Even concentrating on the virus and lockdown is a distraction.
"The man of system … seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces on a chessboard."
Those in Government (and I mean the clerisy, not just Parliament) are *still* convinced that a few suitably chosen words by the Great and Good will have the desired effect on real life. They choose to have no post-audits because that would expose their ineffectiveness and the costs of unforeseen consequences.
You could make an argument that the Government 'being right' was far more important to them than being accused of ineffectiveness.
Yes. Once they’d made the initial decision it had to be the right one or they would have had to have admitted making a mistake. That would have been the worst outcome of all.
Thanks for publishing this paper. My understanding is that this is by no means the only paper of this kind, but it may well be the only one originating in the UK.
Some day I will write about how these events went down in the British Medical Journal, which I read daily during the Nonsense, in a futile attempt to present the evidence and ethical arguments that were being elided. Some day, I should like to see Trisha Greenhalgh face the music for her wilful inversion of the precautionary principle that constructed the illusion of consensus for community masking, not only against the evidence, but inverting this ethical principle entirely.
Basically, then, everyone copped out. The scientists and medical experts contented themselves with drawing castles in the air, leaving it entirely to the politicians to make all necessary decisions. Then the politicians affected to believed that the experts had already preempted the decisions. And afterwards, no one at all had any responsibility for the hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths.
A system primed by media that included video of Wuhan Chinese apparently dropping dead in the street and overwhelmed Italian hospitals. We were practicing social distancing before lockdown was initiated, stepping around each other on what were less busy than usual pavements. The population was spontaneously going Swedish before lockdown, but as the scaremongering got ramped up my wife and I, enjoying a near deserted restaurant in March, discussed how Johnson, craving popularity, would not risk being remembered by history as failing to mitigate mass deaths. The precautionary principle meant people saw an opportunity for self-agrandisement, of being important as the source of their personal wills to power. The leaked Hancock Whatsapp messages showed him and others relishing their role in this historical event. What shocked us though was the gullibility, the passivity of the general public. Fortunately for us, we lived in a quartier where local businesses carried on in back alleys out of sight of covid marshalls. We felt like samizdat groups must have felt in the Soviet Union. Lockdown changed our view of politics. I wonder how things might have turned out without the internet's global village effect.
"The precautionary principle meant people saw an opportunity for self-agrandisement, of being important as the source of their personal wills to power."
I'm not sure here if you're referring to the pre-2020 precautionary principle, which stated that no intervention should be undertaken without adequate assessment of risks, or the Bizarro World precautionary principle invented by Trisha Greenhalgh on 9 April 2020, that claimed when the risks were high you had an obligation to act like crazy people. I assume it's the latter.
I'm glad there was an 'underground' where you lived. For us, it was just my family and one of our fellow dog walkers, an elderly lady whose first response to the hysteria was "why are we sacrificing the young people to save the old people? Isn't that the opposite of what we should be doing?" How I valued our conversations with her during those dark times.
Like you, lockdown forever changed how my wife and I looked at politics. Always sobering to be reminded of how swiftly civilisations collapse into utter madness.
Even stepping around each other was probably unnecessary, though emotionally quite understandable. With such diseases, if you’re going to get it you’re going to get it. Most people probably don’t know about the Antarctic station 70 years ago which suffered an outbreak of colds months after seeing an outsider, and hundreds of miles from the nearest habitation. Or the submarine crews who left port without a sniffle, then experienced mass respiratory infections after weeks at sea.
Trying to escape virus may be the most futile thing humans have ever attempted.
“‘We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party’.
“The gene pool of a species, including our own, is a gigantic colony of viruses, each hell-bent on travelling to the future. They cooperate with one another in the enterprise of building bodies because successive, temporary, reproduce-and-then-die bodies have proved to be the best vehicles in which to undertake their vertical Great Trek through time. You are the incarnation of a great, seething, scrambling, time-travelling cooperative of viruses.
“Each of us is home to about 380 trillion viruses, many of them being bacteriophages... that benefit us by preying on bacteria”.
The Genetic Book of the Dead”, Richard Dawkins
“There are so many phages on this planet that they can even be found floating in thin air. When one group of researchers installed collection devices on a concrete platform almost 3 km above sea level in the Sierra Nevada mountains in Spain, they found that hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of viruses rained down onto their equipment every day. Researchers estimate there may be as many as 10**31 phages on Earth... around a trillion phages for every grain of sand on the planet…
“…rather than the number of viruses in the oceans being somewhat insignificant, there appeared to be tens or even hundreds of millions of viruses in every millilitre of water in their samples, on either side of the Atlantic”.
