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.

When Idiocy Becomes Hardwired

Post by Jeff Thomas via International Man

At this point, virtually all of us over the age of forty have encountered enough “snowflakes” (those Millennials who have a meltdown if anything they say or believe is challenged) to understand that, increasingly, young people are being systemically coddled to the point that they cannot cope with their “reality” being questioned.

The post-war baby boomers were the first “spoiled” generation, with tens of millions of children raised under the concept that, “I don’t want my children to have to experience the hardships that I faced growing up.”

Those jurisdictions that prospered most (the EU, US, Canada, etc.) were, not coincidentally, the ones where this form of childrearing became most prevalent.

The net result was the ’60s generation – young adults who could be praised for their idealism in pursuing the peace movement, the civil rights movement, and equal rights for women. But those same young adults were spoiled to the degree that many felt that it made perfect sense that they should attend expensive colleges but spend much of their study time pursuing sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Flunking out or dropping out was not seen as a major issue and very few of them felt any particular guilt about having squandered their parents’ life savings in the process.

The boomer generation then became the yuppies as they hit middle age, and not surprisingly, many coddled their own children even more than they themselves had been coddled.

As a result of ever-greater indulgence with each new generation of children, tens of millions of Millennials now display the result of parents doing all they can to remove every possible hardship from their children’s experience, no matter how small.

Many in their generation never had to do chores, have a paper route, or get good grades in order to be given an exceptional reward, such as a cell phone. They grew to adulthood without any understanding of cause and effect, effort and reward.

Theoretically, the outcome was to be a generation that was free from troubles, free from stress, who would have only happy thoughts. The trouble with this ideal was that, by the time they reached adulthood, many of the critical life’s lessons had been missing from their upbringing. In the years during which their brains were biologically expanding and developing, they had been hardwired to expect continued indulgence throughout their lives. Any thought that they had was treated as valid, even if it was insupportable in logic.

And, today, we’re witnessing the fruits of this upbringing. Tens of millions of Millennials have never learned the concept of humility. They’re often unable to cope with their thoughts and perceptions being questioned and, in fact, often cannot think outside of themselves to understand the thoughts and perceptions of others.

They tend to be offended extremely easily and, worse, don’t know what to do when this occurs. They have such a high perception of their own self-importance that they can’t cope with being confronted, regardless of the validity of the other person’s reasoning. How they feel is far more important than logic or fact.

Hypersensitive vulnerability is a major consequence, but a greater casualty is Truth. Truth has gone from being fundamental to being something “optional” – subjective or relative and of lesser importance than someone being offended or hurt.

Of course, it would be easy to simply fob these young adults off as emotional mutants – spiteful narcissists – who cannot survive school without the school’s provision of safe spaces, cookies, puppies, and hug sessions.

Previous generations of students (my own included) were often intimidated when presented with course books that had titles like Elements of Calculus and Analytic Geometry. But such books had their purpose. They were part of what had to be dealt with in order to be prepared for the adult world of ever-expanding technology.

In addition, it was expected that any student be prepared to learn (at university, if he had not already done so at home), to consider all points of view, including those less palatable. In debating classes, he’d be expected to take any side of any argument and argue it as best he could.

In large measure, these requirements have disappeared from institutions of higher learning, and in their place, colleges provide colouring books, Play-Doh, and cry closets.

At the same time as a generation of “snowflakes” is being created, the same jurisdictions that are most prominently creating them (the above-mentioned EU, US, Canada, etc.) are facing, not just a generation of young adults who have a meltdown when challenged in some small way. They’re facing an international economic and political meltdown of epic proportions.

Several generations of business and political leaders have created the greatest “kick the can” bubble that the world has ever witnessed.

We can’t pinpoint the day on which this bubble will pop, but it would appear that we may now be quite close, as those who have been kicking the can have been running out of the means to continue.

The approach of a crisis is doubly concerning, as, historically, whenever generations of older people destroy their economy from within, it invariably falls to the younger generation to dig the country out of the resultant rubble.

Never in history has a crisis of such great proportions loomed and yet, never in history has the unfortunate generation that will inherit the damage been so unequivocally incapable of coping with that damage.

As unpleasant as it may be to accept, there’s no solution for idiocy. Any society that has hardwired a generation of its children to be unable to cope will find that that generation will be a lost one.

It will, in fact, be the following generation – the one that has grown up during the aftermath of the collapse – that will, of necessity, develop the skills needed to cope with an actual recovery.

So, does that mean that the world will be in chaos for more than a generation before the next batch of people can be raised to cope?

Well, no. Actually, that’s already happening. In Europe, where the Millennial trend exists, western Europeans have been growing up coddled and incapable, whilst eastern Europeans, who have experienced war and hardship, are growing up to be quite capable of handling whatever hardships come their way. Likewise, in Asia, the percentage of young people who are being raised to understand that they must soon shoulder the responsibility of the future is quite high.

And elsewhere in the world – outside the sphere of the EU, US, Canada, etc. – the same is largely true.

As has been forever true throughout history, civilisation does not come to a halt. It’s a “movable feast” that merely changes geographic locations from one era to another.

Always, as one star burns out, another takes its place. What’s of paramount importance is to read the tea leaves – to see the future coming and adjust for it.

