Category Archives: Covid

Zero Carbon Agenda Deconstructed

It's leading us to absolute slavery, says the "Ice Age Farmer"

A vlogger by the name of Christian, who posts under the title “Ice Age Farmer” has posted a 54-minute video (about one year ago) about what zero carbon will really mean for the economy and society. It’s not pretty.

Here’s the video description:

What is a zero-carbon future? What does it look like? To imagine, turn off your heater. No airports. No shipping. No animals. Perfect surveillance state. In this Ice Age Farmer special report, Christian breaks The “Absolute Zero” plan and how governments are actively taking drastic steps every day to meet these dystopian goals for Travel, Transport, Energy, Manufacturing, Recycling, and Food. We must understand the reality underneath their flowery philanthropic language: Absolute Slavery.

Comedy Gold

Actor tells truth about Covid policies, media goes berserk

Writes Tom Woods (see also here):

By now you may have heard about the opening monologue that actor Woody Harrelson delivered on Saturday Night Live this past weekend.

Given the hysteria surrounding it, I assumed it had to be a full-throated attack on Big Pharma.

So I watched it, and 95 percent of it was just normal comedy.

I’m about to share with you the entirety of the portion that sent the Establishment, and those poor and pathetic souls who for some reason feel compelled to defend the Establishment, into a fit.

Harrelson tells a fanciful story about reading a movie script:

Okay, so the movie goes like this. The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes. And people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drugs and keep taking them over and over.

I threw the script away. I mean, who is going to believe that crazy idea being forced to do drugs? I do that voluntarily all day long.

That’s it.

It’s obvious enough that the story is a reference to our Covid experience, with the lockdowns and the mandates. But note that he even softens the blow by ending it with a joke about his drug habit.

Well, this little passage — which, for heaven’s sake, obviously has the ring of truth to it — sent the media into hysterics.

Remember, Harrelson is insinuating that the media are all bought and paid for. And here’s how they reacted, as if trying to prove his point:
Note the verb choices, too — “spews,” “rambles” — intended to denigrate the speaker. And of course “conspiracy,” the ultimate dumb-guy putdown.

To my mind Harrelson is wrong about 90 percent of the time, but when he’s right, it tends to be — as in this case — about something fairly important.

But good for him, making the kind of observation that hundreds of people in public life would be making if we lived in a normal society.

Paul Joseph Watson has made a short video about this: “My God, he said what?“

Salvation through politics

How and why this false notion keeps getting enacted

Gary North often wrote that the prevailing faith in Western societies nowadays is in “salvation through politics” or “salvation through the state”.

Nearly 30 years ago, economist Thomas Sowell laid out in his book “The Vision of the Anointed” how this falsehood works in practice. Wikipedia has an entry about that book. It says that in it, Sowell “brands the anointed as promoters of a worldview concocted out of fantasy impervious to any real-world considerations.”

In an interview from 1995 (10 minutes of excerpts from it – the full 25-minute version is here) he outlines his observations.

First, he explains who the “anointed” are: The elites in leading media, universities, law and politics. One could add nowadays: in entertainment. These people believe they know better than most what needs to be done. And thus think themselves entitled to use government force to get these things done.

If an assertion is made that fits the ideas and vision of these people, they demand no evidence. They simply assume it is true and use their many and powerful channels to plant this assertion in the public’s mind.

Regarding the implementation by these people of measures to fight a perceived societal ills Sowell outlines a four-stage pattern – which we could see very clearly in action during the Covid crisis.

1. Crisis: We’re hyped to believe that something is a terrible crisis for which Something Must Be Done. Very often, the thing we are told is causing a crisis has been “getting better for years on end”. But that gets ignored.

2. A solution for this supposed crisis is suggested. The protagonists say: This will lead to beneficial results A. Critics disagree and say it will lead to detrimental results Z.

3. The suggested solution is implemented and almost immediately we get detrimental results Z.

4. Denial phase: The protagonists of the enacted measures deny that they caused Z. Because, they say, there are many factors, there’s complexities, it’s simplistic to blame it on this.

This is what we will see down the line once the media thinks it is safe to no longer suppress the evidence that lockdowns, masks and vaccines did much more harm than good.

This is what we will hear now that “saving the climate” and “supporting Ukraine” is leading to poverty and destitution.

This is what we have been hearing when discussing soaring crime rates.

And so on.

Economists tend to see through this because they are trained to think in terms of cost-benefit analysis and what is called “opportunity cost”: The cost of any action/decision is that it closes the door to other opportunities. What are they, and can we afford to lose them?

