The Roman Philosopher Lucius Anneaus Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) was perhaps the first to note the universal trend that growth is slow but ruin is rapid. I call this tendency the "Seneca Effect."

Monday, April 11, 2022

Descending to Hell: What's Happening to Humankind?

 

Shanghai residents locked inside their apartments, venting their rage by screaming in the night.  


This is truly beyond the pale. The wave of madness that descended upon us during the past two years was already unbelievable as it was. But it is getting worse. Much worse. The Shanghai lockdown has no justification whatsoever: 90% of the people who tested positive show no symptoms, and worldometer reports zero mortality. Maybe it is not exactly zero, but compared to one billion and a half Chinese people, you can surely take that number as a good approximation. 

What we are seeing has nothing to do with containing an epidemic. We don't know what the people are screaming, it may be rage, they may be cheering at each other. Impossible to say, but the scene looks like the starting scene of a horror movie, with the zombies locked inside their cages, rattling at the bars while trying to escape. I read that sometimes it happens in jail that the inmates start screaming together, rhythmically. It is like that, just on a much larger scale, the entire city of Shanghai. Has the whole world became a jail? It looks like a scientific experiment with rats. Have we become rats? Have we descended to Hell? What is left of human dignity? Human rights? Human life? 

We seem to have overcome some kind of unknown threshold. There had never been 8 billion people on Earth. And 8 billion people had never been connected in a single planetary communication network. Nobody can know what may happen when something that had never happened before happens. 

The impression is that the whole system is going unstable. If you see humankind as a complex system, then you know that moves as the result of a tangle of internal feedback effects. And we know that when a system is sufficiently large, feedbacks can perversely gang up together to collaborate in bringing the system down. It is the essence of the Seneca Effect (growth is sluggish, but ruin is rapid). 

In this case, the system may simply have become too big to be under anyone or anything's control. The feedbacks are untangling themselves, by themselves, like in a giant Jenga tower starting to fall. The immense creature quivers, moves, oscillates, bumps up and down as it mashes information flows that push it in one direction or another. It is a planetary-sized zombie. It doesn't know where it is going, it just moves on, crushing everything it steps on. 

And now what? We don't know. Nobody knows. But the same Seneca who said that "ruin is rapid" also said that "veritatem dies aperit," or "time discloses the truth." There will be better times in the future. There always are.  


52 comments:

  1. I am completely baffled by your response to the pandemic.

    It has been a fundamental principle of infectious disease management for decades that we completely stamp out all outbreaks of dangerous new pathogens while also trying to eradicate the ones that were previously endemic.

    Then all of a sudden in early 2020 the world forgot that principle because apparently mass murdering tens of millions and lowering life expectancy by decades in the name of the "economy" is somehow OK.

    Which has put the Chinese, the only people approaching this situation scientifically and rationally all throughout, in a very tough spot, being encircled by the virus

    Which has resulted in unfortunate situations like the current one.

    Meanwhile we have people like you, who have been writing so extensively about civilizational collapse issues, cheering for the virus.

    Which makes zero sense -- this is precisely how civilization degenerates. Again, previously we eliminated disease burden, now we are increasing it. And this isn't even really due to resource or environmental issues, although they certainly are not helping, this is mostly due to internal socioeconomic dysfunction. It was in the interest of the elites to mass murder millions -- you wrote several posts about how societies find groups to target for extermination for various reasons, in this case that group were the elderly and the infirm -- and it was not in their interest to stop the virus (they would have had to pay the poor to stay home, can't have that).

    Is it because you are ignorant about the biology of the virus and you don't understand what endemic COVID means? Or it's some other reason? It's still very hard to make any sense of it.

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    1. Dear Georgi,

      let me explain to you why you are so baffled. It is because you belong to that category of people who are unable to quantify their worldviews. If it were not so, you would not state (confidently!) that it is possible -- actually a "fundamental principle" -- to "eradicate" a fast mutating virus such as the coronavirus. Even worse, stating that it could be done using lockdowns, a tool that has been demonstrated to be ineffective over and over during the past two years.

      Let me also note that you belong to that specific subgroup of people who are not only ignorant, but also refuse to learn -- and your aggressive statements show that, especially when you think you know more about biology than others.

      Ignorance can be remedied, unwillingness to learn is a much more difficult problem. Nevertheless, thank you for following my blog, at least you have a fighting chance to learn something.

