The life of a conspiracy theorist is less enjoyable than it seems. Knowing something isn't true and that the government is lying to you, gaslighting you, and possibly trying to outright kill you for some reason, isn't that rewarding. There's just not that much to gain, and a whole lot of emotional trauma. I guess most people opt to just go along with what they are told to believe and pretend it makes sense.
Actually I was a little surprised, I expected more conspiracy terrorists in the poll. Maybe the poll is fabricated.
Polls are almost always going to understate controversial (ie anti-liberalist) views because respondents want to say what they think is “correct” even if they disagree. This is why Trump support in 2016 and 2020 didn’t show in most polls, just Rasmussen, and it was based on his confidence in Trump’s win that I immediately doubted the result.
My opinion on conspiracies is that we underestimate how low integrity we, both individually and as a group member are. I have worked at many places where 'everybody knew something was wrong'. And yet we never did anything. If we look at our own lives I think that it is clear that we often simply sit on knowledge of heinous acts and never take the responsibility to do anything about it, like the guys on a subway watching someone get beat to death, often unanimously. My guess is that a lot of conspiracies are the same. The other members of the group walk by clucking their heads thinking what a mess it will be when it all comes out and hoping that they don't have to do the cleanup.
Like the office affair that we all just walk by day after day because it doesn't seem to be our business. Viewing my actual experience I can't help but think that it is very easy to commit nefarious acts more or less in plain sight and simply no one ever does anything about it. It all comes out after the fact and never gets the kind of attention that it takes to break into societal consciousness.
Yeah. We know this. This is why we make laws to protect and encourage whistleblowing. Because we know that it is naturally dangerous and disfavored and yet we don't believe in conspiracies because somebody would blow the whistle. But laws are a very poor replacement for men who are willing to act. A few of the latter would get rid of the needs that thousands of laws are failing to meet.
It is just a weird coincidence that five of the White House Plumbers had CIA backgrounds unbeknownst to Nixon. And a coincidence that Nixon and Kennedy both got taken out when they were planning moves against the National Security State. Nothing has any significance let's just watch porn until we stop caring again safe and loved in the arms of National Security Nanny.
I tried watching the HBO show. It casts the CIA / deep state as a doddering bureaucracy interested in nothing but policing its own irregularities. Ok, sure.
Future generations, if the internet still exists, will wonder why the mainstream narrative on 9/11 could stand with such obvious-at-the-time problems, just as I can wonder about why the narrative of the 60s and 70s is so broken and distorted. The history all has to fit the progressive redemption narrative instead, otherwise society can't make sense of it.
But lock downs were not only a Western and Yankasphere phenomenon. China brutally enforced lockdowns.
Have read and communicated with people from many other Asian nations and Africa as well who locked down.
Yes, our fellow citizens did their part to enforce locks and masks too, but her in Japan, the medical profession is still pushing this madness. My med school allowed on campus classes only since this past April but just for compulsory classes. Electives are still, now in the Fall of 2023 to be conducted over Zoom. Until last April, students were instructed to not leave their residences. While not a student at my school, I am aware of a suicide that was brought on by these lockdowns of college aged persons. If I haven’t shared it you, I can post the rules I we were to follow up until April this year. Many did and among them, many still are. So, it is not just just the un credentialed, following these but even MDs and nurses.
But they too did/do not understand that flattening the curve was never intended to reduce the numbers of infected. I have been arguing with medical students since Japan entered its first lockdown light. According to them, their medical teachers told them that “Just Stay Home” was to reduce case numbers and thus deaths.
In May 2020 I talked with a coworker who is a infected disease control expert. Surprised to see him in a mask, as he should know better, he told me that he and all in his field knew that everything they were having us do was of no use what so ever. His said it was all “political”, that no one could speak out.
They knew, and did it any way. Why? Politics, as he suggests? If so, how is it that all nations suddenly have the same shared political goal? The one thing that I feel confident was and remains at play is a universal fear. Fear of what or whom, I do not know, but it seems clear that for many it was never fear of Covid.
This does not refute your thesis that there was not an actual conspiracy, but I do believe something far from ordinary happened these past three years. What scared all these very different governments into following the same path?
Epidemiology is a very squishy field and when states ask it for advice, there's going to be a lot of looking over the shoulder at what the other guy answered, and if it played well. And ultimately the answers that played well were those that satisfied American PMC expectations of "giving regular people something to do" (stay home) - regardless of whether we interpret the PMC expectations to be driving the cart or not, they went in the same direction.
Then you have most developing countries imitating the same answers. In Mexico like in US this was mostly an issue of commercial and corporate enforcement. You didn't have to mask up to buy stuff at street stands, it would have been totally impractical because too many people are too destitute to comply with minimal requirements. Nothing the government could do.
Japan continuing after everyone else stopped caring is evidence for independently wanting to have the measures to begin with.
