This is update CIX.
Let’s summarize, shall we?
My first post on the panic was 27 January 2020: “Taleb Chastises Calm Journalist, Advises Precautionary Panic To Coronavirus“. Taleb almost at once became a shrinking, shrieking hersteric. Which I should have, but did not see, would have become the default position among Experts and rulers almost planetwide.
My second post was on 3 February 2020: “Unnecessary Panic Over Coronavirus?” Note the question mark, which left room for uncertainty, which at that time still existed. Health theater had already begun, and was laughable even then.
There was lots of uncertainty at the start. Would this bug stay in China, have just one wave, and so on. Many on our side bought the Chinese propaganda and panicked, and became just as hersterical as Taleb. This was exasperating. Our own Moldbug said, “In the next few months, you or someone you love will drown of a cough.” (He’s still at it, by the way.)
The word “exponential” was on everybody’s fingertips. Twitter became idiotic, with those on the right advocating panic, and those on the left screaming racism.
This was just silly, so, for fun and instruction only, since I did not guess the size of the resulting panic, I posted on 13 February 2020 some R code I had been using to post projections on Twitter. This became Update I. This used only the data available at the time, and common models on pandemics. Exponential forever was impossible, but you could hardly get anybody to understand that.
I had no sense the entire world would retreat toward effeminacy, and so didn’t take these models seriously. Except to smack those who kept screaming doom. Even as early as February people thought this is the end. There were “sober” predictions of billions-with-a-B dead.
By 3 March, and Update III, we had Blue Cheka warning about farts. That update also showed what happened seasonally with flu, including the season leading into the Hong Kong fly pandemic of 1968.
We pointed out that there were many other pandemics, like the Asian Flu in 1957 and the Hong Kong, and others, which were much deadlier, and with no panics. Back then, the CDC had these historical events on their web page, saying each killed “up to four million” globally. They’ve since removed the “up to”. You have to laugh.
By Update V, on 17 March, it became clear “Madness Has Arrived.” Funny that soon after this, the CDC stopped reporting flu numbers as they had been doing for years, and years, and years. Sayonara, influenza, our old friend, Covid has arrived.
By 23 March 2020, we knew this was going to be a full raging panic. Taleb was back saying “If You’re Not Panicking, You’re A Psychopath“. This isn’t poetic license. He said the very word, and meant it.
Enter Neil Ferguson, the serial fornicator of Reality. He predicted millions of dead in the USA by mid summer 2020. I screamed that this guy made a (solid, lucrative) career out of being wildly wrong. He predicted apocalypse after apocalypse. He was never right. Yet always believed.
It was then I discovered you can never be fired for being wrong in the right direction.
The insane, punishing, disease-spreading lockdowns began around April. In England, neighbor ratted out neighbor for going outside twice in one day. Bodies of old folks abandoned in nursing homes were discovered.
We knew (in that previous link) about another weak-livered fellow, too: “Cartoonist Scott Adams has embraced his inner little girl and now shouts that people who aren’t cowering in the dark are ‘sociopaths.'”
The WHO recommended against lockdowns in 2019, only to abruptly switch advice after Chinese money began to flow in spring of 2020. Curious, no? Anyway, it’s always been clear lockdowns do not stop respiratory disease, and even help spread them.
We soon couldn’t quite trust official numbers, as the tendency to classify all deaths, even from falling off roofs, were being classified as coroandoom deaths.
I warned us in May 2020 that “cases” were fake and gay and were being used to juice the panic. That hasn’t stopped. Nobody hears that. What they do hear is “case” and think “near death.” Even then, as now, the most common treatment is to send people home to wait it out.
Apologies for lockdowns, all model based, started then, too. Why, not only were lockdowns stopping deaths, they were making trillions of dollars for us all! Yes, the t-word was used. Remind me why any of you listen to economists. Oligarchs got insanely wealthy due to the lockdowns, anyway. Whereas real people were kicked repeatedly in the gonads: governments called people “non-essential”.
Because of economists, I began emphasizing (13 May 2020) all models only say what they are told to say. I can’t get anybody to hear that, either, alas.
Masks had been advocated here and there, but it didn’t become a criminal act not to wear one until July 2020.
I started posting regular and frequent reviews of papers—stretching back a full century, to the Spanish Flu—all of which show masks don’t work. I reviewed paper after paper which claim the contrary, all of which are entirely model based, and use things like spherical cows (mannequins hooked to breathing machines, etc.), all of which are useless. Masks are asinine, and do nothing but spread fear.
