Divided and conquered

 

In 1958, Mao Zedong ordered that sparrows be exterminated throughout China.

For three days, the Chinese went hunting for sparrows. It was the beginning of an ecological and humanitarian disaster leading to millions of dead.

In a state-sponsored announcement and as one of his first initiatives, Mao declared war on the “four pests”: mosquitoes, flies, sparrows and rats. The impact on China’s ecological balance was catastrophic. The sparrow – which Mao identified as a pest – only rarely eats farmed grain from the field. The main components of its diet are in fact insects such as locusts, which can reproduce undisturbed in the absence of their main predator.
From Dr Wolfgang Wodarg’s Telegram feed [my translation] 

Systems prepare for their overthrow with a preliminary period of petrification.
R. H. Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

This post extends “Why I ‘support’ Trump over Biden” and analyses different aspects of the material in Part I of “Only the intensity has changed. Nothing will ever be the same again.” In the former, I briefly touched on the deep divisions that bedevil the American people, and by extension the world’s peoples. In the latter, I examined at some depth a few logical derivations we might tease out from the dogged phenomenon of inter-group antipathy at a broader scale than narrowly focussing on it as productive ground for sustaining an ancient strategy we know as “divide and conquer”.

Within that narrower remit, we here consider why societies and groups can be divided and set against each other, why so often we fail to see it happening, and what we might do about this understandable dynamic going forward. The article is structured as expositions of two civilisational building blocks – specialisation and hierarchy – that, taken together in the remainder of the article, serve to illustrate why divide and conquer is such an effective strategy for controlling very large numbers of people. We close by peering into the nature of reality, for it is among these deepest of fundaments that robust ideas supportive of a possible Better Way are to be found (I assert). 

This article is familiar ground but it is, I feel, absolutely pivotal to our historical moment. My hope is that examining this territory from multiple angles will make the analysis more accessible to more people.

Specialisation

Civilisation without specialisation is almost unimaginable (see Idiocracy). One of the fundamental properties distinguishing civilisation from non-civilisation is the incredible societal complexity it can sustain over large tracts of time. Specialisation cumulatively permits this growing complexity – or more accurately is an expression thereof – and is an accomplishment with roots in numerous civilisational accomplishments such as grain stores, geometry and metallurgy. These and countless other technologies free up time some use to become experts in something very narrow, like viral infection vectors or endocrine disruption. Over time, areas of expertise cumulatively and mutually advance each other, spawn yet others and generally interact in countless ways to, put crudely, produce wealth – lots of wealth. (We’ll talk about wealth later.) 

But this simplistic, progressivist rhetoric does not account for the problem highly focussed specialists can have when communicating with other highly focussed specialists, especially when their respective areas of expertise are remote from one another, yet both are suddenly relevant to some urgent social issue. Add ideological conflict to the mix, and specialists so thrown together can have a very hard time reaching agreement. More mundanely, we might also reflect on how hard it would be for primary-school teachers from north London to truly appreciate the worldviews and interests of Tibetan monks or Cebu’s street children.

And our account should also include vested interests that agglomerate around particularly valuable specialisations while thwarting or suppressing the findings of others that might harm those interests. After all, scientific research has to be funded by something, and not everything that can or should be investigated will yield financial profit – much may even harm it. In a world ruled by money, even science itself, not to mention politics and law, is for sale to a large degree. This problem is compounded by the challenge of staying humble while possessing the extraordinary ambition and skill needed to become a world-leading expert or figure of power. And then really identifying with that lofty status. As Max Planck put it, “Science advances one funeral at a time.”

But the domain of specialisation most important to our discussion here is politics (within which I include the mythical, semi-mythical or wholly real yet invariably disturbing ‘Deep State’). Politics – beyond parliaments to all institutional power structures – could be characterised as a societal process evolved to protect wealth (aka power) and determine its distribution through society. A second relevant quality politics possesses is its structural function as intermediary between Business and The People. The tensions characterising this triad’s interdependencies also characterise human history. How transparently and honestly can politics perform this role? How wisely responsive to cumulative change can it be? Does ‘runaway specialisation’ in fact fatally impair politics’ ability to be a transparent mediator? How does our cultural sense of wealth / wealth generation govern which group has more power over political processes, regