A Staged Coup
WARNING : conspiracy theory (dangerous), misinformation (dangerous), humour (terrible)
I’d probably suggest humour (non-existent) as a more appropriate flag for the reader for this one.
In my perpetual attempt to address the question “what the fuck just happened?” when it comes to all things covid, I find it impossible to fully suppress the conspiratorial goblins who swarm through my mental Mines of Moria. I keep getting to the bridge, with escape being mere yards away, only to find there’s this ginormous Balrog waiting
I know that very smart chaps like Eugyppius and very smart felines like El Gato Malo have come down on the side of the no conspiracy; it was an inevitable consequence of the way we govern, with self-serving assholes running the show, but I just can’t shake those conspiracy goblins off.
I keep thinking about the messaging, and the implementation of the various measures. More importantly, I keep thinking about the temporal evolution of those things.
As much as I try to stop myself, it all looks like a beautifully planned and choreographed exercise in control; a beautifully staged coup.
I’ve mentioned it before, but right back at the start of the whole thing we had the BBB (Bow Before Balrogs?) message. The alarm bell rang so loud for me I thought I’d got tinnitus (being in the mosh pit at a Dropkick Murphy’s concert also produces this effect).
How? Why? What? I mean, just whaaaaaaaaaaaaat?
Build Back Better. It was a creepy phrase, spoken by creepy people, with creepy intent - and I simply couldn’t rationalize it as anything other than a very chilling announcement of a strategy that had been planned for some time. It only really makes sense in this context. It might (for extremely small values of might) make a smidgeon of sense if covid was a super-duper deadly disease rather than the “perhaps a bit worse than a severe flu” it actually was, but you have to couple this with the strenuous government efforts to convince everyone that covid was much, much worse than it really was.
Don’t get me wrong, covid could be very dangerous for the unlucky few, and as you got older your luck ran out more and more. But it wasn’t even close to being the existential threat it was made out to be - and certainly not a threat big enough to instigate some ‘program’ of Building Back Better.
The politicians knew this. They did not believe their own messaging at all. As evidence for the prosecution we could submit exhibits A through M; a small collection of the many photographs where the people who told us it was super deadly went to parties and gatherings without any hint they personally were aware of any elevated danger in so doing.
You also have to remember that, in the UK, we had a pandemic preparedness plan in place that considered a scenario WORSE than even the (inflated) reality of covid. This plan drawn from years of experience and expertise in dealing with outbreaks of infectious diseases did not recommend the measures we took. Indeed, it even explicitly rejected some of them. The story was eerily similar in other countries.
Everyone jumped on the lockdown loco and, whilst not pursued as excessively as the Wuhan Welders, it represented a complete U-turn from all previous scientific advice. Follow the science? No idea what we were ‘following’ at the time, but it wasn’t the science (the real stuff, and not the fake The Science™ that we turned into some kind of fetish).
Sweden had meatballs of steel and decided to follow (mostly) the actual science and didn’t go trotting off following the Pied Piper of (Xi Jin) Ping. I don’t know about you guys, but I’d probably be a bit cautious about following the example of a government responsible for the worst campaign of mass murder in all of human history. They might have a slightly different perspective on how to do things.
In another weird U-turn, Sweden was accused of performing some terrible experiment upon its population by not adopting more stringent controls. It was projection on a governmental (mostly mental) scale. Sweden weren’t the ones doing an experiment - the rest of the world were the ones doing that by trying something completely new and (almost) unprecedented; the scourge of lockdown.
But the weird, disturbing, and surreal Build Back Better messaging is just the tip of the iceberg.
Build Back Better only works if something is destroyed in the first place. The clue is in the word ‘back’. It only works if you can be convinced that something has happened that has irrevocably destroyed your previous way of doing things. It only makes sense if something arises that is so deep and dangerous, unprecedented and unforeseen, it lays waste to the established order.
How can a disease that, even with the earliest of estimates, had an overall IFR of 0.3% (and this is probably a bit on the high side) be described as being of such consequence that “building back better” was necessary?
Perhaps more pertinently we might want to ask how so many government leaders and officials “knew”, very early on, that a radical revision of the way we do things was necessary?
Even if we shoot that estimate up to an absurd level, say 1%, it wouldn’t necessitate the things we did.
I don’t for one moment believe that the UK government and their various advisors were not aware of the true statistics, that covid was not super deadly. We already know the government in the UK told the modellers to present only the very worst case scenarios.
Everything was exaggerated. Deliberately.
It doesn’t really make such sense.
Oh, we inflated things so that people were really cautious and we’d save lives.
Ah, OK I get it now, you’re saving them from something that (with high probability) isn’t going to kill them anyway.
I’ve stressed many times before that this is the One Fact to Rule Them All; covid, whilst serious (I would also describe flu as serious), was nowhere near as serious a threat as it was made out to be. Everything needs to be understood from this overarching perspective.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane and see how everything progressed.
