In his recent comment, Lastmod made an important observation while discussing the death of the manosphere due to the atomization of society:
All of what we are seeing has and IS being orchestrated. Not in the sense of a secret committee of a few people….but through a long march through the institutions of the USA (and the West). [..] churches have willingly fallen into this, and even the ones that are supposedly “bold” most caved during Covid and more would have if it continued.
As Bruce Charlton notes in “Not Even Trying” and on his blog, since the 1950s, there has been a cultural revolution that has since completely captured our institutions. Unlike the conspiracies of the past and those of popular fiction, this is not being controlled by secret gatherings of a few powerful men. The conspiracies[1] today are taking place out in the open for all to see, involving millions of people, yet are generally uncoordinated, as it is with scientific research:
Peer review (where it matters, where it makes a difference to policy and practice) simply is monopolization of all evaluation, reward or punishment processes by senior scientists; yet not as autonomous individuals but as components of a process which nobody-in-particular controls.
This peer review process is seen most practically and plainly in the observation that the CDC only makes recommendations, the state health departments are only following what the CDC tells it to do, and the school districts are just following the orders of the health department. Nobody-in-particular is making it happen, but these “recommendations” are all legally binding nonetheless.
I only rarely discuss political issues on this blog, largely because politics are a tool of institutional capture, and so should be avoided. But many of my readers, whether here and on Twitter, have still not completely rejected politics, activism, or voting.
Back on January 18, 2022, I posted a thread of Tweets regarding the origins of the SARS2—formally SARS-CoV-2—coronavirus. At over 54,000 impressions, 5,500 engagements, and 4,000 detail expands, it is by far the most popular of anything I have ever written. In this article, I will repost the content of that Twitter thread and show how just how deep the lies regarding the origin of covid went, and how the conspiracy was wide open for all to see. In doing so, I will demonstrate the futility of trying to work within the system of captured institutions to reform it and well as demonstrate the veracity of Bruce Charlton’s thesis:
It has now become implicitly accepted among the mass of professional ‘scientists’ that the decisions which matter most in science are those imposed upon science by outside forces: by employers (deciding who gets the jobs, who gets the promotion), funders (deciding who gets the big money), editors and publishers (deciding who gets their work published in the big journals), bureaucratic regulators (deciding who gets allowed to do what work), and the law courts (deciding whose ideas get backed-up, or criminalized, by the courts) – and of course politicians (deciding the framework within which all these others operate). It is these bureaucratic mechanisms that constitute ‘real life’ and the ‘bottom line’ for modern research practice.
And not just for modern research practice, but for every captured institution that you can think of.
A Quick History Lesson
The evidence we have of the different early SARS2 (Covid-19) variants and lineages is a bit spotty, due to the fact that we were not looking for very aggressively at that time. But what emerged from the data was two main lineages, A (which includes F6302L and L84S) and B (which includes D614G).
The B lineage was known as the Wuhan coronavirus. It was the “novel” coronavirus that spread throughout the whole world, killing millions. The A lineage—or more precisely its unknown ancestors—preceded it and was the one spreading throughout Asia until it was displaced worldwide by the more successful (e.g. deadly) Wuhan virus that we all came to know and love.
It is these lineages, variants, and mutations that researchers were concerned with in early 2020.
The Research
It all started with this paper from February 24, 2020.
T. Koyama, D. Platt & L. Parida. “Variant analysis of COVID-19 genomes.”
Bull World Health Organ. E-pub
24 February 2020. doi: 10.2471/BLT.20.253591
This research was completed a month before the Covid lockdowns in America. The paper went through a number of drafts. The first three drafts were largely identical. They were published as preprints and submitted for peer review. Here are the original conclusions from the early versions of the paper:
…and…
…and…
The researchers found that the version of SARS2 that spread to the world—by Chinese workers from the Wuhan province in China—was substantively different (e.g. spread characteristics; infectiousness; severity) than the one that spread within the population of Wuhan—around 11 million people—and also by Chinese travelers, with independent (!!) initial points of exposure between the two versions.
The slow-growth “traveler” branch of SARS2—which included L84S and F6302L—appears to have circulated in Asia, Australian, Africa, and parts of Europe, conferring partial immunity to subsequent variants. Notably, it was not associated with the seafood market. It was not associated the Wuhan strain that spread to the rest of the world. This engenders questions regarding why (and how) the population of Wuhan had a different variant of COVID than the one that spread and bore its name (the Wuhan coronavirus, pejoratively called the WuFlu.)[2] The researchers concluded that the two versions of SARS2 had exposure points that were distinct from each other. In other words, SARS2 could not possibly have originated in a single place.
Here is the phylogenetic tree from the paper:
Here is that same tree annotated by The Ethical Skeptic…
…who suggested that one must go back a year (to 2018) or earlier to find a common ancestor that accounts for the variant depth, concluding:
It was clear in the variant data even in February 2020 that the December 2019 Wuhan variant (D614G) was merely the latest variant to hit the world at that time (no different than Delta emerging in India in October of 2020). A full fourteen clades and six variants already existed the very first day upon which SARS-CoV-2 was detected.
To further bolster the veracity of the paper’s conclusion, the authors had its estimate for the mutation rate of SARS2—used to estimate lineage age and independence—replicated by Duchesne, et al., coming up with a nearly exact match. Since the mutation rate of coronaviruses is a consistently replicated finding by a number of researchers, we can roughly determine the date when the MRCA (“most recent common ancestor”) must have existed. For example:
Here The Ethical Skeptic shows that the MRCA for the Delta/Alpha and Omicron strains—the point at which their common ancestor diverged—was July 2017. This is when SARS2 would have entered the human population if it was not created faster in a lab.[3]
The paper uses genetic evidence to effectively destroy the two claims that SARS2…
- …originated in a Wuhan wet market
- …had a single-point-of-origin in late 2019
…and it did so in February, 2020. Given its assumption of independent origins, the paper showed that there must have been multiple initial points of exposure in February of 2020. All of this was before the initial lockdowns, institutional closures, mask requirements, and vaccine mandates. And yet, more than two years later in July 27, 2022 you would have reports repeating the same conclusion “Newly published evidence points to Wuhan seafood market as pandemic origin point,” citing this research from the typical names Michael Worobey, Angela L. Rasmussen, and Kristian G. Andersen.
