One problem with covering Covid right now is that it’s becoming harder and harder to get good stats, because governments want to pretend it’s over. In Canada, the best reporting provincial government is Quebec, so we’ll look at that and I’m quite sure this is effectively the picture everywhere, though the bumps may not synchronize. The important line is the orange one, that’s excess mortality. It’s over 35%. And these numbers are a known understatement.
Sorry. The picture above was NOT Canada's fast-reporting provinces. It was Quebec, Canada's fastest-reporting provinces and the only province that still tries to track and report COVID in a transparent, complete fashion.
More than 35% excess mortality on Dec 31/22. pic.twitter.com/bMfueZTADP
— Tara Moriarty (@MoriartyLab) April 1, 2023
This is typical of the charts I’ve seen tracking Covid—the numbers aren’t at peak, but they are as high or higher than they were for most of the official pandemic.
Meanwhile there is Long Covid. A Danish study:
As part of an effort to better flesh out the burden of long COVID, Danish researchers today reported a threefold increase in extended sick leave, defined as lasting longer than 30 days, in people who had recovered from COVID, compared to workers who weren’t infected.
Some 1.9 mln people across the UK are currently estimated to be suffering from #longCOVID, or 2.9% of the population. The figure is up from 689,000 at the start of January and 514,000 in September 2022
the number of children under 16 with self-reported Long Covid of any duration ‘increased from 77,000 in October 2021, to 119,000 in January 2022
So we decided to pretend the plague was over and stopped doing the anti-plague stuff like masking:
When you read on Twitter that #masks didn't work in schools,… you are reading a post from someone who is lying. Masks actually helped STAFF stay healthy, not just students. It is that simple. #CovidIsNotOver #maskswork #pediatrics #tweetiatrician https://t.co/Ob9sqYY5mg pic.twitter.com/2HHhko2v49
— Jake Kane, MD, MS, FCCM, FAAP (@JakeKaneMD) March 9, 2023
Covid is still a thing. What’s as bad, maybe worse, is the hospital crush. Politicians pretend Covid is over, but hospitals still have to deal with it, not just in terms of patients but in terms of sick doctors, nurses and other staff. Last year I went to a cancer clinic and had to wait many hours. I asked why? “Three of the four doctors are out with Covid.”
Oh.
Where I live wait times in emergency departments are often 8 hours, sometimes more. They were a couple hours or less before Covid and strangely, now that Covid is “over” they haven’t gone back to 2 hours.
Test times, surgery times, everything times are delayed, and as a result people become more seriously ill or die. Excess deaths from Covid are vastly overstated if they only include Covid and Covid-related damage, because patients with heart and cancer and other problems are dying due to delayed care.
The decision has been made to just live with the plague. If we want to do that, and we clearly do, then we have to adjust our society. We have to train more doctors and nurses and other hospital staff like technicians. We have to increase hospital budgets. We need more long-term care beds and we need to make support available to people with long Covid who can’t work: both financial and outpatient nursing care.
But to do that, as with doing anything, we’d have to spend quite a bit more money on healthcare, and since the only place to get money from is the rich, the poor and middle class being tapped out, that means taxing the rich, which is verboten.
The human propensity to just pretend that problems they don’t want to exist don’t exist in is full display now with respect to Covid, as it has been for generations with respect to climate and environmental collapse. The problem is that some problems don’t care if we don’t want them to exist, they still exist and they get worse (see those increases in people with Long Covid or all the fires and droughts and whatnot from early climate change.)
There is a real world, and sticking our heads in the sand doesn’t make it go away. But it does kill a lot of people and make a lot of other people disabled.
As usual, none of these problems can truly be dealt with while our current elites are in power. If we want them fixed, our elites have to go and be entirely replaced.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
Ché Pasa
1: “Entirely replaced” with whom? Non-elites are unskilled and incapable by design. Individual doctors may have ideas, some of which work or seem to, but applying those ideas to a system that is itself corrupt and desperate doesn’t make it work. Systemic reform — preferably replacement — is far more difficult, and “we” don’t have the skills or resources to do it.