Our current elites don’t like that sort of thinking because it questions their beliefs.

Asked whether these people just don’t think their solutions might be detrimental, Sowell says there’s more to it: The solutions always gives these people more power and influence.

That is also something we see time and time again.

Covid 19 Mandates: Silencing the Opposition

Jordan Peterson speaks with Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya

From the video description:

Dr Jordan B Peterson and Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya discuss the complete failure of the covid 19 response, the danger of handing the reins to Fauci, the proven blacklisting of Dr. Bhattacharya and others across social media (Revealed via the Twitter Files), and the continued corruption across the board regarding the pandemic.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a professor at Stanford University Medical School, where he researches the health & well-being of vulnerable populations. He co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, a focused protection alternative to lockdowns. Dr. Bhattacharya has published over 160 peer-reviewed papers on medicine, epidemiology, health policy, and public health. He holds an M.D. and Ph.D. in economics, earned at Stanford University.

– Chapters – (0:00) Coming Up (1:18) Intro (3:09) The lie in trusting the “consensus” (6:48) Solzhenitsyn, Lenin, Stalin (8:01) The enviro-cartel: motivations (9:35) Naming names, Fauci (14:04) Presidential reminders: do you love your child? (15:05) The revolving door for regulators (18:14) Disgust as a driving factor, sins of the infected (22:09) Communal understandings (24:15) Throwing out the pandemic template (25:42) The Somerville Youth Study (27:40) Fear, propaganda, ignorance (30:22) Serious attempts to follow China’s lead (31:30) The risks that were ignored (32:50) The detriment of Covid-era schooling (35:47) First concerns over the lockdown approach (38:05) The continuing catastrophe unleashed on the poor (38:50) Swine Flu, seroprevalence studies (41:50) Serious factors and the importance of highlighting them (43:37) You can’t monetize vitamin D (44:02) Shaming the healthy and saving grandma (46:10) Refuting Jayenta’s findings, abysmal treatment, and accusations (49:50) Despite innocence, Stanford demands silence (52:28) Trauma inflicted by the forces of the mob (54:40) Nothing saves but the truth (58:11) The Great Barrington Declaration (1:04:17) Being labeled a “fringe epidemiologist” (1:07:40) Limiting the reach of the GBD (1:08:30) Protecting the public in fascist Germany (1:11:40) Silenced by intimidation, living past the risk (1:15:55) The Twitter Files: blacklisting the truth (1:19:50) Visiting Elon Musk and the Twitter headquarters (1:22:03) Zuckerberg’s offer to Fauci (1:23:00) Deposing Fauci and the vast censorship enterprise (1:25:14) Trudeau, lying to the public about MAGA conspiracies (1:27:01) The ridiculous notion that information can be harmful (1:29:30) STEM, rejecting students over their DEI stats (1:30:53) The attraction of egalitarianism, be a communist at home (1:32:55) Destruction of community and the rise of individualism (1:33:40) To the 15 leftists listening… (1:37:00) Why demonetization is such a detriment to science (1:39:50) Bhattacharya now: the Norfolk Group Document

ONS Data: 25% Excess Mortality Among the Boosted is Obscured by Undercounting of the Unvaccinated

Oops, the unvaxed were 50% undercounted

Says Igor Chudov here.

Excerpts:

I am very sorry that the ONS used incorrect counts of unvaccinated people. Fortunately, we can correct them using publicly available, official UK data.

Such corrected counts of unvaccinated people lead to a much more realistic comparison of mortality between boosted and unvaccinated people, consistent with our observations of overall excess mortality in the UK.

This is NOT a harmless mistake. Undercounting unvaccinated people will distract the public from looking at the real cause of excess mortality because ONS numbers falsely suggest that the boosted people experience lower excess mortality than the unvaccinated.

The opposite is likely true: as I have shown, the boosted people have higher excess mortality. Furthermore, corrected mortality explains the 20% or so excess mortality the UK experienced in December.

The many inconsistencies in the Pfizer approval
study

Article in leading German paper "Die Welt"

Here. A saved German version is here.

There is a not unimportant translation error in the text:

The sentence
“Roux’s case took a surprising turn when he was the attorney for Fernando Polack,
study director in Buenos Aires and lead author of the global phase 3 pivotal study,
forced access to his file.”

Should be:

“Roux’s case took a surprising turn when the attorney forced access to his file from Fernando Polack, study director in Buenos Aires and lead author of the global phase 3 pivotal study.”

Why do people think and act diametrically different?

Jeff Leskovar has some interesting answers

From Jeff Leskovar’s article (from 4th December 2021):

Individuals have three main parameters by which they constrain their decisions: property, time, and social hierarchy. Social hierarchies apparently exist to reduce conflict among individuals as do property rights by allowing individuals to know who should defer to whom with regard to each other and physical objects. An individual’s decisions are delimited by these three dimensions, time (time preference), space (property), and social hierarchy. Social hierarchy exists in the minds of individuals so it is like the imaginary plane in the field of mathematics.. We have the real dimensions of time and space along with the dimension of social hierarchy or status. These control the majority of human behavior in the quest for survival and reproduction.

Time preference and social hierarchy are fundamental to understanding the “why” of human action. Putting social hierarchy front and center is especially useful in political science, since politics is the pursuit of social status, as well because it explains why people seem to fall into two different political groups, the left and the right. This theory explains a long list of behaviors engaged in by the left but not the right. Here are some examples:

  • Declining to debate
  • Engaging in ad hominem or using other logical fallacies if they do attempt to debate
  • Becoming emotional if one disagrees with them
  • Refusing to grant the right of free speech to people they disagree with
  • Refusing to associate with people on the right
  • Unfriending people on social media because of political disagreements
  • Marching in the street
  • Living in big cities

Why do leftist seem to have no curiosity about how they may be wrong or why other people may have different opinions? Why do leftist always assume evil motives on the part of those who disagree with them? Why are leftists so hostile to people who disagree with them? Applying considerations of social hierarchy explains all those leftists behaviors and answers all the above questions.

The answer, in short, is that “leftism” is the modern version of tribal, collective, “follow the herd” (which actually means “follow the leader”) thinking, while everyone else to some extent use their faculty of reason to try to figure out what exactly is going on and act on it for their benefit. Both strategies of action are necessary for survival. But they are mutually exclusive. We can engage in both, but not at the same time.

That means inevitably that, in any given circumstance, those choosing one basic survival-strategy will deem those who at the same time choose the other strategy as either “stupid” or “evil”. “Stupid” because they don’t seem to see the danger they are in, or “evil” because they are endangering others – “knowingly”.

Leskovar doesn’t say this, but I think he implies that the “follow the leader” types are much less inclined to discuss their action than the “let’s think this through rationally” types.

In addition, there is a strong incentive for those close to the top of the hierarchy to prevent others from climbing higher. Thus their incentive is to make everyone else a) follow the leader(s) and b) do things that will make it difficult if not impossible for the leaders to be replaced by others. In other words: Leaders are inclined to enhance and support “follow the leader” type behaviour, which will surprise exactly nobody who stops to think about it.

Leskovar explains:

By making some basic simple assertions about human nature and society and then building logically from these statements we can find explanations for many puzzling features of human society, especially politics. These assertions are the following:

  • “Human society always has a natural hierarchy
  • In any moment of decision for human action there are two different fundamental heuristics that can be used to make that decision. One method of decision making is to observe what everyone else is doing and doing the same. The other is to observe reality and use reason to decide how to act at any given moment. These two ways of decision making are fundamental survival strategies. These can be restated as thinking for yourself versus following the crowd. One uses reason and the other does not.
  • It is a fundamental human drive to seek belonging in the group and to seek to rise in the hierarchy. Human decision makers weigh the potential impact on social status at all points in the decision making process.
  • The strength of that drive for status and social belonging varies among people with some having a low drive and others a high drive for improved status. The status drive seems to intensify in people as they rise in status.
  • It is natural to be disdainful of people of lower status and this natural reaction varies in its intensity among individuals. The amount of disdain correlates with the status drive meaning people with a high status drive are probably more likely to disdain lower status people with more intensity than those with less status greed.
  • People tend to worship those of higher status. The intensity of this varies among individuals and probably intensifies as status increases.
  • Since the pursuit of social status is a zero sum game with all gains in status meaning a relative decrease in status for others, people tend to want to prevent lower status people from achieving higher status. Envy is the emotion that tends to trigger action to prevent others from achieving higher social status.”

Leskovar was given an interview with Tom Woods recently, in which he pointed out something highly interesting (prompted here). Namely that ‘Christianity said to people: “Don’t treat the low-status people badly. They are all equal in the eyes of God.” That could have a big part in explaining the rise of Europe. For a thousand years or more, people at the top of the hierarchy were less likely to oppress low-status people. I think that is now going away, and I think we’re getting the fruits from that from this Covid thing, which was very oppressive.’

