot is short in duration. As explained by the authors:¹³

“In December 2020, Israel began a mass vaccination campaign against coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) by administering the BNT162b2 vaccine, which led to a sharp curtailing of the outbreak.

After a period with almost no cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, a resurgent Covid-19 outbreak began in mid-June 2021. Possible reasons for the resurgence were reduced vaccine effectiveness against the delta (B.1.617.2) variant and waning immunity.

We used data on confirmed infection and severe disease collected from an Israeli national database for the period of July 11 to 31, 2021, for all Israeli residents who had been fully vaccinated before June 2021.

We used a Poisson regression model to compare rates of confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection and severe Covid-19 among persons vaccinated during different time periods, with stratification according to age group and with adjustment for possible confounding factors.

Among persons 60 years of age or older, the rate of infection in the July 11-31 period was higher among persons who became fully vaccinated in January 2021 (when they were first eligible) than among those fully vaccinated 2 months later, in March (rate ratio, 1.6 …)

Among persons 40 to 59 years of age, the rate ratio for infection among those fully vaccinated in February (when they were first eligible), as compared with 2 months later, in April, was 1.7 … Among persons 16 to 39 years of age, the rate ratio for infection among those fully vaccinated in March (when they were first eligible), as compared with 2 months later, in May, was 1.6 …

The rate ratio for severe disease among persons fully vaccinated in the month when they were first eligible, as compared with those fully vaccinated in March, was 1.8 … among persons 60 years of age or older and 2.2 … among those 40 to 59 years of age …

These findings indicate that immunity against the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 waned in all age groups a few months after receipt of the second dose of vaccine.”

Two Doses Aren’t Enough

Earlier this year, vaccine makers and health authorities said the shots were about 95% effective and if enough people got the shots, normalcy would be restored. We now know that was a false promise. The goal post was moved back with the emergence of Delta and then Omicron, for which we’re now told we need a third booster.

December 13, 2021, Reuters¹⁴ reported that British scientists have concluded “two-dose COVID-19 vaccine regimens do not induce enough neutralizing antibodies against the Omicron coronavirus variant,” and that “increased infections in those previously infected or vaccinated may be likely.”

‘Just Deal With’ Booster Shots, Fauci Says

When in mid-December 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci was asked if Americans should expect annual COVID boosters, he replied in the affirmative, saying that Americans will “just have to deal with” the prospect of getting boosters at regular intervals.¹⁵ So, in essence, Fauci wants us to accept that booster deficiency is the reason why the COVID-19 “pandemic” continues.

Clearly, that is not the case. The real reason COVID is still an issue is because Fauci and the medical establishment have suppressed viable early treatments. If early treatment was the norm, COVID would rapidly become a distant memory.

As predicted over a year ago, we’re now on an injection treadmill with no end in sight, and every single dose carries the risk of serious side effects, up to and including permanent disability and death. The only scientifically sound way out of this failed experiment is to stop. No more boosters.

Instead, the captured U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization to novel gene transfer technologies that don’t work like conventional vaccines in that they don’t prevent infection and spread, thus creating an evil cycle of new vaccine-resistant variants. As demonstrated by James Lyons-Weiler (in a now broken weblink), the more we vaccinate, the higher the COVID caseload.

Weiler’s graph looks very much like that in a September 30, 2021, study¹⁶ in the European Journal of Epidemiology, which found that the higher the vaccination rate in a given area, the higher the COVID case rate.Dr. Chris Martenson discusses this finding in the video below. As noted by Martenson, “the line goes the wrong way,” meaning the more heavily “vaccinated” a population is, the worse things get.

As predicted over a year ago, we’re now on an injection treadmill with no end in sight, and every single dose carries the risk of serious side effects, up to and including permanent disability and death. The only scientifically sound way out of this failed experiment is to stop. No more boosters.

Fortunately, it seems most Americans are starting to catch on, and so far, the fearmongering around Omicron has not resulted in a rush for boosters.¹⁷ According to an Axios/Ipsos poll conducted December 10 through December 13, 2021, 67% of unvaccinated respondents said Omicron makes no difference in their decision of whether to get vaccinated; 19% said it makes them more likely while 11% said it makes them less likely to get the shot.

Among respondents who already had received one or two doses, 59% said Omicron makes no difference in their decision to get a third dose; 36% said it makes them more likely and 5% said it makes them less likely to get it.