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    2. Shockingly, the NC GM commenter and others who run the site, and who present themselves as knowledgeable seem to be unable to learn exactly what you, Ugo, correctly point out, even though it is is verifiable as a failure, like the "vaccines" for all to see. Really, really heavy brainwashing. C.

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    3. I am also baffled. Bardi chastizes you for being someone "who is unable to quantify their world view", but, as far as I know, he has never presented to us the mathematics behind his preferred epidemiological model, the one which optimizes the delicate tradeoffs between personal mobility and increased death rates from overburdened medical systems.

      I am also baffled by his ready acceptance of China reporting zero covid deaths since the spring of 2020, as if a Chinese government report was totally reliable (yet somehow the same government's penchant for lockdowns is crazy as hell).

      To me it's amusing to see so many people, perhaps not including Dr Bardi, point to lockdowns and vaccines as being totally unnecessary because the death rate has been so low, as if death rates and public health measures have nothing to do with one another.

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    4. All due respect, but this is complete nonsense.

      First, lockdown does work. The Chinese have eliminated it every single time so far. Including in the beginning -- they cleared most of their cities by mid-March 2020, in Wuhan the lockdown ended by May 2020 with a round of mass testing. No virus after that.

      In Australia they had a bad outbreak in mid-2020 in Melbourne, they locked down with the explicit goal of elimination, stuck to it, and eliminated it.

      A handful of other countries cleared it completely too.

      Most of the rest of the world did nothing of the sort. There was never an actual lockdown in most of the West, where there was for some time (e.g. in Italy), it was lifted prematurely. Nobody tried to go after all cases with serious contact tracing (again, fundamental principles of public health and infection disease control) and nobody implemented proper border controls (something that goes back many centuries as a practice).

      Of course "it didn't work" if it was never tried.

      But this isn't HIV, it is a generally non-latent RNA virus. There are some chronic infections, but those can be caught with testing and then cleared with anti-virals.

      From then on you apply the algorithm -- lock down, mass test everyone, isolate the positives, rinse and repeat. In the end you have no virus. Again, as the Chinese have achieved on what is now more than a hundred separate occasions.

      Sure it doesn't work...

      Also, this bit -- that it is impossible to contain "a fast mutating virus such as the coronavirus" -- clearly signals serious ignorance about the subject matter.

      SARS1 was eradicated back in 2003 and guess what, it was a close relative of SARS2 (so presumably it was also a "a fast mutating virus such as the coronavirus"; actually it wasn't even presumably, it did indeed mutate fast within that outbreak).

      MERS is contained every single time it shows up.

      By your reasoning when SARS3 pops out of some bat in SE Asia a few years from now with 20% IFR we will have to lie down and take it on the chin because it is too hard and "impossible"?

      This is exactly how civilization collapses -- people become convinced that doing what was perfectly doable (go back to how smallpox was eradicated back in the 1960s and 1970s -- now way that is getting done today with the current attitudes) is too hard now. And it is now clear it doesn't even have to be because of real resource constraints, which is the scariest part.

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    5. Joe, I have been working on models for 20 years by now. Models cannot tell you what the reality is. The multiparameter models used to justify lockdowns are one of the best example in the history of science of the concept of "garbage in - garbage out"

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    6. Georgi, I am planning a whole post to comment on your comments!

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    7. There is a fundamental flaw in Georgi's argument: he seems unaware that long-agreed pandemic emergency plans everywhere, pre-2020, basically relied on continuing with BAU, telling people with symptoms to stay at home, advocating increased hygiene, while searching for drug combinations that would lessen serious illness and death to an acceptable level.

      Lock-downs such as we have seen are an unprecedented, crude and counter-productive innovation, above all for a disease with so very low a death-rate among the healthy.

      Shutting down primary health services, suppressing the effective treatment protocols that honest doctors had discovered by April 2020 - drugs + vitamins, etc - and locking people with no symptoms up for months, mass destruction of businesses and interruption of supply-chains, do not look like rational and successful public health policies worthy of becoming standard procedure, but more like intentional harm.

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    8. Ugo,

      I agree with your (tangential) comment on the inadequacy of the models of COVID transmission. Last Summer (2021), the Irish government modelling team published a bizarre set of predictions about how the Delta variant might propagate. Their "pessimistic" scenario was so extreme that I spent some time examining the underlying model. I am an engineer with a background in fluid mechanics and coupled systems, so the mathematics were very familiar to me. I concluded that the modelling team conducted what were in effect a series of of thought experiments to try to give an indication of the dynamics, but somehow this was translated (by them or those around them) into a set of hard predictions.