Then, in May, 2020, the final draft of the paper was submitted. The previous conclusion—was gone. It was replaced with the claim that SARS2 has two or more zoonotic origins:
…and…
The conclusion confusingly rambles on about coronovirus reservoirs, modalities, and travel routes, but unless you have read the earlier drafts of the paper for context, you likely wouldn’t have a clue what they were talking about. Nor does the paper explain why there are 2+ zoonotic transfers!
See, the authors understood that the genetic evidence excluded a recent common ancestor and that this meant that either SARS2 existed for a year or two prior, or there were multiple (two OR MORE) zoonotice transfers. Here in 2024, we now know that even one zoonotic transfer lacks evidence, while the evidence of a lab-leak or a 2017 zoonotic transfer is all but certain. But at the time of the paper, it wasn’t clear which of these two conclusions was more likely, and the authors picked the one that seemed most likely to them. One commentator noted on the same day I wrote my thread:
There is practically no single reliable point that points to a purely zoonotic cause of the pandemic, while the circumstantial evidence of a lab-origin is overwhelming. The lab-origin theory, which wasn’t taken seriously for a long time, must be pursued with vigor.
So Many Questions
So how did a paper go from debunking multiple COVID story-lines to supporting its key claim times two (or three!)? By going through the peer review process. The paper’s conclusion is a useless, murky mess. What could have been a revolutionary study was thus rendered impotent. This is just one demonstration of Charlton’s thesis, but it clearly shows how a paper which debunked the official narrative was declawed by the peer review process, even as the stream of paper continued to be released to support that narrative.
Now flash forward in time to the outbreak of the Omicron strain. Remember how Delta—the most deadly of the variants—was suddenly displaced by Omicron? Before that point many people had managed to avoid getting Covid-19, but when Omicron hit, virtually everyone got it, including some who got Covid-19 for this second time. That’s because Omicron looked like:
- …it was older than the “original” Wuhan strain
- …it spread differently
- …it had less impact overall
In short? It looked like the hypothesized original of the “traveler” variant that the paper said hit the Wuhan population.
Omicron and this paper answered COVID’s key riddle: why did Asia do so relatively well? Because the milder proto-Omicron conferred herd immunity on the Asian, African, and Australian populations in 2018 and 2019. It also explains why SARS2 fizzled out on the United States West Coast and why Japan did just fine against Wuhan but not Omicron.
The first version of the paper has aged shockingly well. It was almost prophetic. The published peer-reviewed version? Well, it matches the failing narrative, I suppose.
We are left with many questions. Where did Wuhan variant come from? Was it a direct lab leak or a mutation from an earlier form? What did the travelers have in common and was that earlier variant spread intentionally? What did China know and when? Was the original SARS2 engineered in 2017, 2018, or 2019 or was it a simply a natural crossover?
To this day we do not know for sure where SARS2 came from. Science isn’t even trying to figure it out, and since it isn’t trying to find it, it never will. What we do know is that we were lied to for years and that none of the key figures who lied to us for years can be trusted.
The Authors Weigh In
I reached out to one of the authors by email, and he confirmed they initially believed that there were multiple zoonotic transfers. The peer reviewers had asked them to make this explicit in their conclusion, which they did, but only after they had removed the evidence that led them to this conclusion.
I sent them a follow-up email that sought to get them to explain their reasoning, but they declined to respond. With their careers on the line, they can’t afford to say the wrong thing.
Proximal Origin
On March 17, 2020 the paper “The Proximal Origin of SARS-Cov-S“—by lead author Kristian G. Andersen—was published in the journal Nature. This was nearly a month after the paper by Koyama, Platt, and Parida that I just discussed. Their conclusion?
Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.
This was at the same time that you were being told that SARS2 was a novel coronavirus that originated at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, situated very close to the Wuhan Institute for Virology, the world’s leading center of coronavirus research.
Later, the release of the emails between Dr. Fauci and Kristian Andersen would reveal how they colluded to manipulate the American public, having expressed—in private—doubt on the origin of SARS2, worried that it might have actually been created in a lab. The emails showed how the paper published in Nature was politically motivated, which, if you’ve read Bruce Charlton, you know is par for the course.
Analysis
We don’t have to talk about how “gain of function” research was proposed and funded to do exactly what SARS2 did, nor about all the other evidence that has been uncovered since. We don’t even have to talk about deleted databases to hide the evidence. Nor do we have to talk about fraudulent research on masking. And we don’t have to discuss vaccine testing and efficacy.
Suffice it to say, we knew before the lies were published that the official narrative was false. And more importantly, we know that the researchers researching the coronavirus knew that what they were saying was nothing more than clever marketing of falsehoods, all dressed up in the language of science.
All this was made possible by institutional capture. Employers, funders, editors, publishers, bureaucratic regulators, law courts, and politicians decided what the “truth” was. The actual truth was obscured, and yet none of this is secret.
You had no say in the matter. Your own role was merely to obey. But you don’t have to be deceived.
The whole thing, from the covid origin narrative to the various mandates and acts of tyranny were carefully orchestrated by a bureaucratically captured system, a system where, ultimately, individual responsibility, authority, and truthseeking was replaced with the committees and procedures that eschew responsibility, authority, and truth, in order to embrace power.
This in large part is driven by the rejection of transcendental truth, a core facet of Christianity. It is why I noted yesterday:
The metaphorical “clicks are down” also applies to organized religion. Mainstream churches and denominations are also being phased out: Christianity is utterly dead as a force for society/government, structural authority, group cohesion, and an improved future state. All that’s left is Christianity for the individual going his own way… with Christ.