We May Be Sterilizing an Entire Generation

We are slowly understanding better the long term risks of the mRNA vaccines.

Via Mercola

Story at-a-glance

• Janci Chunn Lindsay, Ph.D., a molecular biologist and toxicologist, has called for an immediate halt to COVID-19 mRNA and DNA vaccines due to multiple safety concerns
• There’s credible concern that the COVID jabs will cross-react with syncytin (a retroviral envelope protein) and reproductive genes in sperm, ova and placenta in ways that may impair fertility and reproductive outcomes
• In the case of the COVID shots, important animal studies that help ascertain toxic and systemic effects were not done. We’re now seeing danger signals that are not being heeded. Preliminary safety results of mRNA COVID shots used in pregnant women, published in April 2021, revealed an 82% miscarriage rate when the jab was administered during the first 20 weeks of pregnancy
• CDC data reveal more than 300 children between the ages of 12 and 18 have died from myocarditis, a now-recognized side effect of the COVID jab, yet the shot is now authorized for children as young as 5
• Since the COVID gene therapies do not prevent infection, but only lessen symptoms, they are actually a treatment, not a prevention. And there are far safer and more effective treatment available, including nebulized peroxide, ozone therapy, and hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin regimens

Janci Chunn Lindsay, Ph.D., is a molecular biologist and toxicologist and director of toxicology and molecular biology for Toxicology Support Services LLC. April 23, 2021, she delivered a three-minute public comment to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

Her expertise is analysis of pharmacological dose-responses, mechanistic biology and complex toxicity dynamics. In her ACIP comment (see video below), Lindsay described how she aided the development of a contraceptive vaccine in the 1990s that ended up causing unintended autoimmune destruction and sterility in animals which, despite careful pre-analysis, had not been predicted. She explains:

“We were developing what was meant to be a temporary contraceptive vaccine, which was very attractive because it prevented fertilization rather than preventing implantation — or it should have; that was the idea.

Unfortunately, even though quite a bit of analysis was done in different animal models to make sure that it did not have an autoimmune action, it did end up having an autoimmune action and caused complete ovarian destruction.

Now it’s used in that manner [for permanent sterilization] in dogs, cats and other animals. So, that’s a cautionary tale of how animal studies can help us avoid mistakes in humans when they’re used properly, and when proper animal studies are done.”

 

At the time, she called for an immediate halt to COVID-19 mRNA and DNA vaccines due to safety concerns on multiple fronts. In particular, she noted there is credible concern that they will cross-react with syncytin (a retroviral envelope protein) and reproductive genes in sperm, ova and placenta in ways that may “impair fertility and reproductive outcomes.”

Not a single study has disproven this hypothesis, she noted. Another theory of how these injections might impair fertility can be found in a 2006 study,¹ which showed sperm can take up foreign mRNA, convert it into DNA, and release it as little pellets (plasmids) in the medium around the fertilized egg.

The embryo then takes up these plasmids and carries them (sustains and clones them into many of the daughter cells) throughout its life, even passing them on to future generations. It’s possible that the pseudo-exosomes that are the mRNA contents would be perfect for supplying the sperm with mRNA for the spike protein.

So, potentially, a vaccinated woman who gets pregnant with an embryo that can (via the sperms’ plasmids) synthesize the spike protein according to the instructions in the vaccine, would have an immune capacity to attack that embryo because of the “foreign” protein it displays on its cells. This then would cause a miscarriage.

“We could potentially be sterilizing an entire generation,” Lindsey warned. The fact that there have been live births following COVID-19 vaccination is not proof that these injections do not have a reproductive effect, she said.

Lindsay also pointed out that reports of menstrual irregularities and vaginal hemorrhaging in women who have received the injections number in the thousands,^2,3,4 and this too hints at reproductive effects. In this interview, we dive deeper into these mechanisms.

Something Has Gone Horribly Wrong

When asked how she ended up getting so passionately involved in this controversial topic, Lindsay replies:

“I became interested in the issue because science was not making sense anymore. For instance, herd immunity was being redefined. Herd immunity has always been defined by a combination of the natural infection with vaccination practices that work.

Suddenly, herd immunity was changed to only being attained through vaccination, and I knew that that was horribly wrong, yet it was being touted everywhere. It was certainly being touted by [Dr. Anthony] Fauci and others who know better.

Other things were also happening within the scientific world. Two of our top tier journals, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, published fraudulent hydroxychloroquine studies.

Ostensibly they had gone through peer review, and it should’ve been easy to catch the errors in these studies — as well as many other studies that allow for the emergency use authorization of these gene therapies — and they weren’t caught.

Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are very safe. They’ve been used safely in pregnant women and children for decades, and suddenly they were being vilified as if they were not safe. As a toxicologist, I know they are safe.

So, these types of things really piqued my attention along with all of the stuff going on in the background with respect to the New World Order and the agenda set by the World Economic Forum, and our joining into this, along with so many other countries, despite their intent, their materials, which claim life will be changed as we know it.