      It reminded me of some reactions to the Limits to Growth. The difference of course being that the pandemic could be well understood (not predicted - understood) with a simple logistic curve, while the strong feedback loops in the world system (even in LTG) can yield very complex behaviour.

      The main lesson I took from all this is that evidence based policy is actually like a drug induced fantasy - it feels very real, but it is a hallucination driven by inherent bias. Again we can see this in the policy response to climate change - the incontrovertible science doesn't really impinge on the policy of governments or behaviour of populations.

      Craig

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    9. >There is a fundamental flaw in Georgi's argument: he seems unaware that long-agreed pandemic emergency plans everywhere, pre-2020, basically relied on continuing with BAU, telling people with symptoms to stay at home, advocating increased hygiene, while searching for drug combinations that would lessen serious illness and death to an acceptable level.

      That's for a flu pandemic that comes and goes. It was still wrong, but that's besides the point.

      The important this is that this is not a flu pandemic but an introduction of a completely new class of pathogen in the population that will not go away. And indeed it hasn't -- people's fleeting attention spans and short memories don't allow them to recall that it was supposed to have gone way by now according to many of those whose opinions were in fact listened to in 2020 when the decisions to "live with it" were made. Instead we have wave after wave after wave.

      These are very big and extremely consequential differences.

      >Lock-downs such as we have seen are an unprecedented, crude and counter-productive innovation, above all for a disease with so very low a death-rate among the healthy.

      You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Those people in their 20s that are fine for the first 2-3 reinfections will not be still "fine" the time they get to reinfection #15. This isn't just burning the dry tinder, it is a firestorm that creates its own dry tinder to burn through. Damage is cumulative and much of it is initially hidden but then manifests itself very rapidly when it reaches a certain critical point.

      And lockdowns are a standard public health tool. You know when the last lockdown was before Wuhan? In December 2019, just a month and a half earlier. Check the details:

      https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2019/12/samoa-measles-crisis-nation-in-lockdown-shops-closed-people-banned-from-driving.html
      https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7758857/Samoa-shuts-authorities-battle-deadly-measles-outbreak.html
      https://headtopics.com/ie/samoa-in-lockdown-as-measles-death-toll-reaches-55-9917906

      Yes, schools closed and cars were banned from the streets. Over measles...

      You can also check how smallpox was handled back in the days:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Yugoslav_smallpox_outbreak

      Somehow nobody cried about "what is happening to humanity" because of the Samoa lockdown. I will venture a wild guess that the reason for the differential outrage is that the stock market wasn't affected by what is happening in Samoa and the socioeconomic order that maintains the privileges of the wealthy was not under any threat from it, while the larger scale of what was needed to contain COVID did pose such a threat. So instead of going to the well worked out (and updated with more modern tools such as mass testing) recipe book and following it as they did in China, we were subjected to incessant propaganda from the start aiming to (and very much succeeding) to brainwash people into thinking this isn't going to be like all other coronavirus (i.e. they will get it once and be done with it), it is mild "just like the flu", it isn't a SARS-type coronavirus (i.e. nobody should ever know that SARS1 left half of the survivors disabled for life), basic quarantine measures are unheard of infringements on people's freedom, and it is in the best interest of everyone to catch the virus and lower life expectancy by decades (though that last part was never explicitly mentioned).

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    10. Craig, the LTG model and the pandemic models are very similar -- the pandemic one is much simpler, but the parameters are less well known. Eventually, the saving grace of the LTG model was that it wasn't used to make predictions (although many people misunderstood it in this way). Conversely, the epidemic modelers presented their results as if they were prediction. One of the reasons of the disaster.

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    11. >Conversely, the epidemic modelers presented their results as if they were prediction

      Why are we talking about epidemic models at all?

      You know the IFR and you know that everyone will get infected (seropositivity for the four common cold coronaviruses is 100% and it is 100% nearly 100% of the time, with some drop between reinfections) and you also know that people will get it again and again and again.

      That's all you need to know to warrant Chinese-style zero-tolerance approach, and from there on modeling is just a distraction. In fact the fact that we started doing modeling at all is a sign of our collective failure -- paying attention to models implies that you are not going to do much to stop transmission.

      The only thing "modelling" has any relevance to is to tell you how many people will die in a given wave, but that is largely irrelevant given that there are going to be endless waves.