You can’t fix this. As I wrote to commenter Liz, humanity is living in an ever increasing bureaucratic, managerial, committee-based, procedural group-think world, which necessarily produces dishonesty and incompetence in everything it does. Standards have been in steep decline and they will continue to decline.
Things will get worse, but it will be reframed as “this is the way it has always been” or “actually, things are much better than they were” even though an anti-suicide net added to the Golden Gate bridge cost over a quarter of what the bridge itself did ($224 million vs $820 million in inflation adjusted dollars) and the replacement Tappan Zee Bridge cost 5.5x what the original cost. If they can erase the extreme heat of the 1930s (remember the Dust Bowl era?), they can revise any bit of history to fit their narrative.
Men and women need to go their own way and abandon anything bureaucratic, which includes every single government organization and every religious denomination. Withdraw from society—especially politics—as much as possible and focus on your families. Things will get worse, so prepare for it.
It takes far more effort to find the truth than it is to corrupt it. Even though analysis of a single paper here destroyed large portions of the covid-19 narrative even before the narrative was firmly established, still yet nothing can stop the narrative. I was able, as an individual, find the truth and share it with a tiny few people. But nothing I say or do can alter the course of history. See, for every victory against the bureaucracy, you will experience ten losses. All you can do is go your own way.
The Death of Faith
What remaining faith I had in institutions—whether church, science, or government—completely died in 2020.
When the churches surrendered to the state, rather than follow Christ, I realized that organized religion was dead. My faith in Christ is no longer tied to any institution.
When elected governments engaged in tyranny while ignoring the truth and blatantly disregarding the explicit will of the people and the laws they passed, I realized that there was no hope to be found in government. I’m just a stranger in a foreign land.
I’ve long known about the peer review crisis and the falsehoods of Climate Alarmism, but when science was used mainly as a tool to lie about covid-19, I realized that scientific research was useless and dead. I no longer believed in science, but rather in its critics, the only ones who proved they were not blind.
And so I woke up. It is rather trite, but what else is there to say?
Postscript
Compare how the original conclusion of the paper was altered.
…and…
Notice how in the first draft, the authors are optimistic, citing scientific ideals of “sharing information on variants and clinical information” and “more genomes released in public repositors, the variant analysis will be updated and shared.” Notice how firm they are in their idealistic belief that it would just happen!
But in the published document three months later, an increased emphasis is placed on developing drugs and vaccines. And now the authors could only say that the information “must” be shared, as if there was some question that this would actually happen, and which in reality never took place: medical professions and public health officials never did follow the evidence. But they sure followed the narrative!
Have even a single one of you readers ever heard from anyone in the mainstream media or government—regardless of party—that SARS2 existed prior to—and independently of—the alleged zoonotic crossover in the seafood market?
Every published paper goes through a peer review process that is designed to do anything but seek truth. All science is suspect, because net result of the process is not to try to determine the truth. As Charlton notes, this is extremely obviously the case. If you can’t see what is plainly true, then you cannot be reached or helped. But if you are able to see this, then you can restrict your trust to only those people who are able to demonstrate that they understand this too. This includes people who can successfully challenge narratives. Many of these will be labeled as quacks or cranks, censored, suppressed, or fired.
Footnotes
[1] To conspire: to act in harmony toward a common end
[2] Remember that the Wuhan SARS2 virus—in Hubei Province—bore the closest known genetic similarity to a known bat coronavirus that came from from bat caves—in the Yunnan province:
[3] One cannot infer from apparent age whether or not a virus was created in a lab or a natural crossover. This is because a lab can speed up the natural process of evolution.
During the dot.com era in San Francisco when I still had a nice head of blonde hair I was invited to a group of fellow “high tech” guys that were going to “startup” a dot.com company.
White board, post-it notes. I was going to design the the page and navigation. So, basically when it came to the “research” it was the most made up “pile o’ crud” I had ever seen.
Pretty blonde Stanford gal “Our studies show…..that this and this and people want and will buy online and want an easy way to do this…”
I asked to see the studies.
I was told “they would be provided” (they never were)
Basically it was a company that wasnt going to make a dime in profit, all it was going to do was grab a ton of money from a VC firm, build an internal structure and page and design…and sell it to a Yahoo, or another company that wanted the name domain or some of the aspects of the architecture of the site so they could just own it. Also inflate the stock to outrageous levels before the sale.
It failed of course, glad I never got involved in the end, but when it did fail……the same people cried and loudly complained “wall street shorted us / greedy VC firms / banks / these rich people dont others to get in”
Mind you…..they had no problem with the theft and fraud they were going to perpetuate. Mind you, their own personal greed was never mentioned. Mind you, this idea they had was about as retarded as “cheesegraters.com” or a gazillion companies like it. Mind you, they had no problem discussing “who was going to lead and who was going to be the face of the company” (the pretty blonde gal from Stanford with an English degree selected herself btw.
This peer review process, or this type was common in those long gone days. You had companies like Yahoo and Ebay….stock reaching 800 per share in 1998……and they had not turned a penny in profit. Mind you, none of them really never did. When the boom went bust….and the vampires drank the blood out of the VC money…..
You never saw any humility from people like this. You never saw an admission of mistakes. It was blamed on “wall street” and “banks” and since it was the SF Bay Area ” a deep, massive, shady, huge right wing conspiracy hiding everywhere that wants creative people stopped” (were these people mentally ill?)
These same people moved on to housing bubble scams, higher education bubble scams…..all expecting a different result with same tactics. All “research” of course was tested and “proven sound” (until it wasnt)
That is partially why I dont believe studies that the manopshere puts out or surveys….or using “science” to purport many of their outrageous views…because it ALWAYS conforms to the narrative they want. They never back down. They “stand by our statements” and always, always double down with smears, shaming, negging and other means. This is why it has really no credibility.
