Substack Roundup #3
Insurance Companies and Vax Risk, Land Wars, and the Collapse of Western Institutions
Insurance Companies Weigh in on Covid Vaccine Risks
one of the most outrageous stories of the past week has receded into the background as WAR took front and center. I believe that is the way it is supposed to work, actually.
Here are two articles you’ll want to check out. This is far from comprehensive but gives you a glimpse at the scale of the problem.
I really have no idea where this goes now. In a pre-2020 world, the vaccine manufacturers would get nominal fines slapped on them, as Pfizer paid in 2009 for the greatest corporate fraud fine of all time ($2.3B or something like that). This is chump change to them but it sounds like a lot to the public and everyone moves on.
But as we all know by now, the covid vaccine fraud is at least an order of magnitude worse because of the levels of coercion and deception involved. Will the trial lawyers even have a chance at securing some small level of justice for billions? Or will they be accused of undermining national security in wartime?
The life and disability insurance arm of the ruling class may be about to go to war against Big Pharma/NIH/FDA/CDC, all as populations die in actual land wars, vaccine democide, and starvation.
Grab your popcorn (if you can afford any) and fasten your seatbelt. It's gonna be a bumpy ride.
On Land Wars
I hesitate to venture into war commentary because I deplore war, do not want to pretend I understand the geopolitics involved in this latest struggle. However, I enjoyed the following pieces.
In The Upheaval, N.S. Lyons writes, in Ukraine and the End of Dreams:
“…for at least three decades now the Western world has been living in a dream.
In this dream, history left the past behind and humanity was reborn into a new world. In this world progress only marched, inexorably, in one direction: toward a great flattening of space and time and difference, in which all the peoples of the earth, once fallen and scattered, would be knit back together again by the golden threads of communication and commerce. First Europe and then in time the world would be united, whole and free. Someday they would, together, take to the stars and embrace their boundless destiny.
… Eventually the better angels of his nature would triumph and War would fade from the earth – along with Famine, Pestilence, and, perhaps in time, even Death.
Kant’s Kingdom of Perpetual Peace would at last be established on earth.
This was the dream of global liberalism, made dream-able by the momentary advent of unipolar American hyperpower in the wake of the last Cold War. For years since that moment every bump and jolt that threatened to jostle the sleepwalking Western world out of this dream, from America’s disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the rise of China, seems to have provoked only a little tossing and turning between snores.
But now it seems Vladimir Putin may have succeeded at last. Startled awake by another major war in Europe, the liberal establishment may have, just maybe, now sat up and realized they’ve been under the spell of the “Great Delusion” – as the indefatigably realist scholar John Mearsheimer has memorably dubbed it – this whole time. And that in the 21st century the world is pretty much the same as it ever was in any other century.
Maybe now you think this is yet another essay on whether NATO expansion was historical folly, and whether war in Ukraine might have been avoided by a more realistic foreign policy. But I promise you it’s not (plus there’s a little twist at the end). I want to put those debates aside to try to make a broader point here. Because the delusions that have prevailed for so long now have run deeper than international relations theory.
In Strength and Weakness, Eugyppius writes:
Shado“As the western political order decays, it will become more totalitarian at home, and more impotent abroad.”
There is an important contrast between the weak, hysterical rhetoric of the vaccinators, and their brutal tactics, even as circumstances have forced them to retreat. The Canadian truckers are only the most recent movement to draw the backlash of this international order of hypochondriacs. They did a great deal of damage to the vaccinators’ credibility, much more than I thought was possible… Still, the vaccinators shouldn’t be underestimated. They’ll move heaven and earth to freeze the financial assets of ordinary people who donated a few dollars to a labour protest movement over mandatory vaccination policies in one of the most heavily vaccinated countries on earth.
This central paradox, of simultaneous strength and weakness, can be very counter-intuitive, but I think it arises from a phenomenon I’ve mentioned a few times before. This is the diffusion of power downwards, from the upper reaches of the political system, into the bureaucratic institutions, academia and even the press. This diffusion, which has happened in varying degrees throughout all of our countries, and which is still ongoing, means that all major government initiatives arise from a broad consensus of the new political elites. Major media organisations, learned societies, and all branches of the bureaucracy collaborate to realise the same consensus vision everywhere. This broad collaboration means all regime policies have a broad base of powerful supporters and that official discourse is always tightly controlled. Political actors are increasingly isolated from all criticism. In the countries where this process of diffusion is the most advanced, ordinary people have lost almost all political influence. Those matters of most importance to the regime are simply never debated, and there are no political alternatives.
Shadowrunners talks about The Ukraine War as Mass Entertainment:
this particular Hate Week we happen to be at war with Eurasia.
The "Hate Week", or the actualization of an already established enemy image at this particular time, can plausibly be considered a response to the development of potentially destabilizing dissent in relation to the pandemic politics, the vaccine roll out and its consequences, and the economic repercussions of the Reset issue. These forms of dissent will be projected onto the Russian menace, and will likely be associated with right-wing populism and their common “attack on democracy”.