"In 2009, Dana Willner, a biologist at San Diego State University, led a virus-hunting expedition into the human body... On average, each person had 174 species of viruses in the lungs. But only 10 per cent of those species bore any close kinship to any virus ever found before...
"[Lita] Proctor estimated that every liter of seawater contained up to one hundred billion viruses...
"Scientists came to agree that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 [a million trillion trillion] viruses in the ocean...
"Viruses outnumber all other residents of the ocean by about fifteen to one. If you put all the viruses of the oceans on a scale, they would equal the weight of seventy-five million blue whales...
"Over millions of years, our genomes have picked up a vast amount of DNA from dead viruses. Each of us carries almost a hundred thousand fragments of endogenous retrovirus DNA in our genome, making up about 8 percent of our DNA. To put that figure in perspective, consider that the twenty thousand protein-coding genes in the human genome make up only 1.2 percent of our DNA".
In fact a quick glance at this article itself illustrates the limits of this unscientific modelling:
"R is a function of three parameters: transmissibility, ie the probability of infection when an infected individual comes into contact with a susceptible individual; the duration of infectiousness; and the amount of contact."
No it is not. Because people do not travel around meeting random others. They congregate in groups. The local church. The golf club. The pub. And so on. We are all familiar with a virus "going around" a local club. Thus the average amount of contact is not relevant because people form "bubbles" of contact.
We saw similar policy-based-on-modelling in the case of the Icelandic volcano, in which the whole of European airspace was closed for weeks essentially on the basis of modelled spread of ash clouds as opposed to actual measurement.
And the slow motion car crash that is net zero is another example. It is based, after all, on climate modelling. And the scientists doing the modelling don't understand the system they are modelling, just as in those previous two cases.
The numpties who govern us have learned nothing from their abject failure over the last 30 years.
Funny thing this 'covid' virus. It appears just after an almighty problem appears in the financial markets ( especially in the US) and is immediately replaced with the anti-Russian brain rot.
I think we know by now that most of the 'conspiracy theories' banded around as the lockdown occurred have been found to have legs.
Gates et al wanted to test their designer vaccines, Central Banks wanted to introduce their programmable 'money', the CIA/MIC wanted to enact their schemes to protect the hegemony.
Control over the plebs was required, could it be done? oh so easily did the sheep welcome their positions in the pens.
I see that some readers regard the theories of Covid 19 as a psyop & control exercise with the same credulity as the government adopted the worst case scenario and opted for suppression.
Occam's razor applies. The mistakes flowed from the factors so often chronicled by DM in his accounts of government warped by personality defects, ideological and status incentives. 'Well-intentioned' mass attemps at 'harm reduction' strategies (like Net Zero now) flow from a surfeit of arrogance and overweening desire to manipulate the world into the believers' own image.
Fringe metanarratives are entertaining and reassuring in the face of the miserable fact that do-gooders run the show, largely thoughtlessly (in a philosophical sense) and often with woefully incomplete information.
The one bit (among many) which I'll pull out here, because it retains so much continued relevance, is this:
"No extent of desiring a goal logically entails that one knows what to do to realise it, and any strategy that can be rationally adopted has to be one which it would be within the government’s capacity to formulate and implement. "
The delusion that this is not so has been embraced with enormous enthusiasm since the COVID disaster - perhaps by the subsequent Conservative governments, but most especially by the present Starmer regime. Legislating for the "an improvement in welfare" has become nothing more than a _gesture of intention_, completely divorced from the practical likelihood of actually achieving the claimed improvement. Let alone any consideration of the costs - generally in terms of liberty. It could be termed "good-intention-signalling", a neologism which maps back perfectly onto the rhetoric about Lives Saved which provided the context for the article here.
This "law as mere signalling" is evident in everything Starmer's government has done - Net Zero, ID cards, jury trials, "ban the internet".
I thought I'd read analysis of the obvious effect of this divorce from reality here on this Substack. But it turns out that this effect - that "law" becomes something to be ignored when you feel like it - was best documented by a recent article in the Spectator by Joanna Williams: https://archive.vn/10iP2.