We will ‘own nothing and be happy [about it]’ in just a few years. All of these things converged for me into a sense that something had gone horribly wrong, that our regulatory institutes were captured, and that our scientific journals were not being honest anymore …

There’s a paper that came out in 2006 called ‘Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza.’⁵ This paper is wonderful. It goes through World Health Organization and CDC guidelines on how to react during a pandemic, what works and what doesn’t work, and it clearly points out that masks don’t work.

They knew at that point they don’t work. Travel lockdowns don’t work. It’s a wonderful paper to basically go through everything we have done in response to this pandemic, and say that’s an inappropriate way to respond, and we have scientific data that proves it. So, I encourage everybody to go back to that paper … to really see how crazy we’ve gotten in the mandates that make no scientific sense at all.”

Massive Danger Signal Is Being Ignored

As noted by Lindsay, in the case of the COVID shots, important animal studies that help ascertain toxic and systemic effects were not done. But we’re still seeing danger signals that need to be heeded.

Preliminary safety results of mRNA COVID shots used in pregnant women, based on data from the V-Safe Registry, were published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in April 2021.⁶

According to this paper, the miscarriage rate within the first 20 weeks of pregnancy was 12.5%, which is only slightly above the normal average of 10%. (Looking at statistical data, the risk of miscarriage drops from an overall, average risk rate of 21.3% for the duration of the pregnancy as a whole, to just 5% between Weeks 6 and 7, all the way down to 1% between Weeks 14 and 20.⁷)

However, there’s a distinct problem with this calculation, as highlighted by Drs. Ira Bernstein and Sanja Jovanovic, and Deann McLeod, HBSc, of Toronto. In a May 28, 2021, letter to the editor, they pointed out that:⁸

“In table 4, the authors report a rate of spontaneous abortions <20 weeks (SA) of 12.5% (104 abortions/827 completed pregnancies). However, this rate should be based on the number of women who were at risk of an SA due to vaccine receipt and should exclude the 700 women who were vaccinated in their third-trimester (104/127 = 82%).”

In other words, when you exclude women who got the shot in their third trimester (since the third trimester is AFTER week 20 and therefore should not be counted when determining miscarriage rate among those injected BEFORE week 20), the miscarriage rate is a whopping 82%.

Of those 104 miscarriages, 96 of them occurred before 13 weeks of gestation, which strongly suggests that getting a COVID shot during the first trimester is an absolute recipe for disaster.

“They concluded, very fraudulently, in my estimation, that it was safe to vaccinate in the third trimester, and said nothing about the clear safety signal in the first trimester,” Lindsay says. “It’s just so dishonest, so purposefully manipulative.”

As for the women who get the shot in their third trimester, there’s still no telling what the ramifications might be in the long term.

“We just don’t know, and that’s the problem,” Lindsay says. “There are all kinds of things that can go wrong with these types of therapies, and have gone wrong in animal models. We don’t know what will happen in the future for these women or for their children. This could be passed on.

We’re seeing now a lot of mention of constitutive expression, whether that’s failure of the mRNA to degrade or integration into the genome. That’s still being investigated.”

Children Are Dying From COVID Jab-Induced Myocarditis

Lindsay goes on to cite a CDC report that shows more than 300 children between the ages of 12 and 18 have died from myocarditis, a now-recognized side effect of the COVID jab.

We also know, based in part on whistleblower testimony, that more than 50,000 Americans have died within three days of these shots,^9,10 and that’s just from one database (the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System or VAERS). There are 10 other databases that feed into the CDC that the public does not have access to.

“This many deaths, it’s appalling and alarming,” Lindsay says. “Dr. Peter McCullough says the safety signal for typical vaccines, other than this gene therapy, would’ve been around 186 total. We’re now up to [17,128 reported deaths in VAERS, as of October 15, 2021¹¹], but they haven’t paused this in children.

They have not paused this while they’re investigating the myocarditis. Instead, they’re pushing it even more. Has this ever happened before? I mean, does this happen in a scenario where the population is at essentially zero risk for the disease? …

The cardiac deaths alone in perfectly healthy kids, and pulmonary embolism deaths in kids, should’ve stopped this. They are at no risk [from COVID-19]. There is no reason to vaccinate them, absolutely zero reason to give them these gene therapies because they’re at no risk [from the infection] …

You know [the shot] is causing heart failure, pulmonary emboli, cardiac arrest in healthy teenagers, and you’re not pausing to investigate the risk versus reward scenario? Something is horribly wrong.

Unfortunately, our regulatory institutions are not going to stop this. They’ve clearly been captured. It’s something that we’re going to have to do. Vaccinated and non-vaccinated must stand together to say, ‘No, you’re not going to experiment on my children’ …

With the RSV vaccines and the dengue fever vaccines, we had deaths in children that were much fewer in number that stopped those campaigns as well. It’s very, very clear — if you don’t get anything else out of this interview with me, understand that our regulatory and safety agencies have been captured.

They’re not doing their job to protect you or your children. You must not trust them, because they are not doing anything according to practices that used to be adhered to. It’s clear that they’ve been captured and compromised, and I hate to say that. I really hate to say that, but that’s the only logical answer …

We have all these breakthrough cases too. If you look at Michigan, and I’ve actually been privy to some other databases of true death numbers in different states [comparing] those who are vaccinated and those who don’t, and I can tell you that the media is lying with respect to the unvaccinated making up 99% of hospitalizations. They’re absolutely lying.”

How the Jab Can Sabotage Fertility

Getting back to the fertility issue, Lindsay cites a Singaporean study that examined the COVID jab’s ability to interfere with fertility by triggering anti-syncytin-1. The study included 15 women, two of whom were pregnant. She explains:

“They did something that I had asked to be done a long time ago, which was to measure anti-syncytin antibodies in an ELISA test. The syncytins are conformationally and genetically similar to the [SARS-CoV-2] spike protein, this fusogenic spike protein.

The thought by several experts was that you could have an autoimmune reaction to the syncytins by developing an immune reaction to the spike protein, and then that would prevent successful pregnancy.

But the syncytins are also important in a number of psychological diseases, such as bipolar depression. They’re important on autoimmune disease, lupus and multiple sclerosis. They are present in skeletal muscle. There’s some association with breast cancer. They’re really important ancient retroviral elements.

What this study found was extremely interesting. It found that every single one of these women who had been vaccinated developed autoantibodies to syncytin-1. Now, the authors kind of dismissed this and said, ‘Oh, but we don’t think that those antibodies were high enough to mean anything.’

But there was a clear difference between the pre-gene therapy sera [blood sample] and the post-therapy sera … What it shows is that there is an antibody response, and the significance of it, we don’t really know. But every single one of the women developed an antibody response that was different from the baseline … and I think that’s probably what’s causing some of these pregnancy losses.”

Are COVID Jabs a Population-Wide Immunocontraceptive?

When asked what she thinks the motive behind this mass injection campaign might be, considering the clear danger signals, she replies:

“I certainly think that to discount that it is a form of population-wide contraceptive would be naïve. There’s a paper that came out in 2005. It’s called ‘Evaluation of Fusogenic Trophoblast Surface Epitopes as Targets for Immune Contraception.’¹²

This paper tried to find contraceptive peptides in persons that had infertility problems already that were isolated to placentation. So, it was taking a backwards approach, getting the sera from people who had fertility problems and trying to see what they had antibodies to that was causing the fertility problems …

This work was sponsored by the WHO and the Rockefeller Foundation [and the National Institutes of Health]. No surprise there. It was then picked up by a company called AplaGen that took it to patent in 2007.

These are 12-mer peptides, and there’s a series of eight of them that can be used to induce sterility. When they patented it, they also said that it could be used to ameliorate sterility. Interestingly, it was also associated with all of the things that we know syncytin is associated with, — lupus, skeletal muscle disorders, bipolar depression [and] a number of other things.

Even though they don’t name syncytin proteins as the proteins that are targeted, they worked backwards from these peptides, and then said they were a series of other proteins. Sometimes we know that proteins can be called the same thing in different discovery realms. So, that’s going to take more research, but it was certainly interesting to me.

What it really points out is that there were efforts to use peptides or immunocontraceptive means at the placental trophoblast interface to cause sterilization … So, it would be naïve to think that this was not on the plate for future use.”

How Long Will Effects Last?

An obvious question is, how long might these effects last? Are they lifelong? Of course, any answer we come up with here will be hypothetical only, as the studies simply haven’t been done. That said, with her background in molecular biology, Lindsay is at least qualified to theorize.

The mRNA is extremely fragile, which is why a nanolipid with polyethylene glycol delivery system is used. In addition, about 30% of the mRNA has been genetically modified to decrease degradation. As a result, the mRNA being injected is magnitudes sturdier than natural mRNA.

What’s more, the nanoliposomes allow for superior penetration into tissues, and we now know it spreads throughout your body. It doesn’t stay in your deltoid. How long this modified and stabilized mRNA remains viable is still unknown, however. A corollary question is whether this mRNA might be integrated into your genome to become a permanent fixture.

“The answer is, we don’t know for sure,” Lindsay says. “Of course, with the adenoviral vector vaccines [Janssen and AstraZeneca], they’re more prone to integration into the genome. We know that from animal studies and past experiments.

With the mRNA technology, we’ve never stabilized something like this in this manner. What we do know is that recent studies have come out — Bruce Patterson’s group and another group — both came out with the finding that the spike protein is being expressed, [it’s] present on monocytes, as far out as from the time that the people were given the gene therapy.

So, that gives us an indication that it is resistant, for sure, to degradation. The longer it stays around, and is resistant to degradation, the more likely that genomic integration events can occur. But I don’t know the answer to whether or not it will become a permanent feature.”

Make a Rational Choice

As explained by Lindsay, no coronavirus vaccine has ever been successfully brought to market, despite 20 years of effort. All have failed due to antibody dependent enhancement, where the vaccination facilitates infection rather than protects against it.

If all these gene therapies do is lessen the diseases, then they’re not a vaccine, they are a treatment. You have to use your common sense to say, why wouldn’t I use a treatment that has been known to be safe over 70 years as opposed to one that is brand-new, that is experimental? ~ Janci Chunn Lindsay, Ph.D.

Now, we’re to believe a safe and effective coronavirus “vaccine” has been developed in mere months. She also makes another important point. Since the COVID gene therapies do not prevent infection, but only lessen symptoms, they are actually a treatment, not a prevention.

