I think this is a stunning piece of evidence that explains what happened. Go to the last paragraph before the summary and the summary. Excuse me if it was you Brad that previously alerted readers to this.
People in positions of power and authority were previously engaged in using global crises to remake, primarily, western society. Looks like we just allowed our fear and our "good compliance gene" to overcome our need for freedom and liberty. We let the authoritarians have at it. The pandemic hit and they were ready.
I do wonder if we would do the same next time. Sheeple comes to mind. Yesterday I passed a tiny Smart car driving too slow on the freeway by a middle-aged woman with Biden stickers on her bumper. She was driving alone double masked. I wish I could say that where I live she is the exception.
I will try to take a crack at Brad's questions, with my guidepost being that old chestnut "Power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely" and my underlying theme being more or less the modern Western addiction to CONTROL, to how this idea of CONTROL (sorry, Substack needs italics) has become an unstoppable omnivorous force for people raised by the twin gods of Science and Technology, this discomfort our elites seem to have knowing that there still remains aspects of existence that are unknown or unknowable and cannot (yet) be assimilated into the Market machine (and also how tempting the idea of CONTROL is for the type of people who go into politics, activism, postmodern journalism and academia, and all the other "Let me tell you how to live" professions).
One more quote first (sorry): The famously demented Emperor Caligula famously said "I wish all of Rome had one throat, so I could cut it", and that is the position our global ruling class has arrived at in re the internet and the fact that just about all of life has moved there.
Sometime in the past decade it seemed to dawn on everyone at the top of the food chain, from the WEF to the NYT etc: Our society does have one throat! (Or one voicebox) And this presented too tempting a prize not to be fought for: imagine that with a few clicks the FBI, DHS, NIH, FDA etc could coordinate between themselves to craft a single reigning narrative, and then imagine that w a few more clicks they could ge their friends at Big Tech (who are the mouth for our social voicebox) to make their narrative the sole permissible one, while censoring all dissent and silencing or banishing all dissenters. With a few keystrokes, they made themselves omnipotent, omniscient, godlike.
Our entire ruling class, from the grubbiest most brain dead bureaucrat at the DHS or NIH up to Gates, Zuckerberg, Soros & Sulzberger etc, couldn't resist the temptation: they have been able to grab more power than even the immortal Emperor Caligula dreamed of, and didn't even have to shed a drop of blood or look a smelly plebe in the eye.
There seems to be increasing evidence that the perception that a pandemic was occurring was similarly engineered. Most likely the real number of deaths due to infection by the novel virus was no more than a bad flu season.
Excellent summary, Brad. Man, I love and look forward to your writing, essays AND stories. Would that all Substack writers were as direct and concise and adventurous as you. Lockdowns were a Rubicon, a boundary that was crossed thoughtlessly and irrevocably, an unspeakable desecration of a centuries-old social compact. I say "thoughtlessly" because I don't think the people who occupy positions of power these days possess anything the leaders of yore would have recognized as "thought." I recall writing to a friend in spring 2020, quoting that old saw, "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad." Well, the "making mad" part we have witnessed and endured in spades; now we'll get to endure the "destroy" part, as we are now ruled, left and right, up and down, by madmen and zombies. I see no thought, no clarity or sanity, in the near future. There is a cataclysm coming, after which there may be a reckoning and correction, or else a decline into a dark age wherein we no longer even aspire to sanity, or recognize it. I need another drink. I'm a real Canadian, so it has to be Gibson's 12-year-old. I'll drink a toast to your clarity and sanity.
It is still almost impossible sometimes to believe that the events of 2020 happened as they did, how it was allowed to happen, and, even now, I have no confidence at all that the right lessons have been learned. I think that if something similar to Covid pops up as it will inevitably, the same 'emergency declarations', masking, closures, quarantines and lockdowns will happen, heck, it might even be easier the second time around.
Is it retro and out of touch to point out that the lockdowns were illegal? The 1st Amendment...