China, likewise at the end. But also their lockdowns were localized and effective (presumably because virus didn't spread well in East Asia before Omicron, so the bar was low). So they were more open than the West overall, which again suggests that there was no directive to close for closing's sake. Of course there were still measures in place, though that seemed to be about Xi disempowering the elite.
First, let me say that my comments are not adversarial. For the first time I am believing that there is at least international coordination towards an end point that we will not like of which covid, as big as it was/is, is but a small part. Before I get to that though, your point on the squishiness of epidemiology makes sense. But they have long had protocols in place on how to deal with epidemics. They threw all that out the window very early on. Why? This is not the first pandemic. It is not even the first in recent times, though I was shocked to learn that a great many people believe that this is the first one in their lifetimes. Epidemiologists should know that that is not the case and they should have acted accordingly. Lockdowns were used for the first SARS but I do not think they could be called successful. Conspiracy or not, I think at a minimum, like minded people in places of influence say the opportunity a population scared to death over covid presented for them and exploited it.
If I may, I will use two actual conspiracies, one governmental the other private individuals.
The first I started to learn about 10 years. This is the US law that requires each and every Financial Institution (FI) outside the US to report all data they have on their “US Person” customers to the US government. And all do. Either by carrot or whip, most every nation has signed formal agreements to change their own laws if needed to allow their FIs spy on their customers on behalf of the US. Or, if you will, entered into a conspiracy to do so.
Following the US’s success, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) started their own system which they call the Common Reporting Standards or CRS. A stated goal of the OECD CRS is to have a single, common data base where all member nations can at their desire see all the financial data on any person residing in any member State. They are not there yet but at present they are reporting all cross boarder financial activity to the nations involved. For example, let’s say a British nation residing in Japan makes an online purchase from an online store in Taiwan. Japan and Taiwan will share all financial they have on the individual making the cross boarder purchase. If not yet, soon they will also share the same with Great Britain, the home country of our buyer living in Japan and the UK will share all information on his assets in his home land with these two countries. Same holds true whenever he crosses any national borders. When we hear all this talk about financial transparency, they are not talking about us seeing what they are up to, they mean all our finances will be known to them in real time. To me, this is a massive conspiracy.
Next we have the ESG conspiracy. As far as I have been able to ascertain, Environmental, Social and Governance is the overall structure and it is supported by Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which put the “E” of ESG in to practice and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) which put the “S” in gear. I have yet to discover what supports the “G”. ESG is not often seen but SDG is EVERYWHERE. So what is ESG? It is nothing other than a social credit system and it is not theoretical, it is already in use. If you wondered why Coke went woke and alienated much of its customer base and other corporations followed suit despite the economic damage suffered by that company and all that have done the same, it is because they must to keep a high enough ESG score or they will lose access to financial services they need to stay in business. Who is behind this? A few ultra wealthy financiers whose companies have bought up much of the financial industry which allows them to force their whims on pretty much every one world wide. Both ESG and SDGs are also UN initiatives. If this is not a conspiracy, then I do not understand the term. Perhaps I don’t.
While trying to find a way out of from US control for my kids who are citizens of the land of their birth, Japan, I have learned that much of what have long been conspiracy theories are in part true. The Great Reset is as you say on another facet of our troubles, openly discussed. But they have also been implementing policies that will bring it about. I learned in 2017 that starting at least as far back as June 2014 that my banks in jJapan wher I have been a legal resident since 2000 where reporting each and every transaction I make to the US. Prior to that, I have over the last 20 years suffered through the elimination of several services I once used to to pay bills back home and to receive money from home; mainly International Postal Money Orders (IPMO). But before these ceased to be, I dealt with increasingly intrusive information requirements. “Who is sending you this money?” “Why are they sending it?” “What is your relationship with them?” Then I had to also provide my US social security number to the Japanese Post Office, all just to cash an IPMO from my parents for their grandchild’s birthday money for a whole forty, $40, US dollars. Lived here for almost 20 years and never had to proved my US SSN. And just like that, I now do. Now, can’t even use IPMOs as they no longer exist.
There is a force driving all this. Someone really wants to drive us to where we do not have the freedoms we have taken for granted and every nation is cooperating in this.
This is different. The desire for this level of control has always existed, but the technology did not exist to bring it to fruition. It does now and they are using it.
Forgive my sloppy argument. There is much more, in the gory details, that I can not put into a single reply. I wrote a multiparty post on my substack covering much of it though, if you care to take look, it’s free.
The only way to 'test' a narrative whether the 'official' story OR a supposed 'Conspiracy theory' is to challenge the Claims and check if the bare reality, the evidence available, supports the Claims.