We published innumerable comparisons showing even near full mask compliance did nothing, and even caused harm.
Alas, nobody heard that either.
The wizened pervert troll Fauci (in September 2020) said our pandemic was not because he funded gain-of-lethality research, but because we angered Mother Nature. This man still shows his face in public.
I admit to another political error. I had thought that vaccines, when announced, would calm Experts and rulers, and therefore propagandists would signal it was okay not to panic. I was way off. Even as early as November 2020—even before the vaccine was generally available—Expert and rulers were saying they ought to be mandatory.
But in an effeminate, toxic femininity way. Vaccines wouldn’t be forced: you just couldn’t work or eat without one. A few readers here, mostly older and frightened themselves, thought this was a grand idea.
I predicted, in December 2020, that the efficacy statistics touted by vax manufacturers were far too high—simply because all pharmaceuticals boast and brag all the damned time. This turned out to be true.
And so it went.
I’ve been warning us for months now that as we went into fall and early winter, deaths would start to rise. As they always do. I said don’t panic. We are panicking.
I’ve pointed out, almost from day one, that we have had flu vaccines for decades upon decades, which have never eliminated flu (though it has now mysteriously “disappeared”), and because the coronadoom is a coronavirus, one of the causes of the common cold, there was no chance we would eliminate covid, which we would have to learn to live with.
In recent days, there has been an enormous increase in propaganda about heart attacks in the young, and how they are caused by cold and global warming, lockdown stress and freedom, marijuana and e-cigarette use, video games, and on an on. Every possible cause has been blamed, except, heaven forfend, the vax itself.
I showed, over and over again, kids are not at any serious risk of coroandoom, but they were from the vax. They have 10 times the risk of dying in a car crash. Yet nobody is advocating criminalizing kids in cars.
We have reached the concentration camp stage in Australia, a state Austria and Germany envy. They are going to, they say, arrest the unvaxxed and throw them into camps. You have to admire the German sense of historical continuity. In Canada, in New Brunswick, the unvaxxed can’t buy groceries. Well, if the unvaxxed starve to death, they at least won’t die of coroandoom.
Comrade de Blasio yesterday dictated that all should be vaxed, or die. Yet our great comrade only holds power for four more weeks. This is purely vice signaling on his part, a way to go out with one last Screw You.
The Courts, at least in the States, have pushed back some of the madness. Some countries, like Sweden and Florida (it should secede), maintained their sanity throughout the panic. Mention their name to Experts and the frightened and they will pretend not to have heard you.
We all saw the word fully transform. In Israel, “fully” now means the number 4. It will, if predictions are correct, only grow.
Experts cannot admit error; rulers adore their newfound powers. But there is more to it than that. The entire elite class does not want this to end. They love not going to the office, staying home, and masturbating on zoom calls. They love to wear masks. They love to signal their vice. Covid has been the greatest thing in their lives, and they will not give it up easily.
This brief review proves on solid thing: being right about Reality does not matter. Power does. I said it before, and I say it again: we have to replace their Experts with our Experts, their rulers with our rulers, their elite with our elite. There is no other solution.
BRIEF PREDICTIVE ADDENDUM: LIKELY BEST TO SKIP
Predictions? Well, there are those involving Reality, and those in politics. My track record in politics is dismal, though I’m solid on Reality.
For Reality, we have the Coronadoom Worry Index:
This is covid attributed deaths divided by “cases”. Recall both numbers are only proxies of Reality, and are exaggerations to various extent. Nevertheless, given this, everything we’ve seen, and the depressing (for propagandists) new that the Ominous Omicron isn’t killing anybody, I predict we’ll see a peak in January, followed by a series of diminishing smaller peaks.
Which is nothing more than what I have been predicting since the beginning, these two years ago, suitably tweaked.
For politics, well, Reality always does win in the end. It’s that the end can be a long time coming. I see forced vaccination diminishing in fervor, but not until the spring, when the sun works its annual miracle. Some Experts are softening. They’ll never admit to error, but they can lose their ardor.
But that may be wishcasting. The other possibility is that our evil rulers move to the next logical steps after concentration camps.
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An excellent summary Briggs. I fear that our leaders who have sampled the status of Kim Il Jong will be loath to give up their new found powers of state.
I have to say, federalism in the United States may not be what it used to be, but it’s still not dead. Imagine how much worse it would be – all over the world, even – if the US federal government were all powerful and unconstrained and were able to “lead the way” in “mitigation” measures? We would have had concentration camps way before Australia ever did.
