So we have the CIA Director William Burns deploying in haste to Kabul to solicit an audience with Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar, the new potential ruler of a former satrapy. And he literally begs him to extend a deadline on the evacuation of US assets.

The answer is a resounding “no.” After all, the 31 August deadline was established by Washington itself. Extending it would only mean the extension of an already defeated occupation.

The ‘Mr. Burns goes to Kabul’ caper is by now part of cemetery of empires folklore. The CIA does not confirm or deny Burns met Mullah Baradar; a Taliban spokesman, delightfully diversionist, said he was “not aware” of such a meeting.

We’ll probably never know the exact terms discussed by the two unlikely participants – assuming the meeting ever took place and is not crass intel disinformation.

Meanwhile, Western public hysteria is, of all things, focused on the imperative necessity of extracting all ‘translators’ and other functionaries (who were de facto NATO collaborators) out of Kabul airport. Yet thundering silence envelops what is in fact the real deal: the CIA shadow army left behind.

The shadow army are Afghan militias set up back in the early 2000s to engage in ‘counter-insurgency’ – that lovely euphemism for search and destroy ops against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Along the way, these militias practiced, in droves, that proverbial semantic combo normalizing murder: ‘extrajudicial killings,’ usually a sequel to ‘enhanced interrogations.’ These ops were always secret as per the classic CIA playbook, thus ensuring there was never any accountability.

Now Langley has a problem. The Taliban have kept sleeper cells in Kabul since May, and much earlier than that in selected Afghan government bodies. A source close to the Ministry of Interior has confirmed the Taliban actually managed to get their hands on the full list of operatives of the two top CIA schemes: the Khost Protection Force (KPF) and the National Directorate of Security (NDS). These operatives are the prime Taliban targets in checkpoints leading to Kabul airport, not random, helpless ‘Afghan civilians’ trying to escape.

The Taliban have set up quite a complex, targeted operation in Kabul, with plenty of nuance – allowing, for instance, free passage for selected NATO members’ Special Forces, who went into town in search of their nationals.

But access to the airport is now blocked for all Afghan nationals. Yesterday’s double tap suicide-car bombing has introduced an even more complex variable: the Taliban will need to pool all their intel resources, fast, to fight whatever elements are seeking to introduce domestic terror attacks into the country.

The RHIPTO Norwegian Centre for Global Analyses has shown how the Taliban have a “more advanced intelligence system” applied to urban Afghanistan, especially Kabul. The “knocking on people’s doors” fueling Western hysteria means they know exactly where to knock when it comes to finding collaborationist intel networks.

It is no wonder Western think tanks are in tears about how undermined their intel services will be in the intersection of Central and South Asia. Yet the muted official reaction boiled down to G7 Foreign Ministers issuing a mere statement announcing they were “deeply concerned by reports of violent reprisals in parts of Afghanistan.”

Blowback is indeed a bitch. Especially when you cannot fully acknowledge it.

From Phoenix to Omega

The latest chapter of CIA ops in Afghanistan started when the 2001 bombing campaign was not even finished. I saw it for myself in Tora Bora, in December 2001, when Special Forces came out of nowhere equipped with Thuraya satellite phones and suitcases full of cash. Later, the role of ‘irregular’ militias in defeating the Taliban and dismembering al-Qaeda was feted in the US as a huge success.

Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai was, to his credit, initially against US Special Forces setting up local militias, an essential plank of the counter-insurgency strategy. But in the end that cash cow was irresistible.

A central profiteer was the Afghan Ministry of Interior, with the initial scheme coalescing under the auspices of the Afghan Local Police. Yet some key militias were not under the Ministry, but answered directly to the CIA and the US Special Forces Command, later renamed as the infamous Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

Inevitably, CIA and JSOC got into a catfight over controlling the top militias. That was solved by the Pentagon lending Special Forces to the CIA under the Omega Program. Under Omega, the CIA was tasked with targeting intel, and Special Ops took control of the muscle on the ground. Omega made steady progress under the reign of former US President Barack Obama: it was eerily similar to the Vietnam-era Operation Phoenix.

Ten years ago, the CIA army, dubbed Counter-terrorist Pursuit Teams (CTPT), was already 3,000 strong, paid and weaponized by the CIA-JSOC combo. There was nothing ‘counter-insurgency’ about it: These were death squads, much like their earlier counterparts in Latin America in the 1970s.

In 2015, the CIA got its Afghan sister unit, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), to establish new paramilitary outfits to, in theory, fight ISIS, which later became locally identified as ISIS-Khorasan. In 2017, then-CIA Chief Mike Pompeo set Langley on an Afghan overdrive, targeting the Taliban but also al-Qaeda, which at the time had dwindled to a few dozen operatives. Pompeo promised the new gig would be “aggressive,” “unforgiving,” and “relentless.”

Those shadowy ‘military actors’

Arguably, the most precise and concise report on the American paramilitaries in Afghanistan is by Antonio de Lauri, Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, and Astrid Suhrke, Senior Researcher Emerita also at the Institute.

The report shows how the CIA army was a two-headed hydra. The older units harked back to 2001 and were very close to the CIA. The most powerful was the Khost Protection Force (KPF), based at the CIA’s Camp Chapman in Khost. KPF operated totally outside Afghan law, not to mention budget. Following an investigation by Seymour Hersh, I have also shown how the CIA financed its black ops via a heroin rat line, which the Taliban have now promised to destroy.

The other head of the hydra were the NDS’s own Afghan Special Forces: four main units, each operating in its own regional area. And that’s about all that was known about them. The NDS was funded by none other than the CIA. For all practical purposes, operatives were trained and weaponized by the CIA.

So, it’s no wonder that no one in Afghanistan or in the region knew anything definitive about their operations and command structure. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), in trademark infuriating bureaucratese, defined the operations of the KPF and the NDS as appearing “to be coordinated with international military actors (emphasis mine); that is, outside the normal government chain of command.”

By 2018, the KPF was estimated to harbor between 3,000 to over 10,000 operatives. What few Afghans really knew is that they were properly weaponized; well paid; worked with people speaking American English, using American vocabulary; engaged in night operations in residential areas; and crucially, were capable of calling air strikes, executed by the US military.

A 2019 UNAMA report stressed that there were “continuing reports of the KPF carrying out human rights abuses, intentionally killing civilians, illegally detaining individuals, and intentionally damaging and burning civilian property during search operations and night raids.”

Call it the Pompeo effect: “aggressive, unforgiving, and relentless” – whether by kill-or-capture raids, or drones with Hellfire missiles.

Woke Westerners, now losing sleep over the ‘loss of civil liberties’ in Afghanistan, may not even be vaguely aware that their NATO-commanded ‘coalition forces’ excelled in preparing their own kill-or-capture lists, known by the semantically-demented denomination: Joint Prioritized Effects List.

The CIA, for its part, couldn’t care less. After all, the agency was always totally outside the jurisdiction of Afghan laws regulating the operations of ‘coalition forces.’

The dronification of violence

In these past few years, the CIA shadow army coalesced into what Ian Shaw and Majed Akhter memorably described as The Dronification of State Violence, a seminal paper published in the Critical Asian Studies journal in 2014 (downloadable here).

Shaw and Akhter define the alarming, ongoing process of dronification as: “the relocation of sovereign power from the uniformed military to the CIA and Special Forces; techno-political transformations performed by the Predator drone; the bureaucratization of the kill chain; and the individualization of the target.”

This amounts to, the authors argue, what Hannah Arendt defined as “rule by nobody.” Or, actually by somebody acting beyond any rules.

The toxic end result in Afghanistan was the marriage between the CIA shadow army and dronification. The Taliban may be willing to extend a general amnesty and not exact revenge. But to forgive those who went on a killing rampage as part of the marriage arrangement may be a step too far for the Pashtunwali code.

The February 2020 Doha agreement between Washington and the Taliban says absolutely nothing about the CIA shadow army.

So, the question now is how the defeated Americans will be able to keep intel assets in Afghanistan for its proverbial ‘counter-terrorism’ ops. A Taliban-led government will inevitably take over the NDS. What happens to the militias is an open question. They could be completely taken over by the Taliban. They could break away and eventually find new sponsors (Saudis, Turks). They could become autonomous and serve the best-positioned warlord paymaster.

The Taliban may be essentially a collection of warlords (jang salar, in Dari). But what’s certain is that a new government will simply not allow a militia wasteland scenario similar to Libya. Thousands of mercenaries of sorts with the potential of becoming an ersatz ISIS-Khorasan, threatening Afghanistan’s entry into the Eurasian integration process, need to be tamed. Burns knows it, Baradar knows it – while Western public opinion knows nothing.

A great confusion has settled over America’s political scene. The country, for most, seems harder and harder to recognize. Our capacity for ceaseless revision has given way to longer trends that have locked us onto tracks whose fixity we never thought to anticipate. The confusion has been made more intractable by the self-delegitimation of the academy and the press, which are selectively allergic to context and historically shallow, respectively.

As Theta Skocpol noticed, over the course of the 20th century America went from membership civics to managerial civics. Membership civics involved civil society groups with thick social ties—the Knights of Columbus, the Elk’s Lodge, and so on. Even presidential candidates had to win them over. But as America became more disaffiliated, membership groups gave way to managerial civics. Rather than relying on the power of regularly meeting groups, we got a world of PACs and lobbyists and inboxes buckshot with panicky fundraising emails warning of imminent partisan collapse without another $5 donation to someone you’ve never heard of.

While this happened, Karl Rove’s Red Map strategy went into effect. Republicans came to dominate the local level from schoolboards to judiciaries to statehouses. Democrats, meanwhile, shifted from a pseudo-labor party to the party of the urban professional. While Rove’s plan worked to cinch victory at the lower levels, Democrats took to the federal level. Couple this with a trend Christopher Lasch noticed in the ’90s, and which lockdowns and the 2020 riots helped deepen: the death of “third places,” local organizations and establishments that allowed the co-mingling of classes and provided venues for civic practice.

Set atop this yet another trend: the downfall of local news media to social media. The internet, and social media in particular, has devastated local press, blinding the public to local issues and turning their gaze toward larger national issues over which they exert less and less control. Thus all news is national news and most national news is helmed by an establishment of so-called centrists and progressives. What we see here is the death of a federalist civic culture, a huge shift in American political subjectivity.

Ellen Meiksins Wood marked this shift from a different angle nearly 25 years ago as she surveyed political life in America since the fall of the Soviet Union. The left began to quit socialism for a postmodern “new pluralism” anchored in identitarian issues. Wood worried that the left’s abandonment of class politics for “new pluralism” would mean surrendering to a politics that reached “beyond the traditional liberal recognition of diverse interests and the toleration (in principle) of diverse opinions” in three important ways: first, “its conception of diversity probes beneath the externalities of ‘interest’ to the psychic depths” of identity while expanding the political into lifestyles; second, it no longer assumes that universalist principles can “accommodate all diverse identities and lifestyles”—in other words, a politics of exception and entitlement; and, third, its belief that no larger structure overhangs human life so that society is little more than a sum of different fragments that need to be brought together by evermore elaborate theorizing. Wood thought that identity politics would launder elite interest while the left cheered it on. Imagine.

On the right, a different mistake was being made: that business was the “innocent opposite” of government, as Christopher Caldwell puts it. Now that Lockheed Martin is putting on white guilt human resources seminars, the CIA is posting woke advertisements to YouTube, and efforts like Prop 22 are incentivizing further destruction of unions as Uber puts up billboards shaming “racists,” it’s clear that business has no cultural counter-state allegiance to the little guy. Of course, it never had much material allegiance either. Deploying wokeness as a script to co-opt the left is a remix of big business’s relationship to the traditional values of the right: pledge concern for said values while steamrolling whatever stands in the way of making a buck.

But Wood’s and Skocpol’s angles need updates. Since the Non-Profit Industrial Complex has come of age, the managerial civics Skocpol described have evolved into something far stranger. And Wood wasn’t cynical enough.

Anyone who’s been paying attention has noticed how the wealthy have bankrolled foundations and NGOs that now dictate much of our political life. In some cases, it helps entrench certain discourses at the national level. Take Jack Dorsey of Twitter bankrolling Ibram X. Kendi, for example. Or the hundreds of millions major foundations poured into #BlackLivesMatter which has done bupkis for everyday black Americans, their alleged cause. In other cases, it has led to a new version of the company town. Take Kingston, New York, for example, which Peter Buffet—Warren’s son—has terraformed with various other woke overlords. They have inundated the town with so much money residents would sooner choke on a wad of Benjamins than criticize the Buffets. Those who do face ostracism and are severed from the money pipeline. Yet while Buffet and his buddies decolonize hot chocolate by calling it cacao and astroturf local politics, a fentanyl epidemic ravages Kingston’s working class.

This is a politics as divorced from democracy as is possible without altering the Constitution. The civil society formation brought on by the non-profit regime works as an end run around the public will as different elite-funded groups vie to Gene Sharpe their way into dominance. Not only that, this formation has restructured political life at the local level—how could what’s left of traditional membership organizations compete with NGOs with well-stocked war chests? No surprise the word “neofeudalism” has been popping up on both sides of the partisan spectrum.

Because civil society has ballooned to capture government and political proceedings at every level it feels increasingly hard to tell what’s real and what pro wrestling calls “kayfabe.” The net effect of unreality and elite meddling casts a fog over the national self-understanding. Who’s in charge? What are they doing? And why are they doing it? Unsurprisingly, a bounty of conspiracy theories—left and right, hub and heartland—has flowered over the last few years. The role of the citizen is less in doubt than increasingly irrelevant. So why do we feel so involved?

* * *

Whoever manages to capture the hearts of the people can do so at the expense of reality and to their own advantage. Fear of this has been around as long as democracy. Where people need persuasion—as all democracies do—political rhetoric enters the fray. The potential disjuncture between rhetoric and truth and the consequences incurred by that disjuncture can be found in writers like Thucydides and Plato. Political emotions have proved a boon and a burden to human society for a long time. What I want to highlight is not so much new in itself as it is a new version of an old problem.

The novel permutation goes by what I call the “culture of emotionalism,” though it has gone by many names and been puzzled over by all thinkers of all political persuasions. It came to the fore in the post-war era when mass media, particularly television, came to present new political problems and opportunities. The problems involved information control, deception, and seduction. The potential could best be summarized by a member of the Chicago Six, Abbie Hoffman, who thought that whereas previous revolutionaries headed to the job site, “a modern revolutionary group should head to the television station.”

The most optimistic engagement with mass media came from those who conveniently ignored that hedges and warnings within the work of Marshal McCluhan. A gentler, softer, more connected world was possible, they said. This was a world of uplift and feelings over facts. It rejected the regimentations of Fordism and embraced the coming horizontalism that the Telstar-1 satellite, which first connected the world via simultaneous television broadcast, prophesied. We would become a “global village.” Nation-states would fall into obsolescence and so too would other divisions that arbitrarily bar our hearts from touching.

In other words, the Cold War battle plan for a society that could remain connected after nuclear winter and the vision a society so interlinked as to provide us with new intimacies anticipated the same technology: the internet. A strange fusion of ’60s pathetic appeal and hawkish cynicism intertwined as the internet grew and brought each of us into its network. No surprise then that the author of the “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,” published in 1996, was John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Like Newt Gingrich, Barlow found himself favorably depicted in the early issues of Wired magazine.

While this material, technological, and media shift took place, culture became more therapeutic in tone. We used to worry about “self-esteem” and now we fret over “mental health.” Everyday life has become yet more pathologized, more in need of experts to adjust, interpret and rework it for us. It’s as if we can make no commonsensical assumptions about how to behave, how to raise children, how to date, marry, or even weep.

As our society has become more invested in our emotions, it has become more manipulative. Slavoj Zizek likes to joke about the difference this way: while the older, authoritarian father would tell you that you’re going to grandma’s whether you like it or not, the new, postmodern father would say, “You know how much your grandma likes it when you come with us to visit her.” Rather than commanding you, our society prefers to emotionally massage you into obedience. This, of course, means access to your interiority. And access to your interiority is what the internet, as it currently exists, is designed to secure, catalog, and adjust. At least, that’s their hope.

To put it succinctly, the emergent telos of the culture of emotionalism from the ’60s wedded well to the expansion of control society as incarnated in the internet. Their mutual development has given us what we’re now living in: an emotionalist managerial regime concerned with moral coercion on behalf of elite interest.

* * *

The online version of the bureaucrat is the moderator, who has deep roots in the culture of the internet. You could argue that today the figure of the moderator has replaced that of the bureaucrat. Policing the norms of discourse is the moderator’s job. Its function, originally, was small “p” political back when forums, messageboards, and other internet venues were the norm. As the major platforms grew, moderators grew with them.

Not all moderation is bad of course. There are plenty of underpaid workers in places like Florida whose lives are slowly ground down by monitoring Facebook for videos and images of child molestation, animal cruelty, murder, etc. But that’s a category apart from the regime-legitimizing moderator function we’re watching now. As the Biden administration has rolled out its “domestic terror” initiative, obviously meant to punish those outside the monoparty orthodoxy, and as Twitter and Facebook have severally purged accounts with dissenting views, it’s obvious that moderation exists in a loose agreement between private tech companies and the federal government. What’s more, those in the media and many in the academy, members of the professional-managerial class all, serve as enforcers of the regime in the open.

The managerial class is obsessively meritocratic, but of course meritocracy can’t concern itself with instrumental knowledge alone. It eventually adopts moral worth as criteria and thus turns moral worth into a category of knowledge about which people need to be taught. The managerial class moderators’ role is to “educate” people on the latest moral formulations. This makes for much of this class’s political commitments. As Catherine Liu writes in Virtue Hoarders, “If [the professional managerial class’s] politics amount to little more than virtue signaling, it loves nothing more than moral panics to incite its members to ever more pointless forms of pseudo-politics and hypervigilance.”

I say “latest moral formulations” because, as we’ve noticed, a large portion of this moderating class is interested in enforcing “wokeness,” an ideology born on the internet with antecedents in the “new pluralism” of the new, new left that Wood criticized. Wokeness seems endlessly revisable with new acronyms and obscure social rules issued by the month and sometimes week. With each new iteration, people must be shown how they ought to relate so that they can merit moral worth. Their inner lives must be plumbed for old badness so that the knowledge of the new goodness can take its place.

Philosopher Jacques Ranciere calls this dynamic the “schoolteacher’s paradox.” The logic of the relationship between the schoolteacher and the ignoramus constitutes itself around abolishing “the distance between his knowledge and the ignorance of the ignoramus. His lessons and the exercises he sets aim gradually to reduce the gulf separating them.” The catch is that the schoolteacher can only achieve this goal by constantly recreating the gulf between himself and the ignoramus. “To replace ignorance by knowledge,” Ranciere writes, “he must always be one step ahead, install a new form of ignorance between the pupil and himself.”

Thus our unending tutelage under the managers. Those who cannot or will not get with the program are delegitimized and even drummed out of the discourse to make more room for the semi-official line. As the “epistemic gulf” between the woke schoolteachers and the ignoramuses of the world bloats and shrinks, a sister dynamic plays out at the same time.

As Geoff Shullenberger noticed during the flare-up over the Harper’s Letter (remember that?), “Regardless of which side wins any particular battle in the recurring speech wars, both parties to the conflict end up reinforcing the power of the overall system in which the drama is enacted.” What appears as ideological conflict is in actuality a process that social media platforms are built to foster. Shullenberger continues,

It is an arena for perpetual conflict driven by an accumulation of grievances collected in a mass program of decentralized surveillance. We are incentivized, by the coded logic of the social media platforms where public engagement now takes place, to find reasons to hate each other. The algorithms that encourage and reward particular behaviors on Twitter and Facebook play on our deepest human instincts and desires to create spectacles of symbolic violence and sacrifice.

And so the miasma shrouding American political life, more and more divorced from its most basic political traditions, thickens around us. What appears to be a “breaking point” at any given time is more likely confirmation that the platforms work as planned to the benefit of those already in power. In this way, resistance gets absorbed into the legitimating machinery itself. Wokeness is only one version of content that will generate the correct squabbles to perpetuate the platforms. The status quo remains remarkably plastic.

* * *

“Like all men of Babylon,” the narrator begins in Borges’ In the Lottery of Babylon, “I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave.” As the story unfolds, we learn a lottery has taken hold of Babylon. At first an innocent game, like any lottery, it eventually came to incorporate more people by replacing financial remuneration with non-monetary chances. Sometimes you could win the role of proconsul, sometimes that of a slave. Some began to say a shadowy cabal runs it. Others that there no longer is a lottery. But it is impossible to tell because it has so colonized everyday life that no one can determine what activity does or does not fall under its control.

It feels today as if America is a lottery owned by elites but run by those below them, so that unifying against them and their interests appears so obscure and difficult that we hardly know where to begin. But what we seem to be losing in the confusion is a basic civic sense of equality. While it may appear unclear who will find themselves proconsul or slave, so to speak, the durability of those roles becomes more and more ingrained in the national culture. No republican democracy can survive without a basic commitment to common standards that apply to all. To the extent difference and exception become the name of the game is the extent to which we abandon basic democratic values.

And this is the darkest success of the regime thus far: that fewer and fewer Americans believe they are or can be a nation of co-equals committed to the shared project of society.

Emmet Penney is a writer and the co-host of the ex.haust podcast.

“I’ve been reading…” That was the response I received from one of the staffers of Skeptic magazine when I asked why she wasn’t vaccinated. My query came on the saddest day in our 30-year history—we were mourning the death of Pat Linse, the Art Director, co-founder of the magazine and the Skeptics Society, and my business partner, friend, and confidant of three decades. Pat was 73, overweight, and in poor health, so she was in the high morbidity cohort for contracting the SARS-CoV-2 virus that produces the COVID-19 disease. As she was herself vaccinated, socially isolated, and hyper-vigilant about outsiders coming into the office, I just assumed everyone else in the office was vaccinated.

Pat’s cause of death was not COVID-19. Nevertheless, Skeptic has been at the forefront of debunking conspiracy theories and quackery related to the pandemic, so the discovery that one of our staffers had not been vaccinated was troubling. “I read about people having seizures, getting violently sick, having heart attacks, and even dying from the vaccine,” she explained. “And getting injected with a foreign substance like that just doesn’t seem like a healthy thing to do.” Her reasons for being vaccine hesitant are not unique and are shared by tens of millions of people, who have also “been reading.” Google readily provides a massive trove of misinformation, disinformation, lies, damn lies, and distorted statistics.

I was so distraught that I forgot the overarching mission of the Skeptics Society, captured in Baruch Spinoza’s maxim “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them,” and I shamed her for putting the lives of those around her at risk (I later apologized). In keeping with the findings of psychological science,1 my shaming made her even more resistant as cognitive dissonance kicked in,2 and so the subsequent deluge of data, anecdotes, and analogies didn’t help at all. Not a few people with whom I shared this story expressed their opinion that I am the one who is confused about the science. So let me use this personal experience to address three of the most important underlying concerns that I think drive vaccine hesitancy.

1. Doubts about the vaccines themselves

The vaccine hesitant may be compared to spectators at a witch burning, more concerned about women being witches (believed to cause plagues, among other catastrophes) than about the inquisition burning people alive. It’s an imperfect analogy, since rare vaccine side effects are real and witches aren’t. But the point remains: during a pandemic, it is important to focus on the real, not the imagined threat.

Here’s another comparison to put the risk-benefit calculation into perspective: According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 38,680 people died in automobile accidents in the US in 2020. Yet few people think twice about going for a drive, and will sometimes do so while texting, eating, drinking alcoholic beverages, and fiddling with sound and nav systems. By comparison, according to the CDC, COVID-19 killed 345,000 Americans in 2020 alone, making it an order of magnitude deadlier than driving. So why are some people hesitant to protect themselves from a lethal disease but not from injury in far less common traffic accidents?

What about allergic reactions to the vaccine, known as anaphylaxis? According to the CDC, the rate of anaphylactic reaction from the vaccines is roughly two per 1,000,000 people, or 0.000002. By comparison, according to the CDC, the death rate from lightning strikes in the US is roughly one per 500,000, or 0.000002. So, you have the same chance of dying from a lightning strike as you do from going into vaccine anaphylactic shock, and yet we’ve seen no corresponding run on lightning rods. (And that’s assuming that after you received the vaccine you promptly left the facility rather than waiting 15 minutes, as instructed, so that you can be treated in the event of an allergic reaction. I waited 30 minutes after my vaccine stabs just in case, as several years ago I went into anaphylactic shock from a bee sting and now carry an EpiPen with me on bike rides.)

Another possible side-effect of the vaccine is thrombosis, or blood clotting, which is a serious health risk. According to the CDC, two confirmed cases of thrombosis have resulted from administration of the Moderna vaccine out of 328 million doses worldwide, which would be roughly the equivalent of getting struck by lightning 300 times in one year. The risks of myocarditis and pericarditis are slightly higher—there have been 716 reports of incidents (not deaths) out of over 300 million doses. There is no evidence whatsoever that the vaccines cause infertility in women.

All told, the CDC reports that, out of 346 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines administered, they received reports of 6,490 deaths affiliated with the vaccines, “even if it’s unclear whether the vaccine was the cause.” Let’s take that number as a worst-case scenario and divide it by 346,000,000—the risk of dying from a COVID-19 vaccine is 0.000018, again, roughly the rate of being stuck by lightning. You are far more likely to drown in your bathtub or pool or die in an airplane crash, tornado, hurricane, or earthquake, not to mention succumb to heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, lower respiratory diseases, nephritis, influenza and pneumonia, homicide, and suicide, causes of death to which most of us don’t give a second thought.

Many people have an understandable aversion to being injected with a derivative of a virus designed to train the body for combat with the fully armed viral enemy. The very idea engages our disgust emotion and negativity bias, in which bad is stronger than good (and in many cases a lot stronger). Bad smells, for example, elicit far more animated facial expressions than good or neutral odors.3 Negative stimuli have a stronger influence on neural activity than positive stimuli.4 Bad information is processed more thoroughly than good information.5 Traumatic events leave traces in mood and memory longer than good events.6 There are more cognitive categories and descriptive terms for negative than positive emotions.7 Evil contaminates good more than good purifies evil, as in the old Russian proverb: “A spoonful of tar can spoil a barrel of honey, but a spoonful of honey does nothing for a barrel of tar.”

COVID-19 vaccines, however, are completely different from any that came before as they contain no traces of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. As the CDC explains, unlike previous vaccines that inject “a weakened or inactivated germ into our bodies,” these new messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines “teach our cells how to make a protein—or even just a piece of a protein—that triggers an immune response inside our bodies. That immune response, which produces antibodies, is what protects us from getting infected if the real virus enters our bodies.” Once the mRNA instructions are inside the muscle cells of your upper arm, the cells use them to make the protein piece. Then, “the cell displays the protein piece on its surface. Our immune systems recognize that the protein doesn’t belong there and begin building an immune response and making antibodies, like what happens in natural infection against COVID-19.” If you felt ill after your second jab, as I did for a day, that is your body building immunity to the disease.

This is not only the fastest vaccine ever developed, it is also the most effective with the lowest rate of side effects ever recorded (with the usual caveats here that we don’t know the long-term consequences yet; then again, we have some confidence in the long-term consequences of COVID-19, and they aren’t good, starting with death). In the long history of medical inventions, this vaccine could well be the most miraculous, and as an atheist I don’t toss that word around lightly. To date, if you are vaccinated, there is a 99.999 (yes, three nines!) percent probability that you will not be hospitalized or die from COVID-19. Arguments that the vaccination process itself is leading to new strains of COVID were refuted by a July 30th, 2021 study published in the journal Nature that concluded: “As expected, we found that a fast rate of vaccination decreases the probability of emergence of a resistant strain,” and that “a period of transmission reduction close to the end of the vaccination campaign can substantially reduce the probability of resistant strain establishment.”

A final objection to vaccines is that the death rate from COVID-19 is so low that it’s not worth the risk of getting vaccinated. As of August 12th, 2021, 619,723 Americans have died out of the 36,446,791 reported COVID-19 cases, or 0.017. Compare that to the aforementioned worst-case vaccine death total (which is probably an order of magnitude too high) of 6,490 out of the 346 million vaccine doses, or 0.000018. That’s three orders of magnitude lower. If a person’s house is on fire they don’t stop to worry about the possible consequences of inhaling fine particles from the fire extinguisher chemicals. In other words, get vaccinated!

So, with all this information a few keystrokes or TV remote clicks away, why on Earth isn’t everyone clamoring to get vaccinated?

2. The politics of vaccination

A hint was on display in the first week of August, when a 31-year-old unvaccinated man named Daryl Baker was hospitalized by COVID-19. Asked to explain his reasoning by a local TV crew, with his wife and six-year-old son looking in through a window, he said, “I was strongly against getting the vaccine … because we’re a strong conservative family. But that little boy out there is a reason to have the vaccine.” Well, quite.

Then there is the “I’m unbreakable” belief, an example of which can be found in Travis Campbell, a 43-year-old man hospitalized by COVID-19 and now pleading on social media: “We just thought we were invincible and we weren’t going to get it. I’m testifying to all my bulletproof friends that are holding out, it’s time to protect your family.” He added “I have never been this sick in my life! My whole family has COVID. I truly regret not getting the vaccine … I’m over the stupid conspiracies. It’s time to be rational and protective.”

As of this writing, Baker and Campbell are recovering. But an unvaccinated 45-year-old Texas Republican official named H. Scott Apley succumbed to the disease five days after attacking vaccines on his Facebook page. He is survived by his widow Melissa and their infant son Reid. This entirely avoidable tragedy occurred after Apley invited people to a “mask burning” party at a bar, compared mask mandates to Nazism, described a program intended to incentivize vaccination as “disgusting,” and responded to Baltimore health commissioner Leana Wen’s announcement about the Pfizer vaccine’s stunning efficacy with this tweet: “You are an absolute enemy of a free people, #ShoveTheCarrotWhereTheSunDontShine.”

When I shared Apley’s story on Twitter, I proposed that “Instead of dancing on his grave for being an anti-vaxxer, let’s work toward encouraging the vaccine hesitant to hesitate no longer. Conservatives: family values include protecting your family from deadly viruses and staying alive for them.” A Kaiser Family Foundation study ranking vaccination rates and views by demographic group, placed Democrats at the top, with 86 percent having received at least one dose, and Republicans near the bottom, with only 52 percent at one dose. Astonishingly, 23 percent—more than one-in-five—of Republicans say they will “definitely not” get vaccinated.

The Skeptic Research Center recently collaborated with Dr. Kevin McCaffree and Dr. Anondah Saide to survey over 3,000 Americans on their beliefs and attitudes on 29 different conspiracy theories. Our study found a moderate-to-large correlation between the belief that “Political and medical elites are hiding the truth about the harmful role of vaccines in causing autism in children” (an older conspiracy theory) and belief that “COVID-19 was developed in a Chinese lab and Chinese officials have covered it up” (r = .39). It also found large correlations between that older conspiracy theory and belief that “5G cell phone towers reduce our immune function and increase our risk of COVID-19 infection” (r = .60), “The COVID-19 vaccine contains tiny computer chips to help make government surveillance of people easier” (r = .63), and that “Political and medical elites are hiding the truth about how the COVID-19 vaccines cause magnetic reactions” (r = .69). The only one to show any political difference was the Chinese lab origin conspiracy theory, with Democrats more strongly disagreeing with it, compared to Republicans, who were nearly seven times more likely to agree with it. Encouragingly, most people we asked rejected the conspiracy theory that COVID vaccines cause magnetic reactions, because we made that one up.

Historically, as far back as the late-19th century (the Vaccination Act of 1898 included a “conscience clause” for parents to opt out of vaccination), fears about vaccination have been disproportionately entertained by liberals (a recent holotype is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose anti-vaxxer beliefs are so extreme that his own family felt compelled to disown his views). So, it is disconcerting to see conservatives assume the vaccine hesitancy mantle, especially since Republicans boast about being the pro-life party.

3. What does “freedom” mean in a civil society

At a fundraising event on July 23rd, 2021 sponsored by the Alabama Federation of Republican Women, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said this from the podium: “You lucky people here in Alabama might get a knock on your door because I hear Alabama might be one of the most _un_vaccinated states in the nation.” Greene is not known for being a stickler on checking facts, but in this case she was right. According to the CDC, Alabama is tied with Mississippi for the lowest percentage of fully vaccinated citizens at only 35 percent. Her remarks produced cheers from the audience, to which she added: “Well, Joe Biden wants to come talk to you guys … What they don’t know is in the South, we all love our Second Amendment rights, and we’re not really big on strangers showing up on our front door, are we?”

A viewer of mine secretly recorded this video of @mtgreenee hinting at using guns to shoot door-to-door vaccinators at an event in Alabama recently pic.twitter.com/cjmUJ8UWI9

— David Pakman (@dpakman) August 3, 2021

Greene’s barely veiled suggestion that citizens take up arms against public health officials is surely rhetoric meant to swell campaign coffers, but the incident illuminates a deeper explanation for vaccine hesitancy—a misplaced understanding of freedom. When the Biden administration announced its plan to require federal employees to either get vaccinated or obtain regular negative COVID tests, Larry Cosme, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, expressed this misunderstanding of freedom as follows: “Forcing people to undertake a medical procedure is not the American way and is a clear civil rights violation no matter how proponents may seek to justify it.”

No it isn’t. As the appellate attorney Chris Truax explains, “Every school district in every state in America requires children to be vaccinated to attend public schools. Most states offer exemptions in some cases … But there is no question that states and school districts have the legal authority to demand that school children be vaccinated.” Truax tracks the legality of vaccine mandates back to 1905, when the US Supreme Court determined in Jacobson v. Massachusetts that “mandatory vaccinations were perfectly constitutional and an important tool of public health. Henning Jacobson, an early anti-vaxxer, refused to be vaccinated for smallpox. Just like anti-vaxxers do today about the COVID vaccine, he argued that the smallpox vaccine didn’t work.” The court determined otherwise, siding with “high medical authority” that vaccines do, in fact, work.

What about the freedom of choice protected by the Constitution? “We are unwilling to hold it to be an element in the liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States,” the justices held, “that one person, or a minority of persons, should have the power thus to dominate the majority when supported in their action by the authority of the State.” Otherwise, they concluded, “the spectacle would be presented of the welfare and safety of an entire population being subordinated to the notions of a single individual.” As the preamble to the US Constitution makes clear:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Pandemics can decimate a population—historically, between 10 and 50 percent of entire populations have been killed by plagues.8 That certainly qualifies as a threat to our domestic tranquility and general welfare. After all, it’s hard to be free when you’re dead. Civil society is based on the fundamental premise that we give up certain liberties to secure tranquility, defense, welfare, and greater liberty, such as the freedom from fatal diseases. To paraphrase a classic libertarian line, the freedom to sneeze and cough your virus ends at my nose.

