A web of interests
In “The Foundation of Theories” I tried to make the point about the inevitability of what we are seeing around us. We somehow managed to push ourselves into a corner economically, politically, philosophically, culturally and maybe even civilizationally. I also made the point that being trapped in that corner created the fertile ground for the insanity we are experiencing for the past two years. However, none of this apparent inevitability, none of the circumstances can excuse the despicable and often criminal behaviour of so many, nor lessen the virtue of those standing up against it. It is time to take a look at the heroes, the villains, the dupes and the victims of this scamdemic. We’ll start with the villains and their web of colluding interests.
Apart of its brazen audacity, nothing is new about the players, their goals and motivations. There is nothing new about greed, the will to power, short term and self interest, opportunism and sheepish, unthinking compliance. They just came together in a perfect storm that may still destroy the world as we know it.
By now, the evidence is so overwhelming that it isn’t even controversial to say that:
The virus escaped from a lab which is part of a network of institutions engaging in biological warfare research for decades. The gain of function research was financed partly by the US taxpayers through its various bureaucracies.
For some the crisis was planned, for some it was a welcome opportunity and it was shamelessly exploited by all.
The virus was not any more dangerous than the seasonal flu, and it could have been easily managed by existing medications.
The ‘scientists’ cheated, the media lied, the health-care system and the politicians killed, while the globalists clearly did not let a good crisis go to waste.
The question then, is who are the villains? What motivates them? What are their incentives? What are they hoping to achieve?
The villains are many. The greedy pharma executives, the corrupted scientists, the resource hungry health-care providers, the cowardly, conformist medical doctors, the cheating and lying politicians, the corrupt regulatory agencies, the opportunist globalists, the compromised media, the hired hit-piece writers masquerading as ‘independent fact-checkers’, the list is long. It is difficult to rank them because they are feeding on each other. You may ask, for example, who is more culpable – the politician seeking campaign donations, or the donor expecting a return on his ‘investment’ in the form of a favourable legislation? Could big pharma be as powerful as it is without the profits afforded to them by the health care regulations and the very generous patent laws? Corruption grows in a slow process of iterations with the stakes slowly getting higher in every turn. The web of self interest and corruption is also getting more complex. Let’s look at the players!
Big Pharma
Pharmaceutical companies are still trying to cultivate the image of the heroic research scientists tirelessly laboring on finding new ways to save mankind from the horrors of various illnesses and diseases; that they are like Louis Pasteur. In reality, nothing can be further from the truth. The pharmaceutical industry is hopelessly corrupt and even more seriously corrupting. Big pharma is on the top of the food chain of a whole ecosystem of corruption. It is in full control of health care regulations, medical education, all medical research, the peer-review process, all medical publications and ‘standards of care’ definitions. They are spending hundreds of millions in the US on lobbying, which is a thinly veiled synonym for institutionalized bribery. Their interest is profit. There is no profit in healing but there is a lot of it in chronic illnesses and lifelong drug dependence. There is very little money in curing the few sick people from a minor illness with a cheap drug, but there is a lot in forcing everybody to submit to repeated vaccination whether it is needed or not. If someone found a cheap, easy and unpatentable cure for cancer, you can be assured that the pharmaceutical companies will do everything in their power to get it banned. And power they have. Morals they don’t. Several books have been written about their crimes; several billion-dollar settlements have been paid by them for various wrongdoings, which makes perfectly understandable why they felt necessary to spend whatever was needed to get blanket immunity for the crimes they are committing now.
Big Science – the scientists
“Trust the science!” “Listen to the scientists!” “Most scientist agrees….” Scientists are posited as the custodians of knowledge and science as the oracle of truth. In reality, nothing can be further from the truth. It’s not just that science is never settled and is supposed to be constantly evolving; it’s not just that scepticism is supposed to be its most important element, but mainly the fact that science does not equal scientists. Science is ideas, methods and principles, while scientists are people. Fallible, error prone and very easily corruptible. Their interests are prestige and funding for their work. They are willing to compromise for some research dollars and citations of their publications. Science is an extremely competitive field and scientists know that they should not bite the hand that feeds them.
Big science – education
When we think of doctors, we do not think of Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Mengele. Our doctors supposed to have the highest moral standards and be educated with the best available knowledge at the time of their education. That’s the idea. In reality, nothing can be further from the truth. Medical students are not learning about the cutting edge of the science, they are indoctrinated into the accepted wisdom at the time. They are strongly discouraged from thinking for themselves, from deviating from the ‘accepted practices’. They are trained to be compliant representatives of the medical zeitgeist. Big Pharma has an inordinate influence on medical education steering it toward the type of medicine that relies on life long drug dependence and away from natural and preventative medicine. The interest of medical education is to keep its most important financial supporters (Big Pharma) happy.