And there are far safer and more effective treatments available, including nebulized peroxide, ozone therapy, and hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin regimens.

“If all these gene therapies do is lessen the diseases, then they’re not a vaccine, they are a treatment,” she says. “They are a treatment that you don’t know the mid- or long-term consequences of, that have already caused a number of adverse events. You have to use your common sense to say, why wouldn’t I use a treatment that has been known to be safe over 70 years as opposed to one that is brand-new, that is experimental?”

Other Safety Signals

Aside from fertility issues, heart inflammation and blood clots, another side effect seen among the fully “vaccinated” is de novo Type 1 diabetes in adults. This makes sense considering Pfizer’s biodistribution study showed the spike protein accumulates in the pancreas. The natural SARS-CoV infection can also have this effect.

Type 1 diabetes is a serious problem, as it leaves you metabolically handicapped for the rest of your life, dependent on extremely costly insulin injections. Doctors are also reporting an increase in pancreatic cancer and acute myeloid leukemia.

Where Do We Go From Here?

“Many scientists and physicians feel as I do, and are trying to figure out where we go from here,” Lindsay says, “because our typical safety and regulatory agencies have been compromised.” She believes we need to continue sharing the data and facts that mainstream media refuse to discuss, and continue urging those who have received the jab to at least protect their children.

“We need to stand together as one people and say we’re not going to accept this, especially not for our children, and try to get to the bottom of this and see what’s really behind all these efforts. Is it really about a virus, or is it more about other political motivations and campaigns, as it seems to be?”

I’m less optimistic about the idea of breaking through the brainwashing to get people to not sacrifice their children. So many have their minds set in cement with the wrong information. They could have their brother, sister, mother or father get the shot and die with the needle still on their arm, and they’d still go out to get a booster the next day.

I’ve seen it so many times. My friends, their parents, their siblings and loved ones — there’s this barrier that prevents any openness to new information. They’ve made their decision. Mark Twain said, “It’s far easier to fool someone than to convince them they’ve been fooled.” And it’s true.

So, while I agree that we must keep trying, and have faith that truth will prevail, I also think it’s important to have realistic expectations. We’re up against the most effective propaganda campaign in modern history. It’s psychological warfare at its best.

From my perspective, being a pragmatic realist, I believe the best strategy is to reinforce and support those who didn’t buy into the propaganda narrative to begin with, because they don’t struggle with that cognitive dissonance. If we stick together and support each other, so none of us get sucked into the lunacy, then we can at least preserve the control group.

Ultimately, the truth will come out, as long as we can preserve the control group. In a year or two, or three, we will clearly be able to tell how devastating this intervention was simply by comparing the two groups. I suspect those who got the shot will be severely crippled in various ways, and those who didn’t get the shot will have far better health in comparison.

“I absolutely agree that we have to preserve a control group. We also have to think of ways that we can help those that have been injured. I brought this out in a letter I recently wrote, advocating for Dr. McCullough.

People who have gotten this inoculation, if they have mid- to long-term effects, if you deny that any adverse effects are really going on, then the efforts going into those treatments for people who are having side effects are not going to be there. We have to accept that these [side effects] are real in order to help people who have already taken the inoculations, and I believe we have to try.”

Now Or Never: The Great 'Transition' Must Be Imposed

 

 This article is a must read for the links it makes between apparently unrelated issues. In spite of all the rhetoric, the great reset will not be inclusive. You are either in or you're out!

Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

A new wave of restrictions, more lockdowns, and – eventually – trillions of dollars in new stimmie cheques may be in prospect...

Were you following the news this last week? Vaccine mandates are everywhere: one country, after another, is doubling-down, to try to force, or legally compel, full population vaccination. The mandates are coming because of the massive uptick in Covid – most of all in the places where the experimental mRNA gene therapies were deployed en masse. And (no coincidence), this ‘marker’ has come just as U.S. Covid deaths in 2021 have surpassed those of 2020. This has happened, despite the fact that last year, no Americans were vaccinated (and this year 59% are vaccinated). Clearly no panacea, this mRNA ‘surge’.

Of course, the Pharma-Establishment know that the vaccines are no panacea. There are ‘higher interests’ at play here. It is driven rather by fear that the window for implementing its series of ‘transitions’ in the U.S. and Europe is closing. Biden still struggles to move his ‘Go-Big’ social spending plan and green agenda transition through Congress by the midterm election in a year’s time. And the inflation spike may well sink Biden’s Build Back Better agenda (BBB) altogether.

Time is short. The midterm elections are but 12 months away, after which the legislative window shuts. The Green ‘transition’ is stuck too (by concerns that moving too fast to renewables is putting power grids at risk and elevating heating costs unduly), and the Pharma establishment will be aware that a new B.1.1.529 variant has made a big jump in evolution with 32 mutations to its spike protein. This makes it “clearly very different” from previous variants, which may drive further waves of infection evading ‘vaccine defences’.

Translation: a new wave of restrictions, more lockdowns, and – eventually – trillions of dollars in new stimmie cheques may be in prospect. And what of inflation then, we might ask.