We all gladly give up the freedom to drive on any side of the road we want for the security of relatively safe passage on our highways. We routinely agree to and abide by laws regulating the safety of food, drugs, trains, planes, and automobiles, so that we can eat, travel, and medicate with confidence. And while I wouldn’t say we are all happy to give up our hard-earned money through taxation so that the government can fund a public sanitation system that reduces the risk of us dying through communicable diseases, most of us recognize the economist Thomas Sowell’s trenchant observation that “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”9

With this understanding of the underlying motivations of vaccine hesitancy, we can solve the collective action problem of ending the pandemic in the simplest and safest way possible: Get vaccinated!

Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, host of The Michael Shermer Show podcast, and a presidential fellow at Chapman University. He is the author of Why People Believe Weird Things, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc, and Heavens on Earth. His latest book is Giving the Devil His Due. His next book is on conspiracies and conspiracy theories. You can follow him on Twitter @michaelshermer.

Feature image: Melbourne, Australia. 20th Feb 2021. Anti-vaccination protesters gather in Fawkner Park to condemn the coronavirus jab in the name of medical freedom. Jay Kogler/Alamy Live News

References

1 Two recent summaries of the research on the psychological underpinnings of science denial include: Science Denial: Why it Happens and What to Do About it by Gale M. Sinatra and Barbara K. Hofer (Oxford University Press, 2021) and How to Talk to a Science Denier by Lee McIntyre (MIT Press, 2021)
2 Mistakes Were Made but Not by Me by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007)
3 Gilbert, A. N., A. J. Fridlund, and J. Sabini, J. 1987. “Hedonic and Social Determinants of Facial Displays to Odors.” Chemical Senses, 12, 355–363.
4 Ito, T. A., Larsen, J. T., Smith, N. K., & Cacioppo, J. T. 1998. “Negative Information Weighs More Heavily on the Brain: The Negativity Bias in Evaluative Categorizations.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 887–900.
5 Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. 1978. “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 917–927.
6 Cahill, C, Llewelyn, S. P., & Pearson, C. 1991. “Long-Term Effects of Sexual Abuse which Occurred in Childhood: A Review.” British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 30, 117–130.
7 The Emotions by Nico H. Frijda (Cambridge University Press, 1986)
8 Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeill, (New York: Anchor Books, 1976)
9 A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles by Thomas Sowell (William Morrow, 1987)

More from Afghanistan where history now happens at a speed seldom seen before.

The current situation:

At least three more province capitals are now under Taliban control. In total 21 out of 34 provinces are now in Taliban hands. Most of the others are contested.

• August 14 - Sharana (Paktika)
• August 14 - Asasabad (Kunar)
• August 14 - Gardez (Paktia)

I have modified the yesterday's Long War Journal map to reflect the confirmed changes in the southeast and east.

August 13

bigger

August 14

bigger

The Afghan Analyst Network just published a detailed report about the development in Paktia over the last years. It explains the Taliban's operational course of action:

The Domino Effect in Paktia and the Fall of Zurmat: A case study of the Taleban surrounding Afghan cities

A thread by Bilal Sarawary, who hails from Kunar, documents the recent development there.

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Taliban peace offer:

Yesterday the Taliban have opened a new path to real negotiations.

To understand its full meaning requires a bit of historic background.

The Jamiat-e-Islami party was founded in 1972 by Burhanuddin Rabbani. Its aim was to form an Afghan state based on Islam. Ahmad Shah Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar were both early followers of Rabbani, being Kabul University students at the time.

In 1976 Hekmatyar broke away from Jamiat to found his own party: Hezb-e Islami. Jamiat members were mostly ethnic Tajik while Hezb members were mostly Pashtun. Jamiat followed a gradualist approach to take over the state. Hezb-i-Islami took a uncompromising militant stand. It gained support from the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

After the Soviet invasion both groups fought against the occupier. After the Soviet retreat both groups started to fight each other as well as the government. After the communist government fell in 1992 Jamiat took Kabul and installed its own government. Hezb, later joined by the Uzbek warloard Dostum, attacked Kabul with thousands of rockets. In 1994 Pakistan stopped financing Hezb and started to build the Taliban.

In 1995 the Taliban appeared and pushed both groups out of Kabul. The Hezb Dostum alliance fell apart. Dostum joined the Jamiat in the Northern Alliance. Hezb eventually took the Taliban side.

While fighting continued the Taliban were dominating until November 2001 when the U.S. supported the Northern Alliance to occupy the country. The warlords of the Jamiat have since held onto most of the offices in the various U.S. proxy governments in Kabul.

One of the Jamiat warlords is the Tajik Ismail Khan from Herat near the Iranian border. Khan was the governor of Herat when the Taliban last week took the city and province and arrested him.

In other times one would have expected that the Taliban would kill Ismail Khan. But that did not happen. Instead Ismail Khan received a phone call from Amir Khan Motaqay, a senior Taliban leader:

بدري ۳۱۳ @badri313_army - 15:48 UTC · Aug 13, 2021

This is a very historic call Essentially the TB rep greets Ismail Khan and asks him to ask the other Jamiat-i-Islami members like Atta, Salahuddin, Ahmad Massoud, Qanuni Saib to make a reconciliatory deal with the TB so that we can have peace after 40 years and give no reason for outsider to get involved in Afg affairs. Or even internal forces to start be dissatisfied. He also mentions that the TB have a policy not to insult any figures. Overall spoke to him in a respectful tone. Inshallah this leads to peace

Bilal Karimi(بلال کریمي) @BilalKarimi21 · Aug 13
Muttaqi Sahib's telephone contact with Ismail Khan https://pscp.tv/w/ ...

That the phone call was published proves that this is an official Taliban offer and request.

There is unconfirmed news that Ismail Khan is traveling to Kabul today to convince the other Jamiat members to agree to peace with the Taliban and to form a government with them.

The Taliban's only condition, as far as known, is to remove President Ashraf Ghani and his immediate followers. Everyone, including the U.S., will by now be ready to support that. Ghani has been a roadblock during the negotiations in Qatar. He is an academic and former World Bank bureaucrat who has spent most of his life in the U.S. He has little support in Afghanistan.

Ghani was expected to resign today but in a TV statement given earlier today he only promised to rally the defenses of Kabul. As he is unwilling to recognize the graveness of the military situation someone may well help him to leave the office.

With Ghani removed the two largest factions in Afghanistan, both coming from Islamic movements, could form a government and work out a new framework for the Afghan state.

This must have all along been the big plan behind the Taliban's current moves. Their military success puts enough pressure on the other side to agree to it.

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Other news bits from Afghanistan:

U.S. 'intelligence' is a joke. These tweets were a mere six hours apart.

Aron Lund @aronlund - 14:21 UTC · Aug 13, 2021

U.S. intelligence estimates for when Kabul could be overrun are now down to 30-90 days, report @barbarastarrcnn, @kylieatwood, and @jmhansler.
By my estimate as a professional estimate analyst, this still leaves time for two or three downward revisions.
CNN: Intelligence assessments warn Afghan capital could be cut off and collapse in coming months

Shashank Joshi @shashj - 20:16 UTC · Aug 13, 2021

US embassy in the 'burning documents' stage of preparation. "one diplomatic source telling CNN that one intelligence assessment indicates that Kabul could be isolated by the Taliban within the week, possibly within the next 72 hours."
CNN: US Embassy in Afghanistan tells staff to destroy sensitive materials

But don't despair. Someone did not get the memo. So help is underway.

Daybook @DaybookJobs - 14:01 UTC · Aug 13, 2021

Job Opportunity!
The U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan seeks a Public Engagement Assistant. The incumbent functions in an extremely sensitive political environment in which an ongoing insurgency adds to the urgency of accurate media reporting.
Daybook: Public Engagement Assistant At U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan

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The Afghan army has had seven corps. Five have now surrendered to the Taliban or dispersed. Only two, in Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif, are still operating. Neither of them is fairing well.

Babak Taghvaee - Μπάπακ Τακβαίε - بابک تقوایی @BabakTaghvaee - 11:00 UTC · Aug 14, 2021

#BREAKING: This just happed in #MaidanShahr, SW of #Kabul minutes ago. #Afghanistan National Army had sent its Special Operation Forces from #Zabul to secure the town but they surrendered to Taliban with their M1117 APCs! #Taliban will use them for attack to #Kabul on Monday! video

Paktﻯawal @Paktyaw4l - 10:57 UTC · Aug 14, 2021

Warlord Ata & Dostum forces in the north just suffered a heavy blow, their commander Ali Sarwar ended up in an ambush after hour of negotiations, his men put up a short lived fight, many casualties now. Some of them reached MazarESharif most have been killed, incld the cmdr.

The defenses of Mazar-i-Sharif have been broken. The city is under attack.

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Professor Paul Robinson on how it came to this:

After 20 years & billions of dollars, the American defeat in Afghanistan is worse than the Soviet failure ... how has this happened?

(Part 2 of the Girard series. Part 1 here)

Today, the Western world and particularly the United States appears to be in the midst of a classic Girardian sacrificial crisis. Once-reliable social institutions crumble. The public loses trust in its authorities: political, financial, legal, and medical. The new generation is poorer and sicker than the last. Few of any political persuasion believe that society is working or that we are on the right track. Reason, markets, and technology have failed to redeem their utopian promise. The gods have failed us, and we glimpse monsters emerging from their shadows: ecological collapse, nuclear armageddon, the poisoning of our bodies, minds, and world. Simmering differences and rivalries, once subsumed under a general civic consensus, take on a new intensity as each side grows more militant. As confidence wanes in the state’s capacity to hold evil at bay, latent ritualistic instincts come back to life.

Philosopher Rene Girard argued that these ritualistic instincts derive from social upheavals in which runaway cycles of vengeance – the original social disease – were converted into unifying violence against scapegoated victims. Rituals, religions, festivals, and political institutions evolved to prevent similar outbreaks from recurring.

One such ritual pattern that Girard identifies is the “antifestival,” in which “The rites of sacrificial expulsion are not preceded by a period of frenzied anarchy, but by an extreme austerity and an increased rigor in the observance of all interdicts.” In modern times this takes an extended institutional form in totalitarianism. Both Soviet communism and Nazi fascism had a strong puritanical streak, as both were hostile to anything outside their own order. Fascism is essentially an extended antifestival, and it arises, as does the antifestival, in response to looming social breakdown, real or imagined. In many societies, the priestly caste takes every opportunity to impose these rigorous interdicts, taboos, and rituals, which after all increase their own power. The best opportunity is a crisis that can be attributed to people’s sinful ways. A crisis like an earthquake, a flood, or… a plague.

We seem today to be partially emerging from an extended series of antifestivals, otherwise known as “lockdowns.” They have accompanied totalitarian tendencies and a quasi-fascistic hostility to true festivals or indeed to anything resembling public fun. Moreover, many of our public health measures bear a distinct ritualistic cast, and share with both fascism and with numerous archaic antifestivals an obsession with “pollution.” Consider the following passage from the early 20th-century anthropologist James Frazer, entitled “The Collapse of the Nredom Tribe: A Case of Religious Hysteria.”

Jenkins’ chronicle begins at a moment when the Nredom “tribe” (actually a numerous and highly organized society) was already showing signs of social, political, and ecological decline. For years its priests had been warning of evil spirits on the verge of attacking the people. Finally on the third year of Jenkins’ ethnographic residency, some members of the tribe began to take ill. An evil spirit was afoot! As the priests explained it, the spirit could possess anyone who did not abide by various new taboos and perform necessary rituals. Once possessed by the spirit, a person became unclean, at risk of transmitting it to anyone they associated with. No one could see the spirit without special ceremonial instruments such as the priests possessed, but they made drawings of it to show the populace.

A ritual was devised to determine whether any given person was possessed by the spirit. A specially consecrated wand was moistened with the bodily fluids of the person suspected of possession, and then sent to a special hut where priests would subject the stick to further divinatory rituals designed to force the evil spirit to reveal itself. Thereupon, agents of the priests would notify the unfortunate tribesperson of his or her possession. Anyone so adjudged of possession had to remain in strict separation from the rest of the tribe for a fortnight.

Some of the taboos and rituals that the unfortunate superstitious natives adopted were quite bizarre. For example, the priests had marks placed a fathom-length apart in all public places, stating that if everyone stood no closer to each other than the marks indicated, that they would enjoy magical protection. They also demanded that everyone who might come into proximity to the unclean perform frequent ritual ablutions and other forms of bodily purification, and wear various forms of ceremonial headgear to frighten off the spirit. All public gatherings were prohibited, and even normal functions of life severely curtailed. No activity was permitted except with the priests’ explicit sanction.

As you can imagine, this regime generated intense social stress, hardship, and some degree of opposition. Soon the priests were busy stamping out various heresies. Some heretics claimed that the rituals to stop transmission of the evil spirit wouldn’t work, or that the spirit was not so dangerous. Some heretics doubted in the very existence of the evil spirit, saying the heightened levels of sickness were due to some other cause. Others loudly proclaimed that the evil spirit had been loosed upon the populace by the priests themselves. Social tensions mounted as the priests tried to silence the heretics and arouse the populace against them.

Most people in the tribe trusted the priests, but many apparently harbored doubts too, because adherence to the rituals was inconsistent. Knowing that public rejection of the strict regime of taboos and rituals was inevitable, the priests announced they were developing a new sacrament, a magic potion that would protect the recipient forever from possession. Administered by a deputized priest via a slightly painful ritual of skin piercing, the potion sanctified all those who received it. These sanctified brethren could engage in normal life again, although they still had to abide by certain of the new rituals and taboos. Those refusing the potion remained unclean and were subject to all kinds of penalties, shaming, and ostracism.

Unfortunately, the new potion proved less effective than the priests originally promised. According to the priests, other ghosts and spirits were laying in wait, against whom new rituals and taboos must be applied and new potions administered. The power given unto the priests in this time of crisis would need to be permanent. And, they hinted darkly, this plague of evil was a kind of punishment for the tribe’s sinful ways, particularly the sins of the heretics. Heresy must be stamped out! The unclean must be sanctified! Soon religious pogroms swept the land, followed by counter-pogroms against the priests themselves. And Nredom society collapsed.

Okay, I confess. I made up this passage. The priests are the scientists. The wand is the PCR test swab. The unclean are those who test positive. The potion is the vaccine. My point is not that Covid is nothing but a religious hysteria. My point is that, whatever else Covid is, it is also a religious hysteria; that this lens greatly illuminates our current condition and quite probably upcoming events. Our social responses to Covid bear so striking a resemblance to ritual practices and ideas (masks, potions, tabooed persons, sanctification, etc.) that we have to ask how much of our public health policy is really scientific, and how much is religion in disguise. It might even lead to a deeper question: how and whether science differs from (other) religions. (Before you start protesting, “Ridiculous. What about objectivity? The Scientific Method? Peer review?” please read this explanation. The idea cannot be dismissed on trivial grounds.)

I hesitate to call anything “just a ritual,” a dismissal that ignores the mysterious relationship between ritual and reality; however, the dubious efficacy of many of our public health practices invites the judgment that they are, indeed, “just rituals.” I will not attempt here to make a case that masks, lockdowns, distancing, and so forth are dubious. Ultimately the argument comes down to whether our systems of knowledge production (science and journalism) are sound, and whether our medical and political authorities are trustworthy. To doubt public health orthodoxy is to answer no, they are not sound, they are not trustworthy. However, anyone who tries to make this case must, by necessity, source evidence from outside official institutions – evidence which, for the true believers, is illegitimate by definition.

One is unlikely to prove the priests wrong using information sanctioned by the priests. If you try, you are exposed as a heretic.

One contemporary term for a heretic is a “conspiracy theorist.” The term belongs in quotes because it is one thing to claim our institutions are unsound, and quite another to claim that a conscious conspiracy makes them so. “Conspiracy theorist” has become one of the ways to dismiss and dehumanize dissidents to public health orthodoxy.

The swiftness with which deviants from Covid orthodoxy are consigned to subhuman categories is alarming. It is just what is needed to prepare them for their role as Girardian scapegoats. A perennial human reflex, in times of trouble, is to find or create heretics and outcasts. Today they are called “anti-maskers,” “anti-vaxxers,” “science deniers,” “Q-adjacent,” “conspiracy theorists,” “covidiots,” and “domestic extremists,” subjects of a kind of virtual pogrom that humiliates, blames, and often digitally extinguishes its targets. And sometimes the consequences are more than digital.

Like modern fascists with their ideas of ethnic cleansing, and modern communists with their party purges, ancient societies according to Girard were often obsessed with pollution. The original pollutant was violence, which once instigated could quickly spread out of control, much like an infection. To quote Girard, “If the sacrificial catharsis actually succeeds in preventing the unlimited propagation of violence, a sort of infection is in fact being checked…. The tendency of violence to hurl itself on a surrogate if deprived of its original object can surely be described as a contaminating process.” Thus it was that sacrificial victims were often quarantined from normal society, and that the violence of the sacrifice was strictly contained within ritual structures.

What totalitarian societies, traditional antifestivals, and Covid lockdowns have in common is a reflex of control. This reflex meets any failure of control with more of it. When herbicide-resistant weeds appear, the solution is a new herbicide. When immigrants cross the border, we build a wall. When a school shooter gets into a locked school building, we fortify it further. When germs develop resistance to antibiotics, we develop new and stronger ones. When masks fail to stop the spread of covid, we wear two. When our taboos fail to keep evil at bay, we redouble them. The controlling mind foresees a paradise in which every action and every object is monitored, labeled, and controlled. There will be no room for any bad thing to exist. Nothing and no one will be out of place. Every action will be authorized. Everyone will be safe.

Those who attribute the controlling programs of Bill Gates and the technocratic elite to malice do not see the idealism behind the Technological Program. To the elites, their critics seem incomprehensible: deluded, ignorant enemies of progress itself, enemies of the betterment of humanity.

Unfortunately for them and for us, the paradise of total control is a mirage, receding all the more quickly the faster we approach it. The more tightly we impose order, the more chaos squeezes out through the cracks. Girard: “Violence too long held in check will overflow its bounds—and woe to those who happen to be nearby.” The same for other aspects of the Wild: desire, anger, fear, eros. Extreme order creates its opposite.

A subtle parallel connects the dynamics of the sacrificial victim with other programs of control. Ultimately, both depend on a false reduction whose temporary appearance of success allows deeper problems to persist. The cause of immigration is not just immigrants; the cause of school shootings is not just shooters; the cause of disease is not just pathogens; the cause of climate change Is not just greenhouse gases. These are but the terminal agents of a long process; they are the most conspicuous among a complex of causes; they are, like a scapegoat, convenient targets for the exercise of power. Having exercised it, we rest satisfied that something has been done.

(Part 1 of a multi-part series)

We live a double life, civilized in scientific and technical matters, wild and primitive in the things of the soul. That we are no longer conscious of being primitive, makes our tamed kind of wildness all the more dangerous. – Hans Von Hentig

The natural order is unraveling. Plagues, floods, droughts, political unrest, riots, and economic crises strike one upon the next, before society has recovered from the last. Cracks spread in the shell of normality that encloses human life. Societies have faced such circumstances repeatedly throughout history, just as we face them today.

We would like to think we are responding more rationally and more effectively than our unscientific forebears; instead, we enact age-old social dramas and superstitions dressed in the garb of modern mythology. No wonder, because the most serious crisis we face is not new.

None of the problems facing humanity today are technically difficult to solve. Holistic farming methods could heal soil and water, sequester carbon, increase biodiversity, and actually increase yields to swiftly solve various ecological and humanitarian crises. Simply declaring a moratorium on fishing in half the world’s oceans would heal them too. Systemic use of natural and alternative healing modalities could vastly reduce covid mortality, and reverse the (objectively more serious) plagues of autoimmunity, allergies, and addiction. New economic arrangements could easily eradicate poverty. However, what all of these easy solutions have in common is that they require agreement among human beings. There is almost no limit to what a unified, coherent society can achieve. That is why the overarching crisis of our time – more serious than ecological collapse, more serious than economic collapse, more serious than the pandemic – is the polarization and fragmentation of civil society. With coherency, anything is possible. Without it, nothing is.

The late philosopher Rene Girard believed that this has always been true: since prehistoric times, the greatest threat to society has been a breakdown in cohesion. Theologian S. Mark Heim elegantly lays out Girard’s theis: “Particularly in its infancy, social life is a fragile shoot, fatally subject to plagues of rivalry and vengeance. In the absence of law or government, escalating cycles of retaliation are the original social disease. Without finding a way to treat it, human society can hardly begin.”

The historical remedy is not very inspiring. Heim continues:

The means to break this vicious cycle appear as if miraculously. At some point, when feud threatens to dissolve a community, spontaneous and irrational mob violence erupts against some distinctive person or minority in the group. They are accused of the worst crimes the group can imagine, crimes that by their very enormity might have caused the terrible plight the community now experiences. They are lynched.

The sad good in this bad thing is that it actually works. In the train of the murder, communities find that this sudden war of all against one has delivered them from the war of each against all. The sacrifice of one person as a scapegoat discharges the pending acts of retribution. It “clears the air.” The sudden peace confirms the desperate charges that the victim had been behind the crisis to begin with. If the scapegoat’s death is the solution, the scapegoat must have been the cause. The death has such reconciling effect, that it seems the victim must possess supernatural power. So the victim becomes a criminal, a god, or both, memorialized in myth.

The buildup of reciprocal violence and anarchy that precedes this resolution was described by Girard in his masterwork, Violence and the Sacred, as a “sacrificial crisis.” Divisions rend society, violence and vengeance escalate, people ignore the usual restraints and morals, and the social order dissolves into chaos. This culminates in a transition from reciprocal violence to unanimous violence: the mob selects a victim (or class of victims) for slaughter and in that act of universal agreement, restores social order.

The Age of Reason has not uprooted this deep pattern of redemptive violence. Reason but serves to rationalize it; industry takes it to industrial scale, and high technology threatens to lift it to new heights. As society has grown more complex, so too have the variations on the theme of redemptive violence. Yet the pattern can be broken. The first step to doing that is to see it for what it is.

Death of the Festival

In order that full-blown sacrificial crises need not repeat, an institution arose that is nearly universal across human societies: the festival. Girard draws extensively from ethnography, myth, and literature to make the case that festivals originated as ritual reenactments of the breakdown of order and its subsequent restoration through violent unanimity.

A true festival is not a tame affair. It is a suspension of normal rules, mores, structures, and social distinctions. Girard explains:

Such violations [of legal, social, and sexual norms] must be viewed in their broadest context: that of the overall elimination of differences. Family and social hierarchies are temporarily suppressed or inverted; children no longer respect their parents, servants their masters, vassals their lords. This motif is reflected in the esthetics of the holiday—the display of clashing colors, the parading of transvestite figures, the slapstick antics of piebald “fools.” For the duration of the festival unnatural acts and outrageous behavior are permitted, even encouraged.

As one might expect, this destruction of differences is often accompanied by violence and strife. Subordinates hurl insults at their superiors; various social factions exchange gibes and abuse. Disputes rage in the midst of disorder. In many instances the motif of rivalry makes its appearance in the guise of a contest, game, or sporting event that has assumed a quasi-ritualistic cast. Work is suspended, and the celebrants give themselves over to drunken revelry and the consumption of all the food amassed over the course of many months.

Festivals of this kind serve to cement social coherence and remind society of the catastrophe that lays in wait should that coherence falter. Faint vestiges of them remain today, for example in football hooliganism, street carnivals, music festivals, and the Halloween phrase “trick or treat.” The “trick” is a relic of the temporary upending of the established social order. Druidic scholar Philip Carr-Gomm describes Samhuinn, the Celtic precursor to Halloween, like this:

Samhuinn, from 31 October to 2 November was a time of no-time. Celtic society, like all early societies, was highly structured and organised, everyone knew their place. But to allow that order to be psychologically comfortable, the Celts knew that there had to be a time when order and structure were abolished, when chaos could reign. And Samhuinn was such a time. Time was abolished for the three days of this festival and people did crazy things, men dressed as women and women as men. Farmers’ gates were unhinged and left in ditches, peoples’ horses were moved to different fields...

In modern, “developed” societies today, neither Halloween nor any other holiday or culturally sanctioned event permits this level of anarchy. Our holidays have been fully tamed. This does not bode well. Girard writes:

The joyous, peaceful facade of the deritualized festival, stripped of any reference to a surrogate victim and its unifying powers, rests on the framework of a sacrificial crisis attended by reciprocal violence. That is why genuine artists can still sense that tragedy lurks somewhere behind the bland festivals, the tawdry utopianism of the “leisure society.” The more trivial, vulgar, and banal holidays become, the more acutely one senses the approach of something uncanny and terrifying.

That last sentence strikes a chord of foreboding. For decades I’ve looked at the degenerating festivals of my culture with an alarm I couldn’t quite place. As All Hallows Eve devolved into a minutely supervised children’s game from 6 to 8pm, as the Rites of Resurrection devolved into the Easter Bunny and jellybeans, and Yule into an orgy of consumption, I perceived that we were stifling ourselves in a box of mundanity, a totalizing domesticity that strove to maintain a narrowing order by shutting out wildness completely. The result, I thought, could only be an explosion.

It is not just that festivals are necessary to blow off steam. They are necessary to remind us of the artificiality and frailty of the human ordering of the world, lest we go insane within it.

Mass insanity comes from the denial of what everyone knows is true. Every human being knows, if only unconsciously, that we are not the roles and personae we occupy in the cultural drama of life. We know the rules of society are arbitrary, set up so that the show can be played out to its conclusion. It is not insane to enter this show, to strut and fret one’s hour upon the stage. Like an actor in a movie, we can devotedly play our roles in life. But when the actor forgets he is acting and loses himself so fully in his role that he cannot get out of it, mistaking the movie for reality, that’s psychosis. Without respite from the conventions of the social order and without respite from our roles within it, we go crazy as well.

We should not be surprised that Western societies are showing signs of mass psychosis. The vestigial festivals that remain today – the aforementioned holidays, along with cruise ships and parties and bars – are contained within the spectacle and do not stand outside it. As for Burning Man and the transformational music & art festivals, these have exercised some of the festival’s authentic function – until recently, when their exile to online platforms stripped them of any transcendental possibility. Much as the organizers are doing their best to keep the idea of the festival alive, online festivals risk becoming just another show for consumption. One clicks into them, sits back, and watches. In-person festivals are different. They start with a journey, then one must undergo an ordeal (waiting in line for hours). Finally you get to the entrance temple (the registration booth), where a small divination ritual (checking the list) is performed to determine your fitness to attend (by having made the appropriate sacrifice – a payment – beforehand). Thereupon, the priest or priestess in the booth confers upon the celebrant a special talisman to wear around the wrist at all times. After all this, the subconscious mind understands one has entered a separate realm, where indeed, to a degree at least, normal distinctions, relations, and rules do not apply. Online events of any kind rest safely in the home. Whatever the content, the body recognizes it as a show.

More generally, locked in, locked down, and locked out, the population’s confinement within the highly controlled environment of the internet is driving them crazy. By “controlled” I do not here refer to censorship, but rather to the physical experience of being seated watching depictions of the real, absent any tactile or kinetic dimension. On line, there is no such thing as a risk. OK, sure, someone can hurt your feelings, ruin your reputation, or steal your credit card number, but all these operate within the cultural drama. They are not of the same order as crossing a stream on slippery rocks, or walking in the heat, or hammering in a nail. Because conventional reality is artificial, the human being needs regular connection to a reality that is non-conventional in order to remain sane. That hunger for unprogrammed, wild, real experiences – real food for the soul – intensifies beneath the modern diet of canned holidays, online adventures, classroom exercises, safe leisure activities, and consumer choices.

Absent authentic festivals, the pent-up need erupts in spontaneous quasi-festivals that follow the Girardian pattern. One name for such a festival is a riot. In a riot, as in an authentic festival, prevailing norms of conduct are upended. Boundaries and taboos around private property, trespassing, use of streets and public spaces, etc. dissolve for the duration of the “festival.” This enactment of social disintegration culminates either in genuine mob violence or some cathartic pseudo-violence (which can easily spill over into the real thing). An example is toppling statues, an outright ritual substituting symbolic action for real action even in the name of “taking action.” Yes, I understand its rationale (around dismantling narratives that involve symbols of white supremacy and so forth) but its main function is as a unifying act of symbolic violence. However, this cathartic release of social tensions does little to change the deep conditions that give rise to those tensions in the first place. Thus it helps to maintain them.

I became aware of the festive dimension to riots while teaching at a university in the early 2000s. Some of my students participated in a riot following a home-team basketball victory. It started as a celebration, but soon they were smashing windows, stealing street signs, removing farmers’ gates from their hinges, and otherwise violating the social order. These violations also took on a creative dimension reminiscent of street carnivals. One student recounted making a gigantic “the finger” out of foam and parading it around town. “It was the most fun I’ve had my whole life,” he said. More than any contained, neutered holiday, this was an authentic festival seeking to be born. And it wasn’t safe. People were accidentally injured. A real festival is serious business. Normal laws and customs, morals and conventions, do not govern it. It may evolve its own, but these originate organically, not imposed by authorities of the normal, conventional order; else, it is not a real festival. A real festival is essentially a repeated, ritualized riot that has evolved its own pattern language.

The more locked down, policed, and regulated a society, the less tolerance there is for anything outside its order. Eventually but one micro-festival remains – the joke. To not take things so seriously is to stand outside their reality; it is to affirm for a moment that this isn’t as real as we are making it, there is something outside this. There is truth in a joke, the same truth that is in a festival. It is a respite from the total enclosure of conventional reality. That is why totalitarian movements are so hostile to humor, with the sole exception of the kind that degrades and mocks their opponents. (Mocking humor, such as racist humor, is in fact an instrument of dehumanization in preparation for scapegoating.) In Soviet Russia one could be sent to the Gulag for telling the wrong joke; in that country, it was also jokes that kept people sane. Humor can be deeply subversive – not only by making authorities seem ridiculous, but by making light of the reality they attempt to impose.

Because it undermines conventional reality, humor is also a primal peace offering. It says, “Let’s not take our opposition so seriously.” That is not to say we should joke all the time, using humor to deflect intimacy and distract from the roles we have agreed to play in the drama of the human social experience, any more than life should be an endless festival. But because humor acts as a kind of microfestival to tether us to a transcendent reality, a society of good humor is likely to be a healthy society that needn’t veer into sacrificial violence. And a society attempts to confine its jokes within politically correct bounds faces the same “uncanny and terrifying” prospects as a society that has tamed its festivals. Humorlessness is a sign that a sacrificial crisis is on its way.

The loss of sanity that results from confinement in unreality is itself a Girardian sacrificial crisis, the essential feature of which is internecine violence. One might think that with little but hurt feelings at stake, online interactions would be less fraught with conflict than in-person interactions. But of course it is the reverse. One way to understand it is that absent a transcendental perspective outside the orderly, conventional realm of “life,” trivial things loom large and we start taking life much too seriously. This is not to deny the substance of our disagreements, but do we really need to go to war over them? Is the other side whose shortcomings we blame for our problems really so awful? As Girard observes, “The same creatures who are at each others’ throats during the course of a sacrificial crisis are fully capable of coexisting, before and after the crisis, in the relative harmony of a ritualistic order.”

Surveying the social media landscape, it is clear that we are indeed at each others’ throats, and there is no guarantee that that will remain a mere figure of speech as something uncanny and terrifying approaches.

Let's open this posting with a definition:

"Antibody-Dependent Enhancement or ADE occurs when the antibodies generated during an immune response recognize and bind to a pathogen, but they are unable to prevent infection. Instead, these antibodies act as a “Trojan horse,” allowing the pathogen to get into cells and exacerbate the immune response.

On a few occasions ADE has resulted from vaccination:

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) — RSV is a virus that commonly causes pneumonia in children. A vaccine was made by growing RSV, purifying it, and inactivating it with the chemical formaldehyde. In clinical trials, children who were given the vaccine were more likely to develop or die from pneumonia after infection with RSV. As a result of this finding, the vaccine trials stopped, and the vaccine was never submitted for approval or released to the public.

Measles — An early version of measles vaccine was made by inactivating measles virus using formaldehyde. Children who were vaccinated and later became infected with measles in the community developed high fevers, unusual rash, and an atypical form of pneumonia. Upon seeing these results, the vaccine was withdrawn from use, and those who received this version of the vaccine were recommended to be vaccinated again using the live, weakened measles vaccine, which does not cause ADE and is still in use today.

A more recent example of ADE following vaccination comes from dengue virus:

Dengue virus — In 2016, a dengue virus vaccine was designed to protect against all four serotypes of the virus. The hope was that by inducing immune responses to all four serotypes at once, the vaccine could circumvent the issues related to ADE following disease with dengue virus. The vaccine was given to 800,000 children in the Philippines. Fourteen vaccinated children died after encountering dengue virus in the community. It is hypothesized that the children developed antibody responses that were not capable of neutralizing the natural virus circulating in the community. As such, the vaccine was recommended only for children greater than 9 years of age who had already been exposed to the virus."

Here is another quote about ADE and SARS-CoV-2 vaccines from a paper entitled "Antibody-dependent enhancement and SARS-CoV-2 vaccines and therapies" by Wen She Lee et al as found in Nature Microbiology with my bolds throughout:

"Antibody-based drugs and vaccines against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) are being expedited through preclinical and clinical development. Data from the study of SARS-CoV and other respiratory viruses suggest that anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies could exacerbate COVID-19 through antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). Previous respiratory syncytial virus and dengue virus vaccine studies revealed human clinical safety risks related to ADE, resulting in failed vaccine trials."

Here is the conclusion from the paper:

"ADE has been observed in SARS, MERS and other human respiratory virus infections including RSV and measles, which suggests a real risk of ADE for SARS-CoV-2 vaccines and antibody-based interventions. However, clinical data has not yet fully established a role for ADE in human COVID-19 pathology. Steps to reduce the risks of ADE from immunotherapies include the induction or delivery of high doses of potent neutralizing antibodies, rather than lower concentrations of non-neutralizing antibodies that would be more likely to cause ADE.

Going forwards, it will be crucial to evaluate animal and clinical datasets for signs of ADE, and to balance ADE-related safety risks against intervention efficacy if clinical ADE is observed. Ongoing animal and human clinical studies will provide important insights into the mechanisms of ADE in COVID-19. Such evidence is sorely needed to ensure product safety in the large-scale medical interventions that are likely required to reduce the global burden of COVID-19."

To put it very simply, ADE can occur in vaccinated humans and animals when they are exposed to the wild virus (the challenge).

With that background, let's look at a very little-reported article that appeared on the National Institutes of Health National Liberary of Medicine website entitled "Informed consent disclosure to vaccine trial subjects of risk of COVID-19 vaccines worsening clinical disease" by Timothy Cardozo and Ronald Veazey as shown here:

The authors open by noting the following:

"Patient comprehension is a critical part of meeting medical ethics standards of informed consent in study designs. The aim of the study was to determine if sufficient literature exists to require clinicians to disclose the specific risk that COVID-19 vaccines could worsen disease upon exposure to challenge or circulating virus."