Considering the shots have been shown to deregulate your immune function, it would be wise to “just say no” to further boosters. Should you develop symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 infection, remember there are safe and effective early treatment protocols, including the I-MASK+¹⁸ and I-MATH+,¹⁹ protocols, which are available for download on the COVID Critical Care website in multiple languages. Other protocols that have great success are:

• The AAPS protocol
• Tess Laurie’s World Council for Health protocol
• America’s Frontline Doctors
• Dr. Peter McCullough’s Ambulatory Treatment of COVID-19

This is a load of information to review, especially if you are fatigued and sick with COVID or have a family member struggling. After reviewing all of these protocols, I believe the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance’s protocol is among the easiest to follow. Below is a summary of that protocol, with minor amendments.

-

Omicron Forces “Health Experts” to Rush to Turn the Narrative

 If you have been carefully monitoring the Covid narrative over the last couple of years, you cannot fail to notice how it jumped from one topics to another without ever looking back. 

 Remember the flattening of the curve? Restricting masks to hospital care workers? Both meaningful early mitigating measures. Soon forgotten for social distancing and universal mask mandates. Terrible liberticide dictates. Death counts overtaken by positive cases, including more and more asymptomatic cases?

 In all instances, the unvaccinated were always presented as the cause of new waves until in some countries like Israel, their numbers dwindled to insignificance as which stage the narrative had to change once again. It just did!

The following article by David Haggith was published on The Great Recession Blog:

The following is a truly ugly example of how desperately the grinchy health authorities are already rushing in to change the narrative about COVID and vaccines in order to keep their vaccine sales pitch going now that Omicron is rendering the vaccines worse than worthless:

Health expert: Surge in COVID-19 cases should no longer be ‘major metric’ of pandemic 

A leading health expert said the largely more mild symptoms reported by vaccinated people against the coronavirus proves the inoculation is the best way to protect yourself from being seriously sick or dying from the disease and that a surge in case numbers should no longer be the central metric by which to measaure the pandemic….

Cases across the U.S. and globally have reached record levels not seen since the start of the pandemic and the omicron variant now makes up a bulk of infections, including breakthroughs in fully vaccinated and boosted people….

The Hill

What the article FAILS to say is that the present surge in case numbers among the vaccinated are the reason you should now stop paying attention to case numbers because those numbers are now showing the very thing the vaccine salesforce does not want you to hear, which is that the vaccine will not protect you from Omicron. While we were instructed to measure the effectiveness of the vaccines based on how they brought down new cases back in the old Delta days, suddenly Omicron is blasting right through the vaccine, so “Nothing to see here, Folks. Time to ignore those meaningless case counts!”

What the article also FAILS to say is that “the largely more mild symptoms reported” are equally more mild for UNvaccinated people. Which means it is NOT the vaccine that is making the symptoms more mild. Omicron is simply a more mild form of COVID, as has already been reported all around the world. (See “The Pinch That Stole Christmas” and my earlier article that practically predicted Omicron would do exactly what we see it doing now in the US: “Could Omicron save us from COVID?“)

The lame expert even claims,

It remains important that health officials track infections among non-vaccinated individuals “because those people will end up in the hospital.

Notice, he suddenly shifts to saying “will” not “are.” He shifts to merely making a prediction that they WILL end up in hospitals, a shift he has to make because the AREN’T winding up in hospitals any more than the vaccinated.

The author’s main goal was to shift the narrative away from how well the vaccine keeps you from getting the disease because IT DOESN’T HELP KEEP YOU FROM GETTING THE OMICRON VARIANT AT ALL! But the story is actually much, MUCH worse than that for the vaccinated: I just saw a study that reported people who are fully vaccinated have 77% LESS PROTECTION from Omicron than the same sized group of people who have not been vaccinated:

“Vaccine Effectiveness,” measured here, is a measure of how much better people with the vaccines avoid the disease than those without the vaccines. A negative number, almost never seen, means they are actually more likely to catch the Omicron variant of COVID than those without the vaccine!

Wow! No wonder the mad doctor above is telling everyone to stop looking at case counts. If you go to the tweet and them click on the chart, you’ll see that each line of numbers shown represents the results starting fourteen days after the second dose of the vaccine, which is when full protection from the vaccine is established. The first line is 1-30 days after full protection is established. The next line is 31-60 days, and then 60-90 days, and the last line in the group is 90+ days after full protection, which is where the real fail begins. 

You can see it is this group that does so terrible against Omicron. Those without any vaccine are 77% less likely to get Omicron than those vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine and 40% less likely to get Omicron than those vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine, even though at 90+ days they still do better with the now fading Delta variant.