Airline pilots all over the world tested their cellphones, the equivalent of what was supposedly used in the hijacked aircraft and above a certain groundspeed and about 3000 feet above ground, both quickly and easily attained shortly after taking off, cells phone of that era did not work. Skyphones built into the aircraft did of course but commonly only handled a limited number of calls at the same time. MMM??? Inaircraft simulators pilots tried flying into building using the visual presentation - it VERY difficult to do for trained experienced pilots familiar with the aircraft. MMM?? The second aircraft to hit a tower hit to the side and likely did not damage much core structure and most of the fireball is outside the building envelope so how did that bring down that tower? MMM?? Many people, TV reporters on the spot, Firefighters outside and inside and police officers, over 150 of them reported explosions in the basement and later in the buildings including some sounding like a string of sequenced reports - bang bang bang etc.. Some report being blown over by explosions including with building 7 . MMM?? No photographs or security camera footage has ever been produced showing an airline aircraft hitting the Pentagon and the impact marks definitely do not fit that scenario. MMM?? Where are the actual boarding details, video on that day and records of seating etc. for the claimed 19 perps? Never seen, MMM??
The PCR so called test, is a research tool and it inventor Kari Mullis was adamant the PCR process cannot be used as a clinical diagnostic tool. MMM?? Claims to have isolated and sequenced the genetic code of an identified SARS-Cov-2 virus have not proved to be correct. MMM?? The record of Influenza shows cases dropping to effectively zero once the Covid-19 illness reports truly began to grow. Strange is it not and never been seen before. How could that be? MMM?? Why was the Order given about Feb 2020 by WHO to alter Death Certification such that Covid-19 was made prominent and all other con ditions reduced in value as causal factors? MMM??
Challenge the Claims and if they do not stand up with clear independently verifiable evidence, then THAT Claim fails and is false. Wont tell you who did it or what happened, but can very simply show what did not happen and who did not do what is claimed. It requires total honesty though.
PCR, as I have said repeatedly, proved to be robust and reliable in the context of SARS-CoV-2. Meanwhile as far as flu the drop in reported cases is not so interesting. "Influenza cases dropping to effectively zero" was not "never seen before," I have posted over and over that this was the norm for flu remarked upon endlessly by all mid-20th-century flu researchers, for the virus to disappear during off-seasons. It's a bit pathetic that criticism of PCR can never talk about how it actually performs and instead must reference Mullis rants like he actually invented polymerase - no, bacteria invented that.
No disagreement with your points RE the towers. If crashing a plane into a building could make it free-fall, then shooting people with a bullet would melt them. It's not physically plausible.
"PCR ... robust and reliable," as confirmed by what other test? I don't think you can make this assertion if you understand how it works. Presumably by now you have seen Kary Mullis, the inventor of the process saying that it can't be used for that.
As confirmed by itself. If you test positive, you are less likely to test positive later. So the positive has a meaning (literally, it means you won't test positive later). As confirmed by antibodies - same thing, testing positive means likely to have higher antibodies soon. Having high antibodies already means less likely to test positive. The test is robust and reliable. You can attack it with words but that's like me arguing why the bus can't take you to work when it observably is doing so for three years.
"If you test positive, you are less ..." could be "reversion to the mean", or, in this case they have changed the number of cycles they are using in order to (a) scare or (b) convince you that a "vaccine" worked. As far as I know they would not tell you how many cycles they were using, officially; but it was variously indicated as ranging from "far too high" to "ridiculously high".
"testing positive means likely to have higher antibodies soon" I would be interested to hear where this data came from, since much more basic metrics were not available. This would have to be repeated many times over months in order to know that it wasn't coincidence or just timing compared to the next wave, and timing compared to the "vaccination" mucking up their immune system etc etc.
"Having high antibodies already means less likely to test positive".
Again, I'd like to see the data. If antibodies to the spike protein were measured to be up, then there should be viral fragments around and you should be MORE likely to test positive (if the test worked). So this seems (a) unlikely and (b) the opposite of what it would show if it did work.
Yes, I can argue using words, and the fact that you have believed something for a long time makes it more difficult for you to rid yourself of the notion.
Thanks! The vaccine and virus questions receding has returned the social atmosphere more to a 2020-to-early-2021 energy, in my perception, and a lot of the topics I post about now I thought would be the focus of this blog when I started it (Delta and boosters changed all that).
One was included in https://unglossed.substack.com/p/update-to-the-case-against-bacterial RE kids innate immunity study. Not much interesting in papers. There is a preprint finding that the Brazil ivermectin study was probably a total fraud, but I’ve never focused much on ivm
I have generally steered clear of “conspiracy theories” for at least some of the reasons you give; the “evidence” they provide simple is not.
However, one aspect of the last 3 years seems to defy a couple of your points. I agree that experts in one country generally disagree with experts in the same field in a different country, yet, we have had experts in most countries adopt the same anticovid measures. Differences between the many various countries are in timing and degree only and in most cases are counter to each nation’s preexisting protocols. Everyone making foolish decisions may be a comedy of errors, but everyone making the same foolish error leads me to believe in at least coordination. We have never seen this level of coordination between anywhere near this the number of nations that followed the same foolish policies. Is it really possible that they all made the same idiotic mistakes by mistake?