Here is another definition, also from the NIH website:

"Informed consent is the process in which a health care provider educates a patient about the risks, benefits, and alternatives of a given procedure or intervention. The patient must be competent to make a voluntary decision about whether to undergo the procedure or intervention. Informed consent is both an ethical and legal obligation of medical practitioners in the US and originates from the patient's right to direct what happens to their body. Implicit in providing informed consent is an assessment of the patient's understanding, rendering an actual recommendation, and documentation of the process. The Joint Commission requires documentation of all the elements of informed consent "in a form, progress notes or elsewhere in the record." The following are the required elements for documentation of the informed consent discussion: (1) the nature of the procedure, (2) the risks and benefits and the procedure, (3) reasonable alternatives, (4) risks and benefits of alternatives, and (5) assessment of the patient's understanding of elements 1 through 4.

It is the obligation of the provider to make it clear that the patient is participating in the decision-making process and avoid making the patient feel forced to agree to with the provider. The provider must make a recommendation and provide their reasoning for said recommendation."

In other words, medical practitioners have the legal and moral obligation to ensure that the people that they are treating understand the risks and benefits of the medical procedure (including vaccinations) and that they do not feel coerced into receiving the medical procedure.

Let's go back to the article by Cardozo and Veazey. The authors reviewed published literature and clinical trial protocols to identify evidence that COVID-19 vaccines could worse disease if the vaccine recipients are exposed to the wild virus. Here are the results of the study:

"COVID-19 vaccines designed to elicit neutralising antibodies may sensitise vaccine recipients to more severe disease than if they were not vaccinated. Vaccines for SARS, MERS and RSV have never been approved, and the data generated in the development and testing of these vaccines suggest a serious mechanistic concern: that vaccines designed empirically using the traditional approach (consisting of the unmodified or minimally modified coronavirus viral spike to elicit neutralising antibodies), be they composed of protein, viral vector, DNA or RNA and irrespective of delivery method, may worsen COVID-19 disease via antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). This risk is sufficiently obscured in clinical trial protocols and consent forms for ongoing COVID-19 vaccine trials that adequate patient comprehension of this risk is unlikely to occur, obviating truly informed consent by subjects in these trials."

Since the technocracy has a way of making things disappear from the internet in this post-truth era, here is a screen capture of the entire article:

The authors concluded that the specific risk of ADE linked to the COVID-19 vaccines should have been prominently and independently disclosed to research subjects in trials and for future patients after the vaccines are approved for use. Given that the current crop of COVID-19 vaccines are not scheduled for completion for at least another year and that they are currently being used under an Emergency Use Authorization, one would think that providing informed consent to all vaccine recipients would be critical.

In closing, as one example, let's look at the COVID-19 vaccine consent form for the State of New York:

This is the only warning given to vaccine recipients about the nature of the COVID-19 vaccine that they are about to receive:

Here is Walgreen's Informed Consent document for COVID-19 and other vaccines:

I wonder how many recipients actually read all of the fine print which, as you will notice, says nothing about ADE? Note that recipients are stating that they were given the "chance to ask questions which were answered to my satisfaction" and that they "understand the benefits and risks of the vaccination as described". How many laypeople actually understand the risks and benefits of the mRNA vaccine technology let alone know what questions to ask? How many laypeople understand that the "jab" could well lead to a greater susceptibility to ADE, making future exposures to the new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus even riskier?

This study is the smoking gun in the COVID-19 narrative and is should be of particular interest to all of us given that it appears on the website of Anthony Fauci's employer. Recipients of COVID-19 vaccines are not properly being informed of the risks of antibody-dependent enhancement by governments, vaccine manufacturers, the mainstream media and public health officials. Most people have absolutely no concept of ADE and its potential impact on their future health and are being coerced into accepting an unproven vaccine with the promise of a return to societal normalcy by their governments (the carrot) and the threat of having their freedom restricted for the indefinite future (the stick), contradicting the very concept of informed consent.

Sergei Kovalyov, who died this week, was a controversial figure. A Soviet dissident who became Russia’s first Presidential Human Rights Commissioner, Kovalyov provoked intense reactions. To his admirers he was a principled defender of human rights and democracy, a man of enormous courage who faced down first the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and then the post-Soviet government of Boris Yeltsin. To his detractors, he was a Westernizing zealot devoid of any patriotic feeling who betrayed his country and its soldiers by taking the side of Chechen terrorists. In a sense, Kovalyov embodied the triumphs and tribulations of Russian liberalism, and as such his life deserves a closer look.

Sergei Kovalyov

A high proportion of Soviet dissidents were scientists, and Kovalyov, a biologist by training, was no exception. Nikita Khrushchev put a great emphasis on science as the means by which Soviet society would catch up and overtake the West, and consequently scientists were given a fair amount of intellectual independence in order to pursue new discoveries. This provided fertile ground for the growth of dissident thinking.

The scientific mindset helped shape the dissident movement. It brought with it Enlightenment humanism (influenced to some degree by the more humanistic elements of Marxist thought) and a form of scientific positivism that saw human society as being driven by the same sort of laws that determined chemistry and physics. This produced a historical determinism that saw society as inevitably heading towards a given goal, which for those imbued with Marxism-Leninism was communism, but which for some others, such as Kovalyov, was Western-style liberal democracy. One might say that just a Marx flipped Hegel on his head, Soviet liberals flipped Marx on his head to discover a new “End of History”, personified by the West. This gave them the sense of confidence they needed to oppose the Soviet regime, and, in some cases, a certain dogmatism that led them to believe that the ends justified the means in the pursuit of the inevitable liberal and democratic future.

Kovalyov fitted well within this paradigm. As his biographer Emma Gilligan writes, his “morality was founded on a rational philosophy that stemmed from a scientific worldview and he shared the enlightenment practice of questioning authority.” His views were “rationalistic humanism … with their emphasis on positive law.” Kovalyov’s “scientific worldview” and “rationalistic humanism” rendered him a cosmopolitan who valued individual humans more than social constructs such as nations. He described himself as an “anti-patriot”. As we shall see, this proved to be his eventual undoing.

After losing his job at Moscow State University, he worked at an experimental fish hatchery in Kalinin (Tver) before being arrested and imprisoned in 1974. His arrest owed itself to the two years he spent editing The Chronicle of Current Events, an underground publication that surveyed abuses of human rights in the Soviet Union, including the Soviet practice of locking dissidents up in psychiatric hospitals on the spurious grounds that they were insane. It was this work that would rightly entrench Kovalyov’s reputation as a courageous defender of human rights and individual liberty.

Kovalyov in prison

After seven years in a strict-regime prison camp, and three years of internal exile, Kovalyov was freed in 1984, just in time for the start of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika one year later. His attitude to perestroika put him at the more moderate end of the dissident spectrum. This had been true even when editing The Chronicle, when as Gilligan says, “Kovalyov argued against … a simple line between ‘us and them’.”

In my last post, I discussed how some Russian liberals tend to blame the country’s problems on a small band of crooks who have usurped the state, while others blame the Russian people as a whole. Kovalyov belonged the second group. He wrote: “Totalitarianism is not only government pressure over society. It consists also of a society that displays a readiness to submit itself to that violence and even to assist in state terror.” Given this belief, he felt that simply opposing the Soviet regime and seeking to topple it was pointless. Regime and people were equally responsible for the fate of the country and needed to work together to improve it.

Kovalyov’s position was controversial in dissident groups. Fellow dissident Alexander Podrabinek, for instance, complained to him that: “You cannot attempt to place moral responsibility for the crimes of the regime on everyone. … This government was never ours. … The majority of the people in our country cannot and must not be held responsible for the crimes of the regime.” Kovalyov, however, argued that, “not all compromises are dishonest. If I agree with something I am ready for conscientious cooperation.” To this end, in 1987 he created the group Press Klub Glasnost which, against opposition from dissidents such as Podrabinek and Valeriia Novodvorskaia, passed a resolution saying that, “We consider it essential to continue persistent attempts to establish a dialogue between the human rights movement in the USSR and the authorities … we from our side are prepared in all good faith to establish cooperation with the authorities at all levels.”

This is, I think, something that Kovalyov’s conservative detractors miss: Kovalyov showed a willingness to work with the authorities, not to seek their destruction.

This applied equally to the post-Soviet government of Boris Yeltsin. Indeed, one might say that Kovalyov, like so many Russian liberals, took his support for Yeltsin too far. The passionate commitment to democracy and human rights led him and many others to tolerate, even encourage, the creation of an authoritarian order in the early 1990s, a move he would later regret.

So it was that following the failed August 1991 coup against Gorbachev, Kovalyov supported banning of the Communist Party, providing expert testimony to the Constitutional Court that the party and the KGB were one and the same. Later, he supported Yeltsin when he sent tanks to attack the Russian parliament in October 1993. He said:

“There is no doubt that the victory of [parliament’s leader Ruslan] Khasbulatov and his supporters … would have meant the end of democracy, the end of parliamentarism, and the final result, the end of freedom in Russia … For my entire life I have tried to fight against the arbitrariness of power. But I am firmly prepared to defend these rights from a crowd of pogromshchiki, from a possessed crowd whose leaders have passed guns to them.”

Yeltsin had acted on the will of the people when he dissolved parliament, said Kovalyov, adding that, “The President by definition must be the guarantor of constitutionalism. But what is constitutionalism – following the letter of a bad law or the fundamental principles of constitutionalism?”

The contradiction between this and Kovalyov the defender of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, is of course striking. He was at least aware that there was a problem. “Haven’t we resorted to the principle of revolutionary expediency?” he asked, “I hope that the present precedent will not become [parliamentarism’s] tombstone.”

Before long, he would decide that indeed it had.

In June 1990, Kovalyov was appointed Chairman of the Human Rights Committee of the Russian Supreme Soviet (the same body whose physical destruction he would later celebrate). In September 1993, Yeltsin also appointed him head of the new Presidential Human Rights Commission. As such, he was responsible for examining the condition of human rights in the Russian Federation, receiving citizens’ complaints, and making suggestions for improvements.

Beyond this, Kovalyov also made a significant contribution to Russian law by drafting Section 2 “On the Rights and Liberties of Man and the Citizen” of the new Russian Constitution that came into effect in late 1993. Section 2 gives the Russian Constitution a distinctly liberal feel, guaranteeing Russian citizens a host of civil and political rights, and unlike the old Soviet constitution makes these rights unconditional, not dependent on citizens’ fulfilment of their obligations or on compatibility with the advancement of the cause of communism. This was perhaps Kovalyov’s greatest achievement. For this alone, he deserves his place in the pantheon of Russian statesmen.

Before long, however, his relationship with the Russian state collapsed into a condition of mutual acrimony.

There were multiple causes. One was the increasingly authoritarian methods used by Boris Yeltsin’s government. Kovalyov objected, for instance, to Yeltsin’s 1994 Decree “On Urgent Measures to Protect Citizens against Banditry and Organized Crime,” saying that it violated the constitution on several counts, such as its articles allowing for warrantless searches and prolonged detention without charge. It’s worth highlighting this case, as it indicates how the Yeltsin government started abusing the Russian constitution before its ink was barely dry. The idea that the 1990s were a liberal paradise that was then destroyed by Vladimir Putin is a little hard to sustain.

The second cause of Kovalyov’s break with the Yeltsin government was the First Chechen War, that started at the end of 1994. Kovalyov called this an “act of terrorism against the Chechen people.” After travelling to Grozny to observe events, he was shocked to see how Russian forces indiscriminate shelling was killing large numbers of civilians. He noted:

“The firing, perhaps, is directed at military targets, but the strikes are falling on people’s homes. I have seen the destruction of people’s homes with my own eyes. I have seen the corpses of peaceful citizens, clearly not combatants. … What is happening is clearly an enormous tragedy. … The Chechen nation, like any nation, can make mistakes in its choice of leader and ideals. But this does not give anyone the right to conduct a debate with them in the language of bombing and bombardment.”

Kovalyov demonstrating against the war in Chechnya

It was at this point that Kovalyov sealed his fate. It’s worth remembering that his job was to defend human rights, not to support government policy. And he took the job seriously. Seeing the massive human rights abuses taking place in Chechnya, he determined that a ceasefire was necessary. But a ceasefire inevitably favoured the Chechen rebels, as it would leave them in control of most of Chechnya. Because of this, many in Russia concluded that Kovalyov was actively supporting the Chechens against his own people.

Kovalyov deepened this impression by visiting the bunker of Chechen leader Dzhokar Dudayev, where he and others found themselves stuck after Russian forces launched an assault on Grozny. It was at this point that Kovalyov is said to done something that forever tarnished his reputation in Russia: supposedly he urged surrounded Russian troops to surrender to the Chechens, guaranteeing their safety if they did (something he was, of course, unable to do). From that moment on, in the eyes of many Russians, Kovalyov was little more than a traitor.

The result was a huge political storm when Kovalyov returned to Moscow. Deputies in the Russian parliament, the State Duma, lined up to condemn him. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, for instance, ranted:

“Who is he defending? The bandits, rapists and troublemakers…people who are fighting against our Constitution, our State, with weapons in their hands! And millions of citizens have suffered. Suffered from the disintegration of the USSR as a result of the activity of his political movement… Why wasn’t he monitoring human rights violations in our city? Why was he sitting in a basement in a city where a war is going on?”

It’s worth pointing out that the State Duma in 1994, though dominated by Communists and Zhirinovsky’s misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, had a much stronger liberal representation than it does today. Yet even then, a strong patriotic mood, and a tendency to denounce political opponents as traitors, were obvious. Once again, the idea that this mood is a creation of Putin is, in retrospect, a myth.

In response to the attacks, Kovalyov dug his grave further. “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel,” he said on TV, an idea he reiterated some years later, telling an interviewer, “I am an anti-patriot. I really do not like what is called patriotism and think it is a socially harmful idea.”

One can argue about whether Kovalyov is right. But politically speaking, his anti-patriotism was politically fatal. The State Duma voted to dismiss him from his position as parliamentary human rights commissioner. For a little while, though, he remained in his presidential post, a fact which led him to the final controversial incident of his career – the Budyonnovsk hospital siege.

In June 1995, Chechen terrorists, led by Shamil Basayev, seized a hospital in the town of Budyonnovsk in southern Russia, taking up to 2,000 people hostage. Kovalyov then negotiated their release. Under the terms of the agreement, Basayev let the hostages go, and in return was allowed to leave Budyonnovsk safely. To guarantee the agreement, 100 volunteers went with him as hostages. Kovalyov joined their number.

One has to admire Kovalyov’s courage, putting his own life on the line to ensure the release of other hostages. Even this, though, wasn’t enough to satisfy his opponents. Kovalyov’s deal allowed Basayev to get away with his act of terrorism. To some, it was proof once again that Kovalyov was on the side of the terrorists. The fact that Dudayev awarded Kovalyov a medal and that Dudayev’s wife described Kovalyov as her favorite politician didn’t help.

By January 1996, Kovalyov had had enough, and resigned as head of the Presidential Human Rights Commision. He wrote to Yeltsin:

“I can’t go on working with a president whom I believe to be neither a supporter of democracy nor a guarantee of the rights and liberties of my fellow citizens. … Life has always been cheap in Russia, especially under the Bolsheviks. But you introduced a new ‘democratic’ and ‘humanitarian’ strain into this shameful national tradition. For a whole year in Chechnya you have been restoring ‘constitutional order’ and ‘civil rights’ with bombs and missiles.”

Kovalyov called Yeltsin a “constitutional criminal.” He said:

“The real cause of the war in Chechnya is neither in Grozny nor in the entire Caucasus region; it is in Moscow. The war pushed aside that corner of the curtain that obscured the real power struggle for control of Russia. Unfortunately, it is not liberal, but the most hard-line forces – those from the military-industrial complex and the former KGB – who are celebrating that victory in the power struggle now … the goal of the war in Chechnya was to send a clear-cut message to the entire population: ‘The time for talking about democracy in Russia is up. It’s time to introduce some order into this country, and we’ll do it whatever the cost’.”

Kovalyov’s story tells us much about the fate of Russian liberalism. In its determination to extirpate the remnants of the communist system, it threw itself 100% behind Boris Yeltsin in his struggle against the then parliament, the Supreme Soviet, and celebrated his use of force to defeat his opponents. It was then shocked to discover that the new order it had created was not the liberal democratic order it had imagined. Committed to the rule of law, it turned a blind eye to it when it suited them, and then threw up its arms in horror when Yeltsin’s army revealed its utter unconcern for the rule of law during the war in Chechnya. While seeking to save lives and end the violence, Russian liberalism proved completely out of touch with the patriotic feelings of most Russians, who didn’t like the war in Chechnya but viewed the Chechen rebels as bandity, bandits or terrorists, and couldn’t tolerate any note of sympathy for them. Kovalyov proved unable to find some sort of language that would condemn the indiscriminate use of force by the government but also condemn the terrorism of the government’s enemies. In the process, he and other liberals inadvertently destroyed liberalism’s reputation by smearing it with the “anti-patriotic” label.

Of course, one may argue that any other approach would have been unprincipled. Indeed, Kovalyov’s career speaks to a man of enormous principle, willing to endure great sacrifices in order to build a better society. His contribution to human rights, especially to the 1993 Constitution, merits high praise. But his career speaks also to the fact that the “authoritarian” regime attributed to Vladimir Putin was firmly in place already by the early 1990s, to the fact that Russian liberals themselves helped construct this regime, and also to Russian liberalism’s fatal tendency to portray itself as anti-patriotic to the bone. It was Kovalyov’s tragedy that a life dedicated to the promotion of human rights ultimately led to his rejection by the people he sought to serve.

In a striking passage near the beginning of his contribution to the Penguin History of the Church, R.W. Southern writes:

The identification of the church with the whole of organized society is the fundamental feature which distinguishes the Middle Ages from earlier and later periods of history. At its widest limits it is a feature of European history from the fourth to the eighteenth century—from Constantine to Voltaire. In theory, during the whole of this period only orthodox and obedient believers could enjoy the full rights of citizenship. … Just as the modern state requires those who are its members by the accident of birth to keep its laws, to contribute to its defence and public services, to subordinate private interests to the common good, so the medieval church required those who had become its members by the accident (as one may call of) of baptism to do all these things and many others.

Nowadays even Christians who hold orthodox views about the theological implications of baptism—that it “cleanses us from original sin, makes us Christians, children of God, and heirs of heaven”—will have a hard time understanding the role it once played in demarcating the boundaries of civilization. Whatever one’s opinions might be concerning its theological efficacy, baptism is understood today as a private act, and belonging to the Church might be compared to holding a membership card that allows one to take part in certain private functions for which the barrier to entry is otherwise extraordinarily low (anyone can show up and throw a few frames, but only league members can participate in the Tuesday Night Double Disco Bowl-a-Thon).

What is the contemporary equivalent of baptism, a discrete status that grounds our formal membership in the political community? The most basic premise of modern liberalism is that there is none. Apart from the exigencies of birth within a particular jurisdiction—one is born, say, a citizen of the United States—there is no necessary condition that must be fulfilled in order for me to exercise full membership in the political community. I am a member simply by virtue of my existence as an American citizen, and there is no contingency that could remove or revoke my membership, no creeds or formulas that must be recited or other extraneous criteria that must be met. Into this void one is set loose (in the words of Anthony Kennedy) “to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

For many years now it has been clear that this is an inadequate account of what constitutes membership in our political community. Birth within a particular jurisdiction is at once too parsimonious—de facto participation in modern American life is the province of countless persons born outside our borders without relevant documents attesting to their formal citizenship—and too generous. Just as it was theoretically possible for some persons to live within the geographic expanse of Christendom while remaining essentially outside its society, so too are there people today who despite having been born American citizens are not in any meaningful sense participants in our broader public life.

I am talking, of course, about people who do not use smartphones.

In ways with which we have barely begun to grapple, smartphone ownership is essentially coercive: These devices that combine the functions of what we once quaintly referred to as “mobile telephones” with those of personal computers have subsumed so many facets of our existence that is almost impossible now to think of a field of human activity or a concrete act—visiting a friend or neighbor, going to a restaurant, traveling, or even taking a short walk—that has not been transformed for the vast majority of the population by digital augmentation. Moreover, smartphones have accomplished all of this at a far more rapid pace than other technologies that have changed the basic nature of our political (and I daresay our economic) life.

In this sense, the smartphone is different (for example) from the rise of the automobile, which was as much a by-product of the already emerging shift from agricultural life during the end of the great period of American industrialization as it was a disruptive technology; indeed, more than a century after the advent of the Model T, it remains vastly easier to live in both large cities and in small towns without a car than it is to do so without a smartphone. (The suburbs are a different matter.)

The extent to which universal ownership of what was once considered an emergency device or a luxury good has become one of the basic governing assumptions of our leaders was brought home during last year’s lockdowns. For those lucky enough to remain employed, one’s duties were neatly performed in an entirely digital space; accessing unemployment benefits from shuttered government offices, becoming informed about the actions (including those unrelated to the virus) of state and municipal governments, and countless other actions were simply impossible without the use of applications such as Zoom. Meanwhile governors were able to issue so-called “alerts” informing citizens of the requirements to which they would become immediately subject via compulsory text messaging. On a day-to-day basis, as nearly every aspect of civilized life was suspended on the basis of an ever-shifting series of rationales, it was not even clear to me how various decisions could have been communicated otherwise.

For all of these reasons, I think every decent American should be horrified by the prospect of so-called “vaccine passports.” The idea of using smartphones as a registry of persons who have been vaccinated against Covid-19 was uncritically endorsed by our leaders months before vaccines had been introduced among the general population or even tested. This is unfortunate. Vaccine passports should be regarded with loathing by everyone, including their loudest proponents—namely, the sorts of people who also suggest that having to present photo identification in order to vote in a public election is a hideous encroachment upon the freedoms guaranteed to individuals. As it happens, I share their instinctive distaste for identification cards, not only in polling places but in bars, convenience stores, banks, and virtually every other space in which they are required, which is why I do not see the wisdom of expanding the “Papers, please!” mindset, according to which we are all criminals or enemies of the state until we can offer definitive proof to the contrary.

So far from being a straightforward addition to the aforementioned inconveniences or a new value-neutral public health technology, digitally abetted vaccine passports represent a point of no return, after which it will be impossible to imagine a world in which basic freedom of movement and action exist except on sufferance granted by the algorithms. Sooner or later the same technology that requires persons to demonstrate that they received certain shots six months ago will force them to show that they have voluntarily undergone more recent medical interventions, or that they have agreed to “terms of use” agreements in which they abjure certain opinions said to be in violation of the code of conduct enjoined by, say, the global casual dining chain whose neighborhood franchise one is attempting to enter. (The very real possibility of payment processing and banking services being denied to persons for ideological reasons has been discussed at some length by those who are in a position to understand how absurdly simple it would be from a technical perspective and how effortlessly it could be justified by the powers that be.)

We already live in a society in which we are quite literally adjuncts of whatever data has been emitted by the devices we are forced to carry in order to perform tasks as simple as parking our cars or entering a baseball stadium. Machines that were once meant to facilitate communication (who now remembers the sheepish arguments that used to run as follows: “I know they’re kind of silly, but I like to have one in case of an emergency”?) have become obstacles to the most ordinary human intercourse. Digital devices have not only overtaken commerce; they have monopolized our attention spans, they have destroyed even the informal etiquette of friendly conversation and casual dining; they have virtually erased the distinction between our time and that of our employers; they have made us not slaves but actual commodities, consumer products to be rated and analyzed.

The future opened by the widespread use of digital vaccine passports is one in which an escape from the barely understood tyranny of these screens becomes impossible. I am not a Luddite. But I believe that it is our duty to confront the implications of the horrifying new role that these devices have come to occupy thanks largely to the indifference of politicians who could not have guessed how rapidly our civilization would be remade in the white heat of technology. Too much that we value has already melted.

Matthew Walther is editor of The Lamp magazine and a contributing editor at The American Conservative.

OCLA researcher Dr. Denis Rancourt and several fellow Canadian academics penned an open letter to support those who have decided not to accept the COVID-19 vaccine.

The group emphasizes the voluntary nature of this medical treatment as well as the need for informed consent and individual risk-benefit assessment. They reject the pressure exerted by public health officials, the news and social media, and fellow citizens.

Control over our bodily integrity may well be the ultimate frontier of the fight to protect civil liberties. Read the letter below or as a PDF here.

Open Letter to the Unvaccinated

You are not alone! As of 28 July 2021, 29% of Canadians have not received a COVID-19 vaccine, and an additional 14% have received one shot. In the US and in the European Union, less than half the population is fully vaccinated, and even in Israel, the “world’s lab” according to Pfizer, one third of people remain completely unvaccinated. Politicians and the media have taken a uniform view, scapegoating the unvaccinated for the troubles that have ensued after eighteen months of fearmongering and lockdowns. It’s time to set the record straight.

It is entirely reasonable and legitimate to say ‘no’ to insufficiently tested vaccines for which there is no reliable science. You have a right to assert guardianship of your body and to refuse medical treatments if you see fit. You are right to say ‘no’ to a violation of your dignity, your integrity and your bodily autonomy. It is your body, and you have the right to choose. You are right to fight for your children against their mass vaccination in school.

You are right to question whether free and informed consent is at all possible under present circumstances. Long-term effects are unknown. Transgenerational effects are unknown. Vaccine-induced deregulation of natural immunity is unknown. Potential harm is unknown as the adverse event reporting is delayed, incomplete and inconsistent between jurisdictions.

You are being targeted by mainstream media, government social engineering campaigns, unjust rules and policies, collaborating employers, and the social-media mob. You are being told that you are now the problem and that the world cannot get back to normal unless you get vaccinated. You are being viciously scapegoated by propaganda and pressured by others around you. Remember; there is nothing wrong with you.

You are inaccurately accused of being a factory for new SARS-CoV-2 variants, when in fact, according to leading scientists, your natural immune system generates immunity to multiple components of the virus. This will promote your protection against a vast range of viral variants and abrogates further spread to anyone else.

You are justified in demanding independent peer-reviewed studies, not funded by multinational pharmaceutical companies. All the peer-reviewed studies of short-term safety and short-term efficacy have been funded, organized, coordinated, and supported by these for-profit corporations; and none of the study data have been made public or available to researchers who don’t work for these companies.

You are right to question the preliminary vaccine trial results. The claimed high values of relative efficacy rely on small numbers of tenuously determined “infections.” The studies were also not blind, where people giving the injections admittedly knew or could deduce whether they were injecting the experimental vaccine or the placebo. This is not acceptable scientific methodology for vaccine trials.

You are correct in your calls for a diversity of scientific opinions. Like in nature, we need a polyculture of information and its interpretations. And we don’t have that right now. Choosing not to take the vaccine is holding space for reason, transparency and accountability to emerge. You are right to ask, ‘What comes next when we give away authority over our own bodies?’

Do not be intimidated. You are showing resilience, integrity and grit. You are coming together in your communities, making plans to help one another and standing for scientific accountability and free speech, which are required for society to thrive. We are among many who stand with you.

Angela Durante, PhD
Denis Rancourt, PhD
Claus Rinner, PhD
Laurent Leduc, PhD
Donald Welsh, PhD
John Zwaagstra, PhD
Jan Vrbik, PhD
Valentina Capurri, PhD

I couldn't stop thinking about what a scam rent is, where you pay your landlord to look after their investment property, so I made a mixed media piece about it. Join Joelene on her whimsical journey to the mythical land of housing security.

There are two versions of the Sphinx: male and female, most commonly found in ancient Egypt and Greece. The male (Egyptian) sphinx is stately and solemn, not very sexy. The female (Greek) one, instead, has a sex appeal that you can't ignore. Which other half-human creature in mythology is so often associated with naked breasts? Mermaids, harpies, medusas, chimeras, sirens-- they are all females and, occasionally, they are shown sporting human breasts (and, in the case of Hollywood mermaids, bras as well). But the image that we normally have in mind of the Sphinx is clear and consistent: she has these prominent female breasts and, almost always, no bra.

Where does this busty image of the Sphinx come from? For an answer, we must examine the origins of a myth that has been with us for a long time; millennia. Ancient images of winged lions are common all over the Mediterranean and, sometimes, the lion is associated with a Goddess riding it. When the lion’s head is human, we call the creature a sphinx. Sometimes we can recognize the creature as a male sphinx, and sometimes as a female one. But, even in the latter case, we don’t normally see human breasts in these very ancient images.

From Minoan times, back to the 2nd Millennium BC, all the way to classical Greece, we have plenty of paintings or sculptures of sphinxes of all shapes and sizes. Breasts, however, just aren’t there. As an example, on the right we see a Greek sphinx from the Delphi museum (6th Century BC). The same we can say for ancient text sources; we have several mentions of the Sphinx, from Hesiod, (probably 9th Century BC) to Sophocles (5th Century BC) and onwards. It is often said that the creature is female but breasts are never mentioned.

Apparently, however, the image of the Sphinx evolved in time. During the classical Greek, and later Roman, period, breasts started to appear, associated with sphinxes. In some images, we see rows of breasts under the belly, as proper for a lioness, as we see in the image on the left - found on the web (unfortunately without a source attribution), is an example. It is a curious image, almost a comic book one. As befits a Sphinx, this one is literate, she is reading something. She has several breasts a row, but they go all the way to the front of the chest, in a position where no four-legged creature has breasts. And these breasts are plump and nearly spherical, not like animal breasts; more like human female breasts.

In time, it seems that the Classical image of the sphinx evolved in a form that showed just a couple of human-sized breasts. Here, we see a Sphinx (ca. 400 BC) said to have belonged to the private collection of Sigmund Freud himself.

With the decline of the classical world, the Sphinx theme declined from the visual arts, although it never disappeared. Medieval artists loved fantastic beasts, but they didn't seem to be especially interested in sphinxes. However, with the late Renaissance, the classical world burst out again on the art scene and, with it, breasted sphinxes came back with a vengeance. This image on the left, by the Italian mannerist painter Perino del Vaga (ca. 1500-1547) gives us some idea of how things had changed. This sphinx is almost aerodynamic; it almost looks like one of those Detroit cars of the 1960s, (maybe those prominent car bumpers of the time had a sexual meaning!) And, considering the frontal weight, one wonders whether this creature would be able to walk without falling on her… er… face.

With the late Renaissance and early post-Renaissance, there also came a wave of erotic interest in female breasts that had been unknown before. In the 17th Century, women started wearing corsets, to sport deep décolletages, and to flaunt their cleavages to men. Nobody seem to know for sure what caused this change in fashion and in attitudes, but sphinxes seem to have been affected by this evolution, too. From then on, no artist would think to draw or paint a breastless Sphinx.

During the “Neoclassical period”, from late 17th Century onward, female sphinxes became a commonplace decorative element in gardens all over Europe and were referred to as the “French Sphinx”. Sometimes, these creatures don’t look very sensual, at least to our modern eyes. Their body is heavy, more like that of a cow than that of a beast of prey. Their posture is solemn, and their hairdo often a funny mix of what may have been the fashion of the time and what the artist thought it should have been in ancient Greece or in Egypt. But their breasts carry a message: no more the virginal breasts of later Greek art, but full breasts of a mature woman.

Garden Sphinxes. From left: Tivoli Gardens, Roma. Belvedere Gardens, Vienna, Chickwick gardens, London.

The eroticism of the Sphinx in art went up of a couple of notches with the 1800's. The first to start pushing things in this direction was the French painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). Ingres painted three images of Oedipus and the Sphinx, the last one in 1864. The one on the left was painted in 1825. In all these images, the Sphinx is half-hidden in shadows, but her human breasts are in full light. Note Oedipus’s posture, the height of his face, the position of his hand and finger. All these elements emphasize the Sphinx’s breasts as the central theme of the whole painting.

In the 19th century, the Sphinx, became a favorite theme of the Symbolist school. The Symbolists tended to eroticize everything classical, and the sensual side of the Sphinx – her breasts – was something that they didn’t miss. Their attitude may have had something to do with the moral attitudes of the time. Many Symbolists were English and they lived in Victorian England. So, they tended to react as they could to the official prudery of their times: they couldn't paint naked women, but they could explore the anatomical features of a non-human creature and eroticize them at will. Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) was one of the Symbolists who explored the Sphinx theme in detail. His sphinxes are always shown as human-breasted and strongly sensual.

Some of Moreau’s Sphinxes

In time, the sensuality of the Sphinx literally exploded on the canvas of the artists. On the right, you an see an interpretation by the Belgian symbolist Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) in a 1896 painting that he entitled “Caresses”. Here, we see how sensual a Sphinx can be, even without prominent human breasts. She is a leopardess, tenderly embracing an ephebic Oedipus. Their expression, their posture, are all details that convey the impression of a seductress, happy with her conquest.

But it was Franz Von Stuck (1863-1928) who best captured the Sphinx's sensuality with this 1895 painting. No trace of lions or leopards, here, no wings and no serpent’s tail. Yet, Von Stuck had no need to write “Sphinx” on the top of his painting to tell us what he was showing. It is perfectly clear that we are looking at the Sphinx, divine seductress. She has gone full cycle, from lioness to woman. She has large eyes, a sensual mouth, well rounded buttocks and, of course, well formed breasts. She is relaxed, dominant, self-assured, and in full flower. Under the Sphinx, we see the parable of human life. In this composition, the Sphinx takes on her proper role of Goddess, dominating the creatures of the Earth.

The fascination of the symbolists with the Sphinx’s myth lasted for about a century and gave us many splendid images. In time, the theme was explored and re-interpreted over and over. In our times, the number of images of the Sphinx is prodigious and the number of variations is beyond all possible attempts of classification. One thing that didn't change, however, was the idea of the “lioness with human breasts.” Sometimes breasts are shown in full, sometimes just hinted at, but they are always there. Here are some examples.

From left: Mark Ellis, Salvador Dali, Selina Fenech, Darren Davy.

At this point, we may ask ourselves what is the whole idea about. Why is the Sphinx always endowed with these prominent frontal objects? Surely, they are not to be intended as overdeveloped flying muscles (as Roy D. Pounds suggested). Several generations of artists couldn’t just have been involved with a mere decorative element, a detail of no significance. These breasts must mean something and the artists who have shown them so often seem to have been able to catch an aspect of the myth that may difficult or impossible to express in words.

From the early studies of Desmond Morris (“the naked ape”, 1967), anthropologists have noted that the shape of human breasts is much different from that of four-legged animals. The idea that has been proposed is that human breasts carry a visual meaning immediate for creatures like us, who interact with each other by standing in front of one another. It may be that prominent breasts signify the health of a woman, her sexual status, her ability of raising children, or something else. In any case, they may be a sexual message aimed at males.

This attitude has genetic origins, but it is surely mediated by cultural factors. We know that the modern Western erotic interest in female breasts is not necessarily shared by other cultures, ancient of contemporary. But our attitude is not unique in human history. For instance, in the sophisticated and complex Minoan art of the second millennium BC, women are shown with exposed, pear-shaped breasts. These Minoan ladies wouldn’t be out of place on the pages of the modern “Playboy” magazine. (Image on the right, from J. Campbell’s “The Masks of God”).