2: Starting over may seem impossible under current circumstances, but history suggests it’s the only way. It’s not pretty. It’s not easy. Many sacrifices are required, most of which cannot be anticipated or planned for. Human sacrifices are a major part of those requirements. Who is sacrificed and when is a question. Our rulers are making those decisions right now, and we are seeing the consequences in shortened lifespans and increasing numbers of excess deaths throughout global populations — though statistics are not necessarily available or reliable. We don’t really know how bad it is — assuming we agree it’s bad.
The Die-Off has begun — by now it’s well under way. It’s not just Covid. Oh no. It’s a wide variety of killer-diseases. And more importantly, it’s neglect.
We’re not prepared. But we can become so… can’t we?
Willy
The worst case scenario is that coronavirus research was offshored with disastrous results, big pharma took advantage (as most MBA-types in corporations are eager to do), and governments made socioeconomic calculations which will continue to cost many lives.
Gee, I cant wait til the next clusterfuck which our rich can profit from. Maybe Fermi’s paradox is the always natural result of concentrated power in any life form, I dunno. I’m in a mood, again.
Joe Bauers mode on.
My railing supplier screwed up badly, despite having advertised “railing design experts“ on staff and a 3D CAD stairway railing design from a former-engineer-now-installer (myself) willing to take all the supplies in raw stock lengths. I guess what I’m saying is, just imagine what damage “elites” can do when given great power over a great many, and then imagine them being too big to be failblogged.
Joe Bauers mode off.
P.S. Sometimes, I conspiracy theorize that anti-vaxxers, covid-hoaxers, covid-catastrophizers… are being astroturfed by our PTB, to get the mob focus off of sanely debating possible solutions to their latest debacle. So maybe not all of our current elites are entirely incompetent.
Clonal Antibody
Ian,
You might want to look at my long twitter thread as to how Medicare can be given to everyone in the US by the Executive. The path to it is already encoded in the ACA
https://twitter.com/ClonalAntibody/status/1308194727460651008
Feral Finster
Everyone of influence and authority wants it over, as COVID was taking attention from the Empire’s wars on Ukraine and China.
Therefore, COVID will not be receiving any kind of attention, unless and until it becomes convenient again.
different clue
Whatever any group of humans are doing is clearly expressing the particular human propensity among that group of humans. That is separately true for every separate group of humans. Perhaps propensity oozes from one group into another where two or more human groups overlap.
Naked Capitalism ( especially Lambert’s Watercooler-Feature ) is displaying a particular human propensity among a particular group of reality-based covid cautious humans to gather best information on what the facts are and what they mean and how reality-based people can respond to them and apply them in their own lives. Corsi boxes is an example.
The covid pandemic may have broken out by accident to begin with. I am prepared to accept either a Wuhan wet-market or an accidental lab leak origin. After it was discovered, it was suppressed by Wuhanese authorities determined to look good and keep up appearances. When it was too runamok in China to cover up anymore, the CPC took command to contain and suppress.
The WHO under Gebreyesus ( and his secret handlers) worked very hard to foster the epidemic and MAKE it spread and achieve pandemic status, in part by lying about the non-existence of a pandemic-level of spreadaround. The WHO’s mission was very clearly to deliberately turn covid into a world-covering pandemic, on purpose and with malice aforethought. The same for CDC and Fauci in America. This is not something “we” did. This is something the Overclass Occupation Regime did to us.
@Willy,
Those who accept the basic fact that the authorities turned the fortuitous appearance of Covid into a pandemic deliberately and on purpose will further accept that the authorities are very competent at Jackpot Design Engineering and Deployment. That is made even more clear by contrasting our authorities’s actions with the actions of the CPC for a while, various East Asian governments, a couple of European Governments, taking very different measures to try to contain and suppress covid within their borders. Western Australia also worked to keep the Covid Zombies from the rest of Australia out of Western Australia for a while. Perhaps because certain mines in Western Australia provide very important raw materials for China and the CPC quietly instructed the Western Australian authorities to keep the CPC’s “beasts of burden” safe and alive to keep mining. The Spice must flow.