Rumours of a Necromancer in Mirkwood
We started off reasonably enough. There seems to be a new disease doing the rounds. No need to panic1. Masks? Haha - don’t make me laugh. They don’t work. Just be a bit cautious and maybe limit your exposure to people who are ill with the disease. Usual bad flu season advice.
Bad News - He Isn’t The Necromancer, He’s a Very Naughty Boy
Look, we’re sorry, it’s a bit worse than we thought. It affects the elderly pretty badly and we’re probably going to have to take things a bit more seriously.
It really IS worse than we thought and we’re going to have to slow things down a bit otherwise our health services might get swamped. So let’s just calm things down a bit by staying indoors for 3 weeks. I know it’s a pain, but we need to flatten the curve.
It’s Actually Sauron and He’s a Really, Really, Naughty Boy
We’re going to need to lock down a bit longer. We need to save lives.
[largely unnoticed flip in goal/messaging here]
Even if you appear healthy, with no symptoms of anything whatsoever, you could be dangerous to other people.
[Complete reversal of previously understood low significance of asymptomatic transmission]
We need a vaccine to get us out of this mess. Vaccines are the only way out of lockdown/restrictions.
[The mess was entirely of our own doing. They created those restrictions and then claimed vaccination was the only way of ending the restrictions. Erm, why don’t we just stop with the restrictions, then? That would end them]
The restrictions work. They save lives. Wear a mask. Get yourself tested to see if you’re healthy and not a risk to others. Sanitize, distance, screens, one way systems, only buy essential stuff (from the few shops that are open), all necessary to combat this deadly disease.
[Remember how deadly it really is?]
We’re probably going to need vaccine passports when we get vaccines. It will mean that if you don’t get vaccinated, you won’t be able to travel freely or enjoy the benefits of society. But we need to keep people safe.
[But if they get a vaccine, won’t they be safe? It was at this point that I learned of the staggering number of people in the world who are immunocompromised and can’t take vaccines - and we need to think about them, even though we never wondered how they managed to still be alive in a world of viruses before covid]
We need to get used to a “New Normal” as part of Building Back Better. Covid has changed the world and the world needs to act together to combat this new, deadly and unprecedented threat.
[Remember all of those efforts to convince us we had to completely revise the way we’d been doing things? It could only possibly work if there really WAS a super deadly disease. Covid wasn’t, but they did everything possible in their power, spent billions on propaganda, to make it seem like covid was such a dangerous disease.]
At this point we’d been so battered and bludgeoned with the propaganda that we thought (a) covid was super-duper deadly (b) the restrictions were necessary and effective (c) we really needed a vaccine to end the restrictions (d) healthy people were dangerous (e) we were following the ‘science’ (f) it was right of the government to severely restrict our rights and (g) a “new normal” was required.
Notice how each step is carefully primed. Each step is supported by a vast propaganda machine. Each step has a ‘plausible’ explanation (plausible enough to convince your average person who thinks their government wouldn’t be telling porky pies about something this important).
An example of the kind of thing that went on was the almost absolute refusal to do anything but suggest risks were high, that extreme caution was required. The probability of respiratory infection has been modelled by the following function
The gamma thing here is the probability of a virion successfully invading a cell and spawning more virus, and the n refers to the number of virions that are breathed in. It’s a decent model that seems to empirically match observation. The gamma thing is very small - and this kind of model takes into account the concept of ‘viral load’. Here’s what it looks like.
Did anyone ever tell you the truth? That if you were out and about in the presence of healthy (non-symptomatic) people, your chances of being infected with Sars-Cov-2 were extremely low? No of course they didn’t. They made it seem like being outside was a death sentence. Ass-ymptomatic transmission would have been a better spelling.
How do we convince people to wear masks? Primarily, you spread a myth surrounding the significance of asymptomatic transmission. How do we convince people to go along with lockdown? Primarily, you spread a myth about how dangerous and deadly the disease is. How do we convince people to go along with the vaccine passport idea, not just for foreign travel, but to be allowed2 to partake of everyday normal activity? Primarily, you spread the myths of deadliness and asymptomatic transmission, and use the magic word ‘vaccine’. And so on.
Notice how each step represents a tightening of the screw. We were being deliberately channelled down a very specific pathway - towards vaccines and an infrastructure of health ‘security’.
Imagine having to do all these things during a flu outbreak? Well, before covid, it would have been utterly unthinkable, but we’ve created a whole new legion of hysterical hypochondriacs with the covid propaganda - so doing the same things for flu probably doesn’t seem so crazy to many any more.
The Return of The King
And, wonders of wonders, in just short of 9 months in which they created, tested and manufactured a vaccine3, the King Pharma returned to deal with Sauron covid. Narsil had been re-forged in the form of a needle containing some super-effective mRNA stuff.