However, the attitude of the Classical world toward female breasts was completely different. In Greek, and in later Roman art, naked female breasts are not uncommon, but they don’t seem to carry a strong sexual message. Breasts appear mainly when there was a logical reason for a woman to be shown naked. That was the case of amazons and athletes, for instance. In other cases, a woman could be caught fully undressed while bathing, but these images were not centered on breasts as an erotic element. Or, an exposed breast could be a sign of distress. This seems to be the case of the piece of statuary known as the “Barberini Suppliant,” that may represent the rape of Cassandra after the fall of Troy. There are other examples of this kind.

A literary glimpse of ancient attitudes towards breasts comes from Pseudo-Lucian’s “Amores” (probably 2nd Century AD). Here, two friends discuss the relative merits of straight and gay love as they pause to admire the statue of Venus in Cnidos. Many facets of human sexuality are explored in considerable detail in this ancient text, but women’s breasts are never mentioned as an object of erotic interest. Even the one of the two characters who expounds straight sex doesn’t seem to find the naked breasts of the goddess particularly exciting. When breasts are mentioned, the sense is much different. So, we are told (41) that women would wear,

“.. thin veils that pass for clothes so as to excuse their apparent nakedness. But everything inside these can be distinguished more clearly than their faces except for their hideously prominent breasts, which they always carry about bound like prisoners.”

Yet, we can say that the ancient Greeks were not indifferent to female breasts, they just saw them differently. We may find a hint of what was their attitude in one of the few surviving fragments of the “Little Iliad” (written a couple of centuries after Homer’s Iliad). Here we read that, after the fall of Troy, Menelaus was ready to kill his wife, Helen, out of revenge. But he cast away his sword when he caught "a glimpse of her breasts, unclad". In our modern view, we would see a woman unveiling herself as passing a sexual message. But we saw that breasts didn’t have a strong erotic meaning for ancient Greeks. So, in showing to Menelaus her breasts, Helen was sending him a quite different message; a message of intimacy. In Euripides (5th Century BC), we hear Helen, captive in Egypt, fondly remembering Menelaus “caressing her breasts”. Breasts that a Greek woman would normally keep “bound like prisoners, ” but that she couldn’t keep hiding while in bed with her husband. So, what Helen was saying to Menelaus with her gesture was, “know who I am: I am your wife.”

In the Iliad, Menelaus was arriving in front of Helen with his sword still dirty of the blood of Deiphobos, Helen’s second Trojan husband. In the myth of the Sphinx, Oedipus was arriving in front of the Sphinx with his sword still dirty of the blood of his father, Laius. These two scenes are eerily similar and, by showing her breasts, the Sphinx was passing to Oedipus the same message that Helen was passing to Menelaus, “know who I am”. When a woman unveils her breasts, she is revealing an intimate part of herself; she is showing herself for what she is.

The Sphinx was opening herself to Oedipus, showing him her intimate essence. What this essence was, can be understood from the riddle she asked him, “what is it that walks on four legs in the morning, on two legs during the day, and on three legs in the evening?” We all know that the standard answer is “man”. But this is a silly answer to a riddle which is not a silly one. Think of a different answer: why not “woman”?

This is not just a question of political correctness: think how the life of a woman is naturally divided into three periods: virgin, mother, and crone. It is a much sharper subdivision than anything that we can relate to a man. And this simple reversal of roles opens up a whole universe. If the riddle hints at the ages of a woman, what the Sphinx was showing to Oedipus was a vision of the triple essence of the Moon Goddess. The moon can be waxing, full, and waning. The Sphinx herself, being of divine nature, had a triple shape: woman, bird, and lioness. These three shapes are the three elements of the female essence: the lion (the strength of a virgin), breasts (motherhood of a mature woman) and wings (the link with the sky: the wisdom of an old woman). (Image on the right, front cover of R. Graves’s “The White Goddess”)

So, Oedipus was presented with a vision of the Female Deity. The Sphinx was offering him nothing less than a sacred initiation to the Goddess’s mystery. As a characteristic of initiations, he would be symbolically “devoured” by the Sphinx, and he would experience death and rebirth. But Oedipus couldn’t understand what was being offered to him. He gave a silly answer, refusing the Sphinx’s offer. Later in the story, Oedipus’s curse was to become blind, but he had started out blind. Blind to the beauty and the power of the triple goddess. Some say that Oedipus actually killed the Sphinx, some that he didn’t touch her, she killed herself. It doesn’t matter; Oedipus’s blindness gave him the power of destroying everything and everyone he came in contact with. When meeting the Sphinx, he had already killed his father and, later on, he would cause the death of Jocasta, his mother and bride. Later still, the death of his daughter Antigone and of his sons was, again indirectly, caused by Oedipus’s actions.

Men are cursed with the power of giving death. Women, instead, have the power of giving life. This is the ultimate meaning of the Sphinx’s breasts. It doesn’t matter if breasts are seen as erotic objects (as they are to us) or as tokens of intimacy between husband and wife (as they were for ancients Greeks). Breasts remain the source of life’s nourishment, the awesome power of the Goddess: Inanna the moon goddess, Tiamat the dragoness, Eurynome, who created the whole universe with her dance.

In our times, the myth of the Sphinx is emerging from the depth of the past millennia to confront us again with Oedipus’s dilemma. The Sphinx is bringing to us a message that goes to the heart of what means to be human, to our relation with everything which is alive around us on this planet. As a Goddess, she is carrying with herself the power of creation and of destruction at the same time. Creation and destruction are the laws of the universe, which will eventually devour us all, no matter what silly answers, in our blindness, we think we can give to its riddles.

This July, the Biden administration picked up where Trump left off and began bombing Somalia, a country with a gross domestic product of less than $6 billion and a poverty rate of 70 percent. But why?

The official reason provided by the Pentagon was that the Somali National Army needed air support in its operations to counter al-Shabaab. But the actual reason was that Somalia is geo-strategically important to US empire.

Successive US administrations have cycled through a myriad of excuses to either bomb the country or to arm its dictators: Cold War politics, “humanitarian intervention,” anti-piracy, and more recently counterterrorism.

As we shall see, in the mid-2000s, a fragile coalition of soft and hard Islamists – explicitly not allied to al-Qaeda at the time – brought some measure of peace to the areas of Somalia it controlled. With help from Britain and neighboring Ethiopia, the US smashed the coalition and pushed more right-wing elements like al-Shabaab over the edge into militancy.

And of course, the global superpower bombing one of the poorest countries on Earth in the name of national security is not terrorism.

Let’s take a look at the broader context and specific chronology.

A US imperial bulwark is born in Africa

The Pentagon has divided the world into self-appointed Areas of Responsibility (AORs). The Southern Command deems itself “responsible” for operations in Central and South America, regardless of what the people of the region think.

The Central Command (CENTCOM) covers much of the Middle East and Central Asia: the key intersections of energy fields and pipelines that enable the US to influence the global economy at the expense of competitors, notably Russia and China.

The Africa Command (AFRICOM) was founded in 2007 by the George W. Bush administration and is based in Stuttgart, Germany. President Barack Obama vastly expanded its operations.

AFRICOM’s current AOR covers 53 of the continent’s 54 states, with Egypt in the northeast already under the AOR of CENTCOM due to its strategic value (more below).

AFRICOM recently bragged about how it helped coordinate with Somali “partners,” meaning elements of the regime imposed on the country by the West, to organize the Biden-led bombing of al-Shabaab.

AFRICOM says: “The command’s initial assessment is that no civilians were injured or killed given the remote nature of where this engagement occurred.” But who knows?

US commanders operating in the African theater have tended to dismiss the notion that civilian deaths should be tallied at all. In 1995, for example, the US wound down its “assistance” to the UN mission in Somalia, but ended up in a shooting war in which several Somalis died.

The US commander, Lt. Gen. Anthony Zinni, said at the time, “I’m not counting bodies… I’m not interested.”

Somalia’s geopolitical importance to US empire

In the Africa-Middle East regions, three seas are of strategic importance to the big powers: the Mediterranean, the Red Sea (connected by Egypt’s Suez Canal), and the Gulf of Aden, which is shared by Somalia in Africa and Yemen in the Middle East.

Through these seas and routes travel the shipping containers of the world, carrying oil, gas, and consumer products. They are essential for the strategic deployment of troops and naval destroyers.

Somalia was occupied by Britain and Italy during the “Scramble for Africa,” the continent-wide resource-grab by Western colonial powers that began in the late-19. Ethiopia continues to occupy Somalia’s Ogaden region.

A 1950s’ British Colonial Office report described the Gulf of Aden as “an important base from which naval, military and air forces can protect British interests in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula.” “British” interests, like “US” interests today, means elite interests.

A George W. Bush-era report by the US Army War College notes that, “Even before the Suez Canal came into being, the [Red] Sea had been of importance as an international waterway. It served as a bridge between the richest areas of Europe and the Far East.” The report emphasizes that the “geopolitical position of the Red Sea is of a special importance.”

AFRICOM was founded with a grand imperial ambition: to make the four of the five countries on Africa’s Red Sea coast – Djibouti, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan – comply with US elite interests, and to keep the Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Suez Canal open for business and strategic deployment.

As noted before, CENTCOM covers Egypt. During the Arab Spring a decade ago, US strategists feared, like their British predecessors, that losing the Suez Canal to a democratic government in Egypt “would damage U.S. capabilities to mobilize forces to contain Iran and would weaken the overall U.S. defense strategy in the Middle East,” home of much of the world’s accessible oil.

International interference drives Somalia’s civil conflict

Somalia declared independence in 1960. Its British and Italian areas merged into a single nation led by President Aden Abdullah Osman and Prime Minister Abdirashid Ali Shermarke, who later became president. Most political parties merged with the Somali Youth League to create a de facto single-party state.

Backed by the West, Ethiopia blocked Somalia’s diplomatic efforts to reclaim the Ogaden region. As president, Abdirashid took millions of dollars in Soviet military assistance and was subsequently assassinated by one “Said Orfano,” a young police-trained man posing as a cop and erroneously referred to in contemporary sources as a “bodyguard.”

Major General Siad Barre took over in 1969 and ruled until his overthrow in 1991. An early-1970s CIA intelligence memo refers to Russian-Somali relations as “largely a liaison of convenience,” marred by “mutual” “distrust.”

After Barre’s failed war with Ethiopia over Ogaden and his explicit rejection of Soviet money and ideology, the US saw him as a client. In 1977, senior US policymakers highlighted Somalia’s “break with the Soviets.” From then until 1989, the US gave nearly $600 million in military aid to Barre’s regime to nudge it further from the Soviet sphere of influence.

The Barre regime used the newly augmented military – from 3,000 to 120,000 personnel – to crush the rival Somali National Movement, killing tens of thousands of civilians and driving a million people from their homes.

But the coalition that deposed Barre in 1991 fell apart and the rival factions fought a civil war that triggered famine and killed an additional 300,000 people within the first couple of years.

The United Nations intervened to deliver food to civilians. The US saw the move as an opportunity to test the new doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” in the form of Operation Restore Hope. President George H.W. Bush said that the objective was to “save thousands of innocents from death.”

But a master’s thesis by Major Vance J. Nannini of the US Army’s Fort Leavenworth provides a version of events much closer to the truth: “Throughout our involvement with Somalia, our overriding strategic objective was simply to acquire and maintain the capability to respond to any military contingency that could threaten U.S. interests in the Middle East, Northeast Africa and the Red Sea area.”

Restore Hope ended in a fiasco for the US, exemplified by the famous Black Hawk Down incident, and thousands of Somali deaths – “I’m not counting bodies,” as Commander Zinni said of a later mission.

A convenient target in the “war on terror”

In Djibouti in 1999, a Transitional National Government (TNG) was formed in exile and came to power in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, in 2001.

At the same time, a broad umbrella of Sufis and Salafists – the “left” and “right” of Islam – known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) was gaining political and territorial ground.

The TNG collapsed in 2004 and was replaced with a Transitional Federal Government founded in Kenya and backed by the Ethiopian proxy Abdullahi Yusuf, a man harbored by Britain and even given a liver transplant in the UK. (The liver allegedly came from an Irish Republican Army member. “Now I am a real killer,” joked Abdullahi.)

Abdullahi was found liable for damages in a UK court over the killing of a British citizen in Somalia in 2002 by his bodyguards.

Under the post-9/11 rubric of fighting a “war on terror,” the CIA added to the chaos throughout the period by covertly funding non-Islamist “warlords,” including those the US previously fought in the 1990s. The aim was to kill and capture ICU members and other Islamists.

In addition, the Pentagon’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) engaged in covert operations. Estimates of the number of JSOC personnel on the ground in Somalia range from three to 100.

US Special Forces set up a network of operations and surveillance in the country, supposedly to counter al-Qaeda.

In 2003, for instance, US agents kidnapped an innocent man, Suleiman Abdullah Salim, from a Mogadishu hospital. Claiming that he was an “al-Qaeda” operative, the US had Suleiman tortured at a number of “rendition” sites before releasing him. (The operatives who grabbed him were tipped off by the “warlord” Mohammed Dheere, who was paid by the CIA.)

But one of the Arabic meanings of “al-Qaeda” is “the database,” referring to the computer file with information on the tens of thousands of mujahideen and their acolytes trained, armed, organized, and funded by the US and Britain throughout the 1980s to fight the Soviets (Operation Cyclone).

There are more direct links between the US and al-Shabaab. In his younger days, ICU secretary and later al-Shabaab leader Ahmed Abdi Godane joined the only major terrorist group in Somalia in the 1990s, Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya (AIAI, “Islamic Union”). The AIAI fighters trained with “al-Qaeda” in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the US and Britain were training “al-Qaeda.” (See citation no. 7.)

Killing Somalia’s hope

By the mid-2000s, with the rise of the ICU, the hope of stability came to Somalia – but it was not to last. In 2003, the US Combined Joint Tasks Force Horn of Africa initiated training of Ethiopia’s military in tactics, logistics, and maintenance. The US backing later came in handy fighting the ICU.

The ICU was rapidly and widely painted as an extremist organization. However, a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report notes that it was “well received by the people in the areas the Courts controlled,” particularly as it provided social services.

Western propaganda spun the ICU’s shutting down of cinemas as proof of its Islamo-fascism. But the CRS report says that such measures were undertaken at the request of parents because children were skipping school, “not because of the Courts’ alleged jihadist and extremist ideology… There is no evidence to support the allegation that women were prohibited from working.”

As Western vessels continue to deplete starving Somalia’s fish stocks to sell to comparatively privileged consumers, propaganda denounces Somali “piracy” against Euro-American ships. However, a report by the Royal Institute for International Affairs (the British think tank also known as Chatham House), says: “The only period during which piracy virtually vanished around Somalia was during the six months of rule by the Islamic Courts Union in the second half of 2006.”

A World Bank report from 2006 notes that the ICU “brought a measure of law and order to the large areas of South-Central Somalia” it controlled. The US State Department, meanwhile, was hosting an international conference in a bid to remove the ICU and bolster the Transitional Federal Government (TFG).

With US and British training, including logistical support, Ethiopia invaded Somalia in late-2006 to install Abdullahi as President of the TFG.

The US and Britain worked hard to set up a new regime in a war so brutal that over 1 million people fled their homes. In addition, tens of thousands crossed the Gulf of Aden to Yemen in hazardous small boats sailed by traffickers. Hundreds of thousands ended up in dire refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, where women and girls were raped.

A US- and UK-backed regime terrorizes Somalia’s people

The Transitional Federal Government terrorized the Somali population. One of the few British journalists to report on this at the time, the Kenya-born Aidan Hartley, wrote: “several Somali leaders who have been linked to allegations of war crimes against countless civilians are living double lives in Britain.”

General Mohamed Darwish, head of the TFG’s National Security Agency, was “given British citizenship, state benefits and a subsidised home.”

The taxpayer-funded privatization unit the Department for International Development (DFID, now part of the Foreign Office) paid TFG politicians’ salaries, as well as buying police radios and vehicles.

Human Rights Watch says that the Commissioner of the Somali Police Force, Brig. Gen. Abdi Hasan Awale Qaybdib, was “a former warlord who has been implicated in serious human rights abuses that predate his tenure as commissioner.”

A House of Commons Library report confirms that the UN Development Program (UNDP) and the World Food Program (WFP) were used as unwitting conduits: “DFID has pledged over £20 million in new commitments for Somalia, including £12 million to the WFP. No money goes directly to the TFG. It is channelled through the UNDP.”

By 2011, this included training 3,000 police in Somaliland and hiring mercenaries formerly of the UK Special Boat Service, who were promised up to £1,500 a day.

The consequences for Somali civilians were devastating. In addition to the refugees noted above, the instability caused by the war triggered another famine by jeopardizing aid and driving people from areas near food distribution centers.

The US has survived shocks like 9/11 because it is a robust nation. Fragile countries like Somalia cannot withstand major political disruptions.

Transforming Somalia into an extremist haven

President George W. Bush bombed “al-Qaeda” targets in Somalia in January 2007. Al-Shabaab, then led by the hard-line Godane, survived the collapse of the ICU in the same year.

The UN Security Council then authorized the African Union (AU) to occupy Somalia with “peacekeepers,” with AMISON being the US support mission.

The British-backed TFG President Abdullahi resigned in 2008 and was replaced by the former ICU leader, the more moderate Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. Sharif met with Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2009, who pledged US support to the TFG in its fight against its former armed wing, al-Shabaab.

A West Point study notes that, using sharia, al-Shabaab had by 2009 “succeeded in bringing about a period of relative stability in much of the territory it controlled,” just like the ICU before it. Shabaab was also comparatively moderate: the “leadership pursued a pragmatic approach toward clan politics and drew its leadership and rank-and-file from a relatively diverse array of clans and sub-clans, unlike many of Somalia’s other armed factions.”

But the group made tactical errors, such as the Ramadan Offensives (2009-1010) against the TFG and AMISON forces in Mogadishu. With Shabaab weakened, Godane merged the group with “al-Qaeda” in 2011.

British-backed terrorists poured into Somalia to join Godane. By the time it allied with al-Qaeda, a quarter of Shabaab’s fighters hailed from the UK. Many had been radicalized by Abu Qatada, a man once described as Bin Laden’s “right-hand man in Europe” and a protected asset of Britain’s internal MI5 Security Service.

Via an entity called al-Muhajiroun (the Emigrants), MI5 informant Omar Bakri Mohammed and an alleged double-agent for Britain’s external security force (MI6), Haroon Rashid Aswat, also radicalized young Muslims to fight in Somalia.

The Nigeria-born Michael Adebolajo, who was charged in the UK with murder, had previously attempted to recruit for Shabaab in Kenya. He maintains that MI5 attempted to recruit him.

A time-tested recipe for destabilization and disaster

Since merging with “al-Qaeda,” al-Shabaab has extended its reach, reportedly sending suicide bombers into neighboring countries, including Kenya.

One could say that the Biden administration has learned no lessons after decades of interference in Somalia. But this would be inaccurate. Successive US administrations understand perfectly that stirring the pot of extremism and relying on propaganda to report the result, not the process, gives them endless excuses to occupy other countries.

The Pentagon is committed to global domination, Somalia is a strategic chokepoint, and the Department of Defense needs reasons to maintain its presence in the country.

The US created al-Shabaab in several ways. First, it escalated Islamist vs. non-Islamist tensions by backing secular “warlords” as a proxy against the ICU in the mid-2000s. This alienated the moderate factions of the ICU and empowered the right-wing Islamists.

Second, and most importantly, Washington backed Ethiopia’s invasion in late 2006, triggering a catastrophe for the civilian population, many of whom welcomed hard-line Muslims because they imposed a degree of law and order.

Third, by painting the nomadic and Sufi Islamist nation of Somalia as a hub of right-wing Salafi extremism, Western policymakers and media propagandists created a self-fulfilling prophesy in which Muslim fundamentalists eventually joined the terror groups they were already accused of being part of.

Fourth, for a country supposedly concerned with international terrorism, the US has done nothing to rein in one its closest allies, the UK, whose successive governments have sheltered a number of Islamic extremists that recruited for Somalia.

Even if we look at Somalia’s crisis through a liberal lens that ignores titanic imperial crimes, such as triggering famines, and focus on the lesser but still serious crimes of suicide bombings, it is hard not to conclude that Somalia’s pot of extremism was stirred by Western interference.

Quoted from: Cederlof, Gustav, and Alf Hornborg. “System boundaries as epistemological and ethnographic problems: Assessing energy technology and socio-environmental impact.” Journal of Political Ecology 28.1 (2021): 111-123.

What are the social and environmental impacts of carbon and low-carbon energy technologies in different places and at different times? To answer this question, we are faced with an epistemological dilemma. Before measurement takes place, we need to define where and when the phenomenon we are measuring begins and ends—to define its “system boundaries.” For instance, one liter of semi-skimmed milk, bought in a British supermarket, has an energy content of 380 kcal. However, to think of the milk in terms of energy also evokes the far-reaching social and environmental contexts that bring milk to the market.

Beyond the energy content declared on the milk carton, we can undertake a life cycle assessment (LCA)—expanding the system boundaries—to account for the energy (or the carbon, water, labor, or land) “embodied” in the milk via its production and distribution. We might include the energy content of processed cattle feed, electricity used to run milking machines, cooling tanks, water boilers, and lighting, energy inputs in alkaline and acid detergents, diesel for tractors, and a wide range of other energy technologies used in production.

We might expand the system boundaries further to account for the fuels needed to generate the electricity, run the chemical plant, fuel the milk tanker, power the dairy plant, and so on. Arguably, we should also account for the energy expended in the production of the electricity generator, the milking machine, the milk tanker and the tractor, fencing and the batteries storing energy to electrify it. But if an electricity generator and a battery are somehow embodied in a liter of milk, we have culturally come far away from what we normally understand milk to be. Where, then, should we draw the system boundaries around an object in order to gauge its social and environmental impact?

Image credit (CC).

More than just posing epistemological problems, however, we argue that system boundaries present an ethnographic problem and that they should be exposed to cultural as well as political analysis. As cultural artefacts, system boundaries sustain different power-serving worldviews, and the way system boundaries are drawn in discussions on energy transitions calls into question how the existence of energy technologies relies on a geographical displacement of environmental load, including flows of resources, land, and emissions.

In discussions on green development and strategies for a low-carbon energy transition, there is a strong case made for technologically utopian solutions in which novel, more efficient technologies will enable a decoupling of environmental impact from economic growth. These solutions range from a complete electrification of transport to the mainstreaming of “cultured” meats, milk, and eggs to a wholesale transition to a solar economy. Depending on the exponent’s political allegiance, they often resonate with teleological imaginaries of technological progress inspired by the American “technological sublime” or the Marxist “development of the productive forces”. However, the socioenvironmental impact of green technology is contingent on the definition of system boundaries. A technologically utopian solution rests on narrowly defined system boundaries.

Read more: Cederlof, Gustav, and Alf Hornborg. “System boundaries as epistemological and ethnographic problems: Assessing energy technology and socio-environmental impact.” Journal of Political Ecology 28.1 (2021): 111-123.

More papers by Alf Hornborg.

Preface. Heavy-duty diesel-engine trucks (agricultural, mining, logging, construction, garbage, cement, 18-wheelers, and more) are the essential for our fossil-fueled civilization. Without them, no goods would be delivered, nothing could be manufacturied, no food planted or harvested, no garbage picked up, no minerals mined, no concrete made, no metals smelted, and roads are constructed with specialized diesel trucks and petroleum asphalt. If trucks stopped running, gas stations, grocery stores, factories, pharmacies, and manufacturers would shut down within a week and civilization would end.

Since oil, coal, and natural gas are finite, biomass doesn’t scale up, and hydrogen is an energy sink, clearly someday trucks will need to run on wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal generated electricity with batteries or overhead catenary wires (though that won’t work either, see chapter 8 of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy and this post). Yet even batteries for autos aren’t cheap, long-lasting, light-weight, or powerful enough for most Americans to replace their current gas-guzzlers with. And given the distribution of wealth, few Americans may ever be able to afford an electric car, since two-thirds of Americans would have trouble finding even $1,000 for an emergency.

Trucks that matter — that haul 30 tons of goods, pour cement, haul mining ore — can weigh 40 times more than an average car. So scaling batteries up for heavy-duty trucks (NRC 2014) is impossible now given the state of battery technology. For example, a truck capable of going 621 miles hauling 59,525 pounds, the maximum allowable cargo weight, would need a battery weighing 55,116 pounds, and so could only carry about 4,400 pounds of cargo (den Boer et al. 2013). And because a heavy-duty truck battery is so heavy and large, charging takes too long — typically 12 hours or more.

Or as Ryan Carlyle, oil company engineer puts it: “As far as heavy trucking is concerned, there is no replacement for hydrocarbon fuels. The physics of power/weight ratios, and existence of legal road weight limits, means you simply can’t build an “electric semi” and expect it to haul anything comparable to what diesel trucks haul today. This is not an area where Tesla can build a 30% better battery pack and suddenly it’s feasible. The necessary energy density numbers are more like 50 times less than they need to be. The truck will use over half its payload capacity just carrying its own batteries. There are chemical limits to what batteries can do. Electrochemical galvanic cells physically cannot store enough energy — ever — to approach today’s large diesel engines (Carlyle 2014).

Microsoft founder Bill Gates agrees: ” The problem is that batteries are big and heavy. The more weight you’re trying to move, the more batteries you need to power the vehicle. But the more batteries you use, the more weight you add—and the more power you need. Even with big breakthroughs in battery technology, electric vehicles will probably never be a practical solution for things like 18-wheelers, cargo ships, and passenger jets. Electricity works when you need to cover short distances, but we need a different solution for heavy, long-haul vehicles (Gates 2020).”

And car battery development is hitting the brick-walls of the laws of physics and thermodynamics, yet truck batteries need to be even more powerful, durable, and long-lasting.

_Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Women in ecology author of 2021 Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy best price here; 2015 When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity_

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There are not any commercially available heavy-duty Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) outside the transit bus segment at this time. It is not expected that BEVs can penetrate into the long-haul trucking vocation in the next several decades, where significant high speed steady-state operations dominate the vehicles duty cycle, without significant advances in battery energy density and BEV recharging technologies. (ARB 2015).

There are however, demonstration projects with class 8 electric trucks. The first, NFI, has two trucks running between Chino and the Ports of Los Angeles/San Pedro 135 miles round-trip using two of the five heavy-duty charging stations in Southern California. Only one round-trip can be made, there isn’t enough juice left in the battery to go again. The second, Penske is averaging 150 miles per shift on dedicated routes to a California quick-service restaurant chain with two battery-powered trucks in a relay system to make the most of the available electric charge. And other demonstration projects are planned (Adler 2019).

Nikola claimed to have a working Nikola One truck and portrayed it as fully functional with a video called “Nikola One Electric Semi Truck in Motion. But investment firm Hindenburg Research published a bombshell report claiming that the Nikola One wasn’t close to being fully functional. Even more incredible, Hindenburg reported that the truck in the “Nikola One in motion” video wasn’t moving under its own power. Rather, Nikola had towed the truck to the top of a shallow hill and let it roll down. The company allegedly tilted the camera to make it look like the truck was traveling under its own power on a level roadway, and has admitted that it didn’t have a working hydrogen fuel cell or motors to drive the wheels, the two key components (Lee 2020).

And the latest Nikola scandle from August 1, 2021: Nikola electric-truck prototypes were powered by hidden wall sockets, towed into position and rolled down hills. The prototypes didn’t function and were Frankenstein monsters cobbled together from parts from other vehicles. Nikola also overstated the number of pre-orders the company had received. Federal prosecutors have charged the founder of the Nikola Corp. (NKLA) with lying to investors about the supposed technological breakthroughs the company had achieved in order to drive up its stock price. Prosecutors said in the initial period following Nikola starting to trade publicly, the value of Milton’s shares shot up by $7 billion. After it emerged the company was under investigation, shares tanked causing many retail investors to lose tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars, prosecutors said. In some cases, some investors lost substantial portions of their retirement savings, they said. Nikola founder Milton was taken into custody and later released on a $100 million bond.

Electric trucks do exist, mostly medium-duty hybrid that stop and start a lot to recharge the battery. This limits their application to delivery and garbage trucks and buses. These trucks are heavily subsidized at state and federal levels since on average they cost three times as much as a diesel truck equivalent (Table 1).

But even these stop-and-start a lot to recharge the battery trucks may not be economically feasible. Nikola Motor Company’s plans to mass produce 5,000 garbage trucks for Republic Services, one of the nation’s largest waste management service providers, were canceled, the latest in a string of bad news for the electric truck and hydrogen cell maker (Alcorn 2020).

The most vital truck is a farm tractor to plant and harvest food. A battery-driven tractor would have to be very small or the weight would compact the soil and reduce crop productivity for many decades. The first one I saw appear in the search engine was the 7030 series John Deere battery pack tractor in December 2016, and it was pretty small. But they never did make it, and it isn’t even mentioned anywhere on their website.

The latest tractor, not in production but promised in 2021, is the $50,000 Monarch Electric Tractor with peak power of 70 HP for a few seconds, otherwise 40 HP (Smith 2020). The farmers comments were interesting:

• Most farmers I know frequently have to drive their tractors long distances, sometimes miles, just to get to the field of the day. And there’s no power out there…. Talk about range anxiety!
• 40hp class tractors do not usually till fields. Where I am now, for these applications we see a 75hp class tractor at the very least, usually 90hp and up on larger farms
• Take it from someone who is actually a farmer. This will never take over the heavy tractor work as there are constant interactions due to irregularities in the ground which require the operator to adjust the tractor or the attached implement to the terrain, ie. rocks, roots, animal burrows. drainage etc. Farming is extremely brutal on equipment and it must be durable enough and simple enough to fix so that we don’t miss very small time windows on each step of the process. Farming has ridiculously small margins so the economic proposition of service life vs. amortized and operating costs over that life must make sense no one wants to pay $4 for one onion.
• I bought my MF 133 for $1200 USD and it works just fine for being 50 years old. Would I like 4WD? Yeah. Would I like an electric? Sure! Do I see this thing running very long in -10º with a snow-blower hanging off of the PTO? Color me skeptical.
• As far as the “goal of 20-plus years of continuous service life” — uh huh. Considering my issues and my friend’s issues with getting EVs repaired, I’ll believe it when I see it.
• I know a few farmers (corn, beans and hogs or cattle) and they dont really have a use for a 40-70hp tractor. This is likely to end up at grape vineyards or hobby farmers who use a tractor intensely for a few days or weeks of the year.
• The grid is thin in the country, if battery tractors existed, could they all charge up at once in the narrow planting and harvesting seasons?

Tractors do a lot of heavy work over rough ground, and today only internal combustion engines can provide efficient mobile and portable heavy-duty power (DTF 2003).

The Port of Los Angeles thought about using heavy-duty all-electric drayage trucks to improve air quality. Drayage trucks drive at least 200 miles a day back and forth between the port and inland warehouses. But it remained a thought experiment because electric drayage trucks cost too much, $307,890. The 350 kWh battery alone is $110,880 dollars. That’s three times as much as an equivalent diesel truck $104,360, and 100 times more than a used $3,000 drayage truck. And cost wasn’t the only problem (Calstart 2013a):

• The range is too short because of the battery weight and size. Drayage trucks need to go at least 200 miles a day, but at best an electric truck could go 100 miles before having to be recharged, which would take too long, and require expensive infrastructure to charge each truck several times a day.
• The batteries/battery pack cost too much.
• Overcoming the long time to recharge by using fast-charging may shorten battery life which would result in the unacceptable expense of a new battery pack before the lifetime of the truck ended
• Although electricity is available almost everywhere, the quantities required for a fleet of Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) drayage trucks are very high and could require significant infrastructure. Multiple costly high-power and/or fast-charging stations would be required
• Roadway power infrastructure is complicated and expensive, and may be appropriate only in certain areas or applications. The impact on the grid and whether enough power could be supplied is unknown for the roughly 10,000 drayage trucks in the I-710 region
• Large battery pack life-cycle and maintenance costs are unknown
• Swapping stations are impractical and would require “industry standardization and ‘ruggedization’ of battery packs, as well as standardized software and communication protocols for batteries and system integration, plus many locations, and the storage space and operating space for multiple large trucks and hundreds of large battery packs.

Table 1. Electric trucks coust 3 times more than diesel equivalents (ICEV) on average. Source: 2016 New York State Electric Vehicle – Voucher Incentive Fund Vehicle Eligibility List. https://truck-vip.ny.gov/NYSEV-VIF-vehicle-list.php

Other costs

• Battery cost is a major component in the overall cost, ranging from $500 to $700 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) range. This is substantially more than the cost for a conventional diesel powerplant. In their 2013 I-710 commercialization study, CALSTART estimated the cost of a 350 kWh battery system at over $200,000 in 2012.
• A BEV 240 kW fast charger can cost can cost $1,500,000 (with $300,000 in additional costs). It can charge 5 heavy duty trucks (ICF 2016) per charger: $350,000 EVSE 450kW+ $150,000 to $200,000 installation costs per EVSE (Calstart 2015), or $350,000 for a specialized Proterra fast charger able to accommodate up to eight Proterra transit buses (ARB 2015)
• Additional costs to upgrade the distribution system if the rated capacity of the installed electric equipment is exceeded. A fleet with 20 E-Trucks in Southern California had to upgrade a transformer on the customer side of the meter. The transformer cost $470,000. 100 medium-duty E-Trucks charging at the same time would demand 1.5 MW of power on the grid and 50 E-Buses would demand 3.0 MW. This is in the same order of magnitude as the peak power demand of the Transamerica Pyramid building, the tallest skyscraper in San Francisco, CA (Calstart 2015)
• Unlike electric cars, which can charge at night when rates are lowest (11 pm to 8 am for $0.05), e-trucks and buses need to run during the day at the highest peak hours (12 noon to 6 p.m. $0.20) and mid-peak charges (8 a.m. to noon and 6 pm to 11 pm ($0.10), doubling to quadrupling the price paid for electricity (Calstart 2015).
• Earning money from V2G is not likely to be adopted by commercial fleets because they have rigid operating schedules while the grid varies constantly and unpredictably. If the grid tapped into e-truck batteries, it might reduce their range or delay availability (Calstart 2015)

Electric trucks are also not commercial yet because they have too many performance issues, such as poor performance in cold weather, swift acceleration, driving up steep hills, too short a range and battery life, they take too long to recharge, declining miles per day as the battery degrades, all of which make planning routes difficult and inefficient.

It is also much harder to develop batteries for trucks than cars because trucks are expected to last 15 years (versus 10 for cars) or go for 1 million miles. Trucks also have to endure more extreme conditions of temperature, vibrations, and corrosive agents than autos (NRC 2015), and it is hard to make battery packs durable enough for this rougher ride, longer miles, and longevity.