Perhaps the question of who can do what to whom in order to remove the malicious human obstacles in the way of better disease-containment performance could take the form of the Three What Woulds . . .
What would Jesus do?
What would Stalin do?
What would Scooby do?
( some humor being necessary to get through these humorless times) . . .
And remember, in the Kingdom of the Witless, the Half-Wit Man is King.
Purple Library Guy
@Che Pasa I don’t see your “With whom?” problem. Who would you rather be in charge–people who don’t know what they’re doing but want to make things better, or people who are very skilled and knowledgeable . . . at picking your pocket and in general deliberately making things worse for you? Expertise isn’t much help if it’s devoted to doing evil. Plus, ignorant people can learn, but people who want to hose you, if they learn more things just get worse.
Of course that’s accepting the basic premise, which is to a fair degree false. The people in charge generally don’t know a whole lot. Turbocharged example: Donald Trump. But how much does Trudeau know? Poilievre? How much do any of their patronage/political ally appointments know? The ones that do know anything, who are considered “experts”, mostly know nothing about specific fields, all they know about is neoliberal economics and finance, the first of which is systematically wrong and the second of which is systematically worse than useless. And further, they tend to have a technocratic viewpoint, meaning they don’t think there’s anything TO know that they don’t already, and don’t think there’s much point finding out what’s happening on the ground. To the extent that they try to find out, there’s so many layers of yes-men between them and any real thing happening in the world that there is no way they can learn anything useful.
So for instance, if you took a random nurse and put them in charge of a province’s health system, they wouldn’t do a perfect job, but they’d still be better than what we tend to get, which is “CEO” types with backgrounds in running private corporations that aren’t even in the health field.
All that in turn assumes you need leaders at all. The problem with direct grassroots democracy is not that it doesn’t work; it works fine. Plenty of co-ops, participatory budgeting processes and such have shown this clearly. The problem is that it doesn’t scale–not everyone can be involved in all decisions.
But this is actually a problem for hierarchy as well: The top dog cannot be involved in all decisions in a large organization, there are too many. Micromanagement rapidly becomes impossible, and there are masses of tools and approaches and research for how to extend the hierarchy’s reach. Early experiments with hierarchy seem to have faced serious limits because they didn’t have all these techniques; a tribe would have a god-king whose word was law, who could order someone killed arbitarily or whatever they wanted . . . but nobody paid attention to them if they weren’t actually present right there. If you were just TOLD the god-king had given an order it was like “So? He’s not talking to me right now, and I don’t have to do what YOU say.” Getting hierarchy to work at scale took a lot of work and thought, and billions of dollars are still being sunk into improving it.
It should be possible to scale egalitarian decision-making as well. I have a scheme for it. Rather than a principle of everyone being involved in every decision, you split things up, with lots of different groups working on different things. The principle would be that anyone CAN be involved in any decision they want to be, and everyone has a DUTY to be involved in SOME decisions. Further, every decision-making group should normally have some proportion of randomly assigned people, to dilute clique formation. And, there should be broader, nested groups that decisions can be pushed out to. So if some people in a little standards group decide to mandate something really sweeping or self-dealing, but 25% think that this is out of line or too big for the small group to decide, they can vote to push it out to the broader umbrella standards group, which maybe includes the committees for a bunch of different standards. Broader votes overrule smaller votes. This stops the creation of small gatekeeper groups capable of grabbing power based on controlling some important bottleneck–they can be overruled or even dissolved by votes from a broader group. The broadest group is the people as a whole. There’s more to it, and if it started being implemented, like hierarchy it would presumably take a lot of thought and research and tweaking to get it really effective. But it’s an alternative to hierarchy which can operate at scale. There could probably be others.