There could be a number of reasons for that. One would be that those who were not vaccinated were much more likely to get COVID earlier and now have strong natural herd immunity toward Omicron. Another would be that the vaccines actually damage your immune system, leaving you more open to getting COVID after they’ve had time to render their longterm damage. 

The doctors who ran the study and didn’t like the results, however, cautioned perhaps the surprise result was because those with vaccines are now more careless about social distancing and wearing masks than the unvaccinated because they are trusting the vaccine. How DUMB is that excuse? Let’s dissect it to see if it makes any sense at all.

First, ask yourself if that explanation fits with anything you’ve seen in the behavior of the unvaccinated versus the vaccinated if you are to believe the vaccinated crowd is less likely to wear masks or social distance than the unvaccinated who have, until this moment, been SCORNED as being the thoughtless, careless ones who don’t care about anyone’s safety, much less their own? Then, ask yourself what does that explanation actually say about the effectiveness of the vaccine anyway if the vaccinated still have to remain every bit as careful as those who haven’t been vaccinated, or they’ll do worse than those who haven’t been vaccinated? This argument is, at very best, a self-defeating argument that says, unless you practice the same safety the Unvaccinated are apparently practicing, you are more likely to get the disease than they are!

Then why vaccinate?

I think the coronavirus has really brought about peak stupidity on planet earth!

So, yes, the vaccinated are inclined to have lighter symptoms from Omicron than from Delta, but SO ARE THE UNVACCINATED. The simple truth is that EVERYONE is likely to have lighter symptoms from Omicron, but you are more likely to catch Omicron, based on the science in this study, if you HAVE been vaccinated! So, the doctors say, “Vax up and you still have to practice the same precautions and restraints that the unvaccinated do.” Or you could choose not to vax up, and actually have a 77% SMALLER chance of catching the new COVID!

Are you really going to believe the study can best be explained by now assuming the UNvaxxed are taking greater protections than the vaccinated? I don’t know what world you live on, but that sure doesn’t square with anything I’ve seen! If anything, my personal observations are that the UNvaxxed are taking fewer precautions all around than the Vaxxed; and they are STILL 77% less likely to catch Omicron! But that explanation the lie presented to explain why the vaccinated are doing 77% worse than the same sized group of unvaccinated.

And vapid publication like The Hill report these arguments as if they are facts without even questioning any of it!

The world has truly gone mad.

If you are not inclined to accept the way I interpreted the data over the doctors’ wacky assumptions, then just note that Sweden, as reported in may last article, finally hit the magical goal of zero COVID deaths per day on Christmas Eve, and they are one of the least vaccinated, least mask-wearing, least social-distancing nations on earth!

Covid-19: Judgment Day: Sweden Vindicated

 Clearly, with hindsight, doing nothing would have been better that doing "something, anything" mostly stupid things. Doing the right thing: Protect and vaccinate the most vulnerable in priority... and stop there, would have been even better. But don't expect to read that anywhere in the news, anytime soon. The Medias have been hijacked by private interest who now completely control the narrative. The solution to bad policies will be more of those policies as always. Necessarily. Until the system breaks...

Via Swiss Policy Research,

Austria, one of the most repressive European countries during the coronavirus pandemic, has recently overtaken Sweden in terms of total covid mortality, showing that almost all government interventions have been ineffective and unjustified.

 

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, Austria has been one of the most repressive European countries, implementing several lockdowns, school closures, far-reaching mask mandates and even an N95/FFP2 mask mandate, record-setting mass PCR testing and contact tracing, as well as early “vaccine passports”. Austria was also the first Western country to impose a “lockdown for the unvaccinated” and the first Western country to announce a general “vaccine mandate”.

In contrast, Sweden has widely been regarded, or indeed criticized, as the least repressive Western country during the coronavirus pandemic, imposing no lockdowns, no elementary school closures, no mask mandates, no “vaccine passport”, and very limited testing and contact tracing compared to Austria and most other Western countries.

And yet, in December 2021, Austria overtook Sweden in terms of total covid mortality (see chart above). This comes after Austria had reached, in late November, the highest seven-day covid infection rate in the world. The European average covid mortality had already overtaken Swedish covid mortality back in March 2021.

Total covid mortality: Sweden vs. Austria (JHU/CSSE)

But can Nordic Sweden and Alpine Austria really be compared in a legitimate way? Indeed, they can. To begin with, their population size is quite similar (10.4 million in Sweden vs. 9.0 million in Austria). While the median age in Sweden is slightly lower than in Austria (41.1 vs. 44.4 years; perhaps due to more immigration), the Swedish life expectancy is actually somewhat higher than in Austria (82.4 vs. 81.6 years).