Calstart interviewed many businesses about their reluctance to buy hybrid or all electric trucks, and found their greatest concerns were the purchase cost, lack of confidence in the technology, lack of industry and truck manufacturer support, lack of infrastructure, and the heavy weight (Calstart 2012).

Elon Musk recently tweeted that Tesla will build a semi-truck with absolutely no details, promising to tweet again half a year from now with more information. Why should I believe an Elon Musk tweet any more than a Trump tweet? Especially since nearly all of the electric truck companies I studied for “When Trucks Stop Running” are out of business now, despite huge federal and state subsidies. Given that Tesla is nearly $5 billion in debt, he’s clearly angling to get drayage truck subsidies from the Ports of Los Angeles and San Pedro and more money from investors. None of the electric trucks I studied or that are on the market now were long-haul or off-road tractors, harvesters, construction, logging, or other class 8 heavy-duty trucks (except garbage trucks). They were all much smaller class 4-6 delivery trucks or buses, because they stop and start enough to use hybrid batteries, a far more commercially likely possibility than long-haul trucks, that can go for hundreds of miles before stopping, and be up to 80,000 pounds (and even more weight off-road). This wired.com article points out other issues as well with electric trucks as well.

But if the devil is in the details, then read more below in my summary and excerpts of a paper about electric trucks. Catenary trucks, which use overhead wires, will be covered in another post. Both electric and catenary trucks are covered at greater length in “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer

Abbreviations:

• BEV Battery Electric Vehicle
• PEV Plug-in Battery Electric Vehicle
• HEV Hybrid Electric Vehicle
• ICEV Internal Combustion Engine Vehicle (usually diesel, also gasoline engines)

What follows is a summary and then deytails of the following paper:

**Pelletier, S., et al. September 2014. Battery Electric Vehicles for Goods Distribution: A Survey of Vehicle Technology, Market Penetration, Incentives and Practices. CIRRELT. 51 pages.

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SUMMARY

Financial

While commercial BEVs’ energy costs can be nearly four times cheaper than ICEV equivalents, the downside is that their purchase costs are around three times higher.

A study of drayage trucks on the I-710 corridor found that $3,000 old used trucks were used to take containers from Los Angeles ports to inland facilities that paid $100 per container delivered. “Costs for a full BEV truck are not expected to go below $250,000 even past the 2025 time frame of this report. … The same is true for fuel cells” (Calstart 2013b).

Furthermore, the cost of the equipment necessary for charging the battery can be several thousand dollars. The high cost of level 3 Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE) is still a significant barrier to a wider adoption of fast charging. Level 2 charging equipment costs approximately $1,000 per station and installation costs approximately $2,500 to $6,000 for one unit or $18,520 for 10 units. Level 3 fast charging is not used much yet because more research needs to be done on whether this shortens battery life.

PEV and HEV vehicles typically have significant autonomy and payload limitations and involve much larger initial investments in comparison to internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEV). The battery pack is the most expensive component in PEVs and significantly augments their purchase cost compared to similar ICEV trucks.

Competing with compressed natural gas (CNG) and existing diesel (ICEV) trucks will be hard — significant improvements in ICEV efficiencies are likely in the future from the 21st Century truck partnership and other efforts to improve diesel engines. BEVs will also have to compete with other fuel alternatives such as CNG, in which case their business case can be even harder to make.

Battery Issues

Can’t carry enough cargo: Battery size and weight reduce maximum payloads for electric vans and trucks compared to equivalent diesel trucks. Even HEVs suffer from the extra weight of two power-trains reducing payload capacity.

Short range. Technical disadvantages include a relatively low achievable range. Typical ranges for freight BEVs vary from 100 to 150 kilometers (62-93 miles) on a single charge.

The miles a truck can travel declines over time. In Germany and the Netherlands, the limited operating range of electric trucks caused less flexibility in planning trips and restricted ad-hoc tour planning, resulting in less efficient operations. Also, the range declined over time through battery aging, when carrying heavy loads, and in winter from heating, lights and ventilation. Furthermore, the range listed by EV manufacturers is based on measurements according to the New European Drive Cycle which, compared to real life energy consumption in urban last mile delivery, do not give a reliable indication of the expected range. The reliability of the EVs was dependent on the model; certain prototypes and conversions were judged as reliable, while others were reported as insufficient (Taefi 2014).

Short battery life. At the moment, lithium ion batteries last for four years; however, practical experience has shown that the average period of use is only two years.

Range is also shortened by: extreme temperatures, high driving speeds, rapid acceleration, carrying heavy loads and driving up slopes. The efficiency and driving range varies substantially based on driving conditions and driving habits. Extreme outside temperatures tend to reduce range because more energy must be used to heat or cool the cabin. Cold batteries do not provide as much power as warm batteries do. The use of electrical equipment, such as windshield wipers and seat heaters, can reduce range. High driving speeds reduce range because more energy is required to overcome increased air resistance. Rapid acceleration reduces range compared with smooth acceleration. Hauling heavy loads or driving up significant inclines also reduces range (U.S. Department of Energy 2012b).

Long time to charge battery: It takes a long time to charge the batteries because of their low energy density. Recharging time may take up to 4 to 8 hours, and even with quick-charging equipment, recharging a battery to 80% takes up to 30 minutes.

Charging issues: The most common way of charging was to slow charge the vehicles over night at company premises. The in-house charging infrastructure had to be fixed several times when it was overloaded by the high capacity need of the e-trucks in Germany. Other charging related issues found were that the implementation of a smart grid and load management for large electrical fleets is not yet clarified; solutions to ensure charging in case of power outage are necessary; and charging plugs were too damageable, so only specially trained staff could handle the plug, which caused problems with replacement drivers and training issues. The limited number of charging spots outside the cities and lack of battery swapping for larger vehicles was also an issue (Taefi 2014).

Batteries have low energy density — too low. Batteries are a critical factor in the widespread adoption of electric vehicles but have a much lower energy density than gasoline, partly caused by the large amount of metals used in their production.

Battery life too short: Lithium-ion batteries in current freight BEVs typically provide 1,000 to 2,000 deep cycle life, which should last around six years.

Some manufacturers are working on a 4,000 to 5,000 deep cycle life within 5 years, but there are often tradeoffs to be made between different lithium based battery chemistries. For example, lithium-titanate batteries already reach 5,000 full discharge cycles, but have lower energy densities than other lithium-ion technologies. Calendar life, on the other hand, is a measure of natural degradation with time and was in the 7-10 years range as of 2010 with a projected range of 13-15 years by 2020. Typical battery warranty lengths for electric trucks have been reported as being in the three to five year range.

Battery degradation. Battery health can be influenced by the way they are charged and discharged. For example, frequent overcharging (i.e., charging the battery close to maximum capacity) can affect the battery’s lifespan, just as can keeping the battery at high states of charge for lengthy periods**. As expressed through deep cycle life, battery deterioration can also occur if it is frequently discharged to very deep levels . This generally implies that only 80% of the marketed battery capacity is actually usable. Using high power levels to quickly charge batteries could also have negative impacts on battery life, especially if used in the beginning and end of the charging cycle. The uncertainty regarding the effect of extreme operational temperatures on lithium batteries is another issue that should be further considered. All these potential deteriorating factors can speed up the reduction of maximum available battery capacity and shorten vehicle range and battery life**.

Lithium-ion batteries. At the moment, lithium ion batteries last for four years; however, practical experience has shown that the average period of use is only two years (AustriaTech 2014).

The Demands on the Electric Grid

Power Requirements to recharge batteries are high. A battery electric truck with a 120 kWh battery would require a charging power level of 15 kW to be able to charge in 8 hours, and the same vehicle with a battery pack of 200 kWh would require a power level of 400 kW to be able to be charged in 15-30 minutes.

The impact of the high power demand from the electricity grid. This could limit the amount of vehicles in a depot which could simultaneously be charged with high power levels, potentially requiring further investments for transformer upgrades.

The stations would also need to recharge a very large amount of batteries at the same time, which could impact the electric grid.

Out of Business

Better Place was considered a fron-trunner in the battery swapping industry but it recently filed for bankruptcy (Fiske (2013)).

Some models have recently been discontinued due to manufacturers’ financial difficulties or restructuring plans; these include Azure Dynamics’ Transit Connect Electric in 2012, Navistar’s eStar in 2013, and Modec’s Box Van in 2011.

Commercial Vehicles are dependent on government subsidies

To see the New York State All-Electric NYSEV-VIF incentives, click here.

To see the California Hybrid Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project (HVIP) incentives, click here.

Many U.S. companies which operate battery electric trucks also have received funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Plug-in electric trucks and vans (class 2 to 8 vehicles) have generally only penetrated niche applications, while remaining dependent on government incentives. They attribute this to key industry players going out of business, the conservative nature of fleet operators when it comes to new technologies, renewed interest in natural gas, and the important cost premium of these vehicles.

Sales of HEV & BEV trucks are very low

The global stock of class 2 to 8 HEVs, PHEVs and BEVs was around 20,000 at the end of 2013, versus 15 million diesel and gasoline (ICEV) trucks sold in 2013.

The vast majority of expected sales are not fully electric plug-ins, but are Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEVs) which do not require plug-in recharging (but which are only suitable for applications that require a great deal of stopping and starting, i.e. garbage trucks, delivery vans).

One of project FREVUE’s reports identifies other factors explaining the limited use of electric freight vehicles in city logistics, namely doubts regarding technology readiness, high purchase costs, limited amount of models on the market, and rapid technology improvements themselves can be a market barrier since fleet operators fear that an electric freight vehicle purchased today could quickly lose all residual value. The uncertainties surrounding the vehicles’ residual value also limit leasing companies’ interest in electric freight vehicles.

The bottom line is that a wider adoption of Battery Electric Vehicles can only be achieved if these prove to be cost-effective.

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[ Here are more details. ]

The worst possible use of an e-truck is daily mileage less than 40 km, never needs to return to the base, has little chance of charging while on operations, needs to be charged in 20 minutes or less, carry a full load equal to a diesel truck, carries the full load all day, goes the same speed much of the day, travels on freeways, hilly terrain, and charges at peak load. The best possible use of EV is 60+ km/day, returns to the base to recharge 3 to 6 times a day for 30 minutes a day, carries half a load, has very high variations in speeds traveled in flat urban areas and only charges off-peak (AustriaTech 2014b).

Cost Competitiveness of Battery Electric Vans and Trucks

While commercial BEVs’ energy costs can be nearly four times cheaper than diesel equivalents, the downside is that their purchase costs are approximately three times higher (Feng and Figliozzi 2013).

Furthermore, the cost of the equipment necessary for charging the vehicle’s battery, which can reach several thousands of dollars, should be considered. Maintenance costs should also be significantly less than for ICEVs (Taefi et al. (2014)) and this advantage should increase as the vehicles get older (Electrification Coalition (2010)). Because of these different cost structures between ICEVs and BEVs, the only way to appropriately compare the cost competitiveness of battery electric vans and trucks for goods distribution is to study their whole life costs (McMorrin et al. 2012), according to which all costs incurred over the vehicle’s life are actualized to a net present value. Whole life costs are also referred to as the vehicle’s total cost of ownership (TCO). The following are brief descriptions of the cost structure and TCO of battery electric freight vehicles compared to their conventional counterparts.

Cost Structure: High Fixed Costs and Low Variable Costs Purchase costs for medium duty battery electric trucks offered by AMP Trucks, Inc., Boulder Electric Vehicles, Electric Vehicle International, and Smith Electric Vehicles range from $130,000 to $185,000 US, while equivalent ICE trucks go within the $55,000 to $70,000 range (New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (2014)). One way to decrease the cost premium of these larger BEVs is to be able to right-size the costly battery according to the application (Electrification Coalition 2013). However, while this measure could significantly improve the vehicles’ business case and allow for additional payload capacity, the smaller battery would require more frequent deep discharges, which could cause accelerated battery deterioration (Pitkanen and Van Amburg 2012). Another option for reducing upfront costs while also addressing fleet operators’ concerns about battery life is to lease the battery for a monthly fee based on energy consumed or distance traveled (McMorrin et al. 2012).

However, uncertainties regarding battery residual value limit many fleets’ interest in battery leasing (Pitkanen and Van Amburg (2012)), most likely because these uncertainties will be integrated into the leasing fee. Furthermore, battery leasing currently only seems available for a few battery electric vans but not for trucks, for whom it could significantly help the business case based on whole life costs (Valenta (2013)). Purchase costs for battery electric vans vary largely depending on GVWs and the availability of battery leasing. Large manufacturer products with battery leasing go for about $25,000 for GVWs close to 2,100 kg. Examples of these include Renault for its Kangoo Z.E. vans and Nissan for its e-NV200 van, with monthly battery leasing fees starting at approximately $100 per month and varying according to monthly mileage and contract lengths (Renault (2014c), Nissan (2014d)). Typical purchase costs with battery ownership range from approximately $25,000 for lighter battery electric vans (GVW starting at 1100 kg) with limited battery capacities, to about $100,000 for larger battery electric vans (GVW up to 3,500 kg) with higher battery capacities. Conventional cargo vans with GVWs close to 4,500 kg cost between $30,000 and $40,000, GVWs close to 3,500 kg are within the $25,000-$30,000 price range, and GVWs around 2,500 kg are closer to $20,000 (Nissan (2014a)).

Valuable sources for vehicle prices include Source London (2013) and New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (2014), referred to as SL (2013) and NYSEV-VIF (2014) in the tables. Some models’ prices are simply not available, most likely because, as Lee et al. (2013, p.8025) point out, “commercial vehicle prices can vary depending upon negotiation between fleet operators and truck manufacturers, and truck volumes to be purchased”. This could also imply that the prices listed here could vary depending on specific purchasing contexts. Ranges for these class 3 to 6 trucks are from 115 to 200 km (71-124 miles) depending on battery size, vehicle weight

• $133,000 AMP vehicles 100 kWh battery, 6350-8845 kg GVW
• $130-150,000 Boulder 500-series 72 kWh battery, 4765-5215 kg GVW, payload 1405 kg,
• $150,000 Navistar eStar 80 kWh battery 5490 kg GVW, payload 1860 kg
• $185,000 EVI walk-in van 99 kWh battery, 7255-10435 GVW
• $150,000 Smith Electric “Newton” 80 kWh, $181,000 with a 120 kWh battery

Den Boer et al. (2013) state that approximately 1,000 battery electric distribution trucks were operated around the world as of July 2013. CALSTART’s report on the demand assessment of electric truck fleets (Parish and Pitkanen 2012) claims that industry experts have estimated there were less than 500 battery electric trucks in use in North America as of 2012, with most sales made in US states like California and New York, which offered incentives for these vehicles. Also, approximately 4,500 hybrid electric trucks were sold in North America as of 2012. The large majority of hybrid and battery electric trucks sold were in medium duty and vocational applications rather than long-haul class 8 applications. Stocks of freight electric vehicles (vans and trucks) as of January 1st 2012 in Europe included 70 in Belgium, 106 in Denmark, 338 in Germany, 1,566 in France, 217 in the Netherlands, 103 in Norway, 38 in Austria, 13 in Portugal, 459 in Spain, and over 2000 in London (TU Delft et al. 2013). However, most of the electric vans in the UK are old low performance vans with lead-acid batteries, with only a few hundred modern electric vans with lithium-ion batteries sold in 2012 (Cluzel et al. 2013).

As previously noted, the advantage in the cost structure of BEVs comes from their lower variable costs (i.e., energy and maintenance costs) (McMorrin et al. 2012).

However, electricity rates incurred depend on geographical location, average consumption levels, and time of use (Hydro-Quebec (2014)). Charging during off-peak hours can allow for reduced electricity rates and seasonal price variations may also occur. It is therefore necessary to evaluate the potential of lower energy costs of commercial BEVs according to one’s specific context.

Gallo and Tomi´ c (2013) provide an overview of the performance of delivery BEVs (class 4-5) operated by a large parcel delivery fleet in Los Angeles. The findings showed that in comparison to similar diesel vehicles, the electric trucks were up to four times more energy efficient, offering up to 80% lower annual fuel costs. The report estimated maintenance savings ranging from $0.02 to $0.10 per mile, finding these savings “will vary widely depending on driving conditions, vehicle usage, driver behavior, vehicle model and regenerative braking usage”(p.53). Other findings included the need for drivers to be trained to adapt their techniques to electric trucks, that a minimum utilization of 50 miles per day is necessary to recuperate purchase costs in a reasonable time span, and that incentives are still necessary at this stage to make the vehicles a viable alternative. Additionally, some repairs needed to be provided by the vehicle manufacturers because of the limited experience of fleet mechanics with electric trucks. TU Delft et al. (2013) also reported several companies having experienced a lack of available resources for quickly solving technical issues with freight BEVs. This is important to consider because in order to profit from lower variable costs, companies must have access to reliable maintenance services and spare parts.

Figliozzi (2013) compared whole life costs of battery electric delivery trucks to a conventional diesel truck serving less-than-truckload delivery routes. The BEVs are the Navistar eStar (priced at $150,000) and Smith Newton (priced at $150,000), while the diesel reference is an Isuzu N-series (priced at $50,000). Different urban delivery scenarios were designed based on typical US cities values and different routing constraints. Thus, 243 different route instances were simulated by varying values for the number of customers, the service area, the depot-service area distance, the customer service time, and the customer demand weight. Different battery replacement and cost scenarios were also studied. The planning horizon was set to ten years, with the residual value of the vehicles set at 20% of their purchase price. In spite of the fact that the electric trucks had a higher TCO in 210 out of the 243 route instances, a combination of the following factors would allow them to be a viable alternative: high daily distances, low speeds and congestion, frequent customer stops during which an ICEV would idle, other factors amplifying the BEVs’ superior efficiency, financial incentives or technological breakthroughs to reduce purchase costs, and a planning horizon above ten years. With a battery replacement after 150,000 miles at a forecasted cost of $600/kWh, the diesel truck always had a lower TCO.

The need for a battery replacement significantly decreases thee business case for BEV Trucks

Battery electric freight vehicles currently fit much more into city distribution than long haul applications because of the battery’s energy density limitations (den Boer et al. 2013). Typical daily miles traveled by urban delivery trucks are often lower than the range already achieved by electric commercial vehicles (Feng and Figliozzi 2013). With limited payloads, this makes them more viable for last mile deliveries in urban areas involving frequent stop-and-go movements, limited route lengths, as well as low travel speeds (Nesterova et al. 2013), AustriaTech 2014b), Taefi et al. 2014)). With forecasted reductions in battery costs and evolution of diesel prices are compared to electricity prices, as time goes by, BEV distribution trucks should become more competitive with equivalent ICEVs based on their own economic proposition (den Boer et al. 2013). However, commercial BEVs will also have to compete with other fuel alternatives such as compressed natural gas, in which case their business case can be even harder to make (Valenta 2013). Furthermore, significant improvements in ICEV efficiencies are expected in upcoming years (Mosquet et al. (2011)). Nevertheless, for now, the appropriateness of using delivery BEVs ultimately depends on the context of their intended use, but the high purchase cost has been extensively pointed out as a huge cost effectiveness barrier, and the need for incentives at this stage of the market seems like a recurring requirement for a viable business case.

Financial Incentives

The goal of financial incentives is to reduce the upfront costs of electric vehicles and charging equipment (IEA and EVI (2013)). One form is purchase subsidies granted upon buying the vehicle (Mock and Yang (2014)). An example of this is the California Hybrid Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project (HVIP) which provides up to $35,000 towards hybrid truck purchases and up to $50,000 towards battery electric truck purchases to be used in California (Parish and Pitkanen (2012)). Eligible vehicles can be found in CEPAARB (2014). Another similar program is the New York Truck Voucher Incentive Program, which offers up to $60,000 for electric truck purchases to be used New York (New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (2014)).

Companies are also eligible to receive similar purchase subsidies for participating in demonstration or performance evaluation projects (US DOE (2013b)).

Overviews of tax exemptions related to electric vehicles can be found in IEA and EVI (2013), Mock and Yang (2014), ACEA (2014), and US DOE (2012a).

Companies Experimenting with BEVs In North America, large companies using battery electric delivery vehicles include FedEx, General Electric, Coca-Cola, UPS, Frito-Lay, Staples, Enterprise, Hertz and others (Electrification Coalition (2013b)). Frito-Lay alone has been operating 176 battery electric delivery trucks in North America since 2010 (US DOE (2014b)). Fedex also operates over 100 electric delivery trucks (Woody (2012)). Many U.S. companies which operate battery electric trucks have received funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to cover a portion of the vehicles’ purchase costs (US DOE (2013b)).

BEVs in city logistics have often been used for parcel delivery, deliveries to stores, waste collection and home supermarket deliveries. A few notable private initiatives identified in the report include Deret’s 50 electric vans for last mile deliveries to city centers in France, UPS’s 12 Modec vehicles for parcel and post delivery in the UK and Germany, Tesco’s 15 Modec vehicles for on-line shopping deliveries in London, Sainsbury’s use of 19 electric vans for supermarket

Drivers expressed concerns regarding the reduction in payloads.

Delivered products include parcel, courier, textiles, fast food, bakery, hygienic articles and household articles.

Negative factors experienced included the required investments (vehicles and EVSE), reduced payloads, limited range, the effect of cold temperatures on range, imprecise marketed vehicle ranges, the lack of resources to fix technical problems, incompatibility of vehicles’ connectors with public charging infrastructure, and the need to train drivers to better adapt to the vehicles. All in all, the case studies indicated that the vehicles were found to be most adequate for last mile and night deliveries.

Electric Tricycles carrying up to 440 pounds (200 kg)

Urban consolidation centers (UCC) are logistic facilities multiple organizations use, close to the area they serve. UCCs using BEVs for last mile deliveries also often use smaller vehicles ideal for tight urban areas, which can lead to increases in vehicle kilometers per ton delivered (Allen et al. (2012)). These smaller vehicles are typically electric tricycles, which have payloads of up to 200 kg (AustriaTech 2014b) and low driving speeds. These tricycles can find parking locations more easily than larger vehicles, can often use bicycle lanes for faster access to customers in congested and pedestrian areas, and from a cost point of view are more affected by driver costs than purchase costs and utilization rates (Tipagornwong and Figliozzi 2014). Allen et al. (2007) present an example of the use of electric tricycles by a UCC. La Petite Reine used a consolidation center in the center of Paris for last mile deliveries of food products, flowers, parcels, and equipment/parts with electric tricycles with a maximum payload of 100 kg (220 pounds). The initial trial in 2003 was deemed a success, with monthly trips growing from 796 to 14,631 and the number of tricycles from seven to 19 in the first 24 months. Operations are now permanent and La Petite Reine operates three locations in Paris with over 70 collaborators, 80 tricycles, 15 electric light duty vehicles and 1 million deliveries per year (La Petite Reine 2013).

Nesterova et al. (2013) present two other cases of two phased deliveries in Paris integrating to some extent electric bikes and tricycles. The first is Chronopost International, which offers express delivery of parcels and uses two underground areas in Paris for sorting last mile deliveries. The parcels are first transported from their facility at the border of Paris to their underground areas, where they are sorted per route and distributed to customers by electric bikes and vans in inner Paris. The second is Distripolis, a delivery concept tested by road transport operator GEODIS. A depot in Bercy receives shipments from three organizations and delivers the packages under 200 kg to multiple UCCs in the city center of Paris (heavier packages are directly delivered to the receiver). From here, electric trucks and tricycles are used for the last mile deliveries of the light packages. Distripolis operated 10 light duty electric vehicles (Electron Electric truck, GVW 3.5 tons) and one electric tricycle in 2012, and aims at having 56 tricycles and 75 electric vehicles by 2015.

BESTFACT (2013) provides another case of two-phased deliveries with electric vehicles. Gnewt Cargo operates a transhipment facility for the last mile deliveries of an office supplies company in London (Office Depot). They use an 18 tons vehicle to transport parcels from the office supplies company warehouse in the suburbs of London to the transhipment center in the city, where the parcels are transferred onto electric vans and tricycles for final delivery to customers. Initially a trial in 2009, the company has permanently implanted this system because it involved no increases in operational costs, and it plans to implement similar delivery systems in other cities (Browne et al. (2011)).

Other Interesting Distribution Concepts for BEVs

An interesting experiment regarding last mile deliveries with BEVs can be found in the context of project STRAIGHTSOL, during which TNT Express integrated a mobile depot into their operations in Brussels with electric vehicles during the summer of 2013 (Nathanail et al. 2013), Anderson and Eidhammer 2013), Verlinde et al. 2014). A large trailer equipped as a mobile depot with typical depot facilities was loaded with parcels at TNT’s depot near the airport in the morning. Next it was towed by a truck to a dedicated parking spot in the city center, where last mile deliveries as well as pick-ups were made with electric tricycles by a Brussels courier company, which then returned to the mobile depot with the collected parcels. At the end of the day, the mobile depot was towed back to TNT’s depot, from where the collected parcels were shipped. Challenges included gaining exclusive access to the parking location for the mobile depot, significant increases in operating costs, and decreases in the punctuality of the deliveries and pickups (Johansen et al. 2014), Verlinde et al. 2014).

They could find a niche application in short haul port drayage operations (CALSTART 2013b). One example of this practice is found at the Port of Los Angeles, where 25 heavy duty battery electric drayage trucks manufactured by Balqon were tested for operational suitability. In exchange for the purchase of the trucks, Balqon agreed to locate its factory in L.A. and pay the port a royalty for future sales (EVI et al. (2012)). The Port of L.A. also tested similar heavy duty battery electric trucks from Transpower and U.S Hybrid, as well as a fuel cell heavy duty truck (Port of L.A. 2014).

Incentives still play a critical role in the business case of these vehicles, but the long-term unsustainability of certain financial incentives and recent trends suggest their imminent phasing out (Bernhart et al. 2014) will require that these vehicles be cost competitive independent of such incentives. One could argue that these vehicles are not ready for this challenge, in view of current cost dynamics, recent financial setbacks of key industry players, often resulting in discontinued vehicle models (Schmouker 2012), Shankleman 2011), Truckinginfo 2013), Everly 2014), Torregrossa 2014)).

The market take-up of electric vehicles in urban freight transport is very slow, because costs are high compared to conventional vehicles and companies are still uncertain about the maturity of the technology and about the availability of charging infrastructure.

The worst possible use of an e-truck is daily mileage less than 40 km, never needs to return to the base, has little chance of charging while on operations, needs to be charged in 20 minutes or less, carry a full load equal to a diesel truck, carries the full load all day, goes the same speed much of the day, travels on freeways, hilly terrain, and charges at peak load. The best possible use of EV is 60+ km/day, returns to the base to recharge 3 to 6 times a day for 30 minutes a day, carries half a load, has very high variations in speeds traveled in flat urban areas and only charges off-peak.

Financially at least 50% public subsidies pay for it

At present, lithium ion batteries are most often used in electric freight vehicles with a current battery lifetime of 1000 to 2000 cycles (approximately 6 years). Also, the kilometer range declines over time, which may reduce peak power capacity and energy density. For these reasons electric vehicles are currently most suitable for daily urban distribution activities as the battery energy density is too low for regular long haul applications. At the moment, lithium ion batteries last for four years; however, practical experience has shown that the average period of use is only two years. Improvements in battery powered trucks are expected within five years in terms of the cost and durability of batteries.

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Diamonds still cut glass regardless of your word for “diamond,” and “cut,” and “glass.”~Ken Wilber

Truth matters. Words matter. What is objectively the case matters. And insofar as our words and concepts can be about the objective world at all, then the shared set of words and meanings that we collectively use and are permitted to use to describe, navigate, and refer to that objective world matters. Such is the case for any society worth defending. The growing rash of instances of threats, intimidation, social cancelling, and violence in the name of creeping gender ideology within academia and beyond drastically threatens this shared set of goods and values and marks the beginning of what will be a steep and rapid descent into institutionalized tyranny if left unopposed.

At first glance, this appears to be quite a hyperbolic and even alarmist claim. After all, what is wrong with referring to “Stephen” as “Stephanie” if that is his prerogative? On the surface, such linguistic accommodations appear to be perfectly reasonable and minimally costly to most language users. This surface question of proper names, however, dramatically obscures the underlying conceptual tensions, moral values, and metaphysical commitments fundamentally at stake. Indeed, as claims of “misgendering” have swelled from being regarded as instances of impoliteness, to disrespect, to phobia, to hate, to intentional harassment, to threats, to actual violence, to warranting official legal penalty, to “human rights” violations (language previously reserved for exclusive use in reference to torture, genocide, atrocity, and crimes against humanity), the moral and metaphysical landscape and the linguistic and social institutions presumably about that landscape have been run over roughshod in public discourse with alarming speed and scarce pause for serious philosophical reflection.

This article therefore sets out to make better philosophical sense of the concepts of “gender,” “transgender,” and “transgender rights.” Contra arguments espoused by gender ideology advocates, I argue that, by the starting premises of their own argumentation, the notions of both “gender” and “transgender” are either incoherent or vacuous and therefore cannot be the conceptual grounds by which persons derive actual positive or negative rights claims. On the contrary, such false “rights” claims actually amount to severe rights violations of the vast majority of everyday language-users and citizens and cause irreparable damage to the set of shared social and linguistic practices necessary for coordinating the basic public goods of a free, flourishing, and truth-preserving society.

The social and political consequence of allowing such false rights claims to swell unopposed to the level of positive rights claims, eventually codifying into actual state-compelled law (as is already the case with Canada’s Bill C-16 and soon to be with America’s Equality Act) will be nothing less than the legal sanctioning of a new priest class of magical people who speak all of reality into existence, and then the rest of society who must simply obey. Consequently, I argue that such passive-aggressive tyranny warrants strong and vocal public rejection and opposition by American lawmakers, politicians, academics, and citizens alike with the greatest of urgency.

Truth

For at least 3,000 years now, philosophers, theologians, and scholars alike have debated the nature of truth. Bracketing contemporary theories of truth such as Paul Horwich’s deflationary theory of truth and Michael Lynch’s plural theory of truth, and bracketing pragmatist theories of truth espoused by folks like James, Dewey, and Pierce, theories of truth largely fall into two main camps; the correspondence theory of truth and the coherence theory of truth.

The correspondence theory of truth posits that a sentence or proposition is true if and only if it shares some sort of correspondence relationship with the mind-independent, objective world. Hence, the proposition that “the cat is on the mat” is true if and only if the cat is indeed on the mat. If the cat is not on the mat, then the proposition “the cat is on the mat” is false. Put another way, the proposition “the cat is on the mat” is made true by the truth-maker and state of affairs of the cat actually being on the mat. All true propositions we refer to as facts. Alternatively, the coherence theory of truth posits that truth is fundamentally a relationship of maximal coherence and internal consistency between and among a web of other propositions (i.e., truth-bearers) and not a relationship between truth-bearers reaching out to make contact with mind-independent, objective truth-makers (i.e., the contours of the objective world).

Another important distinction within discourse on truth is Kant’s famous analytic/synthetic distinction. An analytic proposition, such as “a bachelor is an unmarried man” or “a male is a creature with an XY chromosome pair,” is one whose truth depends wholly upon the meanings of its constituent terms. Conversely, a synthetic proposition, such as “John is a bachelor” or “John is a man” is true in virtue of some feature of the observable objective world. Put another way, we can know the truth of analytic propositions merely by knowing the meanings of their constituent terms, whereas for synthetic propositions we have to look out into the objective world in order to determine whether or not they are true.

Meaning

Another indispensable contribution to discourse on truth is that made by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. In his now famous “private language argument,” Wittgenstein entertained the conceptual possibility of a completely private language. Since definitions within any language, like rules within a game, require fixity in order for the game to hang together at all, and since a wholly private language would have no such checks and balances to keep definitions fixed and stable (the private language user could just amend definitions in perpetuity with no restrictions), Wittgenstein concluded that a wholly private language was conceptually impossible and that for terms and definitions to have any fixed meaning at all required checks and balances provided by other language users. Later expanding on this insight, Hilary Putnam, in his essay “The Meaning of Meaning,” advanced his theory of meaning known as semantic externalism, famously concluding that “meaning ain’t in the head.”

To this day, the vast majority of contemporary philosophers accept this account of how meaning and language fundamentally operates. Put another way, meaning and language is fundamentally public. What’s more, language and meaning (and indeed the collective knowledge passed between generations via language) is not merely public with respect to just present persons but is also constituted by the deep, rich, and networked storehouse of meanings passed on from one generation of language-users to the next. As Gottlob Frege noted in his essay “Sense and Reference,” “For it cannot well be denied that mankind possesses a common treasure of thoughts which is transmitted from generation to generation.”

And while proper names such as “Bruce” or “Caitlyn” do technically fall within the purview of private determination and personal prerogative, indexicals within a language, such as “he” or “she” indirectly connote and refer to fixed meanings deep within our overall shared network of public meanings and are not similarly revisable according to individual personal preference. Insofar as our collective meanings are about our shared storehouse of collective human knowledge and/or about the objective world in some sense, such indexical terms are effectively “load-bearing” terms that do not or simply cannot be moved or amended so easily without logically entailing a complete and total overhaul of the entire network of meaning, every proposition within that network, and every referent in the objective world that each term ostensibly refers to.

Accordingly, indexical terms like “he” and “she,” or generic terms like “male” and “female” for that matter, are held relatively fixed within our shared network of nested meanings either in virtue of the restraints of logic, conceptual consistency, and interrelatedness (on a coherence theory of truth), the contours and joints of objective reality (on a correspondence theory of truth), or some combination of the two. Hence, when it comes to truth claims about nearly anything and everything under the sun, big and small, like it or not, logic has a say in the matter, other language users have a say in the matter, language itself has a say in the matter, and the objective world itself has a say in the matter.

Rights and duties

Another important set of concepts within the present gender debate is the notion of rights and duties. Scholars often cash out the notion of rights and duties as two sides of the same conceptual coin. To say that I have a “right to X” is conceptually equivalent to saying that someone else has a corresponding duty to me as it pertains to X. Scholars make the further distinction between negative rights and duties and positive rights and duties. Negative rights, sometimes referred to as liberties, are freedoms from something. Freedom from slavery, freedom from censorship, and freedom from religious persecution are all canonical examples of negative rights. They engender for others corresponding negative duties of inaction and non-interference.

Positive rights, on the other hand, sometimes referred to as entitlements, are freedoms to something. Freedom to healthcare, freedom to easy rescue, and freedom to education are all examples of positive rights claims. These positive rights claims engender corresponding positive duties of action upon others. Since many positive duties arguably cannot be discharged individually but only collectively, so the argument goes, the state is therefore required as the institutional proxy to ensure, through law and threat of coercion, that citizens discharge their many individual positive duties to one another (most often in the form of taxes). While liberals and conservatives generally agree over negative rights and duties, there has been long and heated debate between both sides as to the scope and content of persons’ actual positive rights and duties and how those duties ought to be best discharged.