I’ve done actual research at IBM. Measuring eye movement from screen to keyboard, from color scheme to design, to even if they a coffee or tea before work. It takes time, its dry, and its cumbersome. The variance is very subjective at times….and sometimes you can’t prove anything. You just go with the mean and use that.
We have put a billion percent trust into studies, polls, “research” and “what I believe the outcome should be” into research, its no longer valid. Science spent centuries to get the reputation it sought and wanted.
that has been destroyed within a generation or three just to fit a “narrative” both right and left are guilty of it in a political sense but the most sinister part of all…….
Anyone who questions, wants a look at said research, is made as an inferior and “they dont know what they are talking about” and the “you have to be such and such to even understand it, TRUST US!”
No thanks. Not any longer.
Lastmod,
Your description is so very accurate. To wit:
As you demonstrate, real science is difficult, time consuming, and most notably unpredictable. There is no assurance that your work will be valid, let alone produce anything of value (whether in a month, in a year, in a decade, or even ever).
And yet professional research science requires frequent results. Indeed, to gain a grant to do research you must promise to deliver the results you are being paid to find. If you do not, you will be out of a job. And so, you must promise in your research proposals what you cannot possibly promise to deliver: you must lie just to do that research.
Of course, in order to keep your funding, you must then lie about having positive results whenever you don’t have any or if your results are negative, lest your funding go to someone else who find the results they are looking for.
And so the vast majority of “science” is useless, because it is delivering what it can’t possibly promise to deliver. And because the amount of science is so much greater than real science, it is extremely difficult to find, use, and share real science.
Simply finding the truth within this single paper above was a significant chore. I had printed all versions of the paper, marked all the key differences with a highlighter, and analyzed all the differences. And of course I had to read the papers themselves—multiple times—to understand the significance of the content. And I wouldn’t have done any of that if not for someone else pointing me in the right direction. Now, imagine doing that every time you needed to verify the truth of whatever politician or media source is telling you.
I agree with you fully. After I did this research, I mostly stopped caring about COVID-19, including whether or not the virus was created in a lab or leaked from a lab leak (since no one was going to be punished for their crimes anyway). I stopped looking into the research. I stopped listening whenever media members or politicians talked about COVID-19. I knew they were lying, so what was the point of even engaging with them? “Not any longer” indeed.
This is why society is collapsing: getting more and more fake and dumb. The demand for the right narrative—whether in science, politics, or religion—far outstrips the supply, and what is delivered is almost completely false. Even where there is truth to be found—as in the research I analyzed—it is effectively dwarfed by all the falsehoods and distractions.
Our institutions have thoroughly subverted honesty and integrity in the very name of honesty and integrity, while replacing it with whatever crazy idea pops into their heads at any given time.
Peace,
DR
Hey I didn’t see that response on the other thread until now. Thank you!
I fear you are right.
This is a really interesting writeup on the research paper (and the change after peer review) from early 2020.
I can’t recall ever seeing this.
Covid reactionism was the “One Narrative to rule them all”.
It was pretty shocking to watch.
Imagine the level of coincidence that the outbreak occurred from a wet market that just happened to be next to the covid lab. Now THAT should stretch belief. But it didn’t.
Cognitive dissonance can be extraordinary.
Indeed. Gov Newsom here in California is now slowly….and slyly changing the narrative about Covid. Did you know he was “standing for freedom” while DeSantis in Florida was actively following Trump with his racism and lockdowns????
It’s “1984” out here. At work, even a few co-workers are now “duckspeaking” what Newsom just said. I mentioned, “I believe it was the other way around” and I was laughed at, called “Trumps clown over here” and “Jay, just because you dont have your facts right, dont get defensive with us”
This is how hard the Kool-Aid has been swallowed here. A Democrat during the Carter Era would not have acted like this. Then again, math is sexist and racist now and indeed….2+2 can equal 5.
EVen Winston Smith in “1984” at one point during his torture actually almost believed he indeed saw five fingers instead of four.
Liz,
So much about the Covid reaction was insane and exposed precisely how broken our country is.
In Pennsylvania, my home state, they had developed a pandemic response plan prior to 2020. The plan was quite detailed and—among many other things—described how the State would intervene to support the long-term care facilities. So what happened when Covid-19 hit? They threw out the plan they had created. Then they started shipping recovering covid-positive patients from hospitals to nursing homes (like they did in New York), causing numerous extra infections and deaths in the long-term care facilities. And of course, there were huge shortages of workers in the LTCF. It got so bad that some nursing homes made their employees come to work when they were visibly sick. Naturally, the original pandemic response plan that the state rejected had procedures to work around staffing problems in LTCFs. Meanwhile, the head of the Department of Health—one Dr. Rachel Levine—responsible for all the bad decisions and extra deaths had moved their own mother out of the nursing home prior to all the policy changes. Watching the state Health Department literally cause the deaths of hundreds of extra elderly really left a bad taste in my mouth.
Then there were the mandates. I need not explain how the state arbitrarily decided which industries were essential and which were not, as to do so would make your head explode. But more importantly, when the business shutdown mandates were challenged in court, the PA Supreme Court ruled that they were unconstitutional. But before any of that could happen, the governor conveniently lifted the bans for the summer. Then the people of Pennsylvania passed a constitutional Amendment which restricted the power of the governor to make health mandates. And what did the governor do? He ignored it and made a blatantly unconstitutional mandate the following fall. That too was litigated, but by the time he had lost in court, it was conveniently time to lift the mandate. But what the whole thing demonstrated was precisely how tyrannical even a moderate “purple” state was.
As for the covid lab, it was always obvious that a lab leak from the Wuhan-Coronavirus-Building-Factory was far more likely that the Seafood-Market-That-Didn’t-Sell-Animals-That-Are-Known-To-House-Coronaviruses, although my personal opinion was that the whole thing was a double-blind Chinese psyop and that the real story is something else—and thus likely far worse—entirely (i.e. a much older origin).