It’s a race for the U.S. and Europe, where the pandemic is back in full force across Europe, to push through their re-set agendas, before variants seize up matters with hospitals crowded with the vaccinated and non-vaccinated; with riots in the streets, and mask mandates at Christmas markets (that’s if they open at all). A big reversal was foreshadowed by this week’s news: vaccine mandates and lockdowns, even in highly vaccinated areas, are returning. And people don’t like it.

The window for the Re-Set may be fast closing. One observer, noting all the frenetic Élite activity, has asked ‘have we finally reached peak Davos?’. Is the turn to authoritarianism in Europe a sign of desperation as fears grow that the various ‘transitions’ planned under the ‘re-set’ umbrella (financial, climate, vaccine and managerial expert technocracy) may never be implemented?

Cut short rather, as spending plans are hobbled by accelerating inflation; as the climate transition fails to find traction amongst poorer states (and at home, too); as technocracy is increasingly discredited by adverse pandemic outcomes; and Modern Monetary Theory hits a wall, because – well, inflation again.

Are you paying attention yet? The great ‘transition’ is conceived as a hugely expensive shift towards renewables, and to a new digitalised, roboticised corporatism. It requires Big (inflationary) funding to be voted through, and a huge parallel (inflationary) expenditure on social support to be approved by Congress as well. The social provision is required to mollify all those who subsequently will find themselves without jobs, because of the climate ‘transition’ and the shift to a digitalised corporate sphere. But – unexpectedly for some ‘experts’ – inflation has struck – the highest statistics in 30 years.

There are powerful oligarchic interests behind the Re-Set. They do not want to see it go down, nor see the West eclipsed by its ‘competitors’. So it seems that rather than back off, they will go full throttle and try to impose compliance on their electorates: tolerate no dissidence.

A 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” by then dissident and future Czech President Vaclav Havel begins mockingly that, “A SPECTRE is haunting Eastern Europe: the spectre of what in the West is called ‘dissent’”. “This spectre has not appeared out of thin air. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the system it is haunting.” Well, today, as Michael Every of Rabobank notes, “the West has polarisation, mass protests, riots, talk of obligatory vaccinations in Europe, and Yanis Varoufakis arguing capitalism is already dead; and that a techno-feudalism looms”. Now, prompting even greater urgency, are the looming U.S. midterms. Trump’s return (even if confined just to Congress), would cut the legs from under BBB, and ice-up Brussels too.

It was however, precisely this tech revolution, to which Varoufakis calls attention, that both re-defined the Democrat constituency, and turned tech oligarchs into billionaires. Through algorithmically creating a magnetism of like-minded content, cascaded out to its customers, it has both smothered intellectual curiosity, and created the ‘un-informed party’, which is the today’s Managerial Class – the party of the credentialed meritocracy; the party, above all, smugly seeing themselves as the coming era’s ‘winners’ – unwilling to risk a look behind the curtain; to put their ‘safe space’ to the test.

Perversely, this cadre of professionally-corralled academics, analysts, and central bankers, all insist that they completely believe in their memes: That their techno-approach is both effective, and of benefit to humanity – oblivious to the dissenting views, swirling around them, down in the interstices of the internet.

The main function then of such memes today, whether issued by the Pharma Vaccine ‘Command’; the MMT ‘transition’ Command; the energy ‘transition’ Command; or the global managerial technocracy ‘transition’, is to draw a ‘Maginot line’ – a defensive ideological boundary, a “Great Narrative” as it were – between ‘the truth’ as defined by the ruling classes, and with that of any other ‘truth’ that contradicts their narrative. That is to say, it is about compliance.

It was well understood that all these transitions would overturn long-standing human ways of life, that are ancient and deeply rooted and trigger dissidence – which is why new forms of social ‘discipline’ would be required. (Incidentally, the EU leadership already refer to their their official mandates as ‘Commands’). Such disciplines are now being trialled in Europe – with the vaccine mandates (even though scientists are telling them that vaccines cannot be the silver bullet for which they yearn). As one high ‘lodge’ member, favouring a form of global governance notes, to make people accept such reforms, you must frighten them.

Yes, the collective of ‘transitions’ must have their ‘Big, overarching Narrative’ – however hollow, it rings (i.e. the struggle to defend democracy against authoritarianism). But it is the nature of today’s cultural-meme war that ultimately its content becomes little more than a rhetorical shell, lacking all sincerity at its core.

It serves principally, as decoration to a ‘higher order’ project: The preservation of global ‘rules of the road’, framed to reflect U.S. and allied interests, as the base from which the clutch of ‘transitions’ can be raised up into a globally managed order which preserves the Élite’s influence and command of major assets.

This politics of crafted, credentialised meme-politics is here to stay, and now is ‘everywhere’. It has long crossed the partisan divide. The wider point here – is that the mechanics of meme-mobilisation is being projected, not just in the western ‘home’ (at a micro-level), but abroad, into American ‘foreign policy’ too (i.e. at the macro-level).

And, just as in the domestic arena, where the notion of politics by suasion is lost (with vaccine mandates enforced by water-cannon, and riot police), so too, the notion of foreign policy managed through argument, or diplomacy, has been lost too.

Western foreign policy becomes less about geo-strategy, but rather is primordially focussed on the three ‘big iconic issues’ – China, Russia and Iran – that can be given an emotional ‘charge’ in order to profitably mobilise certain identified ‘constituencies’ in the U.S. domestic cultural war. All the various U.S. political strands play this game.