StewartM
Clonal Antibody,
As someone who has just signed up for Medicare, I’m afraid that even current Medicare isn’t good enough. I will probably pay almost $400 a month for it, once I get Part B, supplemental insurance, a drug plan, dental, and (maybe) vision. Like 60 % of Americans can’t even afford a unanticipated $500 cost; how they gonna handle $400 a month?
(Yeah, I could go for a “Medicare (Dis)Advantage” Plan, but everything I read is that is a trap. You could easily pay many thousands of $ for care each year, you might have to fight the insurance company for treatments, and finally once you’re in one, you have to prove good health to get out of it onto a Medigap Plan. I figured I’d just steer clear from it from the get-go).
anon
Unfortunately, most people have bought into the narrative that the pandemic is over or Covid no longer being a serious threat. I have seen public health officers for major cities and health professionals decide that masking is no longer needed. People I thought were smart and who share similar politics to those of us who read Ian have said insane stuff against vaccines and masking. If the public and even healthcare professionals don’t demand protection from Covid, politicians won’t deliver because all they care about cutting costs and getting votes. Politicians who still advocate for mandatory masking will not win anywhere, even in liberal cities, so they aren’t going to implement it.
Carborundum
That first viz may be the worst designed graphic I’ve seen in 20 years – and that includes some real doozies created by myself.
That said, when you finally puzzle though it, it does contain some central truths, Currently the pandemic is killing olds and just about no one else (at least according to the tabulated data).
My view, the reason no one cares is because it’s about the only major policy decision in the last two decades that hasn’t structurally favoured that same group to an outrageous, civilization bankrupting degree. A significant fraction of the electorate sees this as reversion to the mean. Harsh, but a non-zero degree of truth.
Carborundum
I don’t usually have the poor taste to serially post on the same thing, but I would note that the correct policy impulse is not to better fund hospitals. If you are fighting a battle like this using acute care, you are going to lose. This is a public health fight, not anything else. Just because care has become hospital centric because that’s what is convenient for bureaucrats to fund and administer, it does not mean that that is the best terrain for addressing the virus.
Ventilation, determinants of health, etc. those are the centroids – ventilation at least has the benefit of being between two and three orders of magnitude cheaper even if the determinants are more expensive.
Eric Anderson
Well, on the bright side Ian, the Club of Rome didn’t predict a Jackpot homicidal elite scenario. At this rate, we’ll get to that 2-3 billion population reduction figure much more quickly. Which, hopefully means we get to the guillotine stage that much faster.
The sociopath cycle churns along.
Tallifer
Well said, Ian. Even in sleepy, remote New Brunswick, the corona virus continues to rip through communities; even only the reported death toll from nursing homes and hospitals is shocking. Unfortunately, almost no one wears a mask in public spaces, and proof of vaccination is nowhere required. The government takes it cues from the voters, and so official reporting is negligible.
My family and I finally caught the virus despite all our own precautions (although my farmer father tended to be careless with his mask and still went to restaurants and lunch meetings). Fortunately, we had all been vaccinated twice with two booster shots on top, so our symptoms although unpleasant were largely consistent with the fever, stomach ache and headache of an immune response.
Willful ignorance and selfishness are condemning the human race to a lingering plague.
Ian Welsh
The majority of the deaths are concentrated among the old, yes, but the younger get long Covid, including children, who because they are in schools that haven’t been properly ventilated and filtered, get Covid over and over and over again, in most cases not even knowing it, since it is most often non symptomatic for them. Eventually it adds up to Long Covid.
The people dying are the ones getting off easy.
Ché Pasa
Far as I know, I’ve only had the Covid once; picked it up in the ER as I waited to be treated for something else. People came in to the waiting room stating “I have Covid; should I take extra precautions?” The receptionist would say to each Covid patient, “Just make sure you wear your (surgical) mask and sit over there (ie: among the rest of the patients.)”
The following month, I was flat on my back and being diagnosed correctly and I started long term treatment and recovery which still hasn’t ended.