Big science – publications
The ideal of scientific journals is a strict adherence to standards such as objectivity, impartiality, transparency. In reality, nothing can be further from the truth. Big Parma has an outsized influence on medical Journals as well. Journals are dependent for their survival on the advertising of drug companies and the kick-backs in the form of buying reprints of articles that pharma salesman use to push their drugs to medical doctors. Big pharma has utterly corrupted medical journals and pushed any discussion of alternatives to expensive, patentable drugs to the fringes of medical science. The interest of medical journals is not the honest promotion of medical science, but to keep Big Pharma happy. They depend on them for their very existence.
Big Health
Canadians love the idea of their socialist healthcare, especially those whose opinion is based mostly on the idea alone. The idea of a caring, egalitarian system where everybody gets the best care in the world. In reality, nothing can be further from the truth. The system is chronically short on resources, the care is not provided with any resemblance of equality, there are waiting lines for essential procedures, except for the ones that are not covered by the ‘free’ system. I could get a sex change operation for free, but I have to pay for all my dental work. I can get the Covid vaccine for free, but if I want my vitamin D levels tested, I have to pay for that. The health care system is just one of the many government bureaucracies competing for the tax dollars and it has far more to do with politics than health. Like with any other socialist system, you are not the customer. If you are not paying for it, you are the product. In most aspects, the US system isn’t any different. Doctors are not free to practice medicine according to their conscience. They have rules to follow. The interest of the health care industry is to stay alive, to control access to the nominally free resources and to keep their paymasters and regulators happy. It is not about helping or curing their patients.
Big medicine
The image of medical doctors is still the romantic, 19th century ideal of the heroic healer dedicating his life to the well being of his patients; being the doctors with the sacred oath of doing no harm. In reality, nothing can be further from the truth. The medical profession is the most heavily regulated and controlled profession in the world. It is also the most brainwashed, dogmatic, politicized and bureaucratized. The education of doctors is corrupted and controlled by the health care bureaucracy which is in turn controlled by the drug industry and political interest. Through these controls, medicine is yesterday’s scientific fashion turned into today’s medical dogma. While many doctors got into the profession with the ideals in their mind, few can maintain the spirit of it. Most will become captive of the milliards of rules and restriction resigned to do what is prescribed to them. The interest of medicine is to conform, to maintain the illusion and to fend off new ideas or alternatives challenging the established ‘science’. Doctors are not bad; they are just trained that way.
Big Politics
Social democracies are the manifestations of the concept of collective decision making through representation. The idea is that we elect people to represent our interest and, in the end, we will end up with a result that the majority of us wanted. Every aspiring politician wants to see himself as Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, the idealist standing up for the principles of democracy. In reality, nothing can be further from the truth. The moment they are elected, politicians become part of an ecosystem where they have to survive. Special interest, party discipline, deal-making, ideological and Machiavellian compromises that leave little time to consider the will of their constituents. The interest of politicians is re-election. They will help anybody, who makes that possible for them. There are only two ways for a politician to survive: be cynical or corrupt. Actually, it is more of a sequence than a choice. First, they lose their illusions and become cynical. Once they are past cynical, corruption feels natural.
Big Bureaucracy
We cannot expect our politicians to know everything. They need expert help. The idea behind the regulatory bureaucracies is that we need the best and the smartest from every field of human activity to set the framework for the laws and rules for everybody else in their field of expertise. From the same premise it also follows that they must be the best people from to manage, and enforce the laws and their own regulations. That is the ideal. The reality is far from the ideal. Bureaucrats are unelected and largely unaccountable. They wield enormous power over the field they regulate. We also need to recognise, that their expertise must come from somewhere. More often than not, that is the field they regulate. Regulatory capture is practically unavoidable. There is no field where this is more true than health care. These regulatory agencies (FDA, CDC) and their various subsidiaries are by far the most corrupt, corruptible, rotten part of American politics. So are their international counterparts. Eventually, they all end up being the whores of the industries they are supposed to regulate. The industry they regulate is international and in complete control of UN agencies such as the World Health Organization. (See Robert F. Kennedy’s book for details) Their interest is to keep the racket going, the money and the power coming.
Big media
The glory days of print media, broadcast radio and television are long gone, but the dying industry is still pretending to live by its ideals expressed in tag-lines. “All the news that’s fit to print.” “Journalism of Courage” “When the Times speaks, the World listens.” “The most trusted name in news” The ideal is the tireless investigative reporter, speaking truth to power and presenting it to his reader and viewers with impeccable impartiality and objectivity. In reality, nothing can be further from the truth. The media is hopelessly partisan, getting to the point where hardly anything is news, all reporting is just a take on it.
My biggest personal disappointment is seeing what happened to The Economist. In the course of the past ten years, it went from liberal centrism to an extreme shrill supporter of the globalist agenda. No wonder. Zanny Minton-Beddoes is an illustrious member of the World Economic Forum while her husband is a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. Globalism runs in the family. Unfortunately, The Economist runs with it.