Peace,
DR
I live in Colorado.
In our state, cannabis dispensaries (and liquor stores) were deemed “essential” whereas churches were not.
If someone had written a dystopian novel in 2010 about all this, I would have thought it stretched suspension of belief too far.
During the lcokdowns, my company actually took advantage of offices being closed. Shopping malls, professional buildings…..
They made us come to work (which I was grateful for) and we deep cleaned buildings. Managres and crews at properties rolling their sleeves up and polishing, washing, toothbrush in a glass of water type of thing to clean grime.
Then big projetcs like water main replacement for fire or regular plumbing, massive condensers / AC units or a new fire system installed were approved immediately. Roof replacements. No office workers at property or shoppers???? No complaints. Lets get some of these big projects done and out of the way now!!!
It was a good trade-off in that way. Permit fees were excused in some areas of California. I was back in Fresno and my company was given a city / county tax break for allowing business to continue…..hated wearing the mask all day at work. All of us….from management down to the janitors were happy to be at work. Many firms like mine DID close up. Our CEO was pretty smart, and the company did take a hit financially but we did get so much done during that time without the massive problems of relocating an office, notices, and the whole other mess of doing capital projects like this while the building is in use.
Think the NY City subway was cleaned for the first time in almost 100 years.
I guess everything has a bright side.
A cynic might wonder why it took a pandemic to clean the subway.
But hey, I don’t want to be the glass-half-empty guy.
We’re never going to get the truth on this matter. China, if responsible will never let it out, and if any info comes out through “trustworthy” organizations they will sit and stare at the camera, unblinking and still “deny” any responsibility.
As for Fauci and Company, these are diabolical and very dangerous people indeed. Nothing will happen to them. Remember 208? Remember when then President Obama said “we will get to the bottom of this at a later date”
They never did, they found their guy “Bernie Meidoff” and he was made to take the fall for the whole stinking thing. You cannot tell me that a gazillion mid level bankers across the world didnt know what was happening, nor did the Federal Reserve, or The Bank of England, the Euro Central in Germany. This was just a “shock” and surprise and little ol Bernie Meidoff pulled the whole thing off with no one knowing.
What a crock.
In loving, liberal San Francisco in 2001, the headlines, the news, the local comedy….”Bush is stupid / cant put a sentence together / got C’s at Yale / he’s so dumb”
The day after the 9-11 attacks suddenly “he is an evil mastermind who pulled this whole thing off singlehandedly and kept EVERYONE quiet. Way too many people to pull something like that off “all by himself”
This in the end also boils down to “thinking” even when I was in high school in the 1980’s. It was hardly the “leave it to beaver” era and schools were terrible back then as well. We’ve had now three generations of kids who didnt learn how to think and they swallow now the first thing they are told to believe. Part of the reason why things are in the state they are in.
“We’ve had now three generations of kids who didnt learn how to think and they swallow now the first thing they are told to believe. Part of the reason why things are in the state they are in.”
2024: “School will be closed due to high winds”
1989: “Tornado happening. Go in the hall and put a book on your head. Also we are having pizza for lunch”
I grew up in the snow and cold of deep northern New York State. College in Vermont. Grad school in northern New York State.
High school, I remember ONCE school being closed due to snow , and it really wasnt because of the snow. It was because the heat wasnt working in the school that day.
In prep school we never had school closed. Once in college (March 1993 “blizzard of 1993”) and on that day, the Governor of Vermont who was Howard Dean at the time; made an urgent announcement / emergency on TV and radio.
He asked all college men who were at the small residential colleges in farming towns and villages to report to the their respected town / village halls to help load, move and stage hay-bails so helicopters could drop hay into the fields of these rural communities for the cows, sheep and goats.
I was surprised that just about all the men at my college (about 250 of us) showed up in winter gear at the Village Hall in Poultney and we helped all day. Even some of the faculty and the president of the college showed up as well.
Can you imagine this today? No.
Here in LA, it was “foggy” one morning and all the schools closed.
Yeah….
When I went to college at Rochester Institute of Technology, they only once partially closed school. It was not merely because there was around two feet of snow, but because the temperature was too low for the ice to melt to actually clear the roads.
In general, though, New York still does an outstanding job of snow removal compared to everyone else. I was once driving home from Maine during a snowstorm. The roads on the interstates were terrible… until I crossed the state line into New York and the roads were immediately completely clear.
When I was a kid, we still had one-hour delays. Now it is is either a two hour delay or a closure. In general, where once we would have had one-hour delays, we now have two. Where we once would have had two, we now close school entirely. As you note, it’s worse in some places.
“Can you imagine this today? No.”
I cannot…at least, not most places. Nebraska probably.
Very cool anecdote, thanks for that Jason.
🙂
(strange for some reason I thought you were born and raised in California)
Our “science” is still full of bogus theories and whole fields which can’t reproduce their findings. Even virology is suspected by some folks of being mostly fraud.
https://expose-news.com/2024/01/21/virology-is-a-fraudulent-pseudoscience-and-is-a-dying-field-according-to-biomedical-scientist/
I’d like to see the original article (the link is not provided to the “published Biomedical Scientist Simon Lee’s” thoughts).
This is like a pilot believing in flat earth theory.
Sure it happens. There’s always one.
A LOT has changed in the field of virology since 1954 (the date cited in this writeup).
Electron microscope technology is much more advanced. We have thermal cyclers.
Furthermore, the cell culture method isn’t exactly “sketchy”. That’s how they diagnosed chlamydia when I worked in the lab in the 90s. they didn’t grow it on a culture.
And yes it was accurate.
Sorry, when I say they didn’t grow it in a culture I mean they didn’t grow it in traditional bacterial medium. They used mouse cells, which the lab tech would “infect” (if the chlamydia was in the specimen), add an agent that adhered to the infected cells, illuminating them, and look through a microscope.