The aim is to ‘nudge’ domestic American psyches (and those of their allies) into mobilisation on some issue (such as more protectionism for business against Chinese competition), or alternatively, imagined darkly, in order to de-legitimise an opposition, or to justify failures. These mobilisations are geared to gaining relative domestic partisan advantage, rather than having strategic purpose.

When this credentialled meme-war took hold in the U.S., millions of people were already living a reality in which facts no longer mattered at all; where things that never happened officially, happened. And other things that obviously happened never happened: not officially, that is. Or, were “far-right extremist conspiracy theories,” “fake news,” or “disinformation,” or whatever, despite the fact that people knew that they weren’t.

Russia and China therefore face a reality in which European and U.S. élites are heading in the opposite direction to epistemological purity and well-founded argument. That is to suggest, the new ‘normal’ is about generating a lot of contradictory realities, not just contradictory ideologies, but actual mutually-exclusive ‘realities’, which could not possibly simultaneously exist … and which are intended to bemuse adversaries – and nudge them off-balance.

This is a highly risky game, for it forces a resistance stance on those targeted states – whether they seek it, or not. It underlines that politics is no more about considered strategy: It is about being willing for the U.S. to lose strategically (even militarily), in order to win politically. Which is to say gaining an ephemeral win of having prompted an favourable unconscious psychic response amongst American voters.

Russia, China, Iran are but ‘images’ prized mainly for their potential for being loaded with ‘nudge’ emotional-charge in this western cultural war, (of which these states are no part). The result is that these states become antagonists to the American presumption to define a global ‘rules of the road’ to which all must adhere.

These countries understand exactly the point of these value and rights-loaded ‘rules’. It is to force compliance on these states to acquiesce to the ‘transitions, or, to suffer isolation, boycott and sanction – in a similar way to the choices being forced on those in the West not wishing to vaccinate (i.e. no jab; no job).

This approach reflects an attempt by Team Biden to have it ‘both ways’ with these three ‘Iconic States’: To welcome compliance on ‘transition issues’, but to be adversarial over any dissidence to mounting a rules framework that can raise the ‘transitions’ from the national, to the supra-national plane.

But do the U.S. practitioners of meme-politics, absorb and comprehend that the stance by Russia-China – in riposte – is not some same-ilk counter-mobilisation done to ‘make a point’? That their vision does stand at variance with ‘the rules’? Do they see that their ‘red lines’ may indeed be ‘red lines’ literally? Is the West now so meme-addicted, it cannot any longer recognise real national interests?

This is key: When the West speaks, it is forever looking over its shoulder, at the domestic, and wider psychic impact when it is ‘making a point’ (such as practicing attacks by nuclear-capable bombers as close to Russia’s borders as they dare). And that when Russia and China say, ‘This is our Red Line’, it is no meme – they really mean it.

Why Is Omicron Being Treated Like Ebola?

 Doctors are speaking. But the voices of reason are drowned in the non-stop noise of panic and fear. Governments must be seen doing "something" and that "something" is heavily manipulated for profit but also with ultimate aims which are often far from democratic to say the least. 

 Many times in the past, similar panics have occurred and proved that once in motion, there is simply no easy way to stop them. Least of all discussion or argumentation. The fire (fear) must exhaust itself. 

Authored by Professor Angus Dalgleish, op-ed via The Daily Mail,

As I listened to ministers react nervously in recent days to the new Omicron Covid variant, I began to experience an all-too-familiar sinking feeling.

Shall I put it into words? Here we go again, I thought.

Mask mandates have been reimposed in shops, schools and hairdressers, and new swingeing £200 fines will be levied on those who dare to break the rules.

Meanwhile, the inevitable chorus of gloomy voices has begun to sing again: that unholy alliance of scientific ‘experts’ who have been given blanket coverage by the BBC and Left-wing media so often during this pandemic.

The Government has used these voices as justification to impose fresh restrictions on our lives — as well as to threaten more in future.

The Government has used an unholy alliance of scientific ‘experts’ who have been given blanket coverage by the BBC and Left-wing media as justification to impose fresh restrictions on our lives — as well as to threaten more in future.

Mask mandates have been reimposed in shops, schools and hairdressers, and new swingeing £200 fines will be levied on those who dare to break the rules

Panicking

Right now, the key question is: are any of the new measures actually necessary?

Yes, there remains much we don’t know about Omicron, but the early signs are distinctly encouraging. Many patients have reportedly recovered quickly from what have been very mild symptoms.

Southern Africa, where the variant emerged, has largely avoided panicking. One German epidemiologist, Professor Karl Lauterbach, who is running to be Germany’s next health minister, has even said that a mild strain would be an ‘early Christmas gift’.

Given all that, how much can the Government’s hawkish approach truly be justified?

Very little, I would submit.

Yes, there remains much we don’t know about Omicron, but the early signs are distinctly encouraging

Many patients have reportedly recovered quickly from what have been very mild symptoms

Jenny Harries: Brits shouldn't socialise with people unless necessary

 

The real danger for most of us now comes not from Omicron or any other coronavirus variant. Instead, it comes from ministers and officials apparently flirting with taking us into yet another era of ruinous restrictions, cancelling Christmas or other cherished holidays, dashing all hope of foreign travel, wrecking the economy and otherwise immiserating our lives at the whim of the state.