The host, Tom Woods, doesn’t explore this aspect further, but the whole interview is worth listening to nonetheless.

UKHSA: Boosters Greatly INCREASE Covid Severity 6-9 Months after Vaccination

See here. Very strange.

Excerpts:

The most important fact we see is that for people over 50, the most dangerous period after vaccination is between 6 and 9 months after their last dose. Their risk of hospitalization is several times higher than before six months or after nine months. The increase in risk far outweighs a small reduction in the first six months.

As a side note, this chart shows that additional boosters outright do not reduce risks for people under 50. However, those have very few hospitalizations, making the data less reliable for those ages.

So, people who take a Covid booster first go through a somewhat reduced hospitalization risk for the first six months, then go through a dramatically heightened risk of hospitalization, then hospitalization rates “return to normal,” with the normal being very high. Does that look like the vaccine provides any benefit? Not to me!

Vaccine-injured US-Congresswoman asks ex-Twitter executive why they banned and censored warnings by medical experts against the vaccine

The squirming addressee's facial expression is priceless

See here (5 min video).

Update (11/02/2023): Renowned publicist Naomi Wolf chimes in:

Ms. Navaroli ends her hectoring introductory peroration with a pious, condescending conclusion that her mission is to make communication online “safe.” Her evidence of the crimes committed by speaking on Twitter, include this 1984-level sentence: “The President said he liked to send out his tweets like “little missiles”; and to me that sounded like weaponization of a platform.”’ Has the woman never taken an English class or learned about metaphors? Still later in the hearing, she accuses “fan fiction” of leading directly to the murder of people on Jan 6 — putting herself right in line with the many despots and tyrants who, since the birth of the novel, have accused the act of reading of causing social mayhem.

It is so painful for me to see these faces. I have a very intimate relationship to these people.

They tried to destroy me, and did a fair job of it, by some measures.

These are the people — “my” people, paradoxically; people educated like me, people who shared my political views until 2020; these are people who vacationed where I used to vacation, who hang out with people I know — who were the agents behind full- on Stalinist-type persecution of innocent Americans; of me; these are the people who ruined my life, or sought to do so, and destroyed my career, or sought to do so. These emotionally ugly, these nasty, self-satisfied folks, so sure that they are right, so very, very wrong; are here at last; right here on C-Span.

They persecuted not just me but Dr Martin Kulldorff; Dr Jay Bhattacharya; Dr Paul Alexander; Dr Peter McCullough. So many others. They scrubbed and manipulated the discourse of a platform that has no right to be any more censorious than a telecom company, because they were willing to collude illegally with the government to decide what can be said in America. The messaging from the FBI via “the super-secret James Bond tele-portal”, as Rep Jim Jordan so brilliantly and rightly put it, reached into the voices of Americans and strangled Americans’ rights; but Twitter and the company’s political friends went further than mere silencing. These smarmy people ultimately hurt, and may have helped to injure and kill, many thousands.

Wolf is learning a painful lesson:

I cannot believe that “my own” people, my former tribe on the elite left, are joining forces with the government to violate the First Amendment rights of all Americans and then, worse still, to justify having done so. I can’t believe that Democrat after Democrat, liberal after liberal, is on C-Span singing the praises of censorship and inventing imaginary roles for government officials and social media platforms to keep Americans “safe” from the “threats“ of discourse and ideas. We used to be the side of Howl and Lady Chatterley’s Lover; of The Well of Loneliness. Heck, of the Free Speech Movement! What happened to us?

She concludes:

We will, rather, be in a Nazi reality in which petty officials distort and dictate culture itself and reputationally behead those cultural leaders who pose challenges to the power structure.

Berlin, Munich, in this respect, are here again, in their darkest sense; those who decided, based on a party line, on proper and improper art, books, views — are not dead and gone; lost in history; no; here they are.

But this time they appear in our America, in their bad blue suits, with their pompous nasal voices; saying “I have no knowledge of this matter”; or “I can’t hear the question”; as they occupy, with their damaged consciences, their nauseating excuses, seats in a hearing room on Capitol Hill in the United States of America.

Will we let these cultural functionaries — who operate just like those petty tyrants of the cultures of Berlin and Munich not so long ago — take up space, with impunity, in the heart of our America?

Or will we drag America back into daylight and sunlight again, and force these equivocating wretches to face their own degenerate crimes — crimes against freedom of speech and the Constitution?