I think this is a reflection of the corporate homogenization of media, everything is memetic and SEO-ified so all societies end up getting served the same pitches for what to aspire to and how to behave. So you have to be more rigorous now, to separate these kind of autonomous memes from intentional cooperation, and that is where my 'Origin of Lockdowns' article goes into the weeds of how the idea actually sprang up.
Meanwhile there was a big divergence between East and West in terms of therapeutics, and the suppression of therapeutics is a big element of most lockdown-to-vaccine-pipeline conspiracy theories. In India most state governments endorsed ivermectin as part of care packages, only a few outliers. In China, no real attempt to stop people from trying whatever they want, including Paxlovid.
Those are good points. But, how effective are those for locked downed and masked populations?
Here in Japan, there was never a nationwide “you get the shot and you can return to you life before” campaign or promise. Pf had a TV commercial that ran last new years that said that but in reality, getting the shot did not relieve one of the masks, working from home, distancing and all the rest. They used other methods to get the shot in as many arms as possible and they are reported to be very successful. No mask mandates yet 100%, statistically, mask compliance in the greater Tokyo area and far beyond for over three years.
Now, Japan and Great Britain started off doing things different than everyone else, then something happened and the got their minds right and jumped upon the band wagon. I will read your piece on where lockdowns came from but does it explain why most every one adopted them? We are not the only people who knew they were a bad idea. How did all these different cultures suddenly ignore their own knowledge on what these would do?
In 2020 I hadn't been exposed to evidence of many conspiracies so I would have answered very differently than I would if asked these questions now. I suspect many others who have lived through the insanity of the last 3+ years have taken a different stance on conspiracies in general now.
Sep 11, 2023·edited Sep 11, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey
Some questions are badly phrase. "The Sept 11 attacks were carried out... by 19 terrorists..."
Well yeah, they WERE "carried out" by 19 terrorists, but they were part of a much larger scheme. You could answer "true" to this question yet still believe in a conspiracy.
And this one plays around with negatives: "Humans do not play a significant role in climate change." You have to think for a minute if that's true or false because of the negative, and you could easily answer differently than what you think by mistake. Why not just say "Humans play a significant role..." It's much clearer.
Even "The majority of protests that occurred this summer were violent." Why "majority"? So if you say yes then NPR can say, "no dummy, only 48% were violent, not the majority!" You should say "Many protests that occurred..." so people aren't hemming and hawing over "majority."
The protests one is more about buying a political narrative or not, than it was about a conspiracy to hide truth. The phrasing on the 9/11 question is awkward, off-putting, but this just further demonstrates that Republican respondents want to affirm the mainstream narrative.
Merely unworthy of inclusion in the poll. I found it surprising that the terms "Kennedy" and "JFK" don't occur in the Ipsos PDF, somewhere alongside the Apollo works in the Kubrick oeuvre. Neither does "CIA".
In my pre-millennial youth, the Grassy Knoll was a mighty foundation stone for the tinfoil community. I can understand omitting the RFK shooting or even Jonestown as too obscure. Don't see why JFK didn't make the cut, except perhaps that they wouldn't like the results.
To reply more seriously, I think the difficulty with constructing a survey question about JFK is, "who really knows what the default narrative is?" I couldn't tell you with great confidence (I'm not going to look it up). It's a bit like the situation with lab "leak right" now - it's extremely complicated and esoteric, how did Wuhan make SARS-CoV-2 if no SARS-CoV-2 genes in their published sequences, doesn't actually add up when you try to make it cohesive. So a few decades will go by and no one will be pretending anymore to believe lab leak.
I think that the most enlightening piece of information in this was NPR's blatant bias. Did NPR actually think that designating which statements were correct and which ones were incorrect was a wise journalistic choice when reporting upon the poll? At any rate, the "experts" at NPR vehemently appear to be in disagreement with Brian's conclusion: "Experts are fallible." Not at NPR, Brian. My tax dollars say so! lol
Right - and though I didn't want to devote a tangent to the issue, the "no evidence vaccines cause autism" claim was the most egregious example. This just means that "vaccines higher + autism higher is not a lab finding" is somehow not "evidence." It literally is evidence. Just because it could be a coincidence, doesn't mean it's not evidence, and it's known by everyone who has a kid. "Oh I gave my kid 8000 vaccines and he stopped developing" is *evidence*. So the word means nothing when NPR uses it.
https://swinehoodsremedy.substack.com/p/unnatural-evolution-indisputable
Unrelated, but have you seen this about the omicron non synonymous mutations?