Another near universal notion within ethics, philosophy, and law is the claim that “ought implies can.” In other words, if one tells me that I have a duty or an obligation to do X, then the implication is that it is physically or at the very least logically possible for me to do X. Put another way, it makes no logical or conceptual sense to say that I have impossible duties. I do not have a duty to walk to the moon, because I physically cannot. I do not have a duty to conceive of a three-sided square, because I logically cannot. Conceptual conceivability is therefore a prerequisite for any legitimate rights claim or corresponding duty claim.

The incoherence of special transgender “rights” claims

Given this basic understanding of positive and negative rights and duties as well as the assumption that “ought implies can,” and given our understanding about theories of truth as well as the fundamentally public nature of terms like “male” and “female” and “he” and “she” within our shared network of public meanings, let us now investigate the coherence, intelligibility, and content of so-called “transgender rights” claims.

To understand the coherence and moral import of transgender rights claims, we must first define what it is that we mean by “transgender.” To understand its meaning, however, we must first discern what exactly we mean by “gender” proper. The Stanford Encyclopedia for Philosophy entry on “Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender,” for instance, captures the conceptual distinction between “sex” and “gender” as follows:

Many feminists have historically disagreed and have endorsed the sex/gender distinction. Provisionally: ‘sex’ denotes human females and males depending on biological features (chromosomes, sex organs, hormones and other physical features); ‘gender’ denotes women and men depending on social factors (social role, position, behaviour or identity). The main feminist motivation for making this distinction was to counter biological determinism or the view that biology is destiny.

Judith Butler, in her famous Gender Trouble echoes this distinction writing that, “Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive,’ prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.”

And lastly, the World Health Organization re-articulates this conceptual distinction between “sex” and “gender” making the further distinction between “gender” and “gender identity.” They write:

Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time … Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs. Gender and sex are related to but different from gender identity. Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth.

Given these definitions, the first source of confusion within the present transgender debate comes from scholars frequently conflating (biologically-determined) “sex,” (socially-determined) “gender,” (privately-determined) “gender identity,” sexual preference, and biological instances of intersex (such as Klinefelter’s and Turner syndrome) all under the same canopy term “gender.”

The second source and primary culprit of confusion within the present transgender debate, however, is the notion of “gender identity.” This is so since “gender identity,” on the gender theorist’s own account, is defined entirely by one’s own wholly subjective determination. Much like Wittgenstein’s hypothetical private language, this wholly subjective and internal pointing to some referent accessible only to the speaker, fundamentally severs the connection of the linguistic term (i.e., “he”) from both its publicly agreed upon analytic meaning (i.e., “a male” is, by definition, “a living organism with an XY chromosome pair”) as well as its publicly agreed upon synthetic definition out there in the world (i.e., “that particular guy over there is a man,” “that particular cluster of things under the microscope is an XY chromosome pair”). In so doing, this wholly subjective turn renders the meaning of the speaker’s utterance (i.e., “he”) completely meaningless, in terms of its analytic and synthetic definition, or, alternatively, completely vacuous.

Catholic political commentator, Matt Walsh, captures the confusion well [stating the following:

The Left tells us that “gender” is a social construct. They reject the idea that women must necessarily have any particular feeling, or thought, or taste, or preference. If “gender” is an artificial construct and our physical features have no bearing on our identity as man or woman, then what the hell is a “woman” anyway? A “woman,” in that case, would not be defined by her feelings, her thoughts, her ideas, her preferences, her body, her reproductive organs, her DNA, her chromosomes. Well what is she defined by? What is she? When a man says that he is a woman, he now makes it that that phrase means nothing, and it doesn’t mean anything to be a woman. He might as well say that he is a whos-a-whats-it or a thing-a-ma-doodle.”

This re-defining of publicly shared meanings like “male” and “female” solely in terms of a speaker’s own subjective feelings generates a host of internal contradictions, intractable questions, and system-wide confusion.

• It is a grave wrong to not first ask for a person’s personal pronouns. It also is a grave wrong to ask for a person’s personal pronouns because it is too personal and invasive.
• What do the indexicals “Ze” and “Zir” even connote or refer to?
• If one can be trans-gender then why can’t one be trans-racial, trans-age, trans-height, trans-species, or trans-Napoleon?
• If gender identity has nothing to do with biological sex whatsoever, then, similarly, why can’t one’s gender identity simply be Latino, 6’3’’, a giraffe, or 87 years old?
• What does it mean for a speaker to report subjectively feeling “like a man” when the stipulated definition of the term “man” is determined wholly by the speaker?
• If gender identity is wholly determined by the speaker’s subjective determination, then why would cosmetic surgery or arbitrary levels of hormone treatment have any bearing whatsoever on affecting or changing that person’s gender identity?
• If gender identity is wholly determined by each person’s subjective state, then how can parents get to decide that their child is “non-binary” or “gender-fluid”?
• If gender identity is wholly subjective and inaccessible to others’ knowledge, then how can so-called “trans” people know that they are actually standing in solidarity with real trans persons versus fake trans persons?
• If a woman stipulates that she has transitioned from a woman to a man, and we are therefore obligated to retroactively change all records of the past to report that she was always a man, then if she was always a man, what did she transition from?
• Furthermore, if this very same woman who claims to be a man was therefore always a man, and this person is a US citizen, does that mean she/he has failed to sign up for selective service all these years and can be retroactively charged as a felon?
• If gender identity is wholly subjectively determined, then how can an individual ever be said to be mistaken about his or her own wholly privately and internally stipulated definitions as in reports of persons being so-called “ex trans” or “former trans”?
• And if such persons themselves can be so fundamentally mistaken about their own internally-stipulated gender identity, then how on Earth can we possibly have laws and legal penalties that require everyone else to know such a thing and to adjust their behavior accordingly, moment by moment by moment?

This confusion culminates in the simple question that each and every one of us can pose to the gender theorist: “what do you mean by male?” And it is here where they will not be able to give either a substantive analytic or synthetic definition of the term without risking their claim’s truth conditions being evaluable under some set of public criteria. All they will ever be able to say is that “it is the thing that I feel that I am.” Which is to say nothing at all.

For claims or propositions to be true or false at all, they must first be “truth-apt” and therefore must rise to a level of basic intelligibility in order for us to be capable of evaluating them as true or false. Accordingly, claims about special transgender rights do not get off the ground to begin with, because claims about “gender identity” don’t get off the ground to begin with, since such claims fail to rise to the level of being truth-apt or minimally coherent. Claims about transgender rights are therefore as intelligible and truth-apt as claims about “flipl-flopl” rights, or “Jabberwocky” rights, or “schmerkle” rights. And just because someone happens to utter the noise “rights” after a particular word or set of words, doesn’t mean that such claims actually grip the moral or metaphysical joints of the world. Consequently, if ought implies can, and we cannot conceptually make basic sense of the concept of “gender identity,” then such blatant conceptual incoherence cannot be the proper grounding of our actual rights or duties.

To be clear, this isn’t to make light of or to suggest that persons suffering from actual mental disorders in this arena are lying, pretending, or acting in bad faith. Indeed, there are many medical reports of persons suffering from gender dysphoria who report the sense of “being in the wrong body” or not feeling like their internal sense of self was in alignment with the social behavioral norms of their biological sex. This felt sense of something being perpetually “off” has, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, led to over 40 percent of gender dysphoric men and women in the US having attempted to take their own life, nearly 10 times the national average. What’s more, according to the most thorough follow-up study of post sex-reassignment surgeries to date, extending over 30 years in Sweden, the suicide rate of persons who had undergone such surgery rose to 20 times that of comparable peers. I do not therefore deny or question the internal mental anguish such persons suffering from these very real mental disorders are facing. Rather, the point that I am driving at here is not one concerning persons with actual, diagnosable gender dysphoria, but instead a critique of the necessary and possible metaphysical commitments and moral demandingness present-day gender ideology seems to entail. And as we have seen here, nothing less than system-wide incoherence and a radical breakdown in public meaning seems to result from persons indexing the definition of “gender identity” to their own moment by moment, wholly private subjectivity.

Political, social, and legal implications

As we have noted, language and meaning are deeply networked, deeply public, and held in place by things like history, collective knowledge, linguistic precedent, logical consistency, and the contours of the objective world (i.e., truth). To claim total control over one proposition within such a network is therefore to control them all. For the state to attempt to grant monopolistic control over both the analytic and synthetic definitions of terms like “he” and “she,” to a privileged and exclusive class of language-users, terms perhaps no more fundamental to the human condition, would be, in essence, to attempt to grant control over truth itself.

The logical implications of the passing of the US Equality Act would therefore constitute nothing less than the legal canonization of a new priest class of magical persons who speak all of reality into existence and a subordinate class of everyday citizens held hostage by state compulsion to be unwilling stage-actors in their never-ending, incoherent game of pretend. What is at stake here is therefore not simply one of politeness and etiquette having to do with proper names. Rather, what is fundamentally at stake are the very reasons we ought to regard claims about reality as being true or false at all.

There is perhaps no greater evidence of this newly emerging priest class than in the recent case of actress, Elliot Page. For Elliot, she merely stipulates that she is a biological male and we must regard her as a biological male in all respects. Record of the past must be amended to reflect that she was always a biological male. All historical records, biomedical records, biomedical theory, all notions of health, social institutions, etiquette, law, public meanings, and objective reality itself must be gerrymandered around the fixed pivot point of her moment-by-moment subjective prerogative. That is, until she changes her mind. Then, at such a point, the frantic process of revising each and every proposition under the sun, past and present, must begin anew for us proles lest we offend. But for that young man in Georgia who must sign up for selective service the moment he turns 18, biological essentialism suddenly and strictly applies to him. Such are the metaphysics of this brave new world.

Such a legal canonization of a protected class of magical “trans” people would actually constitute a severe violation of the actual rights of everyone else not fortunate enough to be let into this new exclusive club. Indeed, the logical implications of such wrong-headed legislation would be totalizing in scope, affecting nearly every law, institution, social practice, linguistic practice, area of knowledge, custom, record, word, concept, and thought that directly or indirectly related to the concepts of “he” and “she,” “male” and “female.” In other words, it would affect nearly all of our shared propositions about reality.

In biology, we would have to change the definition of “human,” “male,” and “female,” as well as amend our taxonomy for all sexed organisms. In medicine, we would have to overhaul all theories and practices of what constituted “health” and “function” for human males and females, boys and girls. In law we would have to adjust all legislation that specifically referenced men and women. In language, we would have to overhaul or abolish all languages, to include all romance languages, that had gendered conjugations. With respect to freedom of religion, all religions, especially Abrahamic religions, would have to subordinate or abandon their theological commitments concerning man and woman’s special and divinely created nature. With respect to freedom of association, all previously-exclusive men and women’s groups would have to open their membership to such new magic persons. With respect to women’s sports, biological males would now have to be allowed to compete if they simply believed themselves to be female, effectively ending all women’s sports.

With respect to feminism, all legal and social progress ostensibly made by and exclusively for women (i.e., protective laws, exclusive spaces, business loans, scholarships, educational opportunities, etc.) would all effectively have to be undone. With respect to penitentiary assignments, men could simply declare themselves to be women and would have to be moved to female jails or, alternatively, have their own personal jails built for them on account of the unique gender. With respect to the military draft, all men of fighting age could opt out of selective service simply by deciding that they are a woman on their 18th birthday. With respect to the nuclear family, the language of “father,” “mother,” “daughter,” “son,” “sister,” “brother,” “uncle,” “aunt,” “grandfather,” “grandmother,” would have to be phased out since they connote offensive biological essentialist categories. And with respect to all recorded history and all social knowledge, any and all truth claims that directly or indirectly reference males or females would have to be placed in a perpetual state of indetermination, contingent exclusively upon the final say the special “trans” speakers.

The coup de grace of such madness of course, of legally sanctioning this special caste of persons who can enter and exit all social and legal groups at will, is when they themselves slam shut the door of entry in the faces of the uninitiated, announcing stridently, “we can tell, you aren’t really trans!” It is here where the loop of the metaphysical encirclement fully closes and The Party now gets to tell us commoners both the contents of our outer world in its entirety and the contents of the private inner world of our own heads as well.

The above claims are neither hyperbole nor slippery slope alarmism, nor hypothetical conjecture. Indeed, in just the past few years we have already begun to see the tragic and unjust fallout of such conceptual incoherence playing out under the illogic baked into Canada’s Bill C-16. From a BC man being held in jail for objecting to his teenage daughter’s gender transition, to a “transgender” female inmate sexually assaulting other inmates at an all-female penitentiary, to “trans” female, Jessica Yaniv, taking more than a dozen esthetician businesses to a Human Rights Tribunal for refusing to Brazilian wax his scrotum, the madness of this incoherent ideology is only just beginning.

Rest assured, under the logical implications of Bill C-16, the cinching of the rainbow police state will only tighten and the situation in Canada for the average citizens will only worsen in the coming years. And so will be the case in the United States if the Equality Act passes. In essence, the legal implications of such a bill will be nothing less than making it illegal for one to say true things, consistent things, logical things, or even to attempt. Conversely it will make use of hard state power to compel persons to say or believe things that are patently false, incoherent, or conceptually impossible. It will be political correctness on steroids, on a fast road to communist dystopia. To quote Theodore Dalrymple:

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

This is how you subvert a nation and a people.

Conclusion

A single line of code, buried within millions or even billions of lines of code, can turn any computer program, no matter how sophisticated, completely inoperable or completely upside down. Such is the case with the present discussion and legislation surrounding so-called “transgender rights.” As we have noted here, despite the utterance of the sound “rights,” it turns out that no matter how much one subjectively feels that he or she is being disrespected, attacked, or oppressed, one simply does not have a legitimate rights claim that the objective world is what he or she says it is. Rather, it turns out that the objective world just pushes back.

If we are to understand transgender rights claims to be meaningful utterances at all, capable of being true or false, then on the most charitable of interpretations we should regard such claims to be at most nothing more than linguistic short-hand for the negative right of freedom of expression and freedom of religion already protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Accordingly, we should regard such ideological expressions as a kind of secular religion reserved exclusively to the private sphere; not something publicly imposed, in all domains of human activity, by state compulsion and threat of force. Otherwise, we should treat such claims as evidence of conceptual confusion, dishonesty, pretending, or a genuine case of gender dysphoria warranting proper medical treatment and counseling.

Or, perhaps I am totally wrong here and there is a huge error and blind spot in my argumentation that I have completely overlooked. I challenge and encourage any advocate of gender ideology to explain to me where exactly I’ve made an error in my argumentation and I look forward to future debate and discourse on the matter. If I’m wrong, then show me where I’m wrong. Regardless, even if I am wrong and mistaken in my reasoning, I and every other citizen in this country should be allowed the freedom to make such mistakes openly; to strive to know truth, to seek truth, and to speak truth, in earnest, however clumsily and however imperfectly.

That being said, this pernicious and deeply wrong-headed ideology will not suddenly stop on its own if people remain silent and complicit. This can only be achieved if people find the courage to speak out publicly, to keep speaking, and to remember, above all, that they are not alone. For there has never been a time in human history when Traditional Catholics, to Protestants, to Muslims, to Jews, to Black Panthers, to Libertarians, to 3rd Wave Feminists have found such common agreement over something so obvious, and when stating the obvious was so very simple. For if freedom is to mean anything at all, it is the ability to worship freely, to live freely, and to speak freely. It is the ability to openly say, without fear, that 2+2=4, that there are only two sexes, that “gender” is a nonsensical concept, that The Party is mistaken, and that the Emperor indeed has no clothes.

• Dr. Michael Robillard is an independent scholar, philosopher, and US Army veteran. He has held prior academic appointments at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Oxford, and the US Naval Academy. His past writings have focused on issues concerning free speech in academia, civil/military relations, veterans issues, and the ethics of automated technology. For more information, visit his personal website, follow him on Twitter @Dr_M_Robillard, and read his Substack.

When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. (Lev Tolstoy, "War and Peace")

Excuse me if I return to the Afghanistan story. I don't claim to be an expert in international politics, but if what happened is the result of the actions of "experts", then it is safe to say that it is better to ignore them and look for our own explanations.

So, I proposed an interpretation of the Afghan disaster in a recent post of mine, together with a report on the story of how the oil reserves of the region of the Caspian Sea were enormously overestimated starting with the 1980s. Some people understood my views as meaning that I proposed that crude oil was the cause of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. No, I didn't mean that. Not any more than the story of the "butterfly effect" means that a butterfly can actually cause a hurricane -- of course it would make no sense.

What I am saying is a completely different concept: a butterfly (or dreams of immense oil reserves) are just triggers for events that have a certain potential to happen. Take a temperature difference between the water surface and the air and a hurricane can happen: it is a thermodynamic potential. Take a military industry that makes money on war, and a war can take place: it is a financial potential. A hurricane and a military lobby are not so different in terms of being complex adaptive systems.

So, let me summarize my opinion on the Afghanistan conflict. I think that these 20 years of madness have been the result of a meme gone viral in the mid-1980s that triggered an event that happened because there were the conditions to make it happen: the invasion of Afghanistan.

It all started in the mid-1980s, when an American geologist, Harry Cook, came back from Kazakhstan with a wildly exaggerated estimate of the oil reserves of the Caspian area. He probably understood the uncertainty of his numbers, but statistical thinking is not a characteristic of American politicians. Cook's numbers were taken at face value and further inflated to give rise to the "New Saudi Arabia" meme: resources so abundant that they would have led to a new era of oil prosperity. At this point, the question became about how to get the (hypothetical) Caspian bonanza.

Even before the presence of these reserves was proven (or disproved), in the mid-1990s negotiations started for a pipeline going from the oil fields of Kazakhstan to the Indian Ocean, going through Afghanistan. That involved negotiating with the Taleban and with a Saudi Arabian oil tycoon named Osama Bin Laden. Something went wrong and the negotiations collapsed in 1998. Then, there came the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan. It was only in the mid-2000s that actual drilling in the Caspian area laid to rest the myth of the New Saudi Arabia. But the occupation of Afghanistan was already a fact.

Does this story explain 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan at a cost of 2 trillion dollars and the humiliating defeat we see now? No, if you think in terms of cause and effect. Yes, if you think of it in terms of a diffuse meme in the minds of the decision-makers. I can't imagine that there ever was someone masterminding the whole folly. But there was this meme about those immense oil reserves north of Afghanistan that influenced all the decisions made at all levels. Memes are an incredibly powerful force.

To explain my point better, I can cite Lev Tolstoy's description of what led millions of Western Europeans to invade Russia in 1812, a decision as foolish as that of invading Afghanistan in 2001. Tolstoy says that "it happened because it had to happen."

Tolstoy means that it was the result of a series of macro- and micro-decisions taken by all the actors in the story, including the simple soldiers who decided to enlist with Napoleon. But there was no plan, no grand strategy, no clear objectives directing the invasion. Even Napoleon himself was just one of the cogs of the immense machine that generated the disaster. "A king is history's slave," says Tolstoy.

Tolstoy's had an incredibly advanced way of thinking: what he wrote could have been written by a modern system scientist. You see it in nearly every paragraph of this excerpt from "War and Peace." An amazing insight on the reason for the folly of human actions at the level of what Tolstoy calls the "hive," that today we would call the "memesphere."

From "War and Peace" - Lev Tolstoy Book 9, chapter 1

On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.

What produced this extraordinary occurrence? What were its causes? The historians tell us with naive assurance that its causes were the wrongs inflicted on the Duke of Oldenburg, the nonobservance of the Continental System, the ambition of Napoleon, the firmness of Alexander, the mistakes of the diplomatists, and so on. Consequently, it would only have been necessary for Metternich, Rumyantsev, or Talleyrand, between a levee and an evening party, to have taken proper pains and written a more adroit note, or for Napoleon to have written to Alexander: ‘My respected Brother, I consent to restore the duchy to the Duke of Oldenburg’- and there would have been no war.

We can understand that the matter seemed like that to contemporaries. It naturally seemed to Napoleon that the war was caused by England’s intrigues (as in fact he said on the island of St. Helena). It naturally seemed to members of the English Parliament that the cause of the war was Napoleon’s ambition; to the Duke of Oldenburg, that the cause of the war was the violence done to him; to businessmen that the cause of the way was the Continental System which was ruining Europe; to the generals and old soldiers that the chief reason for the war was the necessity of giving them employment; to the legitimists of that day that it was the need of re-establishing les bons principes, and to the diplomatists of that time that it all resulted from the fact that the alliance between Russia and Austria in 1809 had not been sufficiently well concealed from Napoleon, and from the awkward wording of Memorandum No. 178.

It is natural that these and a countless and infinite quantity of other reasons, the number depending on the endless diversity of points of view, presented themselves to the men of that day; but to us, to posterity who view the thing that happened in all its magnitude and perceive its plain and terrible meaning, these causes seem insufficient. To us it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other either because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England’s policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them.

To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried away by the process of research and can therefore regard the event with unclouded common sense, an incalculable number of causes present themselves. The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of them we find; and each separate cause or whole series of causes appears to us equally valid in itself and equally false by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the events, and by its impotence- apart from the cooperation of all the other coincident causes- to occasion the event. To us, the wish or objection of this or that French corporal to serve a second term appears as much a cause as Napoleon’s refusal to withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and to restore the duchy of Oldenburg; for had he not wished to serve, and had a second, a third, and a thousandth corporal and private also refused, there would have been so many less men in Napoleon’s army and the war could not have occurred.

Had Napoleon not taken offense at the demand that he should withdraw beyond the Vistula, and not ordered his troops to advance, there would have been no war; but had all his sergeants objected to serving a second term then also there could have been no war. Nor could there have been a war had there been no English intrigues and no Duke of Oldenburg, and had Alexander not felt insulted, and had there not been an autocratic government in Russia, or a Revolution in France and a subsequent dictatorship and Empire, or all the things that produced the French Revolution, and so on. Without each of these causes nothing could have happened. So all these causes- myriads of causes- coincided to bring it about. And so there was no one cause for that occurrence, but it had to occur because it had to. Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to the west, slaying their fellows.

The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words the event seemed to hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier who was drawn into the campaign by lot or by conscription. This could not be otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (on whom the event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable circumstances was needed without any one of which the event could not have taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power- the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns- should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and complex causes. We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us.

Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance. There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life, which is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental hive life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him. Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity. A deed done is irrevocable, and its result coinciding in time with the actions of millions of other men assumes an historic significance. The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with and the more power he has over others, the more evident is the predestination and inevitability of his every action.

‘The king’s heart is in the hands of the Lord.’
A king is history’s slave.

History, that is, the unconscious, general, hive life of mankind, uses every moment of the life of kings as a tool for its own purposes. Though Napoleon at that time, in 1812, was more convinced than ever that it depended on him, verser (ou ne pas verser) le sang de ses peuples*- as Alexander expressed it in the last letter he wrote him- he had never been so much in the grip of inevitable laws, which compelled him, while thinking that he was acting on his own volition, to perform for the hive life- that is to say, for history- whatever had to be performed.

The people of the west moved eastwards to slay their fellow men, and by the law of coincidence thousands of minute causes fitted in and co-ordinated to produce that movement and war: reproaches for the nonobservance of the Continental System, the Duke of Oldenburg’s wrongs, the movement of troops into Prussia- undertaken (as it seemed to Napoleon) only for the purpose of securing an armed peace, the French Emperor’s love and habit of war coinciding with his people’s inclinations, allurement by the grandeur of the preparations, and the expenditure on those preparations and the need of obtaining advantages to compensate for that expenditure, the intoxicating honors he received in Dresden, the diplomatic negotiations which, in the opinion of contemporaries, were carried on with a sincere desire to attain peace, but which only wounded the self-love of both sides, and millions and millions of other causes that adapted themselves to the event that was happening or coincided with it.

When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.

Equally right or wrong is he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and he who says that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because the last navvy struck it for the last time with his mattock. In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.

*"To shed (or not to shed) the blood of his peoples.’

Israel has been allowed to get away with massive espionage directed against the U.S. and the theft of material and technology, Phil Giraldi writes.

Few Americans are aware of the fact that no U.S. government official, to include congressmen, can in any way mention or discuss Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which is estimated by some observers to consist of as many as 200 tactical nuclear weapons which can be delivered on target by air, land or sea. The prohibition is spelled out in a Department of Energy “classification bulletin” graded Secret, which was issued on September 6, 2012 and bears the file number WPN-136. The subject line reads “Guidance on Release of information Relating to the Potential for an Israeli Nuclear Capability.” It would be interesting to learn exactly how the text of the memo reads, but in spite of repeated attempts to obtain a copy under the Freedom of Information Act, the entire body of the document is completely blacked out.

What is known in that the memo is basically a gag order, presumably issued by the Barack Obama Administration to block any official from making a comment that might be interpreted to mean that the federal government recognizes that Israel has nuclear weapons. The silence over the Israeli arsenal dates back to an agreement made by President Richard Nixon with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. In its most recent manifestation, President Barack Obama, when asked if he knew of “any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons,” responded “I don’t want to speculate.” He was, of course, lying.

The bulletin’s first known victim was Los Alamos National Laboratory nuclear policy specialist James Doyle who in 2013 wrote a sentence suggesting that Israel had a nuclear arsenal. It appeared in an article entitled “Why Eliminate Nuclear Weapons?” which had been security cleared by Los Alamos and appeared in the journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. An unknown congressional staffer demanded a review and Doyle had his home computer searched before being fired.

Israel, as is so often the case, gets a free pass on what is for others criminal behavior. Its nuclear program was created by stealing American uranium and weapons technology. Preventing nuclear proliferation was in fact a major objective of the U.S. government when in the early 1960s President John F. Kennedy learned that Tel Aviv was developing a nuclear weapon from a CIA report. He told the Israelis to terminate their program or risk losing American political and economic support but was killed before any steps were taken to end the project.

Israel accelerated its nuclear program after the death of President Kennedy. By 1965, it had obtained the raw material for a bomb consisting of U.S. government owned highly enriched weapons grade uranium obtained from a company in Pennsylvania called NUMEC, which was founded in 1956 and owned by Zalman Mordecai Shapiro, head of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Zionist Organization of America. NUMEC was a supplier of enriched uranium for government projects but it was also from the start a front for the Israeli nuclear program, with its chief funder David Lowenthal, a leading Zionist, traveling to Israel at least once a month where he would meet with an old friend Meir Amit, who headed Israeli intelligence. NUMEC covered the shipment of enriched uranium to Israel by claiming the metal was “lost,” losses that totaled nearly six hundred pounds, enough to produce dozens of weapons. Such was the importance of the operation that in 1968 NUMEC even received a private incognito visit from a top Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan who later ran the spy Jonathan Pollard.

Also there was physical evidence relating to the diversion of the uranium. Refined uranium has a technical signature that permit identification of its source. Traces of uranium from NUMEC were identified by Department of Energy inspectors in Israel in 1978. The Central Intelligence Agency has also looked into the diversion of enriched uranium from the NUMEC plant and concluded that it was part of a broader program to obtain the technology and raw materials for a nuclear device for Israel.

With the uranium in hand, the stealing of the advanced technology needed to make a nuclear weapon, which is where Hollywood movie producer Arnon Milchan comes into the story. Milchan was born in Israel but moved to the United States and eventually wound up as the founder-owner of New Regency Films. In a November 25, 2013 interview on Israeli television Milchan admitted that he had spent his many years in Hollywood as an agent for Israeli intelligence, helping obtain embargoed technologies and materials that enabled Israel to develop a nuclear weapon. He worked for Israel’s Bureau of Science and Liaison acquisition division of Mossad, referred to as the LAKAM spy agency.

Milchan admitted in the interview that “I did it for my country and I’m proud of it.” He was not referring to the United States. He also said that “other big Hollywood names were connected to [his] covert affairs.” Among other successes, he obtained through his company Heli Trading 800 krytons, the sophisticated triggers for nuclear weapons. The devices were acquired from the California top secret defense contractor MILCO International. Milchan personally recruited MILCO’s president Richard Kelly Smyth as an agent before turning him over to another Heli Trading employee, future Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for handling. Smyth was eventually arrested in 1985 but insofar as is known neither Milchan nor Netanyahu has ever been questioned by the FBI regarding the thefts.

Israel’s nukes are now in the news because of an Op-Ed that surprisingly appeared in the New York Times on August 11th written by Peter Beinart entitled “America Needs to Start Telling the Truth About Israel’s Nukes.” Beinart wrote that “Israel already has nuclear weapons. You’d just never know it from America’s leaders, who have spent the last half-century feigning ignorance. This deceit undercuts America’s supposed commitment to nuclear nonproliferation, and it distorts the American debate over Iran. It’s time for the Biden administration to tell the truth.”

Beinart points out that the American public can hardly make an informed judgement regarding what should be done in the Middle East if it is uncertain whether Israel is a nuclear power or not, but one issue he does not discuss is the issue of money. IRMEP’s Grant Smith, who has been challenging the secrecy surrounding the Israeli arsenal, recently observed that “The Symington & Glenn provisions of the Arms Export Control Act (22 USC §2799aa-1: Nuclear reprocessing transfers, illegal exports for nuclear explosive devices, transfers of nuclear explosive devices, and nuclear detonations) forbid U.S. foreign aid to countries with nuclear weapons programs that are not signatories to the Treaty on the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, absent required special procedures… But no member of Congress has taken up this issue — or even mentioned Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal.”

Smith is frustrated by the reluctance of progressives in Congress, who have opposed recent additional $735 million in military aid to Israel permitting it to rearm after its assault on the Gazans, to ignore the gag order and raise the issue of the nuclear arsenal. He writes “It seems as though even these members of Congress, as well as the rest of the U.S. government, are abiding by this secret gag order when they could take action which would challenge the administration’s refusal to acknowledge Israel’s nuclear weapons and possibly stop $3.8 billion in taxpayer money from going to Israel.”

That the Energy Department document exists at all is recognition of the astonishing power of the Israeli Lobby over the U.S. government at all levels, particularly as it is intended to ignore or even negate other legislation passed by congress to combat nuclear proliferation. And the denial of what everyone knows to be true, i.e. that Israel has a nuclear arsenal, appears to all come down to the ability of the United States government to continue to reward a wealthy Israel with billions of dollars of taxpayer money every year. To suggest that the arrangement is nefarious would be to put it mildly, but it is more that that. It is criminal. Israel has been allowed to get away with massive espionage directed against the United States and the theft of material and technology while also since the 1970s being engaged in a conspiracy with the U.S. government that distorts America’s foreign policy, largely done to keep getting the billions of dollars that it is not entitled to receive under existing American law. It is shameful. Beyond that, it might be construed as treason.

Last week, the CDC announced a surprising finding: “Delta infection resulted in similarly high SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated people.” Public officials had known from the early days of vaccine development that vaccinated people could catch COVID-19, but the assumption had been made that they were not going to be spreaders of COVID-19.

It turns out that the delta variant is sufficiently different from the original Wuhan version of the virus that the vaccines work much less well. The CDC performed an analysis of COVID-19 cases arising from one public gathering in Massachusetts. They found that the gathering led to 469 COVID-19 delta cases among Massachusetts residents, with 74% of these cases in fully vaccinated attendees. Massachusetts is a highly vaccinated state, with approximately 64% of the population fully vaccinated.

There are other issues coming up as well. How long does the vaccine really last? Is the vaccine itself part of the reason that the virus is mutating as rapidly as it is? Are we making problems for ourselves by creating an army of people with very light cases of COVID-19 who can spread the virus to both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated without realizing that they have more than a cold? Aren’t we inadvertently killing off the least able of the virus mutations and allowing the most virulent to multiply?

My training is as an actuary, so I am familiar with modeling. I am also a “systems thinker.” I know that it is important to look at longer term impacts as well as short-term impacts. If a person works in the healthcare field, it is easy to consider only the obvious short-term benefits. It takes some analysis to figure out that today’s vaccines may lead to stronger variants (such as delta) and more overall spread of COVID-19.

In this post, I will explain some of the issues involved.

[1] Today’s vaccines provide only a fraction of the true level of protection required. Their actions are in many ways similar to applying weed killer at half the strength needed to kill the weeds or providing antibiotics at half the dose required to stop the spread of bacteria.

All of our lives, we have been told, “Be sure to complete the full course of the antibiotics. It is necessary to kill all of the bacteria. Otherwise, it will be easier for a few of the stronger bacteria not to be affected. If you stop too early, the bacteria that are least affected by the antibiotic will survive and reproduce, while the others will die. Stopping the drug too soon is a great way to achieve antibiotic resistance, quickly.”

Unfortunately, COVID-19 vaccine makers seem to have overlooked this issue. The respected BMJ published an editorial entitled, Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us. It makes the point:

Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said, “Ideally, you want an antiviral vaccine to do two things . . . first, reduce the likelihood you will get severely ill and go to the hospital, and two, prevent infection and therefore interrupt disease transmission.”

Yet the current phase III trials are not actually set up to prove either.

We were told that the new COVID-19 vaccines are “95% effective in preventing symptomatic disease,” but it turns out that this is far less adequate than what most people would assume. The vaccine is “leaky.” A big issue is that the virus mutates, and the vaccine works much less well against the mutations. The world can never reach herd immunity if immunized people keep catching new variants of COVID-19 and keep passing them on, as the evidence now suggests.

[2] In a way, getting sick from a virus is helpful. It tells us to stay at home, away from others. It is the fact that humans experience symptoms from viruses that tends to limit their spread.

If a virus has severe symptoms, those infected with the virus will not feel well enough to continue their usual activities. They will tend to stay at home.

If the symptoms are mild, as is the case with the common cold, people will likely go about their activities as usual. This is especially the case if people need to work to feed their families. Thus, viruses with mild symptoms often spread easily.

But, if citizens feel that they are protected by a vaccine, they will likely continue to go about their activities as usual. Most of them will not realize that they might be spreaders of delta, and perhaps other new COVID-19 variants. Symptoms are likely to be mild or non-existent.

[3] It is becoming clear that people immunized with today’s vaccines can both catch the delta variant and spread it to others.

As I mentioned above, the CDC concluded from looking at its analysis of 469 delta cases that the infection resulted in similarly high SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.

We have independent corroboration of the ability of vaccinated individuals to spread delta COVID-19 in a new analysis from Singapore. This article reports, “PCR cycle threshold (Ct) values were similar between both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups at diagnosis.” This is precisely the information that the CDC was relying on in Massachusetts when they reported that there were similarly high SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated people. While this analysis has not yet been peer reviewed, it reaches precisely the same conclusion with respect to early viral load as the Massachusetts analysis.

The data from this same Singapore study indicates that there are about 3 times as many asymptomatic cases in the vaccinated (28.2%) as the unvaccinated (9.2%). The median number of symptoms reported by the vaccinated was 1, compared to 2 in the unvaccinated. Among the vaccinated, the most frequent symptoms were fever (40.9%), runny nose (38%) and cough (38%). One of these symptoms, especially if it occurred only briefly, could easily be overlooked as a sign of COVID-19.

[4] With nearly all of the current vaccines, the immune system is trained to look for the spike protein from the original Wuhan virus. This narrow focus makes it relatively easy for the virus to mutate in ways that outsmart the vaccine.