I don’t know how it is diagnosed now, that was then.
Liz,
Whether or not the methods themselves (cell culture; electron microscope) are valid, it is the science itself that is questionable, because science is not trying to find truth. Any truth it finds is incidental or accidental, and largely won’t be acknowledged and used in a meaningful way, even when it is done correctly.
Science largely “began”—that is, its practice was most successful—when most scientists were Christian. Then, especially around 1950 when Science took the place of the Classics…
…scientists began more strongly to reject God. But there was a lengthy transitional period when atheists still fake-believed in transcendental truth. They didn’t actually believe in it, but they acted as if they did. This seemed good enough to actually continue to do science.
But without the Christian framework to hold it in place, science simply decayed into subjectivity and dishonesty. Scientific breakthroughs have since steadily declined.
And so now we have Dawkins, an atheist most responsible for the decline of Christianity in the sciences, complaining that the scientific complex is pushing pseudo-science. But of course it is!
It was his own philosophy that led to this. The Peer Review process—of affirming the opinions of the group—that he placed over transcendental truth—of reality itself—has logically led to this exact state of affairs.
There is an endless slippery slope that comes from rejecting God. The fault of all politics—including in the Manosphere—is thinking that you can stop the slide without explicit divine truthseeking.
Now it really doesn’t matter if cell cultures and electron microscopes work, because the science research itself has detached itself from reality. The article states this:
…and…
In other words, virology is a field that does not check its work against reality. Is it mathematically or statistically valid? Is it coherent with other branches of science? Is it confirmed by real world observation? Who knows, because they are not even trying to answer these question.
Whether their conclusions are correct is pretty much irrelevant. Even being wrong that “The “virus” is an imaginary construct” (we can see them under electron microscopes) doesn’t alter the reality that what Sharkly said is correct:
The same thing is true of so-called “Climate Science.” When checked against the field of statistics and against lab measurements, it completely collapses. It’s obvious that it is false as a field of science. Sure, some of its data and methods are factual and valid, but what it produces is garbage, because they are not trying to answer the questions about truth.
The same thing is true in cosmology. Black hole physics is valid within its own field, but as soon as you try to validate it in other scientific fields, it fails. For example, it violates the laws of thermodynamics, and isn’t falsifiable in a lab.
This is true of all fields of science. And it is true of any bureaucratic institution.
What I’m trying to say is not to confuse the technological innovation since the 1950s with science itself. Technology has gone one way and made life better, while science has gone the other and is making life worse—as demonstrated by covid. Unfortunately the effects of technology depends on science being successful, so expect the former to continue to get duller, especially as knowledge and expertise is lost.
Dawkins is the example of this. He’s transitional. He represents the inertia that came before him—all the progress and good philosophy. But he was riding the wave even as he worked to undermine it. The scientists who replaced him stopped trying to fake Christian transcendentalism, so they agreed with Dawkins that there is no transcendental truth, but they went one step farther by not acting as if there was such truth anyway. And so they completely lost the ability to do effective science.
Inertia is being lost.
All of society is riding on the inertia of achievements of what came before us. But it’s being replaced, piece-by-piece, with something worse. This is the true collapse, but rather than being destroyed and replaced with something better, the corruption will just keep happening over-and-over again, like a demonic Ship of Thesus: still America/Science/Church/Government, but not.
Peace,
DR
Perhaps I am not smart enough, or knowledgeable enough (likely) but I’m not sure how virology is appreciably different from other types of germ theory?
When Semmelweis discovered that washing hands after handling cadavers decreased the rate of childbed fevers they did not know the cause (and in fact dismissed his findings for a long while).
It took a long time to find and isolate the actual organisms.
I’m not going to argue about pseudo sciences like “transgender” studies or climate “science” (or vaccines, food science, nutrition and a whole lot of other “sciences”) and I agree the health care field is suspect. But I do think we’ve come pretty far in our knowledge of the disease process since Ted Roosevelt was given cigars to smoke as a child to cure his asthma.
Liz,
No, it is just that we’re not focusing on the same thing, and I’m not explaining myself well enough. I will try to explain later when I have some time to explain it well.
Peace,
DR
Jason,
If your coworkers really talk to you like that, then I am saddened to know it. You got the bead on them, and they obviously don’t want to be bothered by truth or clarity and you probably deal in both comfortably.
I watch a you-tuber in Britain, Kevin Talbot. He’s moving to the Isle of Man because he said taxes and freedom are crushing him there. He said Isle of Man is pretty pricey though.
You never mention Detroit. Wouldn’t that be a logical spot given your musical interests? I think they are known for techno though. I never heard soul music has any following there, but you would know.
Its cold in the midwest! Grew up in that, and would prefer not to live there. The pros about about a place like Detroit is the cost of living….rent wise is low.
We tend to forget about the mid-west musically speaking. Sure, NYC has the finest ballet, symphony and a lot of great music came from there. The West Coast as well.
Rock N Roll was birthed in the midwest. In fact, the first real “rock n roll” concert was in Ohio, headlined by a man named Ike Turner.
Soul music grew up out of Detroit and Chicago for the most part. New wave and what became the “1980’s” sound started by a bunch of nerdy guys in Ohio who called themselves Devo in 1975
We could hairsplit further about black migrations from the South to the North to work in the factories….Jazz in New Orleans……..or how Soul music came mostly out of black churches, mostly in the North / mid-west from Methodist churches.
Detroit has very high crime, and if I had more of professional work-scope. Doctor, nurse, lawyer type of career I would probably consider it.
I want to say lying is so natural to atheists that of course we won’t find the truth from China, but when I go there, I find the people more “godly ” and earnest than the sick, twisted and perverse body of Americans.
Are ways are corrupting them for the worse though. Too much TV and entertainment there, it’s just that they only partake of it in a few hours a week, the rest is learning or working or exercising/family.