      And indeed, the initial IFR was as high as 1.5% in some US states before they started applying steroids to dampen the ARDS, then it went down to below 1%. But we already have whole countries where more than 1% of the population has died (e.g. Bulgaria is at 1.2-1.3% now).

      We also have countries were the PFR is higher than the age-stratified mean IFR. That latter value for places like South Africa and Peru was supposed to be 0.3% but the PFR is already 0.5% and 0.7% respectively.

      Which is because the attack rate is 150-200% there.

      So it certainly doesn't seem like the "modeling" that was projecting e.g. 2 million dead in the US was wrong, in fact it was conservative. It didn't get to 2 million dead because infections were limited before vaccines appeared. But now it is guaranteed to eventually get to 2 million because we still refuse to stop transmission.

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    12. SC-2 and the disease it causes is an airborne respiratory virus much like other coronaviruses.It will infect everyone and most mammals too eventually. You can't isolate all life on earth. It has some very unique elements in (lab induced) it but it still behaves very much like other viruses.

      None of the other viruses that have affected populations "go away" they usually follow a pattern of mutating to become more infectious and less lethal. This is how traditional vaccines are made. They infect lab animals, allow it to work through them until the virus has mutated to the point of being safe. Unfortunately they can also manipulate this process to make the virus MORE lethal, this is called "gain of function".

      Healthy people are not adversely affected by these viruses. Unfortunately in todays world there are so many toxins in the air, water, soil, food that almost everyones health is compromised. If we focused on making people healthy we would have very little threat from viruses and bacteria. That would increase the population and reduce "health care industry profits" dramatically.

      75 to 80% of those who died from C-19 were 75 or older nearly 20% were over 90 and with a minimum of 2 comorbidities up to 6+ serious
      comorbidities.

      99.9% of the population had no problems with C-19 and that is without treatment. Yes, for the most part treatment was denied for most who got the disease. That IMO is the major crime here.

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    13. The lockdowns were COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY. They were never necessary and never will be.

      First, the entire COVID thing was a HOAX perpetrated for ulterior motives by nefarious bastards (no kinder word can be used -- sorry). Contemporary analyst Paul Craig Roberts has listed links to many documents by respected medical authorities regarding this issue on his webpage, which those interested can check out. The virus is actually not much more dangerous than the common cold. Sure, it kills, but it mostly only kills those whose immune system is already severely impaired to begin with, such as the elderly.

      Second, there are actually effective measures that can be taken against COVID, which don't require any lockdowns. (And MASKS!) I'm not talking about any vaccine here (no, thank you, it's yet another part of the whole vile scheme of the miscreants). I'm talking about things like hydroxychroloquine and ivermectin, which are supposed to work against COVID but which have been repeatedly blocked -- by who, you can guess, and all for the purpose of forcing you to take the 'vaccine' which can then become their cash cow. Here again one can check out Roberts' website. Face it, the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries are not interested in your health and well-being. No, they're only interested in your wallet. Analyst Charles Hugh Smith has gone so far as to jokingly say that the healthcare industry really should be called the 'sickcare' industry instead.

      It's frankly not unlikely that there are still many more things that the 'sickcare' industry is trying to hide from us, which can actually aid us greatly in protecting ourselves from things like infectious diseases. One example is HYDROGEN PEROXIDE. A few drops of hydrogen peroxide ingested daily can keep away virtually all sorts of the said diseases. Serious. *I* have been ingesting hydrogen peroxide daily for more than two years now and I can proudly say I've never had any cold, fever or sore throat throughout this time. (No, I haven't taken any vaccine, thank you.) One can also check out the book 'The One-Minute Cure' by Madison Cavanaugh at amazon.com, which details the findings regarding, the medicinal uses of, and the attempts to block the use of hydrogen peroxide. Currently the book's got an aggregate rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars from 3,386 reviews. I shall assume it's not the case that 3,386 people have gone mad. Think of how many lives could have been saved if the use of hydrogen peroxide were widely accepted. There might have been no Black Death if the early Europeans knew about it (and the Church didn't block it). And for all we know, it could have been an excellent weapon against COVID.

      Face it, lockdowns serve only one purpose: the exercising of power. The fat ogre currently on the Chinese throne basically just wanted to play 'Zeus'. It's the greatest misfortune possible that it should be someone like this fat ogre who wanted to play 'Zeus', if you ask me; at least Zeus was way more handsome and had a great figure.