A “History of Vaccines” website indicates that there are several ways vaccines are being made, including weakened (“attenuated”) viruses, killed viruses, and segments of the pathogen. In the new COVID-19 vaccines, a particularly limited part of the virus is used, the spike protein. In fact, in the newer vaccines, only an mRNA code is injected, and the body is instructed to make the spike protein itself.

Using a very narrow target has made it easier for viruses to evade the effects of the vaccine. Delta is one variant of the original virus from Wuhan that is evading vaccines through its mutations. Another such variant is Lambda, which caused serious problems in Chile in the spring of 2021, despite vaccine usage as high as 60%. The virus underlying all of these variants is called SARS-CoV-2, reflecting the fact that this virus is closely related to the virus which caused the 2003 SARS epidemic.

Since vaccination began about December 15, 2020, we have so far encountered two variants that are poorly controlled by vaccines. This is not a promising sign for the long-term success of COVID-19 vaccines. As more time goes on, we can expect more such variants. These variants do not necessarily stay around for more than a few months, making it difficult to create and distribute new specially targeted vaccines.

[5] Given the likelihood of mutations away from the narrow target, it seems strange that the governments have set very high expectations for the new vaccines.

It seems to me that Pfizer and Moderna should have said, “We are producing new vaccines that will somewhat lessen symptoms. In a way, they will be like the annual influenza vaccines that various companies make each year. We will need to update the vaccines regularly, but we will likely miss. Hopefully, our guess regarding what will work will be ‘close enough,’ so the vaccine will provide some partial benefit for the upcoming variations.”

Such a statement would have provided a more realistic set of expectations, compared to what many people have been assuming. No one would expect that herd immunity would ever be reached. The vaccines would be perceived as fairly weak tools that need to be used alongside medications, if they are to be used at all.

[6] Leaky vaccines, if widely used, can encourage the virus to mutate toward more virulent (severe) forms. Ultimately, the problem becomes viruses that mutate to more virulent forms faster than the vaccine system can keep up.

If, as we are seeing today, vaccinated people can catch the variant and pass it on to both vaccinated and unvaccinated people, this extra boost can help the variant tremendously in its ability to spread. This extra boost is especially helpful for the variants that are very virulent, since in the normal situation, people who catch a virulent variant would recognize that they are sick and stay at home.

There would normally be a limit on how much the variant could spread based on its impact on the unvaccinated. This limit goes away if both the vaccinated and unvaccinated can catch and spread the illness. Without a vaccine, the variants might be either more or less virulent, with the more virulent tending to die out because the people who get them either die or stay at home because they are very ill. I would expect that this is the reason why quite a few viruses tend to become less severe (virulent) over time, when leaky vaccines are not available to artificially boost their virulence.

The article, Vaccines are Pushing Pathogens to Evolve, gives the example of how the vaccines for Marek’s disease in chickens have been failing, as the disease gradually evolves to become more virulent under pressure from the vaccines being used to keep this illness away. The first vaccine was introduced in 1970. A decade later, outbreaks of Marek’s disease began to be found in vaccinated flocks. A second vaccine was licensed in 1983, but it too began to fail. When the article was written in 2018 the industry was on its third vaccine, but it too was beginning to fail, as the disease became more deadly. But there was no new vaccine yet available.

A 2015 article in PLOS Biology is entitled, Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens. A person would think everyone involved in vaccine technology would be very much aware of this issue.

The chase after new vaccines is precisely the problem we can expect to have with the vaccines for COVID-19. Only, our problem with the vaccine not really working correctly is coming after a few months, not 10 years. Trying to keep up with new vaccines for a virus that evolves away from us, this quickly, is likely to be an impossible task. It is not just the unvaccinated who have a problem; it is everyone, as the vaccines quickly lose their effectiveness.

[7] Another potential problem with COVID-19 vaccines is Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE). When this occurs, it worsens later infections by different variants.

ADE is a rather strange condition in which the antibodies against one variant gained from a first infection (or immunization) act to make some later infections by a different variant worse, rather than better. Dengue Fever is an example of an illness for which this is an issue.

Dr. Robert Malone thinks that ADE may be happening now for COVID-19. He sees the high virus levels in immunized individuals as evidence of possible ADE.

The large number of immunized patients in the hospital with COVID-19 in Israel (which has mostly delta cases) is also given as possible evidence:

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](https://i0.wp.com/ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Israel-new-hospitalization-and-new-severe-patients-by-vaccination-status.png?ssl=1)

Figure 1. Image from Israel’s official COVID-19 website, showing new hospitalizations and new severe patients separately for fully vaccinated, partially vaccinated, and unvaccinated individuals.

The illness SARS is closely related to COVID-19. There is evidence that vaccinations against SARS tend to produce ADE. In fact, the National Institute of Health provided funding for a 2020 academic paper that reaches the following conclusion:

The specific and significant COVID-19 risk of ADE should have been and should be prominently and independently disclosed to research subjects currently in vaccine trials, as well as those being recruited for trials and future patients after vaccine approval, in order to meet the medical ethics standards for informed consent.

[8] Another problem with the current vaccines against COVID-19 is that immunity may not last very long.

The virus that causes COVID-19 is a coronavirus. The common cold is another illness caused by a coronavirus. We know the immunity of the common cold doesn’t last very long, perhaps a year. While we don’t have long-term experience with COVID-19 vaccine immunity, we shouldn’t be surprised if its immunity begins to wane within a few months, or in a year or two.

Israel, after analyzing its recent COVID-19 experience (almost all with the Delta variant), is now offering anyone over 60 who was vaccinated more than 5 months ago a booster shot. Third doses are also being given to those with weakened immune systems.

It should be noted that if immunity doesn’t last very long, any strategy of “flattening the curve” by stretching out COVID-19 cases becomes counterproductive because it runs the risk of moving the timeframe of the next cycle beyond the time when natural (and vaccine-induced) immunity is still operative.

[9] The public has been led to believe that vaccines are the only solution to COVID-19 when, in fact, they are at best a very poor and temporary band-aid.

Vaccines are a tempting solution because the benefits have been oversold and no one has explained how poorly today’s leaky vaccines really work.

We are already past the period when these vaccines were well matched with the viruses they were aimed at. Now we are in a situation in which the viruses are constantly mutating, and the vaccines need to be updated. The catch is that the variants stick around for such a short time period that by the time the vaccine is updated, there is likely to be yet another new variant that the new vaccine does not really match up with well.

Requirements that employees be vaccinated against COVID-19 cannot be expected to provide much benefit to employers because workers will still be out sick with COVID-19. This happens because they are likely to catch a variant such as Delta, which does not line up with the original vaccine. Perhaps they will be out for a shorter period, and their hospital bills will be lower. These types of benefits are what people have expected of influenza vaccines. There is no reason for them to expect more of the new COVID-19 vaccines.

Even with 100% vaccination herd immunity can never be reached because the vaccine encourages the virus to mutate into more virulent forms. Each new variant stays around for only a few months, making it hard for vaccine makers to keep up with the changing nature of the problem. Vaccine makers can expect to face a constant battle in having to run to stay even. Someone will have to convince citizens that each new vaccine makes sense, even though injuries reported to the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System seem to be much more frequent than those reported for vaccines for other diseases.

An erroneous, one-sided story is being told to the general public, in part because the pharmaceutical lobby is incredibly powerful. It has the support of influential people, such as Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates. The pharmaceutical industry can make billions of dollars in income from the sale of vaccines, with little in the way of sales expenses. The industry has managed to convince people that it is OK to sell these vaccines, even though injury rates are very high compared to those for vaccines in general.

Vaccines are being pushed in large part because the pharmaceutical industry needs a money maker. It also wants to be seen as having cutting-edge technology, so young people will be attracted to the field. It cannot admit to anyone that technologies from decades ago would perhaps work better to solve the COVID-19 problem.

[10] The pharmaceutical industry has been telling the world that inexpensive drugs can’t fix our problem. However, there are several low-cost drugs that appear helpful.

One drug that is being overlooked is ivermectin, which was discovered in the late 1970s. It was originally introduced as a veterinary drug to cure parasitic infections in animals. In the U. S., ivermectin has been used since 1987 for eliminating parasites such as ringworm in humans. Ivermectin seems to cure COVID-19 in humans, but it needs a higher dosage than has been previously approved. Also, it would not be a money maker for the pharmaceutical industry.

The possible use of ivermectin to cure COVID-19 seems to have been intentionally hidden. At approximately 32:45 in this linked video, Dr. David Martin explains how Moderna announced ivermectin’s utility in treating SARS (which is closely related to SARS-CoV-2) in its 2016-2018 patent modification related to the SARS virus. It sounds as though Moderna (and others) have participated both in developing harmful viruses and in developing vaccines to cure very closely related viruses. They then work to prevent the sale of cheap drugs that might reduce their sales of vaccines. This seems unconscionable.

Vitamin D, in high enough doses, taken well before exposure to the virus that causes COVID-19, seems to lead to reduced severity of the disease, and may eliminate some cases completely.

Various steroid drugs are often used in the later stages of COVID-19, when conditions warrant it. The medical community seems to have no difficulty with these.

Monoclonal antibodies are also used in the treatment of COVID-19, but they are much more expensive.

[11] Conclusion. Governments, businesses, and citizens need to understand that today’s vaccines are not really solutions to our COVID-19 problem. At the same time, they need better solutions.

Current vaccines have been badly oversold. They can be expected to make the mutation problem worse, and they don’t stop the spread of variants. Instead, we need to start quickly to make ivermectin and other inexpensive drugs available through healthcare systems. People do need some sort of solution to the problem of COVID-19 illnesses; it just turns out that the current vaccines work so poorly that they probably should not be part of the solution.

The whole idea of vaccine passports is absurd. Even with the vaccine, people will catch the new COVID-19 variants, and they will pass them on to others. Perhaps they may get lighter symptoms, so that they will be off work for a shorter length of time, but there still will be disruption. If those who catch COVID-19 can instead take ivermectin at a high enough dose at the first sign of illness, many (or most) of them can get well in a few days and avoid hospitalization completely. Other medications may be helpful as well.

I am skeptical that masks can do any good with the high level of transmission of Delta. But at least masks aren’t very harmful. We probably need to go along with what is requested by officials.

It is becoming clear that today’s pharmaceutical industry is far too powerful. Investigations need to be made into the large number of allegations against it and its leaders. Why did members of the pharmaceutical industry find it necessary to patent viruses, and then later sell vaccines for a virus closely related to the viruses it had patented?

An astute journalist I know once described carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a "delay-and-fail strategy" devised by the fossil fuel industry. The industry's ploy was utterly obvious to him: Promise to perfect and deploy CCS at some vague point in the future. By the time people catch on that CCS won't work, the fossil fuel industry will have successfully extended the time it has operated without onerous regulation for another couple of decades.

And because huge financial resources (mostly government resources) will have gone to CCS projects instead of low-carbon energy production, society will continue to be wildly dependent on carbon-based fuels (giving the industry further running room).

The trouble is that the cynical CCS strategy has already been under way and failing for more than two decades already. And yet, it is seeking a renewed lease on life with a proposal for a vast network of carbon dioxide pipelines "twice the size of the current U.S. oil pipeline network by volume." The public face of the effort is a former Obama administration secretary of energy with a perennially bad haircut, Ernest Moniz.

Moniz has a partnership with the AFL-CIO to push the idea. No doubt unions like the project because it would create a lot of jobs regardless of whether it actually addresses climate change.

Just for the record, here's a list of reasons that CCS doesn't work and likely will not work in any time frame that matters for addressing climate change:

1. It's very costly. Many of the pilot projects have been shut down because they are uneconomical.

2. Suitable underground storage is not abundant and frequently not near facilities that produce the carbon dioxide.

3. Long-term storage may fail, releasing the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere anyway. After all, one must have injection wells into the underground storage, wells that can leak if not properly maintained. Not least, there is no multi-decade record of successful, leak-free sequestration. And finally, there is no assurance that such storage facilities can be maintained properly for the many centuries required to have them actually protect the climate.

4. The carbon dioxide in some current viable CCS projects is used by the oil industry to flush out more oil from existing wells. That's hardly in keeping with the purpose of addressing climate change.

Energy expert Vaclav Smil did some calculations for an American Scientist magazine article that demonstrate the scale of the CCS challenge:

[I]n order to sequester just a fifth of current CO2 emissions we would have to create an entirely new worldwide absorption-gathering-compression-transportation-storage industry whose annual throughput would have to be about 70 percent larger than the annual volume now handled by the global crude oil industry whose immense infrastructure of wells, pipelines, compressor stations and storages took generations to build. Technically possible—but not within a timeframe that would prevent CO2 from rising above 450 ppm.

Smil wrote that back in 2011. The latest reading in Hawaii at the often-cited Scripps Institution of Oceanography Mauna Loa Observatory is 418 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. The relentless upward slope of the observatory's graph of carbon dioxide concentration shows that the fossil fuel industry's tactics—of which delay-and-fail CCS is just one—are working splendidly.

It is troubling that a key official at the U.S. Department of Energy is taking the CCS plan seriously. One would think that decades of failure would finally make clear the false promises of the industry. But, of course, failure is the whole point of the CCS ruse. What's puzzling is that the failure to date has somehow become a rallying cry to try harder by building one of the biggest boondoggles ever conceived.

In April and June of 2020 I wrote about something I referred to as LOKIN 20. In a series of articles I was among those in the so called “alternative media” who tried to highlight that lockdowns and other response measures, created by the Coronavirus Act, increased the risks to the most vulnerable.

This was entirely contrary to the rationale we were given for these new laws and subsequent policies. The response was promoted to the public as a “plan” to protect the most vulnerable. It was certainly a plan but increasing, rather than decreasing, the risks appears to have been the objective.

I reported the removal of the safeguards put in place following the Shipman Inquiry and Francis Report (Mid Staffs). I pointed to statistical evidence from the Office of National Statistics and the concerns raised, by people like Professor Carl Heneghan and David Spiegelhalter, that a dangerous withdrawal of healthcare was contributing toward unnecessary increased mortality among the most vulnerable.

I am not claiming any great insight or deductive powers. I was just one, among many others, in the inappropriately named alternative media who were reporting the obvious dangers inherent to government policy.

It is important to stress that the increased mortality risk from the policies, rather than COVID 19, was abundantly clear at the time. Many people tried to warn the public but they were widely dismissed and labelled as “COVID deniers.”

A year later a number of mainstream media (MSM) articles have emerged confirming, what appears to have been, a policy that would inevitably maximise the risks to the most vulnerable.

As usual, the possibility of deliberate policy intent is never broached in any of these MSM pieces. Their reports uncritically cite statements by politicians and consistently assume that these policies were mistakes and promote the notion that lessons need to be learned.

Speaking in June 2020 about the high risk discharge of 25,000 vulnerable patients into care setting, where they received neither medical care nor adequate social care, the former Health Secretary and chairman of the Health Select Committee, Jeremy Hunt, was unquestioningly reported as saying:

It seems extraordinary that no one appeared to consider the clinical risk to care homes despite widespread knowledge that the virus could be carried asymptomatically”

Leaving aside the clear scientific proof that there is no such thing as asymptomatic transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the evidence suggests that these were neither mistakes nor failures. Yet all we see from the mainstream media is a free pass for the politicians and a blanket refusal to ever question their deceitful statements.

We face a huge sociopolitical problem. Despite the mountain of historical and contemporaneous evidence that governments can and do intentionally harm us, it seems we are collectively incapable of grasping the reality of democide.

We wrongly assume that every policy is intentionally benign.

We must overcome this flawed and naive belief. Until we recognise that there are those within government, and its wider partnership networks, that wish us ill we will remain unable to address the threat they pose to all of us.

The Coronavirus Act

The UK government not only created the legislation to enable healthcare providers to increase the risks to the most vulnerable, they fully understood those risks. They had previously identified them in training exercises and had extensively modelled those risks.

Contrary to Hunt’s statement, there were many in the UK government who did “consider the clinical risk to care homes.” When the claimed pandemic arrived, rather than respond to limit and reduce the known dangers, the government, of which Hunt is a leading member, appeared to intentionally exacerbate them.

Section 14 of the Coronavirus Act removed the crucial NHS obligations under the NHS (standards) Framework. The NHS did not have to comply with clause 21(2)(a) and 21(12) of the 2012 Regulations.

The NHS no longer had a duty to assess a patient’s “eligibility for NHS Continuing Healthcare” before discharging them. In addition, no relevant body needed to have any “regard to the National Framework.” It is important to recognise what this meant within the context of a supposed global pandemic.

On 19th March 2020 the HCID group of Public Health England and the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) unanimously agreed to downgrade COVID 19, from a High Consequence Infectious Disease, due to low mortality.

The UK government issued instructions to the NHS that they must discharge as many patients as possible on the same day.

With no duty to assess a patient’s continuing healthcare needs, the government set very unsafe assessment criteria and compelled hospitals to discharge them. Unless they were in intensive care, receiving oxygen, on intravenous fluids or imminently close to death, the government decreed:

Every patient on every general ward should be reviewed on a twice-daily board round to determine the following. If the answer to each question is ‘no’, active consideration for discharge to a less acute setting must be made.”

This is worth reiterating. During an allegedly unprecedented health crisis the UK government removed the NHS duty to assess a patient’s health status (and conditions) before discharging them from hospital. They then issued instructions compelling the NHS to discharge as many patients as possible.

The government and the NHS accepted that this would mean discharging patients with an active COVID 19 infection into the community. COVID patients, and people with a range of potentially life-threatening conditions, were shipped into care settings where other vulnerable adults, who may not not have had any infection, were supposedly “shielding.”

There is no doubt that untested and COVID 19 positive patients entered the care system via this route. Both during the first and second “waves.” It is entirely reasonable to suspect that this policy, combined with others we are about to discuss, caused the said “waves.”

An August 2020 study by the Queen’s Nursing Institute found the following practices commonly operating in Care Homes during the spring 2020 outbreak. We should note the element of compulsion:

Having to accept patients from hospitals with unknown Covid-19 status, being told about plans not to resuscitate residents without consulting families, residents or care home staff…..21% of respondents said that their home accepted people discharged from hospital who had tested positive for Covid-19…..a substantial number found it difficult to access District Nursing and GP services….25% in total reporting it somewhat difficult or very difficult during March-May 2020.”

On January 11th 2021, during the alleged second wave, The Care Quality Commission stated:

These settings are admitting people who are discharged from hospital with a COVID-positive test who will be moving or going back into a care home setting.”

Even a few isolated voices in the mainstream media pointed out what they referred to as culpable neglect. Some of the UK’s leading charities for vulnerable people including the Alzheimer’s Society, Marie Curie, Age UK, Care England and Independent Age contributed toward an open letter to the UK government. Written on 14th April 2020 they highlighted a litany of policy “failures:”

Instead of being allowed hospital care, to see their loved ones and to have the reassurance that testing allows; and for the staff who care for them to have even the most basic of PPE, they are told they cannot go to hospital, routinely asked to sign Do Not Resuscitate orders.”

The policies operated both by the NHS and the care homes, as a consequence of Coronavirus Act’s “legislative easement,” did not protect the most vulnerable. Rather they maximised their clinical risk. Not just of COVID 19, but of every condition that rendered them vulnerable in the first place.

From the 17th March 2020 the NHS were discharging vulnerable patients into care homes without assessing their “eligibility for healthcare.” On 2nd April 2020 the NHS combined this with instructions that care home residents should not be conveyed to hospital. On the 6th April they issued guidance to GP’s which stated:

All patients should be triaged remotely.. Remote consultations should be used when possible. Consider the use of video consultations when appropriate.”

So-called “first wave” mortality peaked on the 11th of April and the UK government published its COVID 19 Action Plan on the 15th April. This seemingly insane policy agenda was deemed “necessary” by the UK state to create “capacity” in the NHS:

The UK Government with the NHS set out its plans on the 17th March 2020 to free up NHS capacity via rapid discharge into the community and reducing planned care…..We can now confirm we will move to institute a policy of testing all residents prior to admission to care homes.”

There was no commitment to improve the situation from the UK government, just a plan to move toward one. We know from the observations of the CQC that they continued these high risk policies during the subsequent virus “waves.” There is no evidence that any of these policies were designed to reduce the risks of the most vulnerable. They all, consistently tended to increase them.

It is not tenable for politicians to now claim that they didn’t know what was happening. They constructed and enabled all of the policies that made this dangerous negligence possible. Nor is it credible to simply blame the medical profession. The widespread use of Hospital Trust gagging orders (non disclosure agreements) was also in place.

Doctors who did speak out were disciplined or sacked. This was systemic policy initiative which physicians were expected to abide by.

Once the vulnerable were trapped in abandoned care homes, which were knowingly understaffed, the remaining, unprotected staff were then left to deal with both their own safety fears and the mounting mortality. The government decided this was an opportune moment to suspend all safety inspections in both hospital and care settings.

This was supposed to “limit infections,” although every other decision they made appeared to increase them. Yet again, ending inspections raised the mortality risk for the most vulnerable.

At the same time, Do Not Resuscitate (DNAR) notices were being attached to vulnerable people’s care plans, often without their consent or even their knowledge.

This coincided with a massive increase in orders for the potentially life-ending medication midazolam.

Midazolam

In March 2020 the NHS purchased the equivalent of two years worth of supply. French suppliers were then given regulatory approval by the MHRA to sell additional stock to the NHS. This was then distributed for out of hospital use in the community.

This benzodiazepine (midazolam) is a sedative/anaesthetic that suppresses respiration and the central nervous system (CNS). The British National Formula (BNF) recommends its use for sedation of anxious or agitated terminally ill patients using a mechanised syringe pump in doses of 30–200 micrograms/kg/hour. It is not recommended for conscious sedation in higher doses due to the following risks:

CNS (central nervous system) depression; compromised airway; severe respiratory depression.”

Therefore a frail, eight stone (50 kg) adult could receive an initial dose of up to 2.5mg followed by a total incremental dose of another 2.5mg over a 24hr period. The purpose of this would be to ease their anxiety and agitation if they were experiencing the frightening sensation of intense respiratory difficulty.

Midazolam becomes a conscious anaesthetic for use in intensive and palliative care when given in higher doses. The British Association for Palliative Medicine recommend:

Start with 2.5-5 milligrams – if necessary, increase progressively to 10 milligrams – maintain with 10-60 milligrams / 24h in a syringe pump”

Ten milligrams is twice the BNF recommended dose to ease anxiety (for an 8 stone vulnerable adult.) Therefore it is extremely concerning that NHS Clinical Guideline for Symptom Control for patients with COVID-19 recommended 10mg of Midazolam for patients with “distressing breathlessness at rest.” This risks a rapid deterioration of the symptoms causing them that distress.

Gosport Scandal

Police are still investigating an estimated 15,000 deaths that occurred at Gosport War Memorial Hospital between 1987 and 2001. An inquiry has already found that at least 456 people’s lives were “shortened” through the unwarranted use of unnecessary medication.

Many suspect that the true figure is in the thousands. The independent panel into the malpractice at Gosport War Memorial Hospital found:

There was a disregard for human life and a culture of shortening the lives of a large number of patients by prescribing and administering “dangerous doses” of a hazardous combination of medication not clinically indicated or justified…they were, in effect, put on a terminal care pathway…The risk of using them in combination has been consistently documented in the BNF. In particular, it has long been known that when given together, opioids and midazolam cause enhanced sedation, respiratory depression and lowered blood pressure.”

This report was published in September 2018. In 2020 the NHS treatment guidelines for COVID 19 patients, who were deemed to be “agitated,” was:

Start with Morphine 20mg and Midazolam 20mg”

This is precisely the mechanical syringe combination used at Gosport War Memorial to “shorten” thousands of peoples lives.

There are numerous reasons to suspect that the huge increase in midazolam ordered by the NHS, with the full knowledge of the government, was intended for this purpose.

In April 2020 the Health and Social Care Committee, chaired by Jeremy Hunt, heard submissions from medical professionals as they considered the government response to the global pandemic. In Q377 Dr Luke Evans (MP fror Hinckley and Bosworth) asked then Health Secretary about NHS provisions for “a good death.” This is medical shorthand for assisted dying or euthanasia. Dr Evans (MP) asked:

The syringe drivers are used to deliver medications such as midazolam and morphine. Do you have any precautions in place to ensure that we have enough of those medications?”

To which Matt Hancock replied:

Yes. We have a big project to make sure that the global supply chains for those sorts of medications [are] clear. In fact, those medicines are made in a relatively small number of factories around the world, so it is a delicate supply chain and we are in contact with the whole supply chain.”

Hancock was clearly referring to the huge midazolam order and MHRA approval of the French supply chain. The UK government had already passed the Coronavirus Act, removing the NHS Framework duties, and had ordered them to discharge patients en masse. The NHS had instructed care homes not to send sick patients to hospital and GP support from the care homes had effectively been withdrawn.

Jeremy Hunt was chairing this discussion. For him to claim two months later that no one had “appeared to consider the clinical risk to care homes” smacks of vile obfuscation. The best we can say about this statement is that he was wrong. We now have the documentation which shows that the clinical risk in care homes was very carefully considered and the withdrawal of care was planned.

Cygnus

In 2016 the UK government ran Exercise Cygnus. The training scenario was prepared by Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London (ICL). It simulated a flu outbreak and was a Command Post Exercise (CPX) designed to test the UK’s pandemic preparedness. Nearly a thousand key officials took part from central and local government departments, the NHS, public health bodies from across UK, as well as local emergency response planners.

Some of the Cygnus Report recommendations were implemented in response to COVID 19 and others not. For example, it recommended legislative easements.

The Coronavirus Act certainly eased the legislation surrounding the death registration process and the NHS duty of care. The legal requirements for inquests, post-mortems and cremations were also relaxed.

Exercise Cygnus also highlighted a number of deficiencies. It identified inadequate numbers of critical, general and acute care beds, which the government then proceeded to reduce further; it warned that whole sections of the NHS may have to be shut, which is exactly what the government did during the “pandemic;” it highlighted that the most vulnerable could be denied care, just as they were, and that the health service would have to be set on a war footing just to be able to cope.

These were warnings not policy suggestions. The UK government’s adoption of some of the Cygnus recommendations and determination not to address Gygnus alarms appears to have been their policy response to COVID 19.

COVID 19 healthcare strategies were seemingly set in 2016. The Cygnus scenario, modelled by Ferguson and ICL differed from their COVID 19 “models” only by virtue of being based upon influenza rather than a coronavirus.

Perhaps this explains why Exercise Cygnus was kept secret, reportedly for reasons of “national security.” When the report was released, after being exposed, it was heavily redacted and all the names of the senior officials involved were hidden.

The official explanation for this is that it was just too terrifying for the public to withstand. We might ask, terrifying for whom? Using the media to terrorise the public during the alleged pandemic was recommended by Spi-B (SAGE.)

It is reasonable to assume that many of those redacted names would have been people working for Ferguson’s ICL team and current members of SAGE. If so, this indicates that those involved in planning the response to COVID 19 not only understood what the risks were, they then provided the claimed “scientific” justification for policies which they knew would increase them.

One of the senior officials involved in Cygnus reportedly said:

These exercises are supposed to prepare government for something like this – but it appears they were aware of the problem but didn’t do much about it.”

Again, we see the assumption that everything must be explained away as error or unfortunate oversight. This stretches credibility beyond breaking point when we understand that Gygnus ultimately produced a plan to deny healthcare during a pandemic. This policy of increasing the risks of the most vulnerable was evidently operating during the first alleged pandemic wave. It also seems likely that it continued beyond that point.

Based upon the Cygnus conclusions, in September 2017, the NHS Surge and Triage briefing paper was made available to senior health and government officials. It discussed something called population triage:

The purpose of this paper is to provide an update to Chief Medical Officer (CMO) and the Chief Scientific Advisor (CSA) on continuing refinement of the knowledge and understanding behind the potential decision that may be required in a future extreme pandemic influenza scenario to move to a state of population triage across the country…”

Population triage means the potential denial of healthcare:

The majority of the detail in this paper will not be replicated in any publically available documentation…Difficult decisions will be needed about maintaining patient access to care…There is significant discussion in the paper about ceasing or changing care to patients in the HRG (Healthcare Resource Croups)…Patients would be assessed on probability of survival rather than clinical need and higher level services would no longer be provided…Total excess death rate would be in excess of 7,806 per week of the peak of the pandemic if all these services were stopped…So in the peak six weeks of a pandemic…46,836 excess deaths could be expected”

Between 7th March and 8th May 2020, there were 47,243 excess deaths in England and Wales. According to the Cygnus predictions, this was slightly higher than the numbers envisaged to result directly from the withdrawal of healthcare.

However, nearly all of these deaths were attributed to COVID 19. We should ask where, in the claimed COVID 19 mortality figures, the anticipated deaths from the denial of healthcare are.

In November 2017 a number of English stakeholders also met to discuss the a pandemic briefing paper for Adult Social and Community Care. This too was a product of Exercise Cygnus. Once again the intention was to keep the report secret.

The majority of the detail in this paper will not be replicated in any publically available documentation.. Whilst demand will increase, capacity, which is already under pressure because of recruitment challenges, will also reduce because of staff absences.. Adult social care will have an increased role in supporting rapid discharge from hospital. In a severe pandemic, only those services that are life-critical will be maintained.. More patients could be supported by a greater focus on telecare/tele-monitoring.”

It is known, from the reports of the CQC and national charities and other NHS documents cited in this article, that primary healthcare was withdrawn from care settings and the community. The staff shortages identified in 2016 became chronic and then severe during the pandemic. This was entirely predictable and was a known outcome of the track and trace and self-isolation polices of the UK government.

The briefing paper spoke about which services could be “reduced or deferred.” Crucially these included assessment of care needs, mobility support, personal care support, maintaining family connections and access to medical treatment.

During the “first wave” approximately 25,000 vulnerable people were discharged into care homes to face the extremely high risk environment created for them by the UK government. At the same time potentially life ending drugs were being liberally prescribed.

This was the COVID 19 policy response and we were told the intention was to “protect the most vulnerable”. All of it was predicted on the assumption that hospital were struggling to cope with the “surge” in COVID 19 patients. According to the UK government, patients needed to be discharged to free up capacity in the NHS.

At the height of the so called first wave, on the 13th of April 2020, the Health Service Journal reported that hospital bed occupancy was at a record low, with 4 times more beds available that usual for the time of year. There were 37,500 available beds.

The HSJ stated that the reason for this spare capacity was the discharge policy operated by NHS at the behest of the government. What they didn’t mention is that these figures show the high-risk discharge of the most vulnerable people in our society was entirely unnecessary.

You may not like it but is not “unthinkable” that this was deliberate, coordinated policy designed to increase the mortality statistics. Many have questioned the claimed severity of the alleged pandemic. If you wish to give the impression of a high mortality disease then you need the deaths to back up your claim.

It is feasible that all of these risk heightening factors happened to perfectly coalesce to increase mortality, but is it plausible? A refusal to contemplate the possibility of an intentional act does not rule it out. Only a thorough, truly independent investigation can.

Conclusion

While this system was in operation, the UK government encouraged widespread adoption of the Clap for Carers, often referred to as “clap for the NHS.” During lockdowns, as the whole nation was told to self isolate indoors and avoid all unnecessary congregation, between the 26th March and the 28th May, we were “allowed” to simultaneously congregate on the streets and show our appreciation by clapping, banging pots and pans and ringing bells.

Meanwhile vulnerable people were being discharged into unsafe care homes where access to medical care was withdrawn and essential social care removed.

Clapping for this was obscene.

The government clearly used this ploy both as a distraction and as propaganda. This does not suggest that doctors, nurses and carers do not deserve our support. Any medical professional or carer who blows the whistle is almost certainly making a career ending decision.

Given the evidence we have discussed, if we consider ourselves to be responsible citizens who live in a democracy, it is unconscionable for us to simply ignore what appears to have been a deliberate and illegal government policy of large scale euthanasia in the UK.

We must seek answers from policymakers and malfeasance in office must be prosecuted wherever it is identified.

You can read more of Iain’s work at his blog In This Together

(A standalone Part 3 of a series. Part 1, Part 2)

Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.
– Joseph Goebbels

We would like to think that modern societies like ours have outgrown barbaric customs like human sacrifice. Sure, we still engage in scapegoating and figuratively sacrifice people on the altar of public opinion, but we don’t actually kill people in hopes of placating the gods and restoring order. Or do we?

Some scholars believe we do. Following the thought of the late philosopher Rene Girard, they argue that human sacrifice is still with us today in the form of capital punishment (and incarceration – a removal from society). Girard believed that human sacrifice arose in response to what he called a “sacrificial crisis.” The original sacrificial crisis – the greatest threat to early societies – was escalating cycles of violence and retribution. The solution was to redirect the vengeance away from each other and, in violent unanimity, toward a scapegoat or class of scapegoats. Once established, this pattern was memorialized in myth and ritual, applied preemptively as human sacrifice, and carried out in response to any other crisis that threatened society.

In this view, capital punishment originated in human sacrifice and it is human sacrifice. It performs the same function: to forestall reciprocal violence through unanimous violence. It does so by monopolizing vengeance, truncating the cycle of retaliatory violence at the first iteration. This works whether the subject of execution or incarceration is guilty of a crime or not. Justice is a cover story for something more primal. Theologian Brian K. Smith writes,

The subject of a modern execution might also be carrying multivalent significations. Among other things (i.e., racial and economic metonymic potentialities), such a figure might serve as the representative of all crime, of "disorder" and social "chaos," of the "breakdown of values," etc. Apart from any utilitarian deterrent effect capital punishment might have, it is one, rather drastic, response to a social problem – illegal and illicit violence.

In other words, what we rationalize in the language of justice and deterrence is actually a blood ritual, in which a person, whether guilty or not, becomes a symbol. Ritual springs up irrepressibly around executions: the last meal, the “dead man walking” to the special execution chamber, the witnesses, the medical procedures, the presiding physician, the signed papers, the last rites, the covering of the head, the precise timetable, the final words, and the exacting attention to detail all mark off the execution as separate, special… sacred.

Something Must be Done

In a lucidly argued paper, legal scholar Roberta Harding offers several examples from the deep South during Jim Crow where judge, jury, and prosecutor well knew that the accused black man was innocent of the charge of raping a white woman. However, because the white supremacist social order was threatened by consensual interracial intercourse, they executed the accused anyway; if they failed to do so promptly he was lynched. Partly this was to set an example and terrify the black population, but partly it was because something had to be done.

By the same token, it mattered little that Afghan villagers or Iraqi politicians had no culpability for 9/11; nor did it matter that bombing them would have no practical effect on future terrorism (except to further inflame it). Obviously, the United States was using 9/11 as a pretext to accomplish larger geopolitical aims. Yet it worked as a pretext only because of broad public agreement that “something must be done.” And, enacting the age-old pattern, we knew what to do: find some target of unifying violence that cannot effectively retaliate. I was dismayed in 2001 when, at Quaker Meeting of all places, one of the Quakers said, “Of course, a forceful response of some kind is necessary.” What, I wondered, does “forceful” mean? It means bombing someone. In other words, we must find someone upon whom to visit violence. He may also have mentioned addressing the imperialist causes of terrorism, but those were not the subject of “of course.” Nearly everyone instinctively took for granted the necessity of finding sacrificial victims. We were definitely going to bomb someone – the only question was whom.