"... the law is not meant to be taken literally". I've complained repeatedly to my MP about this, and openly told her that this flood of more and more ludicrous laws only make me more determined to ignore them*; but she doesn't care - clearly "signalling" is more important to this Government than actual effect.
* there's a lovely Catholic word for this: "contumacy". I - and many others, I suspect - are now "contumacious".
Thanks for this. Yes, you’re absolutely right - this is a terrible problem that ultimately totally corrupts the rule of law. That is a concept that is overused, but here it is of vital importance: for a society to be governed by law it has to be possible to comply with its rules and predict their consequences and effects. We’ve now entered a scenario where none of this is possible - it is a tyranny, in which power is exercised arbitrarily under the guise of law.
Too lengthy & challenging an article / report for me to read in full. It does seem to require a knowledge of various economists & their works. Nonetheless I picked up on how government intervention (failure) can make worse market failure or otherwise suboptimal situations & was glad to be introduced to the excellent concept of ‘blackboard economics’.
I'm going to post a note and tag you in it, with the ONS stats for deaths from COVID alone (i.e. not the completely fraudulent ones we all saw) from Feb 2020 to Dec 2021.
Under the age of 50? Just over 300.
Age 2 to 14? 2
Excess mortality 2020 no worse than a bad 'flu year. Figures rose once the jabbing started.
The jabs were experimental - Pfizer first phase clinical trial did not end till Feb 2023; all used under EUL.
Given that many were coerced into having the jab on pain of losing their livelihood, could there be a clearer breach of the Nuremberg Code? One of my sons, coerced, has been sick ever since. Long Vaccine Syndrome.
"In March 2020, SARS-CoV-2 was an organism almost certainly newly emergent and certainly only extremely recently known to UK and international virology, and the experience of Covid-19 was very small."
The experience of Convid was definitely very small, very small indeed - how do you experience something that doesn't exist, and will never exist now or in the future.
Even concentrating on the virus and lockdown is a distraction.
"The man of system … seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces on a chessboard."
Those in Government (and I mean the clerisy, not just Parliament) are *still* convinced that a few suitably chosen words by the Great and Good will have the desired effect on real life. They choose to have no post-audits because that would expose their ineffectiveness and the costs of unforeseen consequences.
You could make an argument that the Government 'being right' was far more important to them than being accused of ineffectiveness.
Yes. Once they’d made the initial decision it had to be the right one or they would have had to have admitted making a mistake. That would have been the worst outcome of all.
Dear David,
Thanks for publishing this paper. My understanding is that this is by no means the only paper of this kind, but it may well be the only one originating in the UK.
Some day I will write about how these events went down in the British Medical Journal, which I read daily during the Nonsense, in a futile attempt to present the evidence and ethical arguments that were being elided. Some day, I should like to see Trisha Greenhalgh face the music for her wilful inversion of the precautionary principle that constructed the illusion of consensus for community masking, not only against the evidence, but inverting this ethical principle entirely.
Stay wonderful!
Chris.
It wasn't madness, it was a well-planned coup. The Ferguson drivel was a key part of the schedule.
See e.g. The Deep State Goes Viral by Debbie Lerman.
And it was global, not specific to the UK.
Absolutely.
Lerman makes the involvement of agencies involved with the US military very clear.
It's no coincidence that the only European country to resist the lockdowns, Sweden, was not a NATO member.
Basically, then, everyone copped out. The scientists and medical experts contented themselves with drawing castles in the air, leaving it entirely to the politicians to make all necessary decisions. Then the politicians affected to believed that the experts had already preempted the decisions. And afterwards, no one at all had any responsibility for the hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths.
The system, evidently, worked to perfection.
A system primed by media that included video of Wuhan Chinese apparently dropping dead in the street and overwhelmed Italian hospitals. We were practicing social distancing before lockdown was initiated, stepping around each other on what were less busy than usual pavements. The population was spontaneously going Swedish before lockdown, but as the scaremongering got ramped up my wife and I, enjoying a near deserted restaurant in March, discussed how Johnson, craving popularity, would not risk being remembered by history as failing to mitigate mass deaths. The precautionary principle meant people saw an opportunity for self-agrandisement, of being important as the source of their personal wills to power. The leaked Hancock Whatsapp messages showed him and others relishing their role in this historical event. What shocked us though was the gullibility, the passivity of the general public. Fortunately for us, we lived in a quartier where local businesses carried on in back alleys out of sight of covid marshalls. We felt like samizdat groups must have felt in the Soviet Union. Lockdown changed our view of politics. I wonder how things might have turned out without the internet's global village effect.