Interestingly, the population weighted density, which takes urbanization into account, is somewhat higher in Sweden than in Austria (2724 vs. 2191, see map below). Obesity rates are very similar in Sweden and in Austria (20.6% vs. 20.1%). ICU capacity is significantly higher in Austria than in Sweden (5.3 vs. 1.9 beds per 1000 people).

In fact, total covid mortality in Austria and Sweden has reached the same level precisely because the two countries are so similar in terms of demographic and health factors. In both countries, the covid population fatality rate (PFR) has reached about 0.15% and is limited primarily to people over 70 years of age (the median age of covid deaths is about 83 years in both countries).

But is it fair to call December 2021 the “judgment day”? Indeed it is, because Sweden has already crossed the “pandemic finish line” and was the first Western country to see the return of influenza, which had been displaced by the coronavirus since March of 2020. Of course, the novel coronavirus will not disappear from Sweden or from anywhere else, and Sweden will certainly see future coronavirus waves, but Sweden has achieved a high population infection rate (about 60% to 75%) and has entered the endemic phase.

Thus, the fact that Austria has now overtaken Sweden in terms of total covid mortality really means that almost every single government intervention in Austria – and almost everywhere else – has been entirely ineffective from an epidemiological and medical perspective, while having caused almost unprecedented social and economic harm.

In particular, it means that lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, N95/FFP2 mask mandates, mass PCR testing and “contact tracing”, as well as “vaccine passports”, have been entirely ineffective and unjustified as interventions to “combat the pandemic”.

Of note, this is not just “post-hoc knowledge”: with the exception of school closures (which are effective against influenza), it had long been known that all of these “interventions”, including masks and contact tracing, are ineffective against respiratory virus epidemics. Concerning masks, the question is not if they are effective in theory or in some lab experiment, but if they make any difference in the real world – and the answer is no.

In fact, in terms of all-cause excess mortality, Austria had surpassed Sweden already several months ago: total pandemic excess mortality currently is 17% in Austria vs. 11% in Sweden. This is primarily because many Swedish deaths happened earlier in the pandemic (in the spring of 2020) and most covid victims were very old (median age of 83); thus, by September 2020, Sweden recorded its lowest mortality in history. (Nevertheless, claims that Sweden has no or almost no excess mortality are based on an incorrect calculation method; there is no “Swedish miracle”).

The same result has been observed in many other regions throughout the world: In Eastern Europe, Belarus has recorded an average regional excess mortality despite almost no interventions at all; in Latin America, excess mortality in Brazil has been higher than in Chile and Argentina, but lower than in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia and Paraguay; in Asia, lockdowns in India, Indonesia or the Philippines were horrific failures affecting 800 million children.

There was only one situation in which lockdowns were a rational intervention: as a preemptive measure in support of early border controls. This situation applied primarily to some islands, such as Australia, New Zealand and Iceland, and possibly to Norway, Finland, Denmark and parts of China (more on these countries below).

Critics of the Swedish approach have often argued that Sweden should only be compared to “its neighbors”. If one compares Sweden to all of its neighbors in the region – Norway, Finland, Denmark, but also Poland and the Baltic states – Sweden again shows an average covid mortality: Poland, Latvia and Lithuania are much higher, Estonia is similar, while Denmark, Finland and Norway are much lower.

But some critics of Sweden insist on comparing Sweden only to Denmark, Finland and Norway. These critics would like to imply that Sweden is a high mortality outlier, when in reality, it is Denmark, Finland and Norway which are the true outliers, having by far the lowest covid mortality rates among Western countries. But why is this?

It is not, as critics of Sweden would like to imply, because these countries had particularly strict measures. In fact, for the most part, their “stringency index” was even lower than in Sweden, and of course also lower than in repressive countries like Austria.

Instead, three explanations seem plausible.

First, Denmark, Finland and Norway imposed early border controls and could avoid a major unexpected wave in the spring of 2020. “Early” here is a relative term and always depends on when the coronavirus reaches a certain country. Due to the timing of its winter holidays, the Stockholm area unknowingly imported the coronavirus directly from early covid hotspots in Alpine skiing resorts near Italy, which was not the case in other Nordic countries or even in other regions of Sweden. (In the famous case of Uruguay in South America, the first covid wave hit not until November 2020).

Second, and in the same context, other Nordic countries imposed preemptive lockdowns in support of early border controls that really may have helped disrupt early infections. But a lockdown is ‘preemptive’ only as long as there have been either no confirmed infections at all or only a very small number of infections that can still be contained without aerosolizing the virus.