The 9/11 attack exemplifies what Harding calls a triggering incident, which “resuscitates dissensions, rivalries, jealousies and quarrels within the community,” leading to a sacrificial crisis. A recent such incident was the murder of George Floyd. The latent conflicts it exposed have been festering for so long that it takes little provocation for them to erupt into an active crisis. The response to Floyd’s murder is a classic illustration of the calming power of violent unanimity, as Derrick Chauvin’s conviction and sentencing temporarily quelled the racialized civil unrest that the killing sparked. Something was done – but only to quell the unrest, not to solve the complex, heavily ramified problem of police killings. It no more addressed the source of America’s race problems than killing Osama Bin Laden made America safe from terrorism.

Not just any victim will do as an object of human sacrifice. Victims must be, as Harding puts it, “in, but not of, the society.” That is why, during the Black Death, mobs roamed about murdering Jews for “poisoning the wells.” The entire Jewish population of Basel was burned alive, a scene repeated throughout Western Europe. Yet this was not mainly the result of preexisting virulent hatred of Jews waiting for an excuse to erupt; it was that victims were needed to release social tension, and hatred, an instrument of that release, coalesced opportunistically on the Jews. They qualified as victims because of their in-but-not-of status.

“Combatting hatred” is combatting a symptom.

Scapegoats needn’t be guilty, but they must be marginal, outcasts, heretics, taboo-breakers, or infidels of one kind or another. If they are too alien, they will unsuitable as transfer objects of in-group aggression. Neither can they be full members of society, lest cycles of vengeance ensue. If they are not already marginal, they must be made so. It was ritually important that Derrick Chauvin be cast as a racist and white supremacist; then his removal from society could serve symbolically as the removal of racism itself.

Just to be clear here, I am not saying Derrick Chauvin’s conviction for George Floyd’s murder was unjust. I am saying that justice was not the only thing carried out.

Representatives of Pollution

Aside from criminals, who today serves as the representative of Smith’s “disorder,” “social chaos,” and “breakdown of values” that seem to be overtaking the world? For most of my life external enemies and a story-of-the-nation served to unify society: communism and the Soviet Union, Islamic terrorism, the mission to the moon, and the mythology of progress. Today the Soviet Union is long dead, terrorism has ceased to terrify, the moon is boring, and the mythology of progress is in terminal decline. Civil strife burns ever hotter, without the broad consensus necessary to transform it into unifying violence. For the right, it is Antifa, Black Lives Matter protesters, critical race theory academics, and undocumented immigrants that represent social chaos and the breakdown of values. For the left it is the Proud Boys, right wing militias, white supremacists, QAnon, the Capitol rioters, and the burgeoning new category of “domestic extremists.” And finally, defying left-right categorization is a promising new scapegoat class, the heretics of our time: the anti-vaxxers. As a readily identifiable subpopulation, they are ideal candidates for scapegoating.

It matters little whether any of these pose a real threat to society. As with the subjects of criminal justice, their guilt is irrelevant to the project of restoring order through blood sacrifice (or expulsion from the community by incarceration or, in more tepid but possibly prefigurative form, through “canceling”). All that is necessary is that the dehumanized class arouse the blind indignation and rage necessary to incite a paroxysm of unifying violence. More relevant to current times, this primal mob energy can be harnessed toward fascistic political ends. Totalitarians right and left invoke it directly when they speak of purges, ethnic cleansing, racial purity, and traitors in our midst.

Sacrificial subjects carry an association of pollution or contagion; their removal thus cleanses society. I know people in the alternative health field who are considered so unclean that if I so much as mention their names in a Tweet or Facebook post, the post may be deleted. Deletion is a certainty if I link to an article or interview with them. The public’s ready acceptance of such blatant censorship cannot be explained solely in terms of its believing the pretext of “controlling misinformation.” Unconsciously, the public recognizes and conforms to the age-old program of investing a pariah subclass with the symbology of pollution.

This program is well underway toward the Covid-unvaxxed, who are being portrayed as walking cesspools of germs who might contaminate the Sanctified Brethren (the vaccinated). My wife perused an acupuncture Facebook page today (which one would expect to be skeptical of mainstream medicine) where someone asked, “What is the word that comes to mind to describe unvaccinated people?” The responses were things like “filth,” “assholes,” and “death-eaters.” This is precisely the dehumanization necessary to prepare a class of people for cleansing.

The science behind this portrayal is dubious. Contrary to the association of the unvaccinated with public danger, some experts contend that it is the vaccinated that are more likely to drive mutant variants through selection pressure. Just as antibiotics result in higher mutation rates and adaptive evolution in bacteria, leading to antibiotic resistance, so may vaccines push viruses to mutate. (Hence the prospect of endless “boosters” against endless new variants.) This phenomenon has been studied for decades, as this article in my favorite math & science website, Quanta, describes. The mutated variants evade the vaccine-induced antibodies, in contrast to the robust immunity that, according to some scientists, those who have already been sick with Covid have to all variants (See this and this, more analysis here, compare to Dr. Fauci’s viewpoint.)

It is not my purpose here, however, to present a scientific case. My point is that those in the scientific and medical community who dissent from the demonization of the unvaxxed contend not only with opposing scientific views, but with ancient, powerful psycho-social forces. They can debate the science all they want, but they are up against something much bigger. Rwandan scientists could just as well debated the precepts of Hutu Power for all the good that would have done. Perhaps the Nazi example is more apposite here, since the Nazis did invoke science in their extermination campaigns. Then as now, science was a cloak for something more primal. The hurricane of sacrificial violence easily swept aside the minority of German scientists who contested the science of eugenics, and it wasn’t because the dissidents were wrong.

We face a similar situation today. If the mainstream view on Covid vaccines is wrong, it will not be overthrown by science alone. The pro-vaccine camp has a powerful nonscientific ally in the collective id, expressed through various mechanisms of ostracism, shaming, and other social and economic pressure. It takes courage to defy a mob. Doctors and scientists who express anti-vaccine views risk losing funding, jobs, and licenses, just as ordinary citizens face censorship on social media. Even a non-polemic essay like this one will likely be censored, especially if I stain it with the pollution of the heretics by linking blacklisted websites or articles by the disinformation dozen anti-vaxxers. Here, let’s try it for fun. Greenmedinfo! Chldren’s Health Defense! Mercola.com! Ah. That felt a little like shouting swear words in public. You’d better not follow these links, lest you be tainted by their pollution (and your browsing history mark you as an infidel).

To prepare someone for removal as the repository of all that is evil, it helps to heap upon them every imaginable calumny. Thus we hear in mainstream publications that anti-vaxxers not only are killing people, but are raging narcissists, white supremacists, vile, spreaders of Russian disinformation, and tantamount to domestic terrorists. These accusations are amplified by cherry-picking a few examples, choosing hysterical-looking photos of anti-vaxxers, and showcasing their most dubious arguments. If the authorities follow the playbook developed to counter other domestic “threats,” we can also expect agents-provocateurs, entrapment schemes, government agents voicing violent positions to discredit the movement, and so forth – techniques developed in the infiltration of the civil rights, environmental, and anti-globalism movements.

Concerned friends have advised me to “distance myself” from members of the Disinformation Dozen whom I know, as if they carry some kind of contagion. Well, in a sense they do – the contagion of disrepute. It reminds me of Soviet times when mere association with a dissident could land one in the Gulag with them. It also reminds me of my school days, when it was social suicide to be friendly with the weird kid, whose weirdness would rub off one oneself. In grade school, this contagion was known as “cooties.” (In my early teens I was the weird kid, and only very brave teenagers would be friendly to me while anyone was watching.) Clearly, the basic social dynamic pervades society at many levels. A deeply ingrained gut instinct recognizes the danger of membership in a pariah subclass. To defend the pariahs or to fail to show sufficient enthusiasm in attacking them marks one with suspicion; the result is self-censorship and discretion, contributing all the more to the illusion of unanimity.

Hijacking Morality

The same kind of positive reinforcement cycle is what generates a mob. All it takes is a few loud people to incite it by declaring someone or something a target. A portion of the crowd goes along enthusiastically. The rest keep silent and conform in outward behavior even as they are troubled within; to each, it looks like he or she is the only one who disagrees. Writ large to the totalitarian state, the support of a majority of the population is unnecessary. The appearance of support will suffice.

The mechanisms that generate the illusion of unanimity operate within science, medicine, and journalism as well as among the general public. Some conform enthusiastically to the orthodoxy; others complain in whispers to sympathetic colleagues. Those who voice dissent publicly become radioactive. The consequences of their apostasy (excommunication from funding, ridicule in the media, shunning by colleagues who must “distance themselves,” etc.) serve to silence other potential dissidents, who prudently keep their views to themselves.

Notice that here I have not yet said what I personally think about vaccine safety, efficacy, or necessity (be patient); nonetheless, what I have said is enough for anyone to distance themselves from me to keep safe. If I’m not an anti-vaxxer myself, I certainly have their cooties.

Someone on an online forum that I co-host related an incident. His children had a play date scheduled at their friend’s house. A parent called him to ask if his family had been vaccinated. Politely, he said no, and his children were immediately disinvited.

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While this parent doubtless believed he was being scientific in canceling the invitation, I doubt science was really the reason. Even the most Covid-orthodox person understands that the non-symptomatic children of non-symptomatic parents pose negligible risk of infection; furthermore, since vaccine believers presumably trust that the vaccine provides protection, rationally speaking they have little to fear from the unvaccinated. The risk is vanishingly small, but the moral indignation is huge.

Many if not most people get the vaccine in an altruistic civic spirit, not because they personally fear getting Covid, but because they believe they are contributing to herd immunity and protecting others. By extension, those who refuse the vaccine are shirking their civic duty; hence the epithets “filth” and “assholes.” They become the identifiable representatives of social decay, ready for surgical removal from the body politic like cancer cells all conveniently located in the same tumor.

Social stability depends on people rewarding altruism and deterring antisocial behavior. These rewards and deterrents are encoded into morals and then into norms and taboos. Performing the rituals and avoiding the taboos of the tribe, and shaming and punishing those who do not, one rests serenely in the knowledge of being a good person. As an added benefit, one distinguishes oneself as part of the moral majority, a full member of society, and not part of the sacrificial minority. Our fear of nonconformity is born of ancient experience so deeply ingrained it has become an instinct. It is hard to distinguish it from morality.

The fear operating in the ostracism of the unvaxxed is mostly not fear of disease, though disease may be its proxy. The main fear, old as humanity, is of a social contagion. It is fear of association with the outcasts, coded as moral indignation.

In any society some people are especially zealous in enforcing group norms, values, rituals, and taboos. They may be controlling types, or they may simply care about the common good. They serve an important function when the norms and rituals are aligned with social and ecological health. But when corrupt forces hijack the norms through propaganda and the control of information, these good folks can become instruments of totalitarian control.

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Those doing the scapegoating may honestly, even fervently, believe the narrative of “the unvaccinated endanger others.” Again, while I find the evidence to the contrary persuasive, I won’t try to build a case for it beyond the hints I’ve offered already. As the saying goes, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into to begin with. Furthermore, most of the citations I would use would come from blacklisted sources, which, owing to their heresy, are unacceptable to those who trust official sources of information. If you trust the official sources, why, then you trust their exclusion of the heretical information. When official sources exclude all dissent, then all dissent becomes a priori invalid to those who trust them.

Consequently, much of the dissent migrates to dodgy right-wing websites without the resources to check facts and scrutinize sources. One would think, for example, that a highly credentialed scientist like Dr. Peter McCullough, a professor of medicine, author of hundreds of peer-reviewed articles, and president of the Cardio-Renal Society of America, would be able to find a hearing outside the right-wing media ecosystem. But no. He’s been sidelined to places like the right wing Catholic John-Henry Westen show. I wish I could fine a link to this persuasive interview somewhere else, especially because there is actually nothing right-wing about McCullough’s views.

Tragically, the sites that host people like McCullough are quite often home to anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ articles that use the same tactics leveled at anti-vaxxers, tap into the same template of dehumanization and scapegoating, and lend themselves to the same fascistic ends.

Moving the Masses

For these reasons, I won’t try too hard to substantiate my belief that – and I may as well say it explicitly as a gesture of goodwill to the censors, who will thus have an easier time deciding what to do with this article – the Covid vaccines are much more dangerous, less effective, and less necessary than we are told. They also seem not as dangerous, at least in the short term, as some fear. People are not dropping dead in the streets or turning into zombies; most of my vaccinated friends seem to be just fine. So it is hard to know. The science on the issue is so clouded by financial incentives and systemic bias that it is impossible to rely on it to light a way through the murk. The system of research and public health suppresses generic medicines and nutritional therapies that have been demonstrated to greatly reduce Covid symptoms and mortality, leaving vaccines as the only choice. It also fails to adequately investigate numerous plausible mechanisms for serious long-term harm. Of course, plausible does not mean certain: at this point no one knows, or indeed can know, what the long-term effects will be. My point, however, is not that the anti-vaxxers are right and being unjustly persecuted. It is that their persecution enacts a pattern that has little to do with whether they are right or wrong, innocent or guilty. The unreliability of the science underscores that point, and suggests that we take a hard look at the deadly social impulses that the science cloaks.

To say that official sources exclude all dissent overstates the case. In fact, peer-reviewed publications and highly credentialed medical doctors and scientists concur with much of what I’ve said. Admittedly, they are in the minority. But if they were right, we would not easily know it. The mechanisms for controlling _mis_information work equally well to control true information that contradicts official sources.

The foregoing analysis is not meant to invalidate other explanations for Covid conformity: the influence of Big Pharma on research, the media, and government; reigning medical paradigms that see health as a matter of winning a war on germs; a general social climate of fear, obsession with safety, the phobia and denial of death; and, perhaps most importantly, the long disempowerment of individuals to manage their own health.

Nor is the foregoing analysis incompatible with the theory that Covid and the vaccination agenda is a totalitarian conspiracy to surveil, track, inject, and control every human being on earth. There can be little doubt that some kind of totalitarian program is well underway, but I have long believed it an emergent phenomenon agglomerating synchronicities to fulfill the hidden myth and ideology of Separation, and not a premeditated plot among human conspirators. Now I believe both are true; the latter subsidiary to the former, its avatar, its symptom, its expression. While not the deepest explanation for humanity’s current travail, conspiracies and the secret machinations of power do operate, and I’ve come to accept that some things about our current historical moment are best explained in those terms.

Whether the totalitarian program is premeditated or opportunistic, deliberate or emergent, the question remains: How does a small elite move the great mass of humanity? They do it by aggravating and exploiting deep psycho-social patterns such as the Girardian. Fascists have always done that. We normally attribute pogroms and genocide to racist ideology, the classic example being antisemitic fascism. From the Girardian perspective it is more the other way around. The ideology is secondary: a creation and a tool of impending violent unanimity. It creates its necessary conditions. The same might be said of slavery. It was not that Europeans thought Africans were inferior and so thus enslaved them. It was that thinking them inferior was required in order to enslave them.

On an individual level too, who among us has not operated from unconscious shadow motivations, creating elaborate enabling justifications and post facto rationalizations of actions that harm others?

Why is fascism so commonly associated with genocide, when as a political philosophy it is about unity, nationalism, and the merger of corporate and state power? It is because it needs a unifying force powerful enough to sweep aside all resistance. The us of fascism requires a them. The civic-minded moral majority participates willingly, assured that it is for the greater good. Something must be done. The doubters go along too, for their own safety. No wonder today’s authoritarian institutions know, as if instinctively, to whip up hysteria toward the newly minted class of deplorables, the anti-vaxxers and unvaccinated.

Fascism taps into, exploits, and institutionalizes a deeper instinct. The practice of creating dehumanized classes of people and then murdering them is older than history. It emerges again and again under all political systems. Our own is not exempt. The campaign against the unvaccinated, garbed in the white lab coat of Science, munitioned with biased data, and waving the pennant of altruism, channels a brutal, ancient impulse.

Does that mean that the unvaccinated will be rounded up in concentration camps and their leaders ritually murdered? No. they will be segregated from society in other ways. More importantly, the energies invoked by the scapegoating, dehumanizing, pollution-associating campaign can be applied to gain public acceptance of coercive policies, particularly policies that fit the narrative of removing pollution. Currently, a vaccine passport is required to visit certain countries. Imagine needing one to go shopping, drive a car, or exit your home. It would be easily enforceable anywhere that has implemented the “internet of things,” in which everything from automobiles to door locks is under central control. The flimsiest pretext will suffice once the ancient template of sacrificial victim, the repository of pollution, has been established.

Rene Girard was, from what I’ve read of his work, something of a fundamentalist. I do not agree with him that all desire beyond mere appetite is mimetic or that all ritual originates in sacrificial violence, powerful though these lenses are. By the same token, I don’t want to reduce our current acceleration toward techno-totalitarianism and a biosecurity state by just one psycho-social explanation, however deep. Yet it is important to recognize the Girardian pattern, so we know what we are dealing with, so that we can creatively expand our resistance beyond futile debate over the issues – and most importantly, so we can identify its operation within ourselves. Any movement that leverages contempt in its rhetoric fits the Girardian impulse. Elements of scapegoating such as dehumanization, rumor-mongering, stereotyping, punishment-as-justice, and mob mentality are alive within dissident communities as they are in the mainstream. Any who ride those powers to victory will create a new tyranny no better than the previous.

There is another way and a better future. I will describe it in Part 4 of this essay although the reader already knows what it is, by feel if not in words. This future reaches into the present and the past to show itself any time that vengeance gives way to forgiveness, enmity to reconciliation, blame to compassion, judgment to understanding, punishment to justice, rivalry to synergy, and suspicion to laughter. Transcendence is in the human being.

One of the theories circulating during the current pandemic and the use of COVID-19 vaccines has been that the vaccines are laced with microchips as shown here:

That said, there is one technological aspect to vaccines that has received very little media coverage; the use of biometrics to track vaccination programs.

Let's start by looking at what biometrics are:

Biometrics are physical or behavioral human characteristics to that can be used to digitally identify a person to grant access to systems, devices or data.

A biometric identifier is one that is related to intrinsic human characteristics. They fall roughly into two categories: physical identifiers and behavioral identifiers. Physical identifiers are, for the most part, immutable and device independent and include fingerprints, photos and videos, physiological recognition (i.e. facial recognition), voice, signature, DNA, typing patterns, physical movements, navigation patterns and engagement patterns.

Here is more information on biometrics should you wish to learn more.

As I noted at the beginning of this posting, according to Biometricupdate.com, the nation of Ghana in Africa is set to become the first nation in the world to use contactless biometrics in a national vaccination program as shown here:

The Ghana Health Service is partnering with GAVI (The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations) and Arm to begin a biometric-based national vaccination program in October 2021 using contactless technology from Simprints.

Here is the announcement from Arm:

The announcement opens with this:

"For many people, receiving a COVID vaccine has been as simple as going online, entering their medical identification number, booking an appointment and turning up a few days or weeks later to get their shot. But for more than 1 billion people that have no formal ID, that is simply not possible.

Until now, COVID vaccination programs have focused on trying to achieve equitable access, first by ensuring distribution to all countries and then getting them out to those that most need them. This last mile – the journey from centralized distribution centers to clinics and, finally, the individuals – can be the most challenging. This is partly because of the supply chain logistics involved, such as keeping the vaccines at the right temperature to ensure they remain safe and effective, but also in terms of identifying who needs the vaccines.

Today, nearly one in four children under the age of five do not officially exist because their births are not registered. Most of these children live in low- and middle-income countries. Without reliable identity registration, it’s incredibly hard to know when people are missing out on vaccines or follow-up vaccinations.

In the case of COVID-19, this presents a serious challenge, as vaccine delivery is staggered by priority group and shots are mostly administered twice, with a specified interval in between. Childhood routine immunization is even more complex, involving multiple vaccines with different schedules. Vaccination cards or other tokens can record doses given and are often used as de facto identification, but they can easily be lost or misused.

Bringing forward new resources, ideas, and technologies has enabled GAVI to achieve considerable success in vaccinating the world’s children. To address the bottlenecks in equitable vaccine distribution we needed a way to bridge the information gap and create reliable digital healthcare records – even in the absence of formal identification."

Arm continues with this information on the "solution" to the problem of vaccinations in societies where personal identification is not readily available:

"A new strategic partnership between GAVI, Arm, and UK-based nonprofit Simprints provided an answer through a unique, contactless, digital identification solution that is accurate, scalable and cost-effective. Guided by GAVI's expertise in immunization, the project deploys Simprints’ biometrics solution with support from Arm’s technology, global network, and funding.

The solution uses a contactless method of identification to safely create a unique ID for each individual, allowing health workers in the field to identify patients accurately, and quickly create or access their record of care. The biometric data is securely collected using the health worker’s Android smartphone, while timestamps and GPS coordinates record the time and location of treatment. Where internet connectivity is poor or non-existent, offline mode can be used to access a previously downloaded database and new patient data is uploaded when connectivity is restored.

Vitally, Simprints’ solution focuses on the ethical and inclusive use of digital ID, ensuring it works for diverse populations with solid privacy protocols and patient protection at its core. The system is compatible with the digital health tools used by healthcare workers, governments, and global development practitioners around the world, and can be rapidly deployed and scaled on low-cost Android devices."

You will notice how many times GAVI is mentioned in the announcement. We'll understand why later in this posting.

As background, here is some information on Simprints:

"Our mission is to transform the way the world fights poverty. We build technology to radically increase transparency and effectiveness in global development, making sure that every vaccine, every dollar, every public good reaches the people who need them most."

Out of sheer curiosity, let's see who Simprint's strategic partners are:

Well, there's a shock! Like flies on a steaming turd, we find that both GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations which is heavily funded by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as shown here:

...and the Bill Gates and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation itself are two of Simprint's strategic partners.

Ghana is the pilot for the deployment of this new technology. This is the first time that contactless biometrics will be used in a nationwide immunization campaign and, according to Arm, could well become the foundation for "strong frontline personal healthcare". The system itself does not require an existing formal identity document, rather, a biometric identity will be created for individuals which will then be downloaded to health workers Android smartphones allowing them to continue to vaccinate individuals while offline and to upload the data when a connection to the internet becomes available. For the second dose of COVID-19 vaccines, the individual's biometrics will be verified to recall their health record and check to see that they should receive the second (or third....) dose of vaccine.

The announcement closes with this:

"At times when vaccine demand outstrips supply, it’s in everybody’s interest to ensure that these precious resources are administered to the right people, at the right place and at the right time. We need to minimize vaccine wastage since every vaccine dose lost is a step backward in our race towards normalcy.

The only way we will overcome the pandemic is by ensuring access to vaccines for everyone, everywhere – not just those lucky enough to have formal ID.

Working alongside partners like Arm, Simprints and the Ghana Ministry of Health, we are excited to help build the digital infrastructure required to serve every patient and lay the foundations for healthcare for all."

This all sounds wonderful, doesn't it? A poor developing nation now has access to the latest in vaccination and health record technology thanks to the unfettered generosity of Bill Gates and other donors, some of which have considerable "skin in the digital identification game" as shown here:

...and here, also noting GAVI's involvement once again:

The downside is that this is just another piece of the puzzle when it comes to e-health records which will be an important part of the universal immunity passports being foisted on an unsuspecting world as governments formulate their totalitarian responses to life and "freedom" in the post-pandemic world.

I’ve been watching the unfolding of the current Covid-19 pandemic since the first news stories about it in the late fall of 2019, and like many people, I find the official story that’s grown up around the virus and the response to it impossible to take seriously. Partly that’s because the official narrative has been veering around like a well-greased weathercock on a blustery day, and partly it’s because large elements of that narrative are contradicted by scientific studies or, in many cases, the press releases on which the narrative itself is based. The fact that people are now being banned from social media for quoting pharmaceutical companies’ own documents is a good indication that there’s some serious falsification going on here.

Yet I find it just as hard to believe the main alternative story on offer these days. This is the claim that the virus and the vaccine are part of a sinister plan to take away what remains of civil liberties worldwide, along the lines of Klaus Schwab’s maunderings about a Great Reset. The problem here is that this sort of scheme would require governments and corporations everywhere to behave with a degree of competence they very clearly don’t display in any other context.

On reflection, it seems to me that what’s happened over the last two years makes sense if you simply factor in the shortsightedness, incompetence, and venality that government and corporate sectors alike have displayed in all their other dealings of late. With this in mind, I’ve sketched out a hypothetical reconstruction of what has actually been happening. It’s speculative but it accounts for the facts as I know them. As usual, I’ve focused on events in the United States, the one country I know tolerably well; readers in other countries will need to modify this story to fit their own local conditions. I haven’t footnoted anything; do your own internet searches on the important concepts listed below and you’ll find plenty of data.

At any rate, here’s a hypothesis about the real story behind Covid-19.

*****

Stage One: Business as Usual

The Covid-19 coronavirus was manufactured as part of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. Gain-of-function research? That’s one of the currently hot fields of virus research, involving genetic engineering to make viruses more virulent in their effects on tissue cultures. It’s dangerous enough that federal regulations prohibit it in the US, which is why it was going on in China. Funding for the research, however, came from one of the many US government slush funds that prop up the pharmaceutical industry, by way of a pass-through entity to provide a fig leaf of plausible deniability. This is normal practice, part of the culture of kleptocracy that funnels tax dollars into corporate pockets with zero accountability.

Stage Two: A Minor Little Oopsie

Someone made a mistake, and the Covid-19 coronavirus got outside the supposedly secure facility where it was being kept. People in and around Wuhan started getting sick. Early on, there were a lot of deaths, but the death rate slid as the virus adapted to its new hosts in the usual way, ending up about as serious as a bad flu. (Respiratory viruses reliably do this: the sicker a patient gets, the fewer people on average they can infect, and this selection differential very rapidly turns novel respiratory viruses into highly transmissible but not especially dangerous members of the ordinary human respiratory flora.) So we saw an initial wave of stark panic and overreaction on the part of politicians and the media, followed by reassurances that everything would be fine after all, along with various more or less frantic attempts to keep anyone from finding out that the US government funded the creation of the virus.

Stage Three: Cashing In On The Sick

Then the pharmaceutical industry realized that Covid-19 had the potential to be a gargantuan cash cow. Since the Covid-19 virus could be counted on to mutate at the usual pace, if they could come up with a vaccine, they could count on being able to release a new booster shot every single year, and make the kind of reliable profits they now make from the annual flu vaccine. Since big pharma’s profiteering at the expense of patients has become a political hot potato in the US of late, the idea of a new source of extreme profits had a very definite appeal. This is why several effective dietary and pharmaceutical treatments for the virus got deep-sixed, since nobody was going to make billions off them, and it’s also why dud pharmaceuticals such as Remdesvir got hauled off the shelf and heavily marketed—they’re still patented and so can be sold for hundreds or thousands of dollars a dose.

Stage Four: Super Geek To The Rescue

At this point Bill Gates comes into the picture. Most of our current crop of kleptocratic godzillionaires like to play at saving the world in one way or another. (It apparently helps them avoid thinking about the way their firms maltreat their employees, cheat their suppliers, and screw the public.) Gates’ save-the-world hobby is vaccines, and the Gates Foundation is accordingly a major player in the vaccine industry. One of the foundation’s biotechnology patents was well suited to the situation, at least on paper. Pharma corporations thus churned out competing versions of a Covid-19 vaccine using that patent. Mind you, the technology in question has had very mixed results, because it has serious problems with antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), a known complication of immunization in which an ineffective vaccine makes it easier for a virus to make you sick. Nor was adequate testing done to find out if the Covid vaccines had that problem. The vaccines went into production anyway, since the pharmaceutical industry has a long history of launching inadequately tested drugs on the market with serene disregard for safety issues. (Remember Fen-Phen?)

Stage Five: Marketing Maneuvers

The political systems of modern industrial nations are riddled with graft, and so corporate interests can reliably get politicians to say and do whatever will help boost their profits. Once the goal du jour became marketing the vaccine to as many people as possible, therefore, politicians did what they were paid to do and turned on a dime, insisting that Covid-19 was sure to kill us all unless we all got vaccinated, and slapping on mask mandates and shutdowns as part of the political theater. That was purely a marketing gimmick. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer was one among many official voices telling people in smug tones that if they wanted to have their lives back they’d better hurry up and get vaccinated. Various interesting irregularities in what counted as a case of Covid and what counted as a Covid fatality were also put to work in this cause. This served the necessary purpose of whipping up a classic media panic, to try to make everyone run out and get vaccinated.

Stage Six: The Pushback Begins

The problem is that a great many Americans do not trust the medical industry. There’s good reason for their mistrust, as medical malpractice has long been among the leading causes of death in the United States, and medical profiteering is far and away the leading cause of bankruptcy here as well. Thus an impressive number of people—possibly as many as half the population—flatly refused to get the vaccines. It didn’t help that the vaccines themselves turned out to have serious immediate side effects, including sudden death, at a rate a couple of orders of magnitude higher than any other vaccine currently in use. Though Soviet-style censorship was slapped on social media to keep “misinformation” from spreading, hard questions about the official narrative got asked with increasing frequency, and the number of people getting the Covid-19 shots flatlined: while the US government is now claiming that 70% of adult Americans are vaccinated, other sources of data suggest that the actual number is much less than that.

Stage Seven: Don’t Breathe A Word Of This

There was another reason for people to be suspicious, though that wasn’t clear at first. Everyone who’s had to use Microsoft programs knows that Bill Gates’ management style tends to produce second-rate, bug-ridden products that don’t work the way they’re supposed to work, and have to be pushed on reluctant consumers via high-pressure marketing and monopolistic practices. It turns out that the same was true of the biotechnology on which the Covid-19 vaccines are based. That would have been discovered in the usual way during the two to five years of testing a new vaccine normally gets, but the Covid vaccines didn’t get that; the first one to be authorized had a total of eight weeks of not especially rigorous testing, the others didn’t get much more, and so a far from minor problem slipped past. In the spring of 2021 word thus began to trickle out that the Covid-19 vaccines had a serious problem with ADE: once the initial protection wore off, a process which took a few months, people who’d been vaccinated were much more likely to get seriously ill from repeat exposure to Covid-19 than people who hadn’t. Thus the federal government and the medical industry suddenly had a self-inflicted disaster on their hands.

Stage Eight: Panic In The C-Suites

The first response of the people in power, of course, was to find somebody else to take the blame. That’s when politicians and the media turned on a dime (again) and suddenly started admitting that the virus could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That’s when Bill Gates suddenly stopped being the poster child for the vaccine effort and got dumped in a hurry by his wife and kids, and when Anthony Fauci suddenly had to deal with a flurry of negative publicity and the unexplained cancellation of his ghostwritten memoirs. The goal was to find someone—Gates, Fauci, the Chinese, anyone—who could be made into the fall guy and blamed for the impending mess. Apparently that first round of bad news was followed by even worse news, however; I suspect that the news was that the ADE caused by the vaccine had a noticeable fatality rate, but that’s just a guess. One way or another, finding fall guys wasn’t an adequate dodge any more, since at this stage it wasn’t just careers that were at risk: it was potentially the viability of the entire political-economic establishment.

Stage Nine: Things Get Serious

All of a sudden, as a result, it was no longer enough to vaccinate 70% of the US population. Everyone without exception had to get vaccinated—if everyone gets the vaccine, after all, it will be easier to claim that what’s happening is a nasty new variant rather than vaccine-driven ADE, since nobody will be able to point out that the unvaccinated aren’t getting it. All of a sudden, officials dropped the (inaccurate) claim that the vaccines keep you from getting Covid-19. New outbreaks flared in which most people who got sick had been fully vaccinated; stories surfaced in the media about how strange it was that so many people were getting really nasty summer colds; the labor shortage somehow just kept getting worse and other shortages snowballed, but if you suggested that it was because too many people were sick you could count on being shouted down. Authorities began to talk earnestly about how a new variant might show up soon that would kill a third of the people who caught it. Under normal circumstances, there’s no way they could know that in advance. It makes perfect sense, however, if the vaccines have been found to cause serious ADE and they already have a good idea of what the fatality rate will be.

This is where we are as I write this. If my hypothesis is right, here’s what we can expect.

Stage Ten: Hoping for a Miracle

As ADE becomes more common, breakthrough infection clusters will pop up with increasing frequency, and the higher the percentage of the population in that region is vaccinated, the worse they will be. Variants will be blamed for this. Word of the imminent crisis will spread through the upper levels of society, however, causing increasingly frantic and irrational behavior, until it becomes next to impossible to get anything done if it depends on the government or big corporations. Medical laboratories will scramble to find a way to counteract ADE, though that’s been tried for decades now without success. Meanwhile the people who refuse to get vaccinated won’t budge no matter how much furious rhetoric and punitive policy gets dumped on them. Once this becomes clear, authorities will insist that everyone but a few holdouts has been vaccinated, in the fond hope that people will believe them one more time.

Stage Eleven: Into The Endgame

When ADE becomes too widespread to ignore and people begin to die in significant numbers, expect governments to proclaim the arrival of the predicted new hyper-lethal variant and impose a new round of shutdowns, mask mandates, and the like. The media will insist that the people who are dying are all unvaccinated as long as they can get away with it; pay attention to the vaccination status and health outcomes of people you know for a reality check. Unless some way of stopping ADE-enhanced infections can be found in a hurry, medical systems will buckle under the caseload and triage will become the order of the day. How soon this will happen, if it does, is impossible to say in advance. It’s also impossible to know in advance how soon it will become clear that the vaccines are responsible—or just how violent a backlash against the political and economic establishment this could provoke.

*****

So that’s my hypothesis. I hope I’m wrong. If anything like what I’ve sketched out does happen, I have friends and family members I care about who almost certainly won’t survive, given their current health and vaccination status. I also know enough about what happened during the Black Death, the Spanish flu, and other situations where a lot of people got sick and died in a hurry, to hope I can avoid seeing the same sort of events in my own time.

Nonetheless, it’s possible that the scenario I’ve sketched out is going to happen in the months immediately ahead of us. I would encourage my readers to assess this possibility and consider getting ready to weather a crisis several months in length, during which food and other necessities may be available only intermittently, medical care may be completely out of reach, and local, state, and national governments may not be able to do much more than flail helplessly and try to pass the buck. If anything like what I’ve described here happens, it will be a world-class mess, and a few basic preparations might go a long way to keep you and your loved ones safe and sound.

One more thing. I'll be moderating comments on this post very strictly. I'm not interested in arguing about whether the hypothesis I've offered is true or not -- that will be demonstrated by events, not by who yells the loudest. I've decided, after much brooding and some favorable divinations, to put this into circulation on the off chance that it may help some people. Make up your own mind and don't let anyone bully you into doing something you don't want to do.