As 2022 draws to a close, this will probably be my last post of the year. I hope you all had a brilliant Christmas free from the worry of playing Scrabble (or any board game)1. I had a 5-day riot with family, and the title of today’s post comes from one of those moments that make no sense to anyone else in which my son-in-law loudly gave thanks to the Time Lords. It will no doubt become the family quote of 2023.
Had we actually been Time Lords, much of the damage wrought by covid or, rather more accurately, the damage done by our response to covid, could have been avoided. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but there were lots of people with considerable foresight (not to mention expertise) who were trying2 to tell everyone that our “management” of covid was, to put it bluntly, fucking insane.
It’s not very much consolation to realise they were right as we survey the damage that has been done and mourn the people who, needlessly, lost their lives in the rush to assuage the Hysterical Hordes of Hypochondriacs that popped up everywhere like some rancid spikes on the surface of a virus.
Almost everything we were told, everything we were told to do, every measure and intervention, was questionable. And that’s putting it somewhat mildly. In any ‘crisis’ situation there will be, in hindsight, probably a few things that could have been done a bit better. What marks covid apart from other ‘crises’ is the sheer number of things we messed up, got wrong3, and made worse. And we didn’t eff these things up by a little, but by a lot.
I’m entering the 5th paragraph with some trepidation because I know that any summary of the AoC (the Age of Covid) is a considerable undertaking. Not because the stuff is difficult, but because there’s just so much bloody stuff to say. Almost everything, everything, from masks to mandates, from models to mRNA, we fucked up. Big time.
And so, as you sit down with the 20 boxes of chocolate you still have left, or attempt to lower the cheese mountain in your fridge, let’s try to summarize the AoC
The Emergence of Emergent Emergencies
Around about the beginning of 2020 we became gradually aware of a new virus on the scene. It was quite contagious and, if it progressed to a more serious infection, the symptoms were, initially, a bit puzzling. Medics weren’t entirely sure whether this was a respiratory infection or some cardiovascular infection, or both.
What was pretty clear, however, and from very early on, was that it was a disease overwhelmingly (seriously) affecting the elderly and that the IFR (the infection fatality rate) was going to be in the ballpark of flu. Maybe a bit worse, but certainly not Ebola-level worse.
The initial advice in the UK was calming and reassuring - don’t worry too much, they said.
Almost overnight we went from a state of mild unease and concern to a full-on Niagara4 of fear. The fear was vastly more contagious than the virus itself and spread across the entire world. We entered into a panicdemic, and the rest, as they say, is history.
It was as if someone flipped a switch from “sane, measured, calm” to the “holy-fuck-we’re-all-gonna-die” position. It was quite bizarre even at the time - and in hindsight it looks even more surreal.
How, or why, this happened has been an endless source of speculation, and it’s one of the most worrisome aspects of it all. Some maintain it was an overreaction as a natural result of large globally-embedded political systems, others look to more nefarious and Machiavellian motivations. What is beyond doubt, however, is that everything else followed from this extraordinary level of fear that had been deliberately inculcated.
It didn’t matter that we weren’t actually facing an emergency in any reasonable definition of that word5, it only mattered that we felt we were in an emergency.
If any one single thing could be said to characterize the AoC it is this fear. Without the fear there could be no population-wide accepted basis for lockdowns, or mask mandates, or emergency use authorizations - or, indeed, any of the other insane interventions such as one-way systems in supermarkets or the ubiquitous useless plastic screens that sprouted everywhere.
It became very clear that the politicians themselves, those responsible for creating policy and the laws for enforcement of those policies, did not share the same level of fear that they were trying to engender in the population. In the UK you could be given a hefty fine for sitting on a park bench, or having someone round to play Scrabble or otherwise entertain each other, whilst the politicians were partying away heedless of the allegedly extreme danger they were in.
They, clearly, didn’t take it seriously, but they expected everyone else ‘beneath’ them to. Nowhere was this more evident than in the many pictures that emerged of this elite, and maskless, caste enjoying their various glitzy soirées whilst the masked serfs servers brought them their latest canapé or champagne flute.
We’re used to rank hypocrisy from our politicians. They’re very, very, good at it. They don’t really care. But this isn’t really about hypocrisy - it’s about the fact that they, obviously, did not believe there was a deadly, dangerous viral pandemic. If they did, their own behaviour would have been vastly different.