Third, and most fundamentally, Norway and Finland have by far the lowest population weighted densities in Europe (910 in Norway and 986 in Finland, vs. 2724 in Sweden and 6785 in Britain; see the map below), which may have slowed the spread of covid.

In fact, in Western Europe, there is a striking correlation between population weighted density – which may influence the speed of virus transmission and the amplitude of infection waves – and covid mortality per country (see map below). This correlation does not apply, however, to Denmark, which has a low covid mortality but an average population weighted density (3434).

At the global level, high population weighted density might help explain strong covid waves in Britain, Spain and Italy, Turkey, South America (including Mexico) and South Africa, but not (so far) in Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Low population weighted density could help explain the slow spread of the coronavirus in Norway, Finland, Indochina, and parts of Black Africa (see map below).

Coming back to the comparison between Sweden and Austria, one factor that worked against Austria was the failure of covid vaccines: if covid vaccines had provided strong long-term protection, Austria could have avoided the very high covid mortality in the winter of 2021/22 (see chart above). On the other hand, in the spring of 2020, even optimists hadn’t expected covid vaccines becoming available before autumn 2021.

The failure of covid vaccines is also a major problem for low-covid countries like Norway, Finland, Australia, New Zealand and China, which now are in a very uncertain position.

While all of the interventions imposed by Austria and other repressive countries failed, are there any potentially effective interventions that have not been adopted?

A few options may be mentioned.

First, research and use of repurposed early treatment drugs should have been a major priority to reduce hospitalizations (especially given the uncertainties regarding vaccine protection).

Second, dedicated covid hospital facilities should have been created to avoid widespread in-hospital transmission (in some countries, including Sweden, the UK and the US, such facilities were indeed created, but they remained largely unused).

Third, given their low covid risk, offering voluntary, medically supervised live virus infection to children and young healthy adults may have made sense to rapidly build up a natural immunity shield, protect high-risk groups (including parents), and ensure smooth education.

Fourth, while masks have been a complete failure (as was already known before the pandemic), indoor ventilation to prevent aerosol transmission might have been one of the most effective interventions (with >99% of all transmission occurring indoors). Then again, living rooms and class rooms cannot be turned into airplane cabins.

Fifth, the media should have supported the calm management of the pandemic, fostering social cohesion and mindfulness, instead of inciting panic and hysteria. The many “dashboards” and “live tickers” may well have been counterproductive.

Sixth, we may have to recognize that societies with a life expectancy of over 80 years and obesity rates of over 20% are inherently susceptible to events like the coronavirus pandemic.

Needless to say, most Western health authorities have not yet acknowledged that their entire approach to the pandemic has been a complete failure. In a typical move, the Austrian health minister in early December claimed that the most recent Austrian lockdown had been effective in breaking the winter wave, but independent analysts quickly pointed out that infections had decreased simultaneously in neighboring countries without a lockdown.

In conclusion, the comparison of Austria and Sweden conclusively shows that a calm, low-intervention, almost business-as-usual approach to the pandemic has been best. In contrast, highly irrational strategies, such as “zero covid” and “no covid”, have caused unprecedented social, political and economic damage at an almost civilizational scale.

How To Create A Health Care Crisis

 The current crisis is a social crisis more than a virus crisis and consequently, the disease will unavoidably metastasize to all the organs of our society. Health Care system (bellow), energy in Europe....

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

At the CVS down the street, the lines are very long to buy home Covid testing kits, $24 a pop, limit four per customer. Everyone seemed to be buying four. Employees cannot restock fast enough. 

We can speculate why. Are businesses demanding negative tests from the unvaccinated? Is Omicron sweeping the country and people need to confirm? Do we have another round of disease panic happening? It’s most likely that everyone in line has a different answer. My intuition, for what it is worth: this virus is everywhere. Lots of people are sick. 

Do you have some sense that we’ve been in this place before? Another variant, another round of panics, more restrictions, models forecasting mass deaths, experts weighing in on all the things you must do, masks masks masks, exhortations from discredited experts demanding that you do things again even though they didn’t work the last time. 

This is just a remarkable scene. Nearly two years after locking down to crush the virus, to stop the spread, this is where we are. It should be more than obvious that the mitigation measures did not achieve the goal and caused enormous damage. 

The ghoul this time is: Omicron. Only one death in the US has been attributed to it. Cases of course are through the roof. It could get worse in terms of severity. At the same time, there is a well-established and once-understood tradeoff within this family of viruses between their transmissibility and their severity. More “cases” – meaning infections in this context – tends toward fewer deaths.