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble..."
To shut down churches and prevent peaceable assembly is simply not legal, unless the Constitution is amended. Certainly the CDC had no legal power to do that.
And yet precedent is set, not only for the next epidemic, but for whatever else our overlords choose to do to us from now on. Our protections under the First Amendment are null and void.
Thank you. Elon Musk is a miracle that happens once in a century.
He single-handedly unmasked the murderous and deeply corrupt US War party – with Twitter Files (J6 choreographed hoax, Russia-gate immense 5-year hoax, has broken total media censorship of terrorist US attack on NATO member Germany and of Covid conspiracy with Pfizer crime organization, of massive crimes by Nazi-dominated Ukraine government which is a mere puppet of US bipartisan War part, etc.).
Elon Musk immense courage and humanity is fully displayed by his one single three-word tweet:
Intelligent, always completely peaceful, childlike US veteran, Jacob Chansley (with documented 15-year innocent mental issues) has been transformed by bloodthirsty and amoral US War party criminals, primarily Democrat leadership and FBI executives, into a symbol of (unarmed) J6 “insurrection” by grotesque lies and evidence hiding.
Peaceful and playful Jacob was tortured by years-long solitary isolation (Tocqueville defined prolonged solitary confinement as instrument of torture) and sentenced to long prison term – despite being now provably innocent of all charges.
The point of the lockdowns had absofuckinglutely nothkng to do with human health, and only one goal was in sight. Destroy the incredible economy that PDT built just by being him. The idea that they used it for mail in ballots,to steal an election, then used the duped humans to destroy the thing he built, and reverse every damn executive order that made America strong again. They had to do something. Now I think it's time to prosecute, with prejudice and Projectiles.
Thank you !! Prof. Jeffrey Sachs states that he is “pretty convinced [COVID-19] came out of US biotechnology lab” and warns that there is dangerous virus research taking place without public oversight.
“Why the Chair of the Lancet’s COVID-19 Commission Thinks The US Government Is Preventing a Real Investigation Into the Pandemic”
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has also served as the chair of the COVID-19 commission for leading medical journal the Lancet.
Through his investigations as the head of the COVID-19 commission, Prof. Sachs has come to the conclusion that there is extremely dangerous biotechnology research being kept from public view, that the United States was supporting much of this research, and that it is very possible that SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, originated through dangerous virus research gone awry.
WHY is this NEVER mentioned in all manufactured hysteria about China ??
I attended med school in Germany, in German, in the late 1980s. I failed the required surgery rotation (lifetime clumsiness), but still entered a psychiatry residency. In 1990 I had to return to the US and gave up medicine for a constellation of reasons.
I do remember the basics of epidemiology as it relates to respiratory viruses: Outside is always better than indoors; search for group vulnerability profiles; almost all exacerbating factors will be associated with obesity. We knew almost from day one that vulnerability varied with age cohort, and that few younger than seventy would be particularly vulnerable. Thus, focus protection on the old and the fat, and leave everyone else alone pending more information. So, we did the opposite.
We locked everyone indoors and treated everyone as having identical vulnerability. To make it worse, we shut down the global economy and began closing borders due to panic induced by authoritarians who knew next to nothing about medicine. The authoritarians were public health officials, not practicing physicians. The best thing we could have done is ignored C19. The next best thing would have been to fund individual visits to private physicians who were not trying to protect their legacy or increase their prestige.
Government reaction to the virus was infinitely more dangerous than the virus itself.
I think this is a stunning piece of evidence that explains what happened. Go to the last paragraph before the summary and the summary. Excuse me if it was you Brad that previously alerted readers to this.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867420310126
And the Great Reset. It is all out there for everyone to read. They are not hiding it. https://www.weforum.org/great-reset
People in positions of power and authority were previously engaged in using global crises to remake, primarily, western society. Looks like we just allowed our fear and our "good compliance gene" to overcome our need for freedom and liberty. We let the authoritarians have at it. The pandemic hit and they were ready.