Safe and effective. Effective and Safe. Really safe and really effective. Amazingly safe and amazingly effective. So very safe - the safest vaccine ever. Effective too. Can’t believe just how effective this stuff is. Best vaccine ever. It’s a dead end for the virus, they said. Again and again and again.
So fucking effective it was a miracle. God, this science stuff is amazing. It’s so amazingly effective, but it’s still really risky if you get too close to someone who hasn’t been vaccinated. What “science” would that be then? It’s both super-effective and doesn’t work at the same time? Has to be some quantum gubbins in there, some kind of Schrödinger’s cat thing going on. Don’t worry your non-scientific little head, buttercup, we’ve got it all figured out; leave it to the experts.
Austria went all gooey-eyed and like their most famous son goose-stepped trampled over civil liberties with really stringent measures against those filthy disease-ridden sub-humans who didn’t get vaccinated. Where have I heard those kind of sentiments before? Hmmmm, let me think. Wasn’t it somewhere around that region about 90 years ago?
Austria, of course, weren’t alone in this but they might be the most (tragically) ironic example.
We’d gone from “don’t panic” to categorizing people who didn’t want to be injected with an experimental product (that, purely incidentally, was going to make Pharma many, many billions of dollars of profit) as not being worthy of full participation in society.
If you look at everything that needed to be in place, and how it was all put in place at its right time, in the right sequence, in order to get from the reasonable beginnings to the beginnings of a fascist state4, then it’s very difficult not to, at least, suspect some kind of plan. It’s a hypothesis I’m unable to completely reject.
Maybe this was all a natural progression, and perfectly explicable without thinking there was some initial strategy in place, but there have been quite a few steps involved that had to happen just so in order for us to arrive at this destination.
If this isn’t what a staged coup looks like then I don’t know what it would look like.
Ask yourself the following question. If you were some deadly villain hell-bent on world domination and control, for the sake of argument let’s call you Nasal Schwab, then how would you go about it? You might well come up with a plan that looks something close to what we experienced with covid. Sure, it all could have happened by ‘accident’, but it also looks very much like a very sweet plan to introduce all sorts of extra control measures into society, doesn’t it?
I think it’s wider than just ‘health’ though. Health is a great way to scare people into compliance. We’re all probably just a teeny-tiny bit afraid of the possibility of some deadly disease that we can’t fight off (I’ve watched too many zombie movies).
But really the key element of control is to do with ‘safety’. More crucially it’s all about getting people on board with the idea that it’s the government’s job to ensure our safety in an ever-widening sphere.
So we have, for example, online ‘safety’ bills that are thinly-disguised power-grabs for total control of the flow and accessibility of information.
In places like China, where the absolute shit stain that was Mao held sway, it was about safety too. The only way you could make yourself safe from this murderous bastard was to go along with the whole communist crapola.
We’re doing the same thing - different end consequences if you disobey, but pretty much the same playbook. Safety has overtaken everything as our overriding concern. Freedom? If you talk about that old-fashioned idea you’re one of those frothing far-right loons. But, just to make sure, let’s introduce a system where if you say hurty words we can suspend your bank account - purely to keep people safe from you. We promise to let you have access to our your money again when you’ve undergone re-education and commit yourself to government policy being kind.
And lots of people think this kind of coercion is the right thing to do. Extraordinary.
The Chinese have evolved a bit too since Hannibal Mao - they use things like social credit scores to ensure compliance.
Remember all those people who, during covid, said “be safe”? They were well-meaning, which was probably why I didn’t say what I really felt, which was something like “say that to me one more time and you’ll find out how ‘safe’ I really am”.
There are so many more elements to this progression, this sequence of well-timed steps and nudges, that I wanted to write about. But I’m trying to keep you guys (reasonably) safe from my extended ramblings.
Except if you were in China. You could drop down dead in the street, there, upon exposure to the CoronaDoom.
Allowed? Whoa - they slipped that one past us didn’t they? Not many in the ‘media’ commented on this radical usurpation of people’s rights.
This is the fabled “speed of science” - look what we can do when we put our minds to it, eh? We can create shit that doesn’t work AND gives people heart problems (amongst other things). Pure magic.
Fascism is hard to define, but very close collusion between the private sector and government in the service of a national goal is not too far off a decent first stab at a definition
As much as I respect El Gato and Eugyppius, they are off-base on this one. This whole thing feels well-planned and co-ordinated and utterly ruthless. Why it was planned, I have no idea. But it was planned, for sure, and people's health was the last thing on the planners' minds.
That was amusing. It is interesting how all the “mistakes” and errors in the pandemic all go in one direction. That direction being favorable to Pharma and its wealthy owners. They never make what is later deemed a mistake in a direction that hurts Pharma. Due to that it is hard to believe it is just another tale of the usual government incompetence.