They weren’t guided by the science, or even The Science™, but by politics. It was a political decision to deliberately inculcate an extreme level of fear - a fear that they, themselves, did not share. This attitude of “we know this virus is probably just a smidgeon worse than flu, but we’re going to pretend it’s an Ebola-level threat” has been one of the most difficult things to explain - and I don’t have any properly-cogent explanations to offer.
If you’re a scientist, the very last thing you want is to have to work with FUD (fucked-up data) and yet this is precisely what government ‘policy’ ensured. The classification of a ‘covid’ death as a death for any reason within 28 days of a positive covid test is utterly inexplicable on any scientific basis. It has the political effect of creating more fear in the population, but it’s a disastrous thing to do from a scientific perspective.
Even Dianne Abbott, a UK politician who seems, God love her, to be spectacularly stupid, would be able to work this one out. Collecting shitty data in the middle of a supposedly deadly pandemic with a novel virus is shitty science. I don’t know why I even have to point this out. It’s as obvious as the boner in the dress that autogynephile is wearing.
Perhaps a very significant factor is, as it always is, money. Vast sums of money were involved. It was up for grabs - particularly if you were chums with some friendly politician. Something like £400 billion6, and probably more, was spent by the UK in ‘fighting’ this once in a lifetime, never before seen, astonishingly deadly and unprecedented, spiky ball of woe.
None of this money would have been available without the extreme fear that was engendered.
Some of it went to keep the population ‘happy’. Have a 6 month break from work - we’ll pay you. But an awful lot of it went on batshit bonkers schemes such as Track and Trace, mass testing - or other things like the various Goo’s generated by AZ, Pfizer and Moderna.
The answer to the question; why was this level of fear deemed necessary? might be no more exciting than the rather prosaic, because some people stood to earn a shit-ton of money.
We’re going to be living with the consequences of this hyped-up ÜberFear for many years to come, and in all sorts of ways - none of them good.
What’s particularly relevant is that the UK’s pandemic preparedness plans, and I imagine the similar plans of other countries, specifically warned about the potential negative effects of too much fear and panic. But, naturally, we did the opposite.
Covid did not meet any kind of ‘threshold’, if indeed there is such a threshold, for the complete and total reversal of decades of pandemic management and advice. It didn’t even come close. Yet we still acted as if it was some deadly alien threat from a bad Sci-Fi movie that required a radical overhaul of everything we thought we knew.
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the deliberate generation of this ÜberFear - because it’s important. Everything rests upon it. Without it, the last 3 years could not have happened.
Stick that in your meditation pipes and meditate upon it, because it’s the key to everything that followed.
Testing, Testing, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, . . .
(Alternative heading : it’s the end of the world as we know it - and I feel fine)
Imagine, if you will, calling your boss in 2019 and saying that you have asymptomatic flu and you’ll be needing a week or so off work. You would probably have found yourself only asymptomatically employed.
Yet in 2020 we went test crazy. Here was this virus, one virus to rule them all, this deadly once in a lifetime unprecedented super-scary virus, that, it was said, something like 30% of people didn’t even know they had unless they tested for it. And of course, if you tested positive, you were treated as some biohazard not fit for human contact.
From somewhere, we know not where, emerged this idea of asymptomatic transmission. You might feel fine, have no symptoms of anything whatsoever, but you needed a test to positively ‘demonstrate’ your health. It was an effing pantomime - and one that many could not avoid.
Getting yourself tested for a few things every now and then, even when you have no symptoms, is not a bad idea. It’s the basis of screening programs for things like cancers which are easier to successfully treat if detected early. But covid testing? And let’s not forget, when the rapid tests came along some utter poltroons were testing themselves several times a week, if not more.
Quite apart from the scientific rationale for mass testing (largely non-existent) it makes little sense even within the (incorrect) narrative framework upon which the whole testing programme was established. Even if we accept the fiction that asymptomatic transmission was a significant driver, you’d have to ensure that you did not come within infectious contact of, basically anyone, in order for your test to mean anything beyond an hour or so.