      Ultimately, the reason why we're all descending to Hell is because of the desire to play 'Zeus', the desire for endless wealth and power, on the part of a handful of nefarious bastards (sorry again for using this word) known otherwise as the Global Elite. We're all suffering for their hubris.

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    14. Ugo, your "let me explain" comment contains two serious mistakes.

      First, the feature of a virus that could make its eradication unfeasible in practice (i.e. when all relevant facts are considered and given its appropriate weight) is not its being fast mutating but its being highly contagious. It is precisely the difference in transmissibility between SARS2, SARS1 and MERS, which we can express as:

      Transm(SARS2) >> Transm(SARS1) > Transm(MERS)

      which accounts for the difference in difficulty and associated economic cost of the eradication of each virus.

      Second, given Georgi's background, the "you belong to" statements in your comment are just embarrasing.

      https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgi-marinov-8994a220

      Note that I am not making an argument of authority out of his background to support his position.

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    15. Focusing now on Georgi's position, it is both correct in itself and already irrelevant outside China. Appealing to an analogy that Ugo will probably like, it is like advocating for Italy to stay out of WW1, but doing it in 1917.

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    16. The possibility of "eradication" of a virus is a long and difficult story. It has been possible in a couple of cases, but, as you note, it is extremely difficult to do with a virus that moves fast from a reservoir to another. But also the mutation rate counts a lot: think in terms of bacteria. It is their mutation rate that made it impossible to eradicate some harmful bacteria by using antibiotics. The same is true for vaccines against viruses. We may find a good vaccine for a certain virus, but if the virus mutates, the vaccine becomes useless.

      Now, Georgi may have good credentials in some fields of microbiology. Fine, but he comes out with sentences like this one

      "Which has put the Chinese, the only people approaching this situation scientifically and rationally all throughout, in a very tough spot, being encircled by the virus."

      What does that mean? "scientifically and rationally"? On the basis of which data? This is faith, not science.

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    17. But it is precisely the high mutation rate of the virus what makes the (lockdown + mass testing + quarantine) approach the only scientifical and rational one IF public health is the overriding consideration. Because with high mutation rate and non-sterilizing vaccines, doing mass vaccination while letting the virus rip in the population provides a qualitatively and quantitatively optimal breeding ground for new variants that evade the immune response produced by said vaccines (*). In this context, IF you want to keep your population healthy long-term, THEN you have to eradicate the virus, which can be achieved only by (lockdown + ...).

      (*) Have a look at these articles:

      https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/covid-is-becoming-increasingly-vaccine?s=r

      https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/homogenizing-herd-level-antigenic?s=r

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    18. Which is exactly what I say: you have no proof whatsoever that lockdowns and NPIs in general can eradicate an epidemic. As I said, you and Georgi reason on the basis of faith, not on data. And I do follow "El Gato Malo"! He is great!

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    19. Again, someone apparently must have forgotten to tell the Chinese that eradication is impossible because did it on more than a hundred separate occasions.

      If that amount of empirical evidence for the possibility of something constitutes "faith, not data", I can only remain silent for I am absolutely stunned.

      P.S. There is something very curious here. Part of my background is me also being from Eastern Europe. And in Eastern Europe (not just there, but it seems to be particularly prevalent) it is a widespread practice to throw around various conspiracy theories involving the Club of Rome. And that includes even high-profile intellectuals who have provided truly deep insights into lots of other issues. Then the pandemic comes and all of a sudden we have people closely associated with the Club of Rome, who have done high quality scientific work in the past, throwing around weird conspiracy theories about it and behaving as if all that previous work was done by entirely different persons. The absurdity and surreal nature of this situation is hard to describe with words...

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  2. Ugo, every morning now, when I get up and make my coffee, I am thinking about these things, what it will be like when there is no gas to make coffee, no water. How to prepare for the loss of water is always on my mind. My pool is repaired now and empty, the solar pump with the tinaco waiting for the next step, filling it after I get the cover on it. My calculations for how far the water will go...what plants can be irrigated til the rains come, IF the rains come. I have a mechanical pulley back up in case the solar panel is damaged. Buckets...

    But what I think about every day...you say, "connected to a communication network"...but if there is real war, nuclear, maybe EMP, or less, we will know nothing.We will not know what is happening outside of what's out our windows, who is alive, who is dead. Will this drive people crazy...the silence? So, I keep thinking about my shortwave radio, will it work if there is nuclear war, an EMP attack? What do you think?