The interest of the media is to get your attention and to keep it as long as they can; to play on your emotions, to manipulate you but above all, to serve the interest of their owners and advertisers. A big chunk of the news media at this point is owned by tech billionaires with agendas.
Big Facts
Fact checking is, was and should be an essential function in any media organization, to protect its reputation as a reliable source of truthful information. The concept of ‘independent’ fact checkers, on the other hand did not even exist ‘till about ten years ago. The fact-checkers of yore were checking the reliability of the information given to them before publication, the new ones are all post-hoc ‘fact- checkers’ with the aim of discrediting public statements they happen to disagree with. Can they possibly be objective? Absolutely not. Every single one of them is partisan, with serious conflicts of interest with their funders and clients. Glenn Beck did a very decent show on the corruption of these so-called fact checkers in 2020. They were all created and are owned, controlled, financed and mostly staffed by media organizations or politically motivated organizations such as Politico, Media Matters and the Open Society Foundation. Their business model is simple: they are hit-piece writers for hire. The years of Covid were (and still are) a bonanza for them. They are unscrupulous liars and vicious slanderers. Their interest is to polarize, as polarization is the foundation their business is built upon.
Big Truth
One of the greatest achievements of Western Civilization is the encyclopedia of the enlightenment. It had a rocky start with censorship, but then for a couple of hundreds of years, encyclopedias were some of the most reliable sources of information for the layman on just about any subject. They were always a several years behind, but fairly trustworthy. The ideal was that trustworthiness with the assurance that changes will be incorporated, not just replaced. Then came the digital age when all online knowledge is live. When celebrities die today, that information will be in their Wikipedia page before the end of the day. This could be good, but it applies to everything. Every ‘truth’ is the truth of the day. True today, may be gone tomorrow. Within the last year and the half, the official definition of what a vaccine is has been changed twice. Just as I am writing this, I found out that the definition of ‘anti-waxxer’ also changed to include opposition to waccine mandates. At the time when the creation of new information and knowledge is easier than ever, so is its destruction. Words are not just fading out of use, but get redefined or forcibly removed by self appointed truth-keepers. The interest of the truth-keepers is the control the narrative and the ruthless control of dissent. The truth has never been this precarious, vulnerable, not even in the darkest days of Stalinism. What is true, what is a fact, what is science, what is within some arbitrarily defined guidelines is determined by a bunch of self-appointed, unaccountable, ideology and self-interest driven autocrats. (I actually meant to say ‘little fascists’, but I am trying to stay civil))
Big Money
This pandemic created the largest wealth transfer in the shortest time within my lifetime. The rich got richer at the expense of the middle class. Bezos & Zuckerberg picked up 34.6 and 25 Billions, respectively, in two months. As a libertarian, I always stood up for the right of the rich to be rich. The (libertarian) ideal is that those who innovate, work hard and outcompete the others deserve the fruit of their labour. In reality, that is not how it works. The moment companies reach a certain size, the moment they can afford to choose corruption over competition, many do. They buy media companies, politicians, regulators, anything that would make them more money. Just consider how much money Jeff and Mark made on the lock-downs. How much have they spent on keeping it going? The interest of Big Money is to make more money. By any means they can get away with.
Big Philanthropy
The philanthropists of the 19th century were building monuments for themselves. Hospital, libraries, opera houses and nature reserves. In the 20th century they created big endowments to support the arts. It all went downhill from there. In the second half of the 20th century philanthropies became indulgence collectors dispensing about 10% of the money collected on their nominal cause. Then came Bill Gates, who not only embraced, but reinvented Philanthrocapitalism. Here is the business model: He donates his money to a charity he controls, and create an investment fund in it for the purpose of generating wealth for the foundation. He uses the charity as a marketing vehicle to sell the products (vaccines in Africa, medical research, etc) that the charity is invested in. On the top of it, he is investing his own money in the same stocks. Money is power and Philanthrocapitalism is a powerful money-maker. The interest of Philanthrocapitalism is uncontrolled political power for the benefit of its controllers.
Big Globalism
In his book “The Better Angels of Our Nature” Steve Pinker makes the argument that the centralization of power creates a more peaceful world. The ideal is to live in harmony, prosperity and material equality. In reality, globalization means two quite different things. It can mean the globalization of trade but it can also mean the globalization - meaning centralization - of power. The globalists like Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates and George Soros aim for the second. Their vision is some sort of technological feudalism where “You will own nothing and you will be happy.” The natural state of humans is tribal. We evolved in small tribes and the tribal attitude is still the foundation of human societies. The interest of the globalists is to make nation states and democracy irrelevant by making their elected politicians subservient to global institution and to shock the people living in those nominal democracies into accepting the loss of their freedoms. They have the most support from the monied global elite who would benefit from bypassing troublesome dealings with local democracies.
We could continue with the list of villains, such as big education and big ideology but they are not directly responsible for this particular atrocity. The people who are leading, representing or just working for the above identified interests are.
Who they are and what their actual crimes are, will be the subject of another post.