It was almost all theatre. The place where I worked required negative tests to be allowed on to campus. They had a testing centre on campus - to which I was allowed to proceed even when my rinky-dinky little green tick on the app had expired. Lines of us, chatting away, being very social and not very distanced, being shepherded by folk in hazmat suits to have the cotton bud from hell shoved into our nasal cavities. It was all a bit like a movie set.
It didn’t do very much, if anything, to contain the virus - but it was all very good at reminding us all just how deadly a situation we were in!
It has been remarked upon very often, but it’s worth repeating; if we didn’t have the daily covid ‘death’ figures shoved in our faces and we didn’t have to test (or mask), how many of us would have realised we were in the middle of a deadly unprecedented pandemic?
We didn’t just go a bit overboard, we fell off the boat and sank to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. It was a grotesque overreaction to a ‘pandemic’ the majority would not have even been aware of had we not been told about it - or been made to ‘test’ for it.
Once again, everything was about the establishment and maintenance of fear.
The question the inestimable Ivor Cummins was fond of asking was why are they doing this to us? It’s not all that easy to answer. The ‘non-conspiratorial’ answer of some synchronised mass-hysteria that gripped the world’s governments might be true, but seems quite hard to fully endorse given that so much of the hysteria was generated by those very same governments and largely created out of whole cloth. And it was a hysteria that, by and large, those in power did not indulge in as they munched on their caviar and quaffed the brandy.
It’s a counterfactual, but imagine what the last three years would have looked like if you took the fear, took the emotion, out of the equation? Would perfectly sane, rational and calm beings have decided upon the same interventional strategy?
There’s a lot wrong with a strategy based on mass testing before we even consider the science part and here, too, it falls apart. Mass testing of an asymptomatic cohort is nuts from a maths perspective. In periods of lowish prevalence a very high percentage of the positive results obtained will be coming from false positives. That’s just an inescapable conclusion from the maths. Add in the somewhat duplicitous and false equivalence of (a) a positive test meaning infection and (b) a positive test meaning infectiousness and you have a recipe for a glorious FUBAR. And let’s not mention PCR tests being run at cycles that could charitably be described as ‘homeopathic’.
Mutual Maskerbation (your mask protects you, but it protects me gooderer)
The science here, and The Science™, is pretty much ‘settled’. The science knows with an extremely high level of probability that masking does not have an appreciable, or significant, effect on the levels of infection. If masks were, say, 10% effective, this would have shone like Captain Marvel’s hairdo when she goes into ‘god’ mode. There’s simply no way that any of the data collected, or the 2 RCT’s done (the Danish study and the Bangladesh study), support the notion that masks had, or have, any significant benefit for the reduction of covid.
The Science™ says otherwise. Of course it does. It, too, is ‘settled’ in the minds of its believers. You have to wear the Eye of Horus to ward off the nasty disease spirits - and they do a jolly good job, it is claimed. The only jolly good job they actually do is that of being an ‘in your face’ visible reminder of the most serious plague since plagues were invented (allegedly).
Did I mention that fear, the establishment and maintenance of it, were the most critical components of our pandemic response? I’m not sure. I might have done.
Masks, again, were a politically necessary7 measure and not a medically necessary measure.
Why did they want us to be afraid when they, themselves, weren’t? Why did they want us to believe that everything was orders of magnitude worse than it actually was? I get that a doctor on a covid ward might have a different perspective because they’re at the sharp end and having to deal with the seriously ill on a daily basis. To them, it might look like the sky is falling down. But at the only level that really matters if you want to shape a national policy, an overarching statistical level, things were nowhere near this desperate. Not by a long shot.
And talking of shots . . .
The Unbearable Tightness of Breathing
Yes, covid could do that. But so, as vigorously denied by The Experts™, could the great Shots of Deliverance (the SODS).
The JISM (the Jabbathon of Infinite Saintly Munificence) is still being vigorously promoted by some governments. The Nordic nations seem to have come to their senses and have stopped promoting this horrendous shite to anyone under the age of 50 (and being only somewhat lukewarm about them for those older), but in other places it’s all about getting this crap squirted into your body as often as is humanly possible to ‘protect’ us against this virus - or its great-great-great-great grandchild.
Thank God most of us have stopped paying attention and are raising our own middle-fingered spike protein as we give our governments the bird.
Get the Goo, they say - it will protect you for at least the next 3 days before you need the next dose. Or something.