The life of a conspiracy theorist is less enjoyable than it seems. Knowing something isn't true and that the government is lying to you, gaslighting you, and possibly trying to outright kill you for some reason, isn't that rewarding. There's just not that much to gain, and a whole lot of emotional trauma. I guess most people opt to just go along with what they are told to believe and pretend it makes sense.
Actually I was a little surprised, I expected more conspiracy terrorists in the poll. Maybe the poll is fabricated.
Polls are almost always going to understate controversial (ie anti-liberalist) views because respondents want to say what they think is “correct” even if they disagree. This is why Trump support in 2016 and 2020 didn’t show in most polls, just Rasmussen, and it was based on his confidence in Trump’s win that I immediately doubted the result.
My opinion on conspiracies is that we underestimate how low integrity we, both individually and as a group member are. I have worked at many places where 'everybody knew something was wrong'. And yet we never did anything. If we look at our own lives I think that it is clear that we often simply sit on knowledge of heinous acts and never take the responsibility to do anything about it, like the guys on a subway watching someone get beat to death, often unanimously. My guess is that a lot of conspiracies are the same. The other members of the group walk by clucking their heads thinking what a mess it will be when it all comes out and hoping that they don't have to do the cleanup.
Like the office affair that we all just walk by day after day because it doesn't seem to be our business. Viewing my actual experience I can't help but think that it is very easy to commit nefarious acts more or less in plain sight and simply no one ever does anything about it. It all comes out after the fact and never gets the kind of attention that it takes to break into societal consciousness.
And this is ultimately a rational act, because it turns out the group never rewards the moral objector in real life. Watergate is just a fairy tale.
Yeah. We know this. This is why we make laws to protect and encourage whistleblowing. Because we know that it is naturally dangerous and disfavored and yet we don't believe in conspiracies because somebody would blow the whistle. But laws are a very poor replacement for men who are willing to act. A few of the latter would get rid of the needs that thousands of laws are failing to meet.
It is just a weird coincidence that five of the White House Plumbers had CIA backgrounds unbeknownst to Nixon. And a coincidence that Nixon and Kennedy both got taken out when they were planning moves against the National Security State. Nothing has any significance let's just watch porn until we stop caring again safe and loved in the arms of National Security Nanny.
I tried watching the HBO show. It casts the CIA / deep state as a doddering bureaucracy interested in nothing but policing its own irregularities. Ok, sure.
Future generations, if the internet still exists, will wonder why the mainstream narrative on 9/11 could stand with such obvious-at-the-time problems, just as I can wonder about why the narrative of the 60s and 70s is so broken and distorted. The history all has to fit the progressive redemption narrative instead, otherwise society can't make sense of it.
But lock downs were not only a Western and Yankasphere phenomenon. China brutally enforced lockdowns.
Have read and communicated with people from many other Asian nations and Africa as well who locked down.
Yes, our fellow citizens did their part to enforce locks and masks too, but her in Japan, the medical profession is still pushing this madness. My med school allowed on campus classes only since this past April but just for compulsory classes. Electives are still, now in the Fall of 2023 to be conducted over Zoom. Until last April, students were instructed to not leave their residences. While not a student at my school, I am aware of a suicide that was brought on by these lockdowns of college aged persons. If I haven’t shared it you, I can post the rules I we were to follow up until April this year. Many did and among them, many still are. So, it is not just just the un credentialed, following these but even MDs and nurses.
But they too did/do not understand that flattening the curve was never intended to reduce the numbers of infected. I have been arguing with medical students since Japan entered its first lockdown light. According to them, their medical teachers told them that “Just Stay Home” was to reduce case numbers and thus deaths.
In May 2020 I talked with a coworker who is a infected disease control expert. Surprised to see him in a mask, as he should know better, he told me that he and all in his field knew that everything they were having us do was of no use what so ever. His said it was all “political”, that no one could speak out.
They knew, and did it any way. Why? Politics, as he suggests? If so, how is it that all nations suddenly have the same shared political goal? The one thing that I feel confident was and remains at play is a universal fear. Fear of what or whom, I do not know, but it seems clear that for many it was never fear of Covid.
This does not refute your thesis that there was not an actual conspiracy, but I do believe something far from ordinary happened these past three years. What scared all these very different governments into following the same path?
Epidemiology is a very squishy field and when states ask it for advice, there's going to be a lot of looking over the shoulder at what the other guy answered, and if it played well. And ultimately the answers that played well were those that satisfied American PMC expectations of "giving regular people something to do" (stay home) - regardless of whether we interpret the PMC expectations to be driving the cart or not, they went in the same direction.
Then you have most developing countries imitating the same answers. In Mexico like in US this was mostly an issue of commercial and corporate enforcement. You didn't have to mask up to buy stuff at street stands, it would have been totally impractical because too many people are too destitute to comply with minimal requirements. Nothing the government could do.
Japan continuing after everyone else stopped caring is evidence for independently wanting to have the measures to begin with.