    I looked at this yesterday when it came up in a comment: What the science says: Could humans survive a nuclear war between NATO and Russia? (Alliance for Science): Scientists studying the outcomes of a nuclear war between NATO and Russia concluded that if 4,400 warheads detonated – equivalent to roughly 1/2 the current inventories held by each side – it would cause 770 million direct deaths, and about 3/4 of humanity would die from starvation within 2 years. That gets it down to Bill Gates Golden Billion, doesn't it...

    What on earth are the Chinese leaders thinking of? They have changed the number of children they can have upward, but they are acting like they want to kill the population, or drive it mad, which is not conducive to children. What are they doing? No sane person will ever want to live in a city or high rise again, which are traps.

    I haven't listened to the whole Globalist meeting from the Corbett report yet, because I don't want it on my mind now, but how many will die or go mad, or switch to barter with the currency digitized and controlled expenditures (here in Mexico already underway due to the pandemic pressures, where 50% of the population doesn't have bank accts, and when the govt opened them for them, they let them die).

    I am having breakfast in a sweet, little, local cafe Wednesday a.m. with a friend while I wait for the truck to be serviced and have decided the conversation should be about the best weeks of our life...focus on the pleasures.

    Thanks for writing this. C.

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    1. There are already many things we know nothing about. What we see is a pale reflection of enormous forces moving behind the scenes. Now we see darkly, as in a mirror.....

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    2. Having read thousands of pages about climate change (aka global warming)when I was teaching and since, that is exactly how I feel about it too...we can watch and see what we can see, but the variables are way too far unknown to say the things some people or writers say. C.

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  3. "There will be better times in the future.There always will be."
    Yes, but for whom?

    "Ci saranno tempi migliori in futuro.Ci saranno sempre".
    Sì, ma per chi?

    Marco Sclarandis

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  4. No me aclaro, Ugo. Primero dices: "No se puede saber lo que puede pasar cuando ahora pasan cosas que nunca antes habían pasado". O sea: futuro incógnito. Pero acabas el post prediciendo el futuro en base al pasado, afirmando: "Vendrán tiempos mejores; siempre los hay" Una aparente contradicción, creo, salvo que pienses sólo en Gaia y no en la especie humana. ¿Es así?.

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    1. I am sorry, Juan. I was not so clear. But I was taking the long view. This planet still has 500 million years to go, perhaps a billion years. Better times will come, but most likely not for us.

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    2. A totalitarian top has infected what was once a free West. President Joe Biden, on video, stated that a general told Him there is going to be a new world order and we need to be the leader of it. Will the good and spiritual people of Italy flower in freedom again? Will it come to - "From the ashes, a new world is born?

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  5. Thanks for this — and it’s not just Shanghai.

    In 1945 the world said, “Never again”. Well, it’s happening again. We hear that hundreds, maybe thousands, of civilians in Ukraine have been senselessly murdered. And it’s not just civilians — the young Russians who have been blown to pieces or burned alive in their tanks and helicopters are victims also.

    And it’s not just Ukraine. Similar events are taking place in Ethiopia, and probably many other places. We just don’t hear about them.

    Of course, “man’s inhumanity to man” is hardly new, as we see whenever we crack open any history book. But what is new is the world-wide connectivity that you allude to, and the potential for world-wide war.

    Regarding the pandemic, a few days ago two friends of ours — both of them in their 80s — contracted the disease. They are recovering, but the virus has not gone away. Our church (in central Virginia) has adopted a policy which seems to make sense. We encourage people to vaccinate (and they do); we ask them to wear a mask in meetings (which most people do); we have ‘zoned’ some of the pews for those who wish to maintain social distancing; and we require the wearing of masks if we leave the green zone for our county as determined by the CDC. We seem to have struck a sensible balance between caution and openness.

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  6. "It is a planetary-sized zombie" - that is actually running out of fuel - the more it zombies...

    The more it zombies, the quicker it is over...

    So, bring it on...


    "Energy, like time, flows from past to future"

    Wailing.