Dear Yeoman,
"The precautionary principle meant people saw an opportunity for self-agrandisement, of being important as the source of their personal wills to power."
I'm not sure here if you're referring to the pre-2020 precautionary principle, which stated that no intervention should be undertaken without adequate assessment of risks, or the Bizarro World precautionary principle invented by Trisha Greenhalgh on 9 April 2020, that claimed when the risks were high you had an obligation to act like crazy people. I assume it's the latter.
I'm glad there was an 'underground' where you lived. For us, it was just my family and one of our fellow dog walkers, an elderly lady whose first response to the hysteria was "why are we sacrificing the young people to save the old people? Isn't that the opposite of what we should be doing?" How I valued our conversations with her during those dark times.
Like you, lockdown forever changed how my wife and I looked at politics. Always sobering to be reminded of how swiftly civilisations collapse into utter madness.
Thanks for your comment,
Chris.
Sobering indeed.
Even stepping around each other was probably unnecessary, though emotionally quite understandable. With such diseases, if you’re going to get it you’re going to get it. Most people probably don’t know about the Antarctic station 70 years ago which suffered an outbreak of colds months after seeing an outsider, and hundreds of miles from the nearest habitation. Or the submarine crews who left port without a sniffle, then experienced mass respiratory infections after weeks at sea.
Trying to escape virus may be the most futile thing humans have ever attempted.
“‘We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party’.
“The gene pool of a species, including our own, is a gigantic colony of viruses, each hell-bent on travelling to the future. They cooperate with one another in the enterprise of building bodies because successive, temporary, reproduce-and-then-die bodies have proved to be the best vehicles in which to undertake their vertical Great Trek through time. You are the incarnation of a great, seething, scrambling, time-travelling cooperative of viruses.
“Each of us is home to about 380 trillion viruses, many of them being bacteriophages... that benefit us by preying on bacteria”.
The Genetic Book of the Dead”, Richard Dawkins
“There are so many phages on this planet that they can even be found floating in thin air. When one group of researchers installed collection devices on a concrete platform almost 3 km above sea level in the Sierra Nevada mountains in Spain, they found that hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of viruses rained down onto their equipment every day. Researchers estimate there may be as many as 10**31 phages on Earth... around a trillion phages for every grain of sand on the planet…
“…rather than the number of viruses in the oceans being somewhat insignificant, there appeared to be tens or even hundreds of millions of viruses in every millilitre of water in their samples, on either side of the Atlantic”.
“The Good Virus”, Tom Ireland
"In 2009, Dana Willner, a biologist at San Diego State University, led a virus-hunting expedition into the human body... On average, each person had 174 species of viruses in the lungs. But only 10 per cent of those species bore any close kinship to any virus ever found before...
"[Lita] Proctor estimated that every liter of seawater contained up to one hundred billion viruses...
"Scientists came to agree that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 [a million trillion trillion] viruses in the ocean...
"Viruses outnumber all other residents of the ocean by about fifteen to one. If you put all the viruses of the oceans on a scale, they would equal the weight of seventy-five million blue whales...
"Over millions of years, our genomes have picked up a vast amount of DNA from dead viruses. Each of us carries almost a hundred thousand fragments of endogenous retrovirus DNA in our genome, making up about 8 percent of our DNA. To put that figure in perspective, consider that the twenty thousand protein-coding genes in the human genome make up only 1.2 percent of our DNA".
Of course yes. Absolutely.
In fact a quick glance at this article itself illustrates the limits of this unscientific modelling:
"R is a function of three parameters: transmissibility, ie the probability of infection when an infected individual comes into contact with a susceptible individual; the duration of infectiousness; and the amount of contact."
No it is not. Because people do not travel around meeting random others. They congregate in groups. The local church. The golf club. The pub. And so on. We are all familiar with a virus "going around" a local club. Thus the average amount of contact is not relevant because people form "bubbles" of contact.
We saw similar policy-based-on-modelling in the case of the Icelandic volcano, in which the whole of European airspace was closed for weeks essentially on the basis of modelled spread of ash clouds as opposed to actual measurement.
And the slow motion car crash that is net zero is another example. It is based, after all, on climate modelling. And the scientists doing the modelling don't understand the system they are modelling, just as in those previous two cases.
The numpties who govern us have learned nothing from their abject failure over the last 30 years.