China, likewise at the end. But also their lockdowns were localized and effective (presumably because virus didn't spread well in East Asia before Omicron, so the bar was low). So they were more open than the West overall, which again suggests that there was no directive to close for closing's sake. Of course there were still measures in place, though that seemed to be about Xi disempowering the elite.
First, let me say that my comments are not adversarial. For the first time I am believing that there is at least international coordination towards an end point that we will not like of which covid, as big as it was/is, is but a small part. Before I get to that though, your point on the squishiness of epidemiology makes sense. But they have long had protocols in place on how to deal with epidemics. They threw all that out the window very early on. Why? This is not the first pandemic. It is not even the first in recent times, though I was shocked to learn that a great many people believe that this is the first one in their lifetimes. Epidemiologists should know that that is not the case and they should have acted accordingly. Lockdowns were used for the first SARS but I do not think they could be called successful. Conspiracy or not, I think at a minimum, like minded people in places of influence say the opportunity a population scared to death over covid presented for them and exploited it.
If I may, I will use two actual conspiracies, one governmental the other private individuals.
The first I started to learn about 10 years. This is the US law that requires each and every Financial Institution (FI) outside the US to report all data they have on their “US Person” customers to the US government. And all do. Either by carrot or whip, most every nation has signed formal agreements to change their own laws if needed to allow their FIs spy on their customers on behalf of the US. Or, if you will, entered into a conspiracy to do so.
Following the US’s success, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) started their own system which they call the Common Reporting Standards or CRS. A stated goal of the OECD CRS is to have a single, common data base where all member nations can at their desire see all the financial data on any person residing in any member State. They are not there yet but at present they are reporting all cross boarder financial activity to the nations involved. For example, let’s say a British nation residing in Japan makes an online purchase from an online store in Taiwan. Japan and Taiwan will share all financial they have on the individual making the cross boarder purchase. If not yet, soon they will also share the same with Great Britain, the home country of our buyer living in Japan and the UK will share all information on his assets in his home land with these two countries. Same holds true whenever he crosses any national borders. When we hear all this talk about financial transparency, they are not talking about us seeing what they are up to, they mean all our finances will be known to them in real time. To me, this is a massive conspiracy.
Next we have the ESG conspiracy. As far as I have been able to ascertain, Environmental, Social and Governance is the overall structure and it is supported by Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which put the “E” of ESG in to practice and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) which put the “S” in gear. I have yet to discover what supports the “G”. ESG is not often seen but SDG is EVERYWHERE. So what is ESG? It is nothing other than a social credit system and it is not theoretical, it is already in use. If you wondered why Coke went woke and alienated much of its customer base and other corporations followed suit despite the economic damage suffered by that company and all that have done the same, it is because they must to keep a high enough ESG score or they will lose access to financial services they need to stay in business. Who is behind this? A few ultra wealthy financiers whose companies have bought up much of the financial industry which allows them to force their whims on pretty much every one world wide. Both ESG and SDGs are also UN initiatives. If this is not a conspiracy, then I do not understand the term. Perhaps I don’t.
While trying to find a way out of from US control for my kids who are citizens of the land of their birth, Japan, I have learned that much of what have long been conspiracy theories are in part true. The Great Reset is as you say on another facet of our troubles, openly discussed. But they have also been implementing policies that will bring it about. I learned in 2017 that starting at least as far back as June 2014 that my banks in jJapan wher I have been a legal resident since 2000 where reporting each and every transaction I make to the US. Prior to that, I have over the last 20 years suffered through the elimination of several services I once used to to pay bills back home and to receive money from home; mainly International Postal Money Orders (IPMO). But before these ceased to be, I dealt with increasingly intrusive information requirements. “Who is sending you this money?” “Why are they sending it?” “What is your relationship with them?” Then I had to also provide my US social security number to the Japanese Post Office, all just to cash an IPMO from my parents for their grandchild’s birthday money for a whole forty, $40, US dollars. Lived here for almost 20 years and never had to proved my US SSN. And just like that, I now do. Now, can’t even use IPMOs as they no longer exist.
There is a force driving all this. Someone really wants to drive us to where we do not have the freedoms we have taken for granted and every nation is cooperating in this.
This is different. The desire for this level of control has always existed, but the technology did not exist to bring it to fruition. It does now and they are using it.
Forgive my sloppy argument. There is much more, in the gory details, that I can not put into a single reply. I wrote a multiparty post on my substack covering much of it though, if you care to take look, it’s free.
The only way to 'test' a narrative whether the 'official' story OR a supposed 'Conspiracy theory' is to challenge the Claims and check if the bare reality, the evidence available, supports the Claims.