It wouldnt surprise me that there are more practicing christians in China than the USA. I have heard of that “home church” thing in China. Meetig quietly in secret, like the early Christians did for centuries in many parts of the ROman and post-Roman world. In a home.
I mean, more people in China speak English than in the USA if you really break it down.
China I am sure still has that “family” structure intact, even under their form of Communism. Children are expected to help in the home. Decent grades are expected. Its more intact there, than here on a grander stage I am sure.
Even in Hong Kong before the takeover of the CCP. You had a very “free” city state that was part of the British Empire…..but in the culture itself. It was still and probably a still a small letter “c” conservative society at large. Yes, you have crime, prostitution, drugs……but the middle class itself. Dinner at a table. Children go to school. Accountability in the home. Expectations and consequences.
Here in the USA in our post modern “new” red pilled church world. Women have zero accountability. They cannot help what they do. They need rigid rules, guidance, training like a dog, the man has to work, come home and “work” his wife. Men need frame n game in order to enforce all boundries on his wife, because she cannot help who she is. She is going to upsur him at any and every moment. The marriage has been made into only extremes.
You either are a blue pilled cuck or a real man who has tirelessly do the above daily just to get some sex. Neither outcome is really appealing.
I would prefer neither, and looks like most men today are understanding both extreme ends are not worthwhile and are hopeless outcomes they are stuck with.
There was a Jefferson Starship song from the mid seventies called “ride the tiger” and it wasnt a hit or anything big……but they posed a question in the song “you ask a Western man what are teardrops and he tells you they are salt, hydrogen and oxygen / water” but you ask a Chinese man and he will tell you “its the power and bond of love between a man and a woman”
RP wants you to break everything down to an equation. Math. A STEM degree. Cold. Materialism. Sex. Things of this world.
The real walk and desire of man and his realitionship with Jesus wants the tears, the healing, the love, the wonder, and the journey.
The Manosphere wants us all cold, stuck, working, decoding, enforving, maintaining, striving, keeping up with the other guy, fiece competetion like a Darwin story concerning women / sex and miserable.
RP wants you to break everything down to an equation. Math. A STEM degree. Cold. Materialism. Sex. Things of this world.
”The real walk and desire of man and his realitionship with Jesus wants the tears, the healing, the love, the wonder, and the journey.
The Manosphere wants us all cold, stuck, working, decoding, enforving, maintaining, striving, keeping up with the other guy, fiece competetion like a Darwin story concerning women / sex and miserable.”
Indeed MOD,
This might be stunning but you know the white pill was already being spoken of in January 2014(10+ years ago now)?
Contrary to even what the incel wiki says here:” The term whitepill can be found in public discourse as far back as 2017, although always in a sparse, ambiguous, and shifting manner.”
Where was the first instance white pill spoken of that i remember?:
On this ”Why Does Jesus Love PUAs?”post
by laidnyc (a PUA-who nicknamed himself ”little Roissy”
It was GBFMS BFF EARL(from dalrock , the GBFM blog and @THE CHATEAU) had the first comment on that post and said this:
earl says:
January 28, 2014 at 9:41 am
A lot of Christians think they are holier than thou but don’t recognize, deflect, or sweep under the rug human nature (especially their own)…they are blind.
A lot of PUAs and most women only recognize human nature and it eventually corrodes their soul. They lose all hope and are blind.
I like the idea of combining the red pill…which is knowing all about human nature warts and all, with the white pill which is not losing hope when human nature attacks you, continuing to help people, and keeping yourself pure through the constant chaos you get into.
Christians need more red pill, seculars need more white. ”
Some obviously didn’t like i for posting that at Spawny’s some months ago either!
GBFM &EARL had essentially been preaching the white pill for almost four years at that point in time , they just didn’t call it the white pill is all.
But as you said the ‘sphere instead promotes ” cold, stuck, working, decoding, enforving, maintaining, striving, keeping up with the other guy, fiece competetion like a Darwin story concerning women / sex and miserable.”
Then they can’t figure out that that they themselves have been fueling the despair and hopelessness that too many MEN & young boys experience today while wondering ”why are WE not getting new recruits and more clicks?”
Because they are already a type of black piller , just calling themselves red pillers with life being all ”an equation. Math. A STEM degree. Cold. Materialism. Sex. Things of this world.”
As Philippians 4:7 says ”And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
Where is that amongst all their ”must-dos and must-bes or must-haves” in the ‘sphere today?
Which is the main cause of why so many hear quote ”gibberish” in my comments as they don’t have this it seems ”And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
To sufdumb:
The only time I’ve ever been solicited by a prostitution services was in China, as I walked from my hotel to the McDonald’s to buy ice cream cones for my children.
The primary differences between China and America regarding perversity is the tolerance of each for different types. This reveals more about personal and cultural biases and tolerances than it does about total amount of perversity.
Consider, for example, the rampant racism in China against Black people. This advertisement is particularly on point.
More to the point, China—within China itself—blamed Black people for covid.
Your experience is different from mine. Where are you going in China?
I’ve been to China three times to adopt children, giving me a rather unique perspective. I’ve been to multiple provinces and had access to locations in cities of millions that you generally don’t find any white (Americans or Europeans). On all three of our visits to the provinces where our children lived, we didn’t find a single other American, even on our visits to local tourist sites, with the exception for other adoptive families in a couple of cases.
So rare is the presence of a white person in most of China, that dozens of people literally stopped to take pictures of us and with us.
Most Americans go to a restricted number of places, and they see what mostly what China wants them to see. You have to be a citizen to purchase most public transit (e.g. high speed rail). We could not travel between provinces freely, but had to have a citizen purchase tickets for us (due to the way China surveils its population). But because we were adopting, we went to places where few Americans go.
———————————————–
To lastmod,
While English is a part of the education, few people actually speak English. Even the official guides are not very good at it. One of our official translators demonstrated this by wearing one of those badly translated Chinese-to-English shirts that boldly declared that she was a pervert. I kid you not.