South African health officials have clearly said that so far it is not resulting in severe outcomes. It killed no one in the country in which it was discovered. Still, the weary world seems always ready for another round of panic. Nothing has ever really made sense, but now the complete senselessness is on hyper-drive. 

Universities all over the Northeast have closed and gone back to Zoom for final exams. New York events are being cancelled. Israel is blocking its citizens from travelling to some 10 countries, one of which is the US. Lockdowns are being imposed all over Europe along with ever more vicious enforcements of masks and vaccine passports. 

Vaccine mandates and passports are spreading from city to city. And this is with a vaccine that has been widely adopted and accepted in all the countries now locking down. 

Health authorities in Rhode Island, Maine, and many other states, are warning of impending disaster with overwhelmed hospitals and other facilities. This is because vast numbers have quit their jobs. Oh, but we are told, this has nothing to do with the vaccine requirement. No no. It’s because they found better job opportunities elsewhere. 

Think about this. The staff and nurses 18 months ago were working like crazy and treated like heroes for exposing themselves to the virus. They were the fodder. They took a huge risk. They obtained natural immunity. These people should have been hired and given raises. But the CDC and NIH don’t like to breathe a word about natural immunity. Instead hospital management, pushed by government pressure, demanded that all staff get vaccinated on top of existing broad, safe, and effective natural immunity. 

We’ve known about natural immunity for thousands of years. Now it is mostly denied or not spoken about. How can we account for that?

From the point of view of doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff, that’s an insult. It’s insulting enough to cause anyone to quit on the spot. So yes, many employees just began feeling demoralized. Here is where we stand and a look at why there is a crisis. Crisis upon crisis. 

It’s the same in nursing homes. 

So yes, the lockdowns and mandates created the health-care crisis that they strategized to prevent. The ICUs are filling up but not necessarily only from Covid. These are health problems generated by lockdowns. Cancer. Drug overdoses. Obesity. Broken immune systems leading to virus vulnerability. 

But the question is why. The answer is that governors in every state locked down the hospitals for Covid only, with some exceptions made for urgent non-elective surgeries. Most hospitals in this country were empty for months. They were bleeding money. Spending on health care in general actually declined 8.6%. 

As I’ve written, In the first half of 2020, inpatient admissions fell by 20%, while outpatient visits collapsed by 35%. Visits to the emergency room crashed too, in some places by as much as 42%. By the fall of 2020, elective surgeries were down by 90% of where they would normally be. 

The financial crisis, the lockdown crisis, the mandate crisis, the public health crisis, have all pointed to one end: a genuine medical care crisis. 

Now the Biden administration is taking the extraordinary step of forcing military doctors and nurses into the hospitals. Does that make you want to go to the doctor? Not likely. In fact, for nearly two years now, many people have been avoiding the doctor, letting cancer screenings go by and so on. This has produced the very public health crisis that the lockdowns were intended to prevent. 

For the first time since this disaster began in March 2020, I feel a loss of words, an inability to explain or even describe the world in which we live. We are on the precipice of disaster, with not only a public-health mess unfolding before our eyes but now we must await a Supreme Court that is only days away from deciding on the OSHA mandate that could permanently change life in America. 

Many businesses are now fighting for their lives. CEOs of major airlines have pleaded to end the mask mandate that is so awful for their customers flying on their extremely clean planes. Fauci flat out said no. We must wear masks forever, he says. Why is he, of all people, the dictator of our businesses, communities, and lives? And it all happened so quickly and shockingly. 

We are surrounded by the carnage of the lockdown and mandate strategy, which not only did not stop the Omicron variant. They might have made it inevitable. And yet we still have major voices such as Jeremy Faust of Harvard University writing in his influential column: “am I willing to disrupt certain aspects of life temporarily when necessary to achieve a clearly stated goal? Yes. The key is to define that goal and to implement a strategy that can deliver it. Nobody gets tired of winning. What we’re tired of is losing.”

Yes, we are losing because of a losing strategy that favored force over social functioning, models over public-health wisdom, central planning over decentralized intelligence, coercion over persuasion, suppression over endemicity, and brutalism over rationality. As for “temporarily,” where have we heard that before?

There isn’t one plan, there are fifty thousand, and nobody is in charge.

 I do not completely agree with this post as I believe that some people do in fact control the narrative. Still, the points it presents are to my opinion compelling and convincing. The social aspects of reality explained are most certainly at work and need to be taken into consideration to understand our current "Virus" predicament. And not just the virus...

Post by Eugippius on the Burning Platform.

This image heads Harvard University’s list of Socializing Rules. None of these students is at serious risk of severe outcome from Corona.