Airline pilots all over the world tested their cellphones, the equivalent of what was supposedly used in the hijacked aircraft and above a certain groundspeed and about 3000 feet above ground, both quickly and easily attained shortly after taking off, cells phone of that era did not work. Skyphones built into the aircraft did of course but commonly only handled a limited number of calls at the same time. MMM??? Inaircraft simulators pilots tried flying into building using the visual presentation - it VERY difficult to do for trained experienced pilots familiar with the aircraft. MMM?? The second aircraft to hit a tower hit to the side and likely did not damage much core structure and most of the fireball is outside the building envelope so how did that bring down that tower? MMM?? Many people, TV reporters on the spot, Firefighters outside and inside and police officers, over 150 of them reported explosions in the basement and later in the buildings including some sounding like a string of sequenced reports - bang bang bang etc.. Some report being blown over by explosions including with building 7 . MMM?? No photographs or security camera footage has ever been produced showing an airline aircraft hitting the Pentagon and the impact marks definitely do not fit that scenario. MMM?? Where are the actual boarding details, video on that day and records of seating etc. for the claimed 19 perps? Never seen, MMM??
The PCR so called test, is a research tool and it inventor Kari Mullis was adamant the PCR process cannot be used as a clinical diagnostic tool. MMM?? Claims to have isolated and sequenced the genetic code of an identified SARS-Cov-2 virus have not proved to be correct. MMM?? The record of Influenza shows cases dropping to effectively zero once the Covid-19 illness reports truly began to grow. Strange is it not and never been seen before. How could that be? MMM?? Why was the Order given about Feb 2020 by WHO to alter Death Certification such that Covid-19 was made prominent and all other con ditions reduced in value as causal factors? MMM??
Challenge the Claims and if they do not stand up with clear independently verifiable evidence, then THAT Claim fails and is false. Wont tell you who did it or what happened, but can very simply show what did not happen and who did not do what is claimed. It requires total honesty though.
PCR, as I have said repeatedly, proved to be robust and reliable in the context of SARS-CoV-2. Meanwhile as far as flu the drop in reported cases is not so interesting. "Influenza cases dropping to effectively zero" was not "never seen before," I have posted over and over that this was the norm for flu remarked upon endlessly by all mid-20th-century flu researchers, for the virus to disappear during off-seasons. It's a bit pathetic that criticism of PCR can never talk about how it actually performs and instead must reference Mullis rants like he actually invented polymerase - no, bacteria invented that.
No disagreement with your points RE the towers. If crashing a plane into a building could make it free-fall, then shooting people with a bullet would melt them. It's not physically plausible.
"PCR ... robust and reliable," as confirmed by what other test? I don't think you can make this assertion if you understand how it works. Presumably by now you have seen Kary Mullis, the inventor of the process saying that it can't be used for that.
As confirmed by itself. If you test positive, you are less likely to test positive later. So the positive has a meaning (literally, it means you won't test positive later). As confirmed by antibodies - same thing, testing positive means likely to have higher antibodies soon. Having high antibodies already means less likely to test positive. The test is robust and reliable. You can attack it with words but that's like me arguing why the bus can't take you to work when it observably is doing so for three years.
"If you test positive, you are less ..." could be "reversion to the mean", or, in this case they have changed the number of cycles they are using in order to (a) scare or (b) convince you that a "vaccine" worked. As far as I know they would not tell you how many cycles they were using, officially; but it was variously indicated as ranging from "far too high" to "ridiculously high".
"testing positive means likely to have higher antibodies soon" I would be interested to hear where this data came from, since much more basic metrics were not available. This would have to be repeated many times over months in order to know that it wasn't coincidence or just timing compared to the next wave, and timing compared to the "vaccination" mucking up their immune system etc etc.
"Having high antibodies already means less likely to test positive".
Again, I'd like to see the data. If antibodies to the spike protein were measured to be up, then there should be viral fragments around and you should be MORE likely to test positive (if the test worked). So this seems (a) unlikely and (b) the opposite of what it would show if it did work.
Yes, I can argue using words, and the fact that you have believed something for a long time makes it more difficult for you to rid yourself of the notion.
You've only gotten better as COVID has (somewhat) receded into the background, Brian.
Thanks! The vaccine and virus questions receding has returned the social atmosphere more to a 2020-to-early-2021 energy, in my perception, and a lot of the topics I post about now I thought would be the focus of this blog when I started it (Delta and boosters changed all that).
I agree, but I have to admit I’m a tad disappoint I haven’t seen any updates from you on some of the latest vax controversies.
One was included in https://unglossed.substack.com/p/update-to-the-case-against-bacterial RE kids innate immunity study. Not much interesting in papers. There is a preprint finding that the Brazil ivermectin study was probably a total fraud, but I’ve never focused much on ivm
I have generally steered clear of “conspiracy theories” for at least some of the reasons you give; the “evidence” they provide simple is not.