The messaging surrounding the ‘vaccines’ has changed more often than a genderfluid weirdo on amphetamines. Only the most vulnerable need it. No, anyone over 40. No, if you’re 18 you need it. No, kids need it too. Fuck, we’d inoculate every single sodding spermatozoa if we could. Get the vaccine to protect yourself. No, others. Nobody is safe until everyone is.
It’s the only way to get herd immunity, something we didn’t agree with until the SODS came along. It will stop the virus dead in its tracks. Well, if you get the Goo you can still catch covid, but it stops you from getting really naughty covid. We developed it over several days - and tested it over a similar timeframe, so there’s no need to worry - and all of those vaccine adverse event monitoring systems are crap anyway - we put them in place as a bit of a joke - you can’t trust them now, even though we did before. And our new super boosters - so scientifically sexy we gave them a new catchy name of bivalent - they got tested on mice so you can rest assured they’re totally fine for use in humans. And they work. Antibodies you see - it’s the only word you total plebs understand about immunity anyway - even though they’re just one component of a deeper and more complex defence system. And you’ll need the shot if you’ve already had covid because reasons. And did we tell you we want to hide the trial data for 75 years? Oh? We didn’t? That was a bit naughty of us wasn’t it?
It’s all a load of incontinent drivel - and even if one or two specific elements of it are actually correct, how on earth are we supposed to trust these eejits?
If you’re a big fan of vaccines (the pre-covid version of these things and not the genetic munging Goo that is merely a very temporary prophylactic at best) then the governmental strategy adopted across the world here must have you holding your head in despair. I’m no longer a big fan of vaccines - too much doubt has been engendered by being SODomized over the last 3 years. Some of them might work, and work well, but I no longer think they’re all brilliant. I am not alone in having my view of vaccines turned through a 180.
They, the SODS, have not worked by any rational measure. They seem to have made things worse. The disease progression and continual infections look nothing like what we would expect from a successful vaccine.
Then along come the modelers. Oh dearie, dearie me. These models can be complex - coupled differential equations, maybe even coupled stochastic differential equations. We squiggle and squirm and translate it all into computer code because we can’t actually solve the equations by hand. We press the big red button and lo! out pops the answer - the computer it says : the vaccines saved 20 million lives in the 2nd year of covid.
Who knew that a disease that only killed 2 million (allegedly) in its first year, when everyone’s immune system was coping with a newish virus, would be over an order of magnitude worse (without the ‘vaccine’) in its second year when a significant fraction of the world’s population had developed disease acquired immunity? These models are magic. Literally, it would seem.
What a total farce. It’s embarrassing.
Follow the science? Well, when you’ve actually shown me some, I might.
We now have a significant fraction of our populations who have been sufficiently scared by everything that they were willing to contemplate the most severe and inhumane restrictions on those who refused to get what is, still, an experimental goo under emergency8 use authorization injected into their bodies on the pretext that, for some reason, their own vaccine only works properly if other people get it too.
For a time, our most cherished notion, the great idea upon which much of our ‘western’ civilisations rests, was that of freedom, or individual liberty. Of course, like any high and mighty principle it needs some boundary or it all falls apart but, by and large, we set things up to give people as much freedom as we could whilst being cognizant of the constraint that some of those freedoms might conflict with the freedoms of others.
We have replaced this, our most cherished notion, with the illusion of safety.
And how did we do this? Simple. We got people sufficiently afraid. I might have mentioned earlier that fear is a central driver.
Fear is the Mind Killer
In Frank Herbert’s novel Dune, Paul Atreides is subjected to a test. It’s a test designed to determine whether he is fit to be categorised as human. He must master his fear - otherwise he’ll be jabbed with the gom jabbar, a needle tipped with a deadly poison.
Of all the devastations wrought by the responses to covid, the financial, the educational, the break up of friends and families, the loss of civil liberties, and more, perhaps the one that will be most pervasive is the psychological devastation.
If I were to be diagnosed with covid tomorrow, I know that tickling away at the back of my mind there would a little note of extra panic and fear. It’s covid. Oh. My. God. However much I can usually suppress this ridiculous thought, I know it would be there - burrowing away like a termite trying to undermine the foundations of my rationality. The propaganda is inescapable and designed to infiltrate to the subconscious. It wasn’t your run-of-the-mill propaganda either, but weapons-grade propaganda signed, sealed, and delivered by your benevolent governments.
We were taught/nudged/encouraged to view our fellow men and women as threats. Literally. Ethel Cuddle-Nuggets was no longer that sweet, but potty, old lady across the way, but a freakin walking biohazard! Away from me you diseased old hag!
I don’t know what this will have done to our psyches, but I suspect the damage is not inconsiderable. We’ve largely forgotten covid now here in the UK and the vast majority of people are back to ‘normal’. But for how long? When the next ‘pandemic’ comes along, as it surely will, how much more readily will we succumb to the same old nonsense?
How much of the programming we endured will be re-purposed and weaponized in the fight against that other ‘emergency’, the climate crisis? Keep us safe from carbon dioxide. We need to be safe. If you drive an ICE vehicle you’re killing the planet, you’re endangering us. You probably didn’t even get vaccinated, did you, you selfish c**t.
You see how it’s going to play out, don’t you?
Keep the Faith
If you’re reading this you probably have not been vaccinated, or regret having been vaccinated. You kept the faith, or wanted to. Not faith in governments and institutions, but faith in yourself and your own instincts. My prediction is that we’re heading, in 2023 (and beyond), for an even rockier road centred around climate alarmism - and we need to keep the faith more than ever.
If anything, the government overreach and grotesque propaganda has made us stronger. It’s an emergency is it? You told us covid was an emergency too. Why should I believe you now? And look at the godawful mess you made with covid.
And so - may God Bless You All in 2023
And the Time Lords
I refer, of course, to the staggeringly inept government “scientists” in the UK who did, indeed, advise against playing Scrabble during Christmas 2020. Most of us ignored the idiots, but some had their festive season turned into a time of fear and isolation. At one point even the ‘dangers’ of Christmas decorations were mentioned.
And failing, because in 2020 this stuff was “misinformation” and went against The Science™ and so the ‘plebs’ had to be ‘protected’ from it. It was all for their own good, you see.
It’s a bit of a moot point here - the nagging doubts remain as to exactly how much of the covibollox these government Scientists™ actually, personally, believed.
Those of us who remained in a relatively calm state began to describe the hysterical overreactors as “bedwetters”. Probably not the wisest of things to do, but the frustration was already building by then.
This is not to say that things weren’t serious, for some, and that some hospitals, but by no means all, were overstretched with people suffering from covid. But “serious” is not synonymous with “emergency”. There’s always going to be some subjective element in deciding to elevate a threat level to emergency status, but there does need to be at least some rational foundation, some recognisable metric, in play too.
To put this figure in context it would take someone earning £30,000 per year (roughly the median household income in the UK) over 13 million years to earn this.
Politically necessary if you wanted to cower your population into submission. They did bugger all in terms of any health benefit (and may even have made things worse in that regard).
What fucking emergency? It wasn’t an ‘emergency’ in the first place and, as sure as large immotile gametes are large immotile gametes, it ain’t one now.
ive been over reading about covid for months and usually just let the stories go, but this one was a well written reminder of the bullshit.
i would guess i was one of the real early ones to figure it out, not cos im smart, i am but because i had spent 20 years looking into biohazards and spent 4 years before covid studying health and had a great understanding of how much medicine is a fraud.
stay away from doctors unless its unavoidable, and at that point dont let them bully you or lie to you, everything is researchable
I spent a large part of my career dealing with risk. When the mRNA jabs came along I couldn't perform an assessment of the risk of getting jabbed because there was no data. There was simply no way to understand the long term risk of getting jabbed. On the other hand, Pfizer was one of the most notoriously corrupt organisations in the world, always ready to harm their customers for profit.
I thought about all this for a couple of nanoseconds and decided there was no way I was letting that stuff anywhere near me. I stood by this decision at considerable personal cost, including early retirement from work. Every day now, I give thanks that I'm not jabbed, particularly because 5 of my ex colleagues died of suddenly in 2021. Im very confident that the vaccines killed them all without warning with heart attacks and strokes in their 40s and 50s. It was all very grim.
On that cheery note...I greatly enjoy your writing. Thanks for your efforts, and a happy and prosperous and idiocy free 2023 to you and your family.