I do wonder if we would do the same next time. Sheeple comes to mind. Yesterday I passed a tiny Smart car driving too slow on the freeway by a middle-aged woman with Biden stickers on her bumper. She was driving alone double masked. I wish I could say that where I live she is the exception.
I will try to take a crack at Brad's questions, with my guidepost being that old chestnut "Power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely" and my underlying theme being more or less the modern Western addiction to CONTROL, to how this idea of CONTROL (sorry, Substack needs italics) has become an unstoppable omnivorous force for people raised by the twin gods of Science and Technology, this discomfort our elites seem to have knowing that there still remains aspects of existence that are unknown or unknowable and cannot (yet) be assimilated into the Market machine (and also how tempting the idea of CONTROL is for the type of people who go into politics, activism, postmodern journalism and academia, and all the other "Let me tell you how to live" professions).
One more quote first (sorry): The famously demented Emperor Caligula famously said "I wish all of Rome had one throat, so I could cut it", and that is the position our global ruling class has arrived at in re the internet and the fact that just about all of life has moved there.
Sometime in the past decade it seemed to dawn on everyone at the top of the food chain, from the WEF to the NYT etc: Our society does have one throat! (Or one voicebox) And this presented too tempting a prize not to be fought for: imagine that with a few clicks the FBI, DHS, NIH, FDA etc could coordinate between themselves to craft a single reigning narrative, and then imagine that w a few more clicks they could ge their friends at Big Tech (who are the mouth for our social voicebox) to make their narrative the sole permissible one, while censoring all dissent and silencing or banishing all dissenters. With a few keystrokes, they made themselves omnipotent, omniscient, godlike.
Our entire ruling class, from the grubbiest most brain dead bureaucrat at the DHS or NIH up to Gates, Zuckerberg, Soros & Sulzberger etc, couldn't resist the temptation: they have been able to grab more power than even the immortal Emperor Caligula dreamed of, and didn't even have to shed a drop of blood or look a smelly plebe in the eye.
There seems to be increasing evidence that the perception that a pandemic was occurring was similarly engineered. Most likely the real number of deaths due to infection by the novel virus was no more than a bad flu season.
Excellent summary, Brad. Man, I love and look forward to your writing, essays AND stories. Would that all Substack writers were as direct and concise and adventurous as you. Lockdowns were a Rubicon, a boundary that was crossed thoughtlessly and irrevocably, an unspeakable desecration of a centuries-old social compact. I say "thoughtlessly" because I don't think the people who occupy positions of power these days possess anything the leaders of yore would have recognized as "thought." I recall writing to a friend in spring 2020, quoting that old saw, "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad." Well, the "making mad" part we have witnessed and endured in spades; now we'll get to endure the "destroy" part, as we are now ruled, left and right, up and down, by madmen and zombies. I see no thought, no clarity or sanity, in the near future. There is a cataclysm coming, after which there may be a reckoning and correction, or else a decline into a dark age wherein we no longer even aspire to sanity, or recognize it. I need another drink. I'm a real Canadian, so it has to be Gibson's 12-year-old. I'll drink a toast to your clarity and sanity.
Cause that was the gameplan from the pandemic simulation.
The simulation controls everything!
It is still almost impossible sometimes to believe that the events of 2020 happened as they did, how it was allowed to happen, and, even now, I have no confidence at all that the right lessons have been learned. I think that if something similar to Covid pops up as it will inevitably, the same 'emergency declarations', masking, closures, quarantines and lockdowns will happen, heck, it might even be easier the second time around.
Is it retro and out of touch to point out that the lockdowns were illegal? The 1st Amendment...
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble..."
To shut down churches and prevent peaceable assembly is simply not legal, unless the Constitution is amended. Certainly the CDC had no legal power to do that.
And yet precedent is set, not only for the next epidemic, but for whatever else our overlords choose to do to us from now on. Our protections under the First Amendment are null and void.