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  7. Given that current conservative estimates at around 5% the risk of long covid amongst infected people. Given that here in France people keep getting reinfected again and again. I never caught covid but know many people who got it twice or even 3 times. It seems that the likelyhood of getting long covid at some point in your life tends to 100%. But instead of taking that as another sign of the relevancy of Meadows'LTG, you keep hinting at a plot that you never dare to enlighten us fully about.
    I thought there was no plot needed for clocks to give the same time. People synchronize. For instance, there was no need for a plot, but with today's situation in Ukraine, one could believe our elites saw a perfect opportunity to ensure the inevitable energetic and material degrowth that was coming anyway due to peak oil would happen without any social justice. Does that mean there was a plot and they planned it ? I doubt so until proven otherwise. Same with covid. Great money-making business for sure. But I am still waiting for the cohesive explanation behind your constant conspirationnist allusions.
    Sorry if that comes out harsh. Got huge respect for your work.

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    1. Sorry, Gracchus, I guess I wasn't clear, but this matter is complex and difficult. I have no "cohesive explanation" -- nor I propose conspiracies. The way I described what's happening in the post is

      "In this case, the system may simply have become too big to be under anyone or anything's control. The feedbacks are untangling themselves, by themselves, like in a giant Jenga tower starting to fall. The immense creature quivers, moves, oscillates, bumps up and down as it mashes information flows that push it in one direction or another. It is a planetary-sized zombie. It doesn't know where it is going, it just moves on, crushing everything it steps on. "

      That is, it is the system itself that decides in which direction to go on the basis of thousands/millions/billions of elements pulling in different direction.

      It is not a conspiracy, although it is also true that some elements of the system have much more pulling force than others. I am planning another post where I try to propose an explanation of what exactly is going on in China. But I tend to agree with this interpretation by Jeffrey Tucker. https://brownstone.org/articles/the-china-model-unravels-in-shanghai/

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  8. I would like to add that I totally agree that civil liberties have been stepped on here in France because of covid. I am vaccinated but always opposed vaccine pass.

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  9. People screaming in the night? I remember seeing this two years ago in Wuhan. The same videos were circulating. You could also see people falling down in the street, people wearing overalls, sometimes armed. Buildings were barricaded from the outside and people were killing themselves. We were waiting for the same thing to happen here, we didn't know the virus and we were afraid. And then what? The apocalypse was overdue.
    So I don't buy that kind of fear anymore. I'll believe it when I see it.
    That doesn't mean that nothing is happening, that there aren't dark forces ready to strike. I just want to emphasize that we shouldn't let ourselves be discouraged or defeatist, let's keep a fighting spirit and a reasonable optimism no matter what happens. The darkness will take those who are unprepared or too terrified to act first.

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  10. I think I've seen this movie before - https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/times-fact-check/news/fact-check-are-these-wuhan-residents-screaming-and-begging-for-their-lives/articleshow/74062839.cms

    Even in the age of instant communications, it's so incredibly difficult to know what's actually happening in the world.

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    1. Yes, I read that, too. That they were not screaming in rage, but cheering each other. It may be. Even in Italy, for a while people were singing from their windows or on balconies. If they are locked again, this time they will be screaming in rage.

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  11. https://alphanews.org/commentary-who-died-from-covid-19-in-minnesota/

    Summary:

    69.29 percent of “COVID” death certificates listed at least three co-morbidities
    50 percent listed at least four co-morbidities
    34 percent listed at least five co-morbidities
    21 percent listed at least six co-morbidities

    In total, only 2.67 percent of the 10,984 certificates they examined were “COVID only” — with no comorbidity listed.

    Some of the co-morbidities listed were:

    Hypertension and throat cancer
    Pulmonary embolism during an elective surgery
    Sepsis-like syndrome
    Traumatic brain injury caused by a pedestrian being struck by a car
    Essential hypertension, GERD, dementia, cerebral infarction
    Blunt force craniocerebral injuries caused by a fall
    Acute kidney injury with hyperkalemia, and congestive heart failure
    Emphysema, congestive heart failure, hypertension, and advanced age
    Peripheral vascular disease and uncontrolled type 2 diabetes

    In addition, Pulles’ team took a close look at the ages of the deceased:

    For those who died in 2020 with COVID-19 as the cause of death on their certificate, the average age was 80.84
    In 2021, the average age was 74.07
    20 percent of Minnesotans listed by the state as COVID deaths were over the age of 90
    50 percent over the age of 80
    74 percent over the age of 70
    Only 209 COVID deaths occurred in those under the age of 40
    Only eight COVID deaths occurred in those under the age of 20

    In addition, over 5,500 of those classified as having died from COVID-19 were in a nursing home. (For context, remember that at least 50 percent of people die within six months upon entering a nursing home.)