Funny thing this 'covid' virus. It appears just after an almighty problem appears in the financial markets ( especially in the US) and is immediately replaced with the anti-Russian brain rot.
I think we know by now that most of the 'conspiracy theories' banded around as the lockdown occurred have been found to have legs.
Gates et al wanted to test their designer vaccines, Central Banks wanted to introduce their programmable 'money', the CIA/MIC wanted to enact their schemes to protect the hegemony.
Control over the plebs was required, could it be done? oh so easily did the sheep welcome their positions in the pens.
So test completed , onwards to WW3.
I see that some readers regard the theories of Covid 19 as a psyop & control exercise with the same credulity as the government adopted the worst case scenario and opted for suppression.
Occam's razor applies. The mistakes flowed from the factors so often chronicled by DM in his accounts of government warped by personality defects, ideological and status incentives. 'Well-intentioned' mass attemps at 'harm reduction' strategies (like Net Zero now) flow from a surfeit of arrogance and overweening desire to manipulate the world into the believers' own image.
Fringe metanarratives are entertaining and reassuring in the face of the miserable fact that do-gooders run the show, largely thoughtlessly (in a philosophical sense) and often with woefully incomplete information.
I agree. There are some conspiracies. But this was sheer incompetence and stupidity combined with a desire to save face.
Phew. A very long read, but well worth it.
The one bit (among many) which I'll pull out here, because it retains so much continued relevance, is this:
"No extent of desiring a goal logically entails that one knows what to do to realise it, and any strategy that can be rationally adopted has to be one which it would be within the government’s capacity to formulate and implement. "
The delusion that this is not so has been embraced with enormous enthusiasm since the COVID disaster - perhaps by the subsequent Conservative governments, but most especially by the present Starmer regime. Legislating for the "an improvement in welfare" has become nothing more than a _gesture of intention_, completely divorced from the practical likelihood of actually achieving the claimed improvement. Let alone any consideration of the costs - generally in terms of liberty. It could be termed "good-intention-signalling", a neologism which maps back perfectly onto the rhetoric about Lives Saved which provided the context for the article here.
This "law as mere signalling" is evident in everything Starmer's government has done - Net Zero, ID cards, jury trials, "ban the internet".
I thought I'd read analysis of the obvious effect of this divorce from reality here on this Substack. But it turns out that this effect - that "law" becomes something to be ignored when you feel like it - was best documented by a recent article in the Spectator by Joanna Williams: https://archive.vn/10iP2.
"... the law is not meant to be taken literally". I've complained repeatedly to my MP about this, and openly told her that this flood of more and more ludicrous laws only make me more determined to ignore them*; but she doesn't care - clearly "signalling" is more important to this Government than actual effect.
* there's a lovely Catholic word for this: "contumacy". I - and many others, I suspect - are now "contumacious".
Thanks for this. Yes, you’re absolutely right - this is a terrible problem that ultimately totally corrupts the rule of law. That is a concept that is overused, but here it is of vital importance: for a society to be governed by law it has to be possible to comply with its rules and predict their consequences and effects. We’ve now entered a scenario where none of this is possible - it is a tyranny, in which power is exercised arbitrarily under the guise of law.
Too lengthy & challenging an article / report for me to read in full. It does seem to require a knowledge of various economists & their works. Nonetheless I picked up on how government intervention (failure) can make worse market failure or otherwise suboptimal situations & was glad to be introduced to the excellent concept of ‘blackboard economics’.
David,
I'm going to post a note and tag you in it, with the ONS stats for deaths from COVID alone (i.e. not the completely fraudulent ones we all saw) from Feb 2020 to Dec 2021.
Under the age of 50? Just over 300.
Age 2 to 14? 2
Excess mortality 2020 no worse than a bad 'flu year. Figures rose once the jabbing started.
The jabs were experimental - Pfizer first phase clinical trial did not end till Feb 2023; all used under EUL.
Given that many were coerced into having the jab on pain of losing their livelihood, could there be a clearer breach of the Nuremberg Code? One of my sons, coerced, has been sick ever since. Long Vaccine Syndrome.
Never mind the destruction of core human rights.
"In March 2020, SARS-CoV-2 was an organism almost certainly newly emergent and certainly only extremely recently known to UK and international virology, and the experience of Covid-19 was very small."
The experience of Convid was definitely very small, very small indeed - how do you experience something that doesn't exist, and will never exist now or in the future.