Divide and conquer. Polarize. Expect a broader projection of all sorts of actual dissent on the enemy image, so that everything from criticism of Covid politics to "climate change skepticism" or (traditional left-wing) criticism of economic globalization can be funneled into the character of the populist Russia-friendly deplorable. This also has clear precedent in contemporary media discourse.
The broadly painted enemy will likely be marketed as "domestic terrorists" in Western media, in concert with Western intelligence’s framing of disinformation as terrorism.
…
Expect that the horrors and evils of Russia, the right-wing deplorables, and their terrible cyber attacks will be the pretext for a continued rollout of the digital ID. It's to protect you from Russian trolls and bots, you see.
Try and take a deep breath and think. What’s currently happening where they don’t want you to look?
So what is being hidden? Here is one of the things that may be hidden in the Ukraine news: A National Vaccine Pass Has Quietly Rolled Out – And Red States Are Getting On Board
Finally,
On The Decay of Western Institutions
This one is not from Substack but is excellent. Alana Newhouse at Tablet Magazine, in Everything is Broken
Everything is broken.
Let’s say you believe the above to be hyperbolic. You never fell through the cracks of the medical system; as far as you understand it, there are plenty of ways for a resourceful person to buy a home in America these days; you easily met a mate and got married and had as many children as you wanted, at the age you wanted to have them; your child had a terrific time at college, where she experienced nothing at all oppressive or bizarre, got a first-class education that you could easily afford and which landed her a great job after graduation; you actually like the fact that you haven’t encountered one book or movie or piece of art that’s haunted you for months after; you enjoy druggily floating through one millennial pink space after another; it gives you pleasure to interact only with people who agree with you politically, and you feel filled with meaning and purpose after a day spent sending each other hysteria-inducing links; maybe you’ve heard that some kids are cosplaying Communism but that’s only because everyone is radical when they’re young, and Trump voters are just a bunch of racist troglodytes pining for the past, and it’s not at all that neither group can see their way to a future that looks remotely hopeful ... If this is you, congratulations. There’s no need to reach out and tell me any of this, because all you will be doing is revealing how insulated you are from the world inhabited by nearly everyone I know.
If, on the other hand, the idea of mass brokenness seems both excruciatingly correct and also paralyzing, come sit with me. Being on a ship nearly 4 million square miles in area along with 330 million other people and realizing the entire hull is pockmarked with holes is terrifying.
But being afraid to face this reality won’t make it less true. And this is the reality.
For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.
But, beginning in the 1970s, the economic ground underneath this landscape began to come apart.
…
This was the tinder. The tech revolution was the match—one-upping the ’70s economy by demanding more efficiency and more speed and more boundarylessness, and demanding it everywhere. They introduced not only a host of inhuman wage-suppressing tactics, like replacing full-time employees with benefits with gig workers with lower wages and no benefits, but also a whole new aesthetic that has come to dominate every aspect of our lives—a set of principles that collectively might be thought of as flatness.
Flatness is the reason the three jobs with the most projected growth in your country all earn less than $27,000 a year, and it is also the reason that all the secondary institutions that once gave structure and meaning to hundreds of millions of American lives—jobs and unions but also local newspapers, churches, Rotary Clubs, main streets—have been decimated. And flatness is the mechanism by which, over the past decade and with increasing velocity over the last three years, a single ideologically driven cohort captured the entire interlocking infrastructure of American cultural and intellectual life. It is how the Long March went from a punchline to reality, as one institution after another fell and then entire sectors, like journalism, succumbed to control by narrow bands of sneering elitists who arrogated to themselves the license to judge and control the lives of their perceived inferiors.
Flatness broke everything.”
It’s too hard for me to keep up to speed with the audio and video content I used to follow in New Zealand. There, I had unlimited (literal and figurative) bandwidth, and a lot of time while spending many hours on the microscope each day. I prefer to consume written words now instead.
However, I did enjoy this 7 minute clip of Dr. Bret Weinstein discussing how many of us have becoming stronger by standing against the onslaught of a good portion of the public that is railing both against reality and against us. He says that if the public experiences an awakening about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, early treatment, and the lab leak, they will have to come to grips with the across the board failure of academic institutions, Big Tech, and public health agencies on which the public depends. I won’t hold my breath, because we’ve been fighting these battles for at least 50 years, but I’d certainly welcome it.
> I won’t hold my breath, because we’ve been fighting these battles for at least 50 years, but I’d certainly welcome it.
Same. Most people can't conceptualise that all the institutions they believed were trustworthy have all failed them miserably.
In their minds it is simply impossible.
Mainly because they are not able to confront their own vulnerabilities nor comprehend how they could contribute to the "banality of evil", simply by doing nothing...
(Because they believe they are good, they infer the same of others.)
Thanks Monica! I loved the ending of this, and it was a relief to see it in words.
Thinking about it now, there's no question that I feel a sense of inner strength that I did not possess two years ago.
This wild journey to find information has led me to what I hope is a healthy mix of curiosity and skepticism, and it's supplied me with the confidence to stand up for what I believe in, and ignore the bullies.
Yet again, Substack is having a huge impact on my life!