Was Covid a factor? Probably. It’s possible I’m not going to recover to full health and I’m stuck where I am. I’m one of the Olds after all, so what’s the point of spending valuable medical time and money on getting me back to where I was before last July? Hm? I’m not going to be around that much longer.
To PLG’s point that it’s better to have people in charge who want to make things better even if they don’t necessarily know how right away, I agree in principle. That’s what I’ve long advocated for and encouraged. Made some mistakes along the way, though. We don’t necessarily know who those people are as many of those we think want to do good are pulling the wool over our eyes, cf: BH Obama as one prominent example. I didn’t vote for him but so many did, and so many would again. Slick bastard, that’s for sure. But then, who hasn’t been pretty much our whole lives?
The internet focus on condemning the “PMC” every waking minute drives me nuts. It’s the wrong target. It is those who employ them you must condemn. It is the real pullers of the strings who are in charge, not their puppets. Not the “PMC”. Focusing on them is pure distraction. Yet so often we don’t even know the names of the string-pullers let alone what to do about them. By design.
Purple Library Guy points out some present day strategies already in place to partially counter the power of our overlords. The problem, yes, is that they don’t scale beyond the small, tight-knit community level. I’ve witnessed it directly. It cannot be how you run a nation or empire. That may be the answer: you don’t.
Small and local may ultimately be the best…
Carborundum
Based on what I have seen in the literature, I would guess that chronic long Covid is going to end up being something suffered by a fairly small minority of the population, once the spike in excess mortality works through the system (i.e., I think we’re going to continue to see the most significant die-off of the elderly in modern history).
Both of these phenomena (unresolved chronic conditions suffered by a minority and increased mortality among the elderly) are the sorts of things that the current body politic is – lamentably – highly tolerant of. We’ve spent a long time degrading social cohesion and curating rhetorical frameworks and instruments that preferentially amplify discontent (not sure it’s ever been easier to find something to be outraged about and someone to be outraged with). This is the natural continuation of the trend templated onto a no longer novel pandemic.
Ian Welsh
I am reasonably sure that Long Covid will be a much bigger deal than that because of compounding effects of multiple infections. I could be wrong, but this is in the class of matters about which I am usually (though not always) right.
multitude of poors
Curious as to whether anyone reading here feels they’ve gotten Asymptomatic™ Covid in the eyes?
(Which is why I noted here, quite some time ago, that I felt I had Asymptomatic™ Covid. The eye issue was the first to rear its ugly head—it’s severely affected my eyesight—this before the virus was even announced, having been around countless medical settings and personnel on behalf of someone. I also may have picked it up because I live in Silicon Valley, where it spread rapidly in the early days.)
It’s not just my eyes that were effected my skin has been severely damaged, but no symptoms™ that would have been deemed treatable as coronavirus, despite the severity of what occurred. My cancer med, a female hormone blocker, taken over many years, has apparently left me wide open for all sorts of infection via the skin, viral, bacterial, and fungal.
Speaking of fungal diseases, I’ve not seen it mentioned here but Candida Auris, which can be very deadly for those already in bad health, was already a huge fear in medical settings, pre- covid, and is once again making headlines.
(leaving this comment at 9:36 AM PDT, 04/06/23, when the last comment showing on my browser was Ian’s I am reasonably sure… comment. I didn’t have time to read all of the comments, but did see some of the Medicare bit and I can attest it’s not near as grand, or affordable (especially and criminally, regarding ears, eyes, and teeth, particularly if one had an existent disease like cancer when enrolled, as I did.)
Take care all.
gotta run… may not be able to respond for a while, if at all.
different clue
I have read that one of the lasting after-damage effects covid leaves behind is T-cell damage and disfunction. ( I don’t know all the distinctions between the different sub-sorts of T-cells). One of the sorts of T-cells are involved in constantly moving around inside the body looking for incipient little baby cancer cells and cancer cell clusters to kill. The healthy body is waging its own ongoing war on cancer all the time, more or less well.