However, one aspect of the last 3 years seems to defy a couple of your points. I agree that experts in one country generally disagree with experts in the same field in a different country, yet, we have had experts in most countries adopt the same anticovid measures. Differences between the many various countries are in timing and degree only and in most cases are counter to each nation’s preexisting protocols. Everyone making foolish decisions may be a comedy of errors, but everyone making the same foolish error leads me to believe in at least coordination. We have never seen this level of coordination between anywhere near this the number of nations that followed the same foolish policies. Is it really possible that they all made the same idiotic mistakes by mistake?
I think this is a reflection of the corporate homogenization of media, everything is memetic and SEO-ified so all societies end up getting served the same pitches for what to aspire to and how to behave. So you have to be more rigorous now, to separate these kind of autonomous memes from intentional cooperation, and that is where my 'Origin of Lockdowns' article goes into the weeds of how the idea actually sprang up.
Meanwhile there was a big divergence between East and West in terms of therapeutics, and the suppression of therapeutics is a big element of most lockdown-to-vaccine-pipeline conspiracy theories. In India most state governments endorsed ivermectin as part of care packages, only a few outliers. In China, no real attempt to stop people from trying whatever they want, including Paxlovid.
Those are good points. But, how effective are those for locked downed and masked populations?
Here in Japan, there was never a nationwide “you get the shot and you can return to you life before” campaign or promise. Pf had a TV commercial that ran last new years that said that but in reality, getting the shot did not relieve one of the masks, working from home, distancing and all the rest. They used other methods to get the shot in as many arms as possible and they are reported to be very successful. No mask mandates yet 100%, statistically, mask compliance in the greater Tokyo area and far beyond for over three years.
Now, Japan and Great Britain started off doing things different than everyone else, then something happened and the got their minds right and jumped upon the band wagon. I will read your piece on where lockdowns came from but does it explain why most every one adopted them? We are not the only people who knew they were a bad idea. How did all these different cultures suddenly ignore their own knowledge on what these would do?
In 2020 I hadn't been exposed to evidence of many conspiracies so I would have answered very differently than I would if asked these questions now. I suspect many others who have lived through the insanity of the last 3+ years have taken a different stance on conspiracies in general now.
Some questions are badly phrase. "The Sept 11 attacks were carried out... by 19 terrorists..."
Well yeah, they WERE "carried out" by 19 terrorists, but they were part of a much larger scheme. You could answer "true" to this question yet still believe in a conspiracy.
And this one plays around with negatives: "Humans do not play a significant role in climate change." You have to think for a minute if that's true or false because of the negative, and you could easily answer differently than what you think by mistake. Why not just say "Humans play a significant role..." It's much clearer.
Even "The majority of protests that occurred this summer were violent." Why "majority"? So if you say yes then NPR can say, "no dummy, only 48% were violent, not the majority!" You should say "Many protests that occurred..." so people aren't hemming and hawing over "majority."
Shit questions get shit results.
The protests one is more about buying a political narrative or not, than it was about a conspiracy to hide truth. The phrasing on the 9/11 question is awkward, off-putting, but this just further demonstrates that Republican respondents want to affirm the mainstream narrative.
What is the JFK assassination, chopped liver?
Not unworthy of ranking in the Kubrick oeuvre.
Merely unworthy of inclusion in the poll. I found it surprising that the terms "Kennedy" and "JFK" don't occur in the Ipsos PDF, somewhere alongside the Apollo works in the Kubrick oeuvre. Neither does "CIA".
In my pre-millennial youth, the Grassy Knoll was a mighty foundation stone for the tinfoil community. I can understand omitting the RFK shooting or even Jonestown as too obscure. Don't see why JFK didn't make the cut, except perhaps that they wouldn't like the results.
To reply more seriously, I think the difficulty with constructing a survey question about JFK is, "who really knows what the default narrative is?" I couldn't tell you with great confidence (I'm not going to look it up). It's a bit like the situation with lab "leak right" now - it's extremely complicated and esoteric, how did Wuhan make SARS-CoV-2 if no SARS-CoV-2 genes in their published sequences, doesn't actually add up when you try to make it cohesive. So a few decades will go by and no one will be pretending anymore to believe lab leak.
I think that the most enlightening piece of information in this was NPR's blatant bias. Did NPR actually think that designating which statements were correct and which ones were incorrect was a wise journalistic choice when reporting upon the poll? At any rate, the "experts" at NPR vehemently appear to be in disagreement with Brian's conclusion: "Experts are fallible." Not at NPR, Brian. My tax dollars say so! lol
Right - and though I didn't want to devote a tangent to the issue, the "no evidence vaccines cause autism" claim was the most egregious example. This just means that "vaccines higher + autism higher is not a lab finding" is somehow not "evidence." It literally is evidence. Just because it could be a coincidence, doesn't mean it's not evidence, and it's known by everyone who has a kid. "Oh I gave my kid 8000 vaccines and he stopped developing" is *evidence*. So the word means nothing when NPR uses it.
PS: Loved your insight, Brian. Your conclusions were (once again) well-reasoned.