    Above summary from: https://dissidentvoice.org/2022/04/a-pandemic-of-co-morbidities/

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  12. Long time reader, first time commentor

    Hugo, do you know this gentleman? He puts into words what i've been thinking since this all began back in early march 2020. I've been waiting for something like this since 2008, because it was apparent in 08 we were bankrupt and the "authorities" were just buying time by buying all the bad debt their friends in fiance had created and making sure they continued to call the shots.

    Italian Author i believe, would love to hear your thoughts on it!

    https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/a-self-fulfilling-prophecy-systemic-collapse-and-pandemic-simulation/

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    1. I know him. And I met him in person, once. Fascinating stories he tells!

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    2. Thank you for the reply Ugo, and i'll take your reply as saying its just a story. But some of us were watching the REPO market begin to blow up in August September of 2019 waiting for the market to blow sky high like 08. Heck they started printing money even before it which shall not be named struck. Chicken and the egg i suppose but his timeline and "story" strikes me as more true then anything i've seen on the tv or "media" the past two years. Thanks again for the reply!

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    3. I read a couple of Vighi's posts. He's well into tinfoil hat territory, believing as he does that "that all geopolitical events either originate in or are heavily conditioned by what happens in the financial Olympus. The Putin-pandemic, then, is driven by the same ruse that drove the Covid-pandemic: it gives Central Banks a free license to prolong their monumental printing sprees...".

      For him, nothing happens except as it is directed by financial elites. The Great Reset is a horrific conspiracy by elites directed toward the enslavement of everyone else. At the very most, Vighi is just rehashing "New World Order" Jewish banker conspiracies that have been floating around in the antisemitic underworld for decades.

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  13. It is more or less obvious that they are occupying the Chinese quarantine to hide supply chain disaster, systemic production problems (shortages), and resource depletion (including diesel fuel).

    Antoine

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  14. Hello Ugo,

    What do you think of calling this a metaphorical "autoimmune disorder" of an obese society?

    I think that we witness an immune system (that is supposed to keep society healthy) which has turned onto society itself, killing its own constituents.

    A bit like the whole swath of inflammation driven autoimmune diseases that attack obese and wrongly fed people.

    Peace,
    Goran

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  15. The China lockdowns are intended to inflict pain on the US et al by disrupting their supply chains under the guise of a 'legitimate' reason. This is China's contribution to Russia in the Ukraine. The US cannot survive without Chinese imports. China uses the political cover of the Covid lockdown to apply the export screws. And they can take the heat. While the US, being corrupt, weak and fragile, cannot. Lesson inflicted.

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  16. Hola Ugo te leo con interés desde que Antonio Turiel confesó seguirte, felicidades por tu Blog. Espero con impaciencia tu siguiente artículo, quizás entienda mejor entonces tu postura en todo esto del Covid y los confinamientos.

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    1. Thanks. It is a pleasure to hear that I have readers from Ade!

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  17. Folks, I am not passing any more comments on lockdowns, especially when they start entering into conspiracy theories. If you have data to show, you are welcome. If you are simply stating your faith-based beliefs, do that somewhere else.

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    1. We do have data to show, and I did show it to you -- the Chinese have eliminated it completely on more than a hundred separate occasions, the Vietnamese did it 4 or 5 times, Taiwan did it half a dozen times, Australia did it about a dozen times, Singapore and New Zealand did it several times each.

      For every single one of these places their first elimination would also have been the last (as it was the case in the first SARS outbreaks back in 2003) if various mass murderers and useful idiots in the rest of the world had not successfully lobbied for letting it rip.

      Yet you still claim lockdowns and NPIs cannot eliminate the virus.

      Then you refuse to to post the comments explaining it to you.

      You are completely ruining your reputation as a scientist with such disgraceful and disgusting intellectually dishonest behavior.

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    2. Ugo, you don't think that "cui bono" is reason enough? Trade China-Russia is booming for example. And Eurasia is generally peaceful even though many countries are starting to experience disorder.

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    3. Maybe... see my next post. Should appear soon

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    4. I think those high rises are the real virus. Its a centuries long pandemic, it first started in the USA, like the spanish flu. Whether you are forced or not, you spend most of your life in those concrete cloud ticklers.
      Id scream everyday

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  18. In the long way down we better would look for some pleaseure and happiness. Not only focus on bad consequences. There are plenty of things we may find to do our lives interesting and worthwhile. Natural world is our true home and will give us much joy in many different ways.

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