I don’t see vexxine mandates ending easily, but I do see them becoming pointless because the vexxinated end up being subjected to the same restrictions as the unvexxinated.
We’ve already seen this with masks. At first a lot of stores had signs saying that those without the jab must wear masks but those with could do without. But very soon the signs said that everyone should wear the masks again.
In Austria they locked down only those without the jab, before extending it to everyone a week or so later.
At my work there is currently a “you must test, but you don’t have to if you have been jabbed” policy. They set it up that way because it is difficult legally in MN to have a straight up vaccine mandate, but testing mandates are fine. This also makes it easier for them to shut down religious and medical objections. Anyway, a few weeks ago the company made testing available to everyone, even the vexxed, and over the last couple of weeks they’ve very strongly encouraged the vexxed to get tested weekly. Based on past behavior from the administration, it will probably be mandatory for everyone to be tested regularly by mid January.
So again and again we see them set up the stick with “you must get the jab, or we will force you do to X.” But they can’t resist making everyone eventually do X. But if everyone must do X, it’s no longer a convincing threat towards getting jabbed.
@JR Ewing
Totally agree. I have never been more grateful for our system.
I do think that the vax injuries and deaths are going to be impossible to hide soon. I’m expecting basketball season to be lit!
If Moldbug loves China so much he should just move there and leave the rest of us sane, intelligent people alone.
Whitney-
I wouldn’t get my hopes up. I’m sure the controllers have ensured US sports stars are getting saline placebos.
Moldbug lost me when he started shrieking about covid. Sad to see that he never stopped. He has degenerated into a midwit. Same with Roderick Kaine (Atavisionary), what a moron he turned out to be! Everybody on the dissident right who bought into the corona craze is disqualified and should STFU.
“Enter Neil Ferguson, the serial fornicator of Reality. ”
Is this a double entendre?
Ferguson’s employer, Imperial College, had received grant commitments of $303,563,584 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Oxford received $254,347,370. How do I know this? I went to the foundation website and added it all up from their own records:
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants
They also likely get funding from the Wellcome Trust, but this information is more difficult to come by. Both of these “charitable” organisations want to medicate the world and treat humanity like livestock, in my opinion, including a cull to follow, no doubt.
“For Reality, we have the Coronadoom Worry Index …”
This is a great metric; for supplemental information as to what is happening country by country in this respect, the the media/political ramifications, see:
https://coronavirus.ravenpack.com/?utm_campaign=covid-monitor&utm_medium=referrall&utm_source=homepage&utm_content=ravenpack&utm_term=
Kudos, kudos, kudos. You have done a remarkable Sisyphean task mucking through the stables of the Ruling Swine. Two books and hundreds of essays have propelled an erudite chitchat about probability and statistics into the leading voice of reason and rationality in our New Dark Ages.
It’s a tremendous achievement. The based aware contingent come here now for our daily dose of Reality (if not fleeting hope). Mega thankyous.
Commenters take heed. This is not your 4chan hunter’s toy blog. It never was. Show some respect and perspicacity. Measure up. The End of something or other is Nigh.
Putin recently announced that the Rudsians have developed a vexx in the form of a nasal spray. I predict that the next step will be the Western Pharmacorps, let’s guess… IG Farben, Bayer & Bayer… to develop the vexxine in the form of a gas.
The vexxine gas could be distributed by chem trails in the air to save the people. Or just sprayed throughout the day by biohazard suits in the NY subways during rush hour. In the Aussie camps, people xan be shuffled through the specially set up showers. Maybe they’ll just mix vexxines in ths drinking water alongsise the fluoride.
They could do all this, and then still require masks and testing for money anyway… but I think they like the power of the prick. It’s very sexual, especially when done under coercion. Very S & M. Especially with a mask. Pervision ain’t just for the privacy of the bedroom no more.
They should add Vexxed as a new alphabet the LGBEEGEES acronym and allow vexxed to celebrate by marching in the parade. It’s all sponsored by Pfizer anyway…
Anyway, look dorward to Zyklon-Ntech-Cormity, being patented for big bucks as we speak!
That’s been one of the biggest eye openers for me:
Normally bright people relied upon for their specific expertise turn out to be sloppy and senseless thinkers regarding other topics.
Hard to add up the number of people who I have ‘Follow’ dropped over the past couple of years.
–>”Hard to add up the number of people who I have ‘Follow’ dropped over the past couple of years.”