So covid’s T-cell damage should render millions of peoples’ bodies unable to wage their own ongoing body’s-own war on cancer. And starting in 15 or 20 years, we should start seeing an increase of millions of cancer cases in some of the millions of people with after-covid legacy T-cell compromise. In 15-20 years we will know whether that is right or wrong.
different clue
I think part of the sudden focus on “PMC” is a desperate effort to breathe new life into the Marxist religion. Its the conceptual invention of another “Social Class” to try and keep Marxist analysis somehow functional and relevant. Legacy Marxists keep trying to invent new Classes and Epi-Classes and so forth, just as the Ptolemaic Astronomers kept inventing more and more Cycles and EpiCycles and etc. to keep their Earth-Sun-Planets theory alive and functional.
” PMC” is the MMT of Social Class Thinking.
different clue
@Tallifer,
As you discovered, getting the mRNA para-vaccinoids for covid doesn’t affect your getting covid, merely how bad getting it feels. Which means that every para-vaccinoided person is just as infectable as every non para-vaccinoided person , and therefor spreads covid just as far and wide as if they had not been vaccinoided. And since the Establishment wants to spread covid everywhere, on purpose, in order to achieve greater death rates, the Establishment seeks to foster the mistake that getting vaccinoided is some kind of covid control. That way, they hope to prevent “society” from seeking actual prevention and control for as long as possible.
I too was vaccinoided twice, and have been boosterated once. But I still live a semi-shut-in life in order to try avoiding the covid which the Ruling Classes want me to get.
So far, I think I have avoided getting it.
Carborundum
My sense is that one of the key challenges is that we’re likely to both be right in our forecasts. I think there’s going to be a lot of people affected by COVID on an ongoing basis, but that the conclusions one draws as to the intensity or magnitude of the effect are going to depend very greatly on what questions one asks / one’s perspective.
The data thus far looks to me to show quite a high incidence of sequelae, but it seems very difficult to objectively identify an acuity threshold. My guess at this point is that we’re likely to see something like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome – from both a medical and socio-political perspective – but significantly amplified. I think we’re going to see everything from persistent forecasts of near-term societal collapse to complete denial that there is such a medical condition, with the interpretation largely dependent on one’s political views.
Ray Blaak
So BC is dropping more mask and vaccination mandates:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/henry-dix-respiratory-update-april-2023-1.6804003?cmp=rss
“Transmission of COVID-19 and influenza is decreasing in all parts of the province, according to testing and wastewater surveillance data from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control.
–
“What we have seen is a levelling off and a decreasing of hospitalizations,” said Henry. “It is at a place where it is manageable, and it is not overwhelming the health care system.
–
New daily hospitalizations due to COVID-19 have fallen from around 40 in early January to about 25 in mid-March, data shows.”
I read the Ian’s article and the comments above, but for some reason more or less trust Dr. Henry’s team as competent. Not sure what exactly to think, but find myself trusting the BC is testing things reasonably.
different clue
@Carborundum,
I hope that everyone who accepts the fact of long covid is able to avoid getting it. I hope that everyone who denies the existence of long covid ends up getting it and keeping it until they have been educated to its reality.
JEREMY
It’s become a “Pandemic of the Vaccinated”.
The novel mRNA gene transfection technology has not only clearly failed to generate ‘herd immunity’ (or any immunity for that matter), but has now rendered those injected to suffer repeat infections.
The S1 sub-unit of the virus is known to be highly pathogenic. The novel mRNA gene transfection technology turns the body’s cells into Spike factories.
Far from remaining the in the injection site, Japanese biodistribution studies have revealed that the mRNA accumulates mainly in testes, ovaries, liver and spleen.
How any of this this can be a good thing simply defies logic.
The current bi-valent booster targets both the original Wuhan Strain and Delta variants, both of which have long left the planet. Why are we still injecting folks with these?