Yes, a new, heavily mutated coronavirus variant has been identified. But Professor Lauterbach, a highly respected clinical epidemiologist, suggested yesterday that the variant might even be good news. Why? Because its numerous mutations — twice as many as the Delta variant that swept the world this year — mean that though it may well be more infectious, it could also be less deadly.

In layman’s terms, this means that more people might catch it, but not suffer serious illness. And that is a good thing — certainly compared to a very infectious, very virulent virus with the capacity to sicken or kill large numbers of people.

Anyone infected with a ‘mild’ Covid virus — one unlikely to cause serious disease — will still develop antibodies to guard against future infection. And the more people with such antibodies, the closer we are to the fabled ‘herd immunity’.

This, coupled with the help of our highly successful vaccination programme, could even spell the eventual end of the pandemic — though not, it must be said, the end of Covid.

This is the sort of grown-up discussion ministers should be having with us. Instead, by announcing new restrictions over the weekend, flanked by his two familiar harbingers of doom, Professor Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance, the Prime Minister risked terrifying large swathes of the nation all over again — just as they were beginning to catch their breath as the worst of the pandemic was lifting.

Anyone infected with a ‘mild’ Covid virus — one unlikely to cause serious disease — will still develop antibodies to guard against future infection

Coronavirus restrictions, it should not need pointing out, do not work in isolation.

A year ago, I wrote in the Mail how I believed that lockdown was a killer in the making far worse than Covid-19. Today, I stand by that view.

From spiralling hospital waiting lists and delayed cancer treatment to the horrendous impact on the mental health of the nation, I think we are seeing the tip of an iceberg of premature deaths from causes other than Covid — and that, in time, history will reveal the second and third lockdowns, at least, for the folly I believe them to be. That is before you contemplate the ramifications of our sabotaged economy: livelihoods destroyed by the enforced shutdown of businesses and High Street firms shuttered thanks to working-from-home mandates.

'Vaccines very likely to be less effective against Omicron': JCVI

It is imperative that ministers do not go down that dangerous road again — unless some terrible new variant or new virus with a vastly higher death rate does emerge.

Even the most fervent lover of lockdown would be hard-pressed to describe today’s scenario as an Armageddon-in-the-making, especially as the virus is behaving exactly as scientists always suspected that it would.

Just as with flu, it is likely that in years to come the world will experience new waves of this coronavirus. Crucially, there is no evidence that these waves will somehow be ever-more lethal. Instead, it is likelier that this virus, like most pathogens, will become less deadly over time.

Cautious

This flies in the face of those who favour the ‘just-in-case’ argument: that we must be extra cautious and ready to lock down early again, lest the new variant prove more dangerous than anticipated.

That argument was valid at the start of the pandemic, when we lacked treatments and vaccinations. But it does not hold any longer.

Today, we are well-versed in the ways of our foe. With a few exceptions (usually the unvaccinated), most people are dying with Covid, not necessarily because of it, while others have had an imminent death merely hastened.

Even the most compassionate individual must realise that public policy cannot be founded on trying to mitigate against a death that, however sad, was due sooner rather than later.

A long time ago, when I was a junior doctor working in A&E, I was initially amazed by the fact that among those admitted to hospital with flu and pneumonia symptoms were the young and fit. That is often the nature with the flu virus.

Just as with flu, it is likely that in years to come the world will experience new waves of this coronavirus

A percentage of them would end up in intensive care, and a proportion would die — just as they do today.

Each individual death was terribly sad, of course, but no one would argue they meant that we should change our health policy.

What a contrast with today, when we live in a country increasingly bedevilled by what the former Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption has rightly labelled ‘Covid authoritarianism’.

Paralysis

Flailing Labour politicians, desperate for any stick with which to beat the Government, demand ever-tougher measures: work-from-home advice and yet more masks, with new lockdowns and furlough schemes waiting in the politicians’ arsenal.

In Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon exhorts her citizens to work from home while demanding tougher restrictions down south.

We are not dealing with Ebola, which kills up to 90 per cent of those it infects, but a virus which was found in one Cambridge University study last summer — thanks to vaccinations and better treatments — to have an infection fatality rate of just 0.085 per cent

Many of us are only too happy to let such Cassandra-like prophecies drift over our heads, but there are many others who have been frightened into what feels like near-permanent paralysis in the face of the news headlines and political shroud-waving.

I see this phenomenon among my own friends. There is a clear divide between those who, like me, think we need to get on with our lives, and others who still appear obsessed with Covid, long after the worst of the virus appears to have retreated.

Yet get on we must. We are not dealing with Ebola, which kills up to 90 per cent of those it infects, but a virus which was found in one Cambridge University study last summer — thanks to vaccinations and better treatments — to have an infection fatality rate of just 0.085 per cent.

By all means let us watch this virus closely. But let us also retain the clear perspective and the common sense that should hold in a free society. 

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Angus Dalgleish is an oncologist at a London teaching hospital