I should have expected that my last post would provoke some angry replies [see UPDATE]. Now that my inbox is full of grumpy people, I will double down.

First, though, a parable from my very formative and disturbing time in American academia: I abandoned my professorial career at the height of the Great Awokening. Before I fled, I endured two pretty difficult years, navigating tidal of waves of nonsense and trying to stay uncanceled. In the midst of it all, I had plenty of time to study the institutional workings of the Woke. The fundaments of their dogma were laid by specific critical theorists long before I entered graduate school, but the system as a whole did not become operative until a long while later, as its acolytes ascended to senior faculty and administrative positions, and a distributed consensus emerged that the tenets of Wokeness were right and necessary and just.

People tend to believe things that further their personal interests, and universities are no exception. Wokification succeeded largely because it gave a lot of different people a lot of different things that they wanted. It gave the increasingly powerful university administration a reason to hire more administrators to manage diversity and ensure its forward march. Self-propagation is the highest goal of administrators everywhere. Wokeness also became a useful tool in ongoing turf wars between administrators and faculty. Diversity is a simple metric via which the administration can interfere with faculty hiring and academic operations; new diversity hires know who is buttering their bread and remain loyal to the administrators whose policies brought them in. For the increasingly mediocre and incapable faculty who now teach at even the most august American schools, the woke circus has its own attractions. It provides distraction from the unrelenting demands of objectivity and originality, and permits a pleasing, self-righteous indulgence in moral scolding. In Woke Studies, the answers are always predetermined and it is very easy to get anything published, provided you say the right things. For students, Wokeness has still other attractions—as a font of easy coursework, as an opportunity for social networking, and as a locus for the periodic ritual entertainment of false moral outrages and protests.

All of this is to say that Wokeness was selected from many aspiring ideological and intellectual programs, because it gave the right things to the right people. The bottomless mediocrities who helped construct the subgenre of critical theory on which the whole Woke phenomenon rests are not in charge of the Wokeness Circus. The administrators who promote and participate in Wokeness are not alone in running it, and they could never turn off or redirect the machine over which they appear to preside. Stepping out of line would only mean their personal destruction. The donors, the trustees, the tenured faculty, the powerful committees – none of these hold the reins either. Wokery is a self-organising decentralised movement. It is the sum of all the actions and opinions of all the people who have opted into it.

Importantly, Wokeness is also self-radicalising, in the way that many university-incubated ideologies turn out to be. Administrators or department chairs are constantly in danger of being outflanked on their left, and so they must adopt and endorse the most radical line to maintain their position. Otherwise they will be accused of racism or sexism or whatever and replaced by even more unhinged dangerous people. Also too, diversity is increasingly managed by dedicated administrative offices and special committees, which end up peopled with the most racially obsessed, divisive, woke-enthused types imaginable. Finally, nobody can gain support for or argue on behalf of anything, unless it can be cast in Woke terms. Want a new Egyptologist? Need to renovate the library? Collecting support for shortening the spring semester by a week? Well, you and your allies better explain why these initiatives will help redress historical racial injustices. In this way, all internal discourse and management comes to be about Wokeness, all of the time.

While Wokeness provides many personal incentives for true believers, it is destructive for the institutions that foster it. Those schools that have advanced very far down the woke path face semi-regular hate speech hoaxes and student protests, hordes of incapable hostile junior faculty, and massive curricular disarray. They are pretty miserable places to work and study and they are bleeding talented people and rapidly burning through the cultural capital they accumulated in prior, more reasonable decades. Nor is Wokeness, at the end of the day, even the best thing for many of its most committed adherents. Alas, this doesn’t matter either. Nobody, not even Kimberlé Crenshaw, can redirect or modulate Wokeness any longer.

All of this matters, because American universities aren’t just eager sponsors of racial hysteria. They have also emerged as some of the most radical centres of Corona containment in the world. Their students endure all manner of unreasonable hygiene measures. Constant testing, quarantining, mask rules, enforced isolation, officially encouraged snitching, movement restrictions, vaccine mandates — all of this and more are routine for millions of students. Klaus Schwab is not making them do this. The culprit is a broad, distributed adherence to the dictates of containment ideology, probably driven in no small part by emotional and ideological exhaustion with the prior tyranny of Wokeness. Now that everybody agrees, the self-directed, self-radicalising elements are in place: Administrators and committee chairs that are perceived not to be taking Corona seriously enough will be removed or sidelined in favour of more radical people who take things more seriously than you could possibly imagine. All of these schools now operate with a wealth of Corona Committees, peopled by all the most lunatic germophobic faculty.