The vast majority of places we went (including some hotels and pretty much all the restaurants) had no one who spoke English. We are seasoned travelers, so this didn’t really bother us, but it isn’t like how the Chinese are portrayed. Unless their jobs require it, they are more-or-less not multicultural.
On each trip to China, we tried to meet up with a native. Once we met up with a family for a meal in their home, which was interesting because no one in the family spoke English. It was an amazing meal though.
All of China is centered culturally and logistically around one child per family, despite this restriction having been lifted. The “apartments” (no one in Communist China truly owns anything, but it’s not renting either) are small with no room for more than one child. Transportation—like bicycles and motorbikes—only have room for one child passenger. Hotel rooms were only large enough for two adults and one child. Even zoo admission only included one child per family. Since we were there with three children during our most recent visit, we ran into all sorts of these problems.
If you think it is hard to have a large family in America, try having more than one child in China!
It’s very clear how Communist government policy has dramatically altered the natural formation of culture, and that’s without getting into social credit scores, all the surveillance, the inability to buy or sell without the government approving, and the Great Firewall of China.
I can confirm that Chinese, especially the elderly, spend a lot of their time exercising or with their grandchild.
I’ve been to Hong Kong twice. In my limited experience, I wouldn’t describe the raising of children there to be so dramatically different than how I raise my own children (except, of course, for the number of children).
As far as the supposed superiority of the Chinese way, the raising of children is more intrusive too. When my child was crying, I’d have perfect strangers come up and offer them a lollipop. This is the Chinese solution to a child having any kind of tantrum or noise-making: bribery. As you can expect, this is not an ideal solution, and it thoroughly matches the coddling that we see in American schools.
There are definitely many cultural differences in how kids are raised, but I suspect the main reason America differs from Asia so significantly is the difference in average IQ. When you control for IQ, the key differences disappear.
Have you ever seen that picture of 2023 South African math champions?
Derek, your experiences in China mirror my own pretty closely (though we didn’t have children at the time).
Might be because it was so many years ago, and very few westerners visited (late 90s).
Clinton had just opened travel restrictions for military to visit China pretty recently.
It was similar to Korea in a lot of ways, where I lived at the time (average ROK person then had at least 10 years of English in school but could not speak a word).
A friend of mine had a father who was a diplomatic attache to China in the 80s.
They took him to an upscale restaurant where he was presented with a basket of puppies. He was supposed to choose the one he wanted them to cook up.
The 80s weren’t so long ago.
Liz,
My son told me that he used to help his foster dad prepare dog in the orphanage kitchen.
I had a few mystery and non-canonical meat meals in China, but my wife and I had it planned out. One time we were out with some native Chinese people that we met up with (no English), so when they offered us the extra special cut of whatever we were eating, I did the polite thing and ate it so my wife didn’t have to. It was probably reproductive organs, or something equally fun, but who knows?
Another time I intentionally ordered Eel (they had a giant tank of live eels out in the dining area). I wasn’t a fan, but you only live once, so live big!
Peace,
DR
Heh, eel is pretty good (unagi sushi here).
I’ve eaten dog also (and I am pretty sure cat)…both inadvertently, in some Korean villages.
It was just fresh eel cooked in a Chinese brown sauce. The meat had a muddy taste, even stronger than tilapia can get.
I have never been to China. Hong Kong once in 1996 with IBM for a week, so it was hardly a real life experience. IBM on business trips strictly monitored work. Arrive at hotel. Check in. Dinner / lunch. Relax and then BAM! The first day of work on the trip was pretty much it. Work ten to twelve hours, back to hotel. Meal. Sleep.
They gave us one full day for “own time” and I visited the park, and I have a picture of me in front of the statue of Queen Victoria and the Union jack, and Hong Kong flags proudly blowing in the sky behind me. Went shopping. Lunch and dinner out. Didnt get to see much, but I did at the time find a city so to speak “neat and orderly” as a Yellow Pages in a telephone book.
To work at IBM back then internationally one had to speak English. So all the Hong Kong employees spoke English….but also, since it being a British Colony, I would also assume…..English was more of a common language there, even for the ethnic Chinese commoner at that time. This was of course about a year before it was handed back. I will say….if a “vote” was held, they would have stayed with Britain.
Absolutely.
I’ve only been to Hong Kong since China took over. Nonetheless, Hong Kong is still dramatically different than mainland China. Even if you are a Chinese citizen, you need a passport to cross to and from Hong Kong and the mainland!
One of the problems with China is all the decay. Things are not built to last. Those beautiful high-rise towers that you see in pictures may well look ruinous in a mere 5-10 years, and they’ll suffer from leaky pipes, dysfunctional elevators, broken facades, etc. long before that. Many roads and sidewalks are in poor shape.
Hong Kong is substantially nicer.
Before covid (I don’t know about since) blackmarket baby formula bought in Hong Kong and smuggled over to China was big business. They didn’t trust the Chinese baby formula. With good reason…hundreds of thousands of children were impacted, tens of thousands hospitalized for melamine contamination).
We had a similar incident with contaminated heparin from China but that didn’t stop us from relying on them to supply our medications. There are scores of examples of other contaminated products and black market counterfeits resulting in injuries/deaths so it should not be surprising something got out at a Chinese level 4 biohazard facility.
”In our state, cannabis dispensaries (and liquor stores) were deemed “essential” whereas churches were not.”
Once i started hearing all the big libertarians say legalize mariuana decades ago, i knew America’s days as any kind of a free country were heavily numbered.
”Our=my edit) ways are corrupting them for the worse though. Too much TV and entertainment there, it’s just that they only partake of it in a few hours a week, the rest is learning or working or exercising/family.”
Radio host and Dr. Michael Savage was saying the hollywood sewer pipe was being pumped into all American homes by the biggest pornographers there is( verizon , comcast and time warner-the three biggest cable and internet providers then and i think to this day) back in the late ’00’s.