Thank you. Elon Musk is a miracle that happens once in a century.
He single-handedly unmasked the murderous and deeply corrupt US War party – with Twitter Files (J6 choreographed hoax, Russia-gate immense 5-year hoax, has broken total media censorship of terrorist US attack on NATO member Germany and of Covid conspiracy with Pfizer crime organization, of massive crimes by Nazi-dominated Ukraine government which is a mere puppet of US bipartisan War part, etc.).
Elon Musk immense courage and humanity is fully displayed by his one single three-word tweet:
Free Jacob Chansley https://t.co/8BbeXF2Fye
Intelligent, always completely peaceful, childlike US veteran, Jacob Chansley (with documented 15-year innocent mental issues) has been transformed by bloodthirsty and amoral US War party criminals, primarily Democrat leadership and FBI executives, into a symbol of (unarmed) J6 “insurrection” by grotesque lies and evidence hiding.
Peaceful and playful Jacob was tortured by years-long solitary isolation (Tocqueville defined prolonged solitary confinement as instrument of torture) and sentenced to long prison term – despite being now provably innocent of all charges.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/107896276 -- OUTSTANDING
Bloodshed & Bullshit, Part One -- This has to come to an end. Mar. 11, 2023
There's no doubt about it, man. Our collective reaction to COVID-19 will go down as the biggest policy mistake since the First World War.
It's turned us all into a bunch of germophobic weirdos. Notice how the phrase, "Be safe" is used as a farewell in the common vernacular.
The point of the lockdowns had absofuckinglutely nothkng to do with human health, and only one goal was in sight. Destroy the incredible economy that PDT built just by being him. The idea that they used it for mail in ballots,to steal an election, then used the duped humans to destroy the thing he built, and reverse every damn executive order that made America strong again. They had to do something. Now I think it's time to prosecute, with prejudice and Projectiles.
Superb writing Brad, as usual. I'm with Owly Peter in Alberta, look forward to your posts.
Thank you !! Prof. Jeffrey Sachs states that he is “pretty convinced [COVID-19] came out of US biotechnology lab” and warns that there is dangerous virus research taking place without public oversight.
“Why the Chair of the Lancet’s COVID-19 Commission Thinks The US Government Is Preventing a Real Investigation Into the Pandemic”
https://www.jeffsachs.org/interviewsandmedia/64rtmykxdl56ehbjwy37m5hfahwnm5
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has also served as the chair of the COVID-19 commission for leading medical journal the Lancet.
Through his investigations as the head of the COVID-19 commission, Prof. Sachs has come to the conclusion that there is extremely dangerous biotechnology research being kept from public view, that the United States was supporting much of this research, and that it is very possible that SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, originated through dangerous virus research gone awry.
WHY is this NEVER mentioned in all manufactured hysteria about China ??
I attended med school in Germany, in German, in the late 1980s. I failed the required surgery rotation (lifetime clumsiness), but still entered a psychiatry residency. In 1990 I had to return to the US and gave up medicine for a constellation of reasons.
I do remember the basics of epidemiology as it relates to respiratory viruses: Outside is always better than indoors; search for group vulnerability profiles; almost all exacerbating factors will be associated with obesity. We knew almost from day one that vulnerability varied with age cohort, and that few younger than seventy would be particularly vulnerable. Thus, focus protection on the old and the fat, and leave everyone else alone pending more information. So, we did the opposite.
We locked everyone indoors and treated everyone as having identical vulnerability. To make it worse, we shut down the global economy and began closing borders due to panic induced by authoritarians who knew next to nothing about medicine. The authoritarians were public health officials, not practicing physicians. The best thing we could have done is ignored C19. The next best thing would have been to fund individual visits to private physicians who were not trying to protect their legacy or increase their prestige.
Government reaction to the virus was infinitely more dangerous than the virus itself.
Sure, but then acknowledge the risks for essential workers, including teachers if you want schools to stay open.