Like wokeness, containment is destructive to the institutions that embrace it. American universities in particular depend on attracting students with over-provisioned campuses and entertaining student-life programs. They are basically massive amusement parks for young adults. Sooner or later, people will begin to think twice about paying tens of thousands of dollars a year to live in a prison camp. The destruction will start at less selective schools and proceed upwards. How high it will go, nobody knows. Also like Wokeness, containment is probably bad even for many of its truest believers and most committed enforcers, who now live lives of fear, desperation and isolation, and see now way out.

It is very easy to confuse cause and effect when examining the emergence of ideological systems. People raised up as leaders and heroes of emerging movements are almost never its directors, but merely expressions of all the separate beliefs and aspirations of those involved. Ultimately it’s just extremely difficult for any confined group of people, no matter how wealthy or powerful, to implement any kind of coherent agenda in heavily bureaucratised modern states. Policies can only be realised via a bureaucratic machinery involving thousands and thousands of people, all of whom have different incentives and answer to different bosses. Even when a single person manages to sell a policy to the bureaucratic machine, he cannot predict how it will be implemented and he will have no control over what actually happens. The agency of any single person is illusory here. It is the demobilised, distributed, complex institutional system that selects items and policies, via largely hidden processes.

To further irritate my readers, I provide the following sloppy sketch. It is the best that I can do with my fingers on the train. The inverted triangle represents the growing volume of people in the apparatus of government who have bought in to Corona containment, as we move forward in time. At the beginning — the tip — there were just a few. Now almost everybody is on board. Even my little institute, which has nothing to do with viruses or hygiene or public health, is a firmly committed node in the bureaucratic Corona network.

The green zone represents a notional threshold. Below this area, most policy initiatives won’t come to your notice or achieve very much. Not enough of the bureaucracy is on board. Much beyond this zone, and this policy is a part of your everyday life. The little circle at the bottom represents the maximum possible size of any directed initiative or conspiracy within the bureaucratic machine. For any such confined initiative to be realised, the conspirators must hope for adoption vastly in excess of their own numbers and their own powers, at which point they will have lost all prospect of steering the juggernaut. Finally, the purple line represents the furthest possible institutional horizon of our conspirators. They may have vague hopes of getting their plan adopted at all levels of government, but the only people on whom they can directly act and whose reactions they have any expectation of predicting, are below that line.

These constraints don’t exist in every country, but in the world of liberal democracy, this is very roughly how governance happens. We have to fit our theories of What Is Going On to some version of this framework, or they just won’t be credible.

Tomorrow, I promise, I’ll get back to more technical Corona posts. There are many scientific and political developments to discuss.

---

For all the people preparing to tell me what an uninformed idiot I am, I’ve prepared this brief list of objections and answers. In my experience it covers about 80% of everything you want to shout at me right now:

These failures are too consistent to be accidental: The system is too large and unwieldy to act according to coherent strategies and basically lurches from one failure to the next. It is only good at sustaining itself and enforcing compliance.

Elites can’t be stupid, or they wouldn’t be elites: Yes, they can actually, but the behaviour of the system as a whole is more important to my argument. Because of these institutional constraints, the system is condemned to behave constantly in overtly stupid ways and there is nothing that any individual supergenius anywhere can do about it.

The system you’re describing is a just a facade, those bureaucrats are all pawns. There are secret actors pulling the strings behind the scenes: This is all but impossible, and one of the fundamental mistakes of conspiracy theorising on both the left and the right. Political power can’t be mediated in this way; power accrues to those who are perceived to wield it.

It’s absurd to say humans don’t plot and scheme: There are many, many plots and schemes all the time. But widely adopted, general policies are the reflection of a broad-based bureaucratic consensus and are by their very nature undirected.

It’s obnoxious that you think they’re acting in good faith: None of this necessarily presumes that anybody is acting in good faith. Plenty of people who participate in bureaucratic consensus politics do so for cynical reasons.

You’re ignoring the fact that this is evil: No, I say all the time that it’s extremely evil. I am arguing merely that the locus of evil is not condensed in any single actor, but rather distributed, like a foul-smelling gas, throughout the entire system.

In sum: If I could wave a wand and send the whole globalist crew on a twenty-year mission to conduct a thorough tree census of Siberia, I would. But that wouldn’t stop any of this. Containment would continue on its current path, and a new collection of clowns and loser philanthropists would emerge out of the woodwork to take their place. Before long, Siberia would be very full of tree counters, and we would still be facing vaccine mandates and lockdowns and all the rest of it.