I’d suggest a good rule of thumb for “following” is inversely proportional to their media/public notoriety. Self-promoters are motivated by the attention received–in other words, they’re narcissists. Articulate polymaths are rare and usually ooze that quality. Most self-promoters don’t knw the difference between being lucky (right place, right time), and insightful experience and wisdom.
Those who exhibit what’s known as ‘second-level thinking’ know their limitations–they know what they don’t know, and therefore operate with modesty and prudence. These are not character traits that draws or develops media/public notoriety.
At the end of the day, self-promoters are entertainers–they love drawing a crowd, they love being the center of attention (even negative attention). But they overstay their welcome when they fail to recognize their overexposure. Fads, fashions, and crowds are fickle with their favorites.
Ugh. Showering with my whole family?
I’d rather try to fight my way out and get us all killed in a hail of supersonic lead.
What Uncle Mike said.
There’s nothing like a review of recent history. My eyebrows were raised when the experts started rambling on about “exponential growth.” Exponential growth of *anything* is unsustainable. (Experts like that u-word.) But, they tried to convince us that this virus would continue to spread until everyone on the planet was infected many times over.
Speaking for myself, I would continue to read the columns here, with or without reader comments below them.
You’ve done, and are still doing, a great job, William. (BTW Moldbug was always an admirer of the Chinese Communists, so perhaps it’s not that big a surprise that he went that way.)
‘Exponential growth of *anything* is unsustainable.
The Fed: ‘Hold my beer’
When experts are not busy bullshitting us about covid, or long-term weather predictions, they are bullshitting us about inflation being a great thing for everyone or how much the people of specific country would absolutely love to have US troops invade them with shock’n’awe campaigns to confiscate WMD and halt weapons programs they do not have, with allies who are absolutely not repurposed Al Qeada militants.
Well in my expert opinion, my vexxine gas theory will come true.
The experts will claim there is perfectly legal precedent for doing so because the government has been fluoriding the water and spraying chemicals in the air all this time. The Marked will suddenly all be conspiracy facters, because you can’t be conspiritorially wrong if its in the right direction! They will set up facilities for you and your family to walk through. The guards will yell at you to keep you mask on while you are getting off the shuttle and waiting in line. They will then yell at you to take your masks off before entering the vaccination chambers so as to better inhale the cure, then they’ll yell at you at the exit to put your masks back on when you re-emerge back into the world as a new man – one that is now allowed to safely eat at a restaurant and attend anime and comic book conventions with your updated papers as they again spray you and masked Superman and Goku cosplayers waiting in line to attend pointless panels on how to make your favorite things even more woke, just in case.
If birds are dropping dead and falling out of the air with more regularity whenever the cropdusters fly by, that is just a coincidence, or experts will tell you is due to elevated CO2 levels which need to be brought under control, so the next day of animecomiccon is therefore cancelled.
I went through this article https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/the-omicron-variant-is-confirmed-in-16-us-states-heres-where-and-what-we-know-about-each-case/2700769/ and checked the vaccination status of each Omicron case. Most were not given, but of the ones either listed in the article or another article, I counted 12 Omicron cases among the jabbed and 2 among the unjabbed. So in this population about 85% with Omicron were vexxed. Now there are a lot of unknowns which could throw off the ratio, but the news shown how eager they are to display cases of the sick and dying among the unjabbed, so it is not very plausible that the news would intentionally be hiding cases of Omicron among the unjabbed. If the unknown information is simply due to the information not being shared by authorities as a matter of policy, it would not favor either the vexxed or non-vexxed.
It’s impossible to know the exact effectiveness of the vexxines versus Omicron, since the population of international travelers is probably weighted towards the jabbed. That will become clearer in the coming weeks. At the moment, negative effectiveness is a very real possibility.
Warren Wilhelm Jr aka Comrade de Blasio is mounting a pathetic attempt to run for governor of New York state. He continues to vice signal in the belief that this will help his foundering flounder of a campaign. He cares not one whit for the health of any of his constituents, this is strictly a play for votes. I can only pray Eric Adams immediately reverses all of this nonsense on his first day in office, but I am not optimistic, as he stated during his campaign for mayor that he was in favor of mandating vaccinations for children in order for them to attend school. My son doesn’t like his school anyway, perhaps we’ll just let him stay home.
There’s no such thing as toxic femininity.
“Toxic effeminacy” is a tautology, of course.