And it turns out that Ivermectin was highly effective anti-viral after all.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/did-the-ivermectin-ban-cost-lives/
https://brownstone.org/articles/setting-record-straight-on-ivermectin/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19109745/
https://rumble.com/v1huyrn-ivermectin-the-truth.html
https://t.me/covidtruthnet/6490
anon y'mouse
PMC are necessary to square the circle of yes–marxist class stuffs.
let’s face it, the rich are few and they can’t get done anything without soldiers. who are their soldiers? well, the entire rest of society but how do you get everyone to cooperate to keep the emperors atop the pile? you need management, especially ideological management to get acquiescence and obedience. that is, until they build the machines to do it all for them.
the PMC, whether they know it or not and whether they realize it or not, are like the right hands of the oligarch class (the police, military are the left hands). they keep this shit show running and the rest of us goose stepping to it. they make sure it appears consistent, natural, reasonable, and therefore get our buy in. they design it and justify it and get it implemented, working out its kinks along the way. they may invent overcomplicated rationales to explain why things really do have to be this way and why they are not truly aligned with the oligarchs (meaning, they are not evil but they are necessary to make us all comply with evil but it’s not really “evil” evil), but they are aligned because they make sure that the rest of us do what ultimately benefits the oligarchs, even though they are not owners except of 401ks and IRAs and a bit of extra property for themselves. for this, they get status, more agency and latitude and the extras of “high” culture.
and because of our technological development, there is a HUGE class of these people and half of them would deny being in that class (teachers most especially, even perhaps at the college level). and at least half are being paid directly by the oligarchs. NGOs are absolutely full of them. they get up every day and make sure the rest of us are running the Red Queen’s race, even if they have to re-invent culture, religion and society to do it (DEI/IdPol–i first encountered this over 10 years ago in college business class textbooks, although they were calling it “pluralism” then. it was a pretty obvious attempt to re-legitimize capitalist social relations, even if the ____studies, sociology and law departments did some of the initial work).
if the PMC were “done away with” (i am not saying killed), then how would the oligarchs get anything done? sending police is not really enough usually, and bombing people means you have no worker/consumers, although i’m sure they have a large number of us they would really like to do away with and would not care if their military psychotic MMORPG game players drone bombed us. which is why COVID Run Wild is so convenient for them.
more to Ian’s topic—i have heard it said that the only real human taboo is incest (but what if it’s willing adults who don’t breed? *boggle*). i have a really interesting time when people claim that murder is an aberration, and that murderers (especially serial) are violating the Great Big Laws of society. when people are shocked by things like that, i laugh. not because it isn’t “evil” but because it is really rather normal for us to do. rape as well. we just confine it to certain areas and avoid looking at it until it affects us/our kind. otherwise, it continues every day that humans exist and probably has done so since we came down off the trees.
when people claim that killers and rapists and torturers are abnormal, it just shake my head. if you talk over many subjects with most of these people, they will find some situation that they would also murder, torture and perhaps even rape as well because they believe it to be justified within certain situations. self defense is usually considered, even by philosophers (or at least my philosophy teachers) as the great exception.
i myself once accepted that i may have to murder someone. not because i enjoy violence, but to remove family members (some underage) from physical and psychological trauma this person enjoyed dishing out, from which they did not seem capable of escape on their own. i wouldn’t have found it a “good” action but i certainly would have found a way to forgive myself rather quickly, and no one would have missed the dude except maybe his mother (maybe–even she knew what a shit he was). eventually the situation changed but the scars (PTSD) from this person are still in these people’s lives, and mine. I wonder what the scar of committing the murder would have felt like? better, or worse?
thank goodness situations changed and i had no need to find out.
capelin
Everyone with LC is like, “but luckily I’ve had 5x Injections of an experimental gene therepy or it coulda been worse …”
The give-away is the absolute avoidance of even considering the glaringly likely contributing factor, or cause.
Unprecedented excess deaths and reduced birth rates, everywhere the mrna was rolled out and society was fracked.
Tip of the iceberg; most of it is a) early days, b) floating in obfuscation (“unexplained deaths”, “sudden adult death syndrom”, “long covid”)
Not saying 100%. Just high 90’s.