Reading over this makes me realize that we are doomed to be led by reverse Cassandras: people who are always believed but are never right. This is a corollary to the observation that you cannot be punished for being wrong in the right direction.
This is also a nice trip down memory lane. I think you could map my growing reactionary extremism along the same lines.
At the very beginning in December 2019 (god that long ago) when first reports of a new virus from China I thought it was sensible to stop Chinese visitors until it was clear what was happening, that is what sensible expert virologist would suggest quarantine from a potential danger.
Of course China was the darling then and we didn’t want to upset their spending in our direction.
Early 2020 it was becoming clear that children weren’t dying in large numbers and it was mainly killing the old but best be careful and limit travel…none of this happened with boat loads of infected released into hotel quarantine?
And then it all started on steroids…two years later the “Tulip Craze” may have peaked but we are left with one last “Moronic strain” and a whole lot of big brother.
We cannot ever trust the rationality of our fellow citizens again, because they would of killed the unvaccinated if told to do so.
We cannot blame the Germans ever again for succumbing to Hitler’s will, because we have fallen for the expert.
This has been an eye opening exercise in humanity.
Mmm low on toilet paper, I better buy some more just in case!
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Thank you! Online says grocery stores in New Brunswick may and can keep the unvexxed off of their premises, but maybe many will still let all shop.
God bless, C-Marie
I have heard several American journalists talking about the Covid concentration camps in Australia and when they speak they usually show aerial images of the camp at Howard Springs which is not too far from where I live. This is to let anyone interested know that it was built in 2012 as an accommodation camp for about 3,500 fifo workers building the Inpex gas and oil plant in Darwin (rental accommodation in town was scarce) and handed over to the NT government in 2019 once the plant was built and the worker accommodation was no longer needed. It now houses about 850 people who are quarantining and is far from being the sort of place one associates with the term “concentration camp”. See here https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-11/quarantine-in-darwin-howard-springs-facility-becomes-a-holiday/12648762
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: he’s an interesting guy who wrote some interesting books. He had some good insights and used them to run a very successful hedge fund. But wow, he bought into the Covid scam and earlier he bought into the global warming scam. As far as I’m concerned, that’s proof that he just doesn’t dig very deep into the details, at least for these two topics.
Briggs, I thank you for the sanity dose every Tuesday. It tells me I am not alone, and that matters to me, at least.
I keep the exact same “worry index” for the US data- I call it the daily fatality rate, but I will probably steal your name for it.
JRM,
Can those quarantiners leave when they want? That is the only question that matters in whether this is a prison or not.
On the topic of otherwise intelligent people falling for nonsense, it can often be observed that the nonsense fallen for often carries with it a perverse sort of religiosity. The “right” direction indeed… One that protects dogmas sacred to the cause of secularism and the confidence in its systems, such as the media and THE SCIENCE ™ – Always ™, always all-caps – which if exposed for what they really are would shake the faith of the true believers.
Examples begin from toleration of unrestrained promiscious sex to acceptance of sodomy to celebration of transgenderism to canonization of high profile POC criminals to adorarion before the beatific vision of enviro-medical-fascism.
Dig into it and you’ll find this obvious pattern of consistency with these types. Many of them are even clergymen, so don’t let the outward appearances fool you! The math was off long at the start.
Bwahahaha!
We’ve done it ladies and gentlemen!
There are now two official and distinct classes to discriminate against!
First they came for the “unvexxed”!
But now… the “unboosted”!
It begins!
https://nonvenipacem.com/2021/12/07/deplorable-bitter-clinger-unvaxxed-filthy-unboosted-hasenpfeffer-incorporated/
“Exponential forever was impossible, but you could hardly get anybody to understand that”.
Guinea pigs understand that! What has happened to the alleged human “intelligence”?
Yancey Ward
Good point.
Well, supposedly, they’ve got a BBQ space, and a swimming pool. Only problem is, they’re not allowed off their little 6×4 front porches.
To be fair, the Mises type Economist crowd has been notably resistant to the covid craziness. Ever since Keynes had his way with the politicians of his day though no one wants to listen to sense there either. How many times has Ron Paul been proven right in the last two decades?
Further thought, to your last point about replacing their experts, etc. . . . perhaps rather than forcing them to listen to us or them forcing us to listen to them, can we just go our own separate ways. How about a little freedom and secession?
For what it is worth, per CDC, the Flu is still with us. Though low numbers now, cases are rising this year.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm
Vaccines do seem to be a match for flu type being detected.
https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/lot-release/influenza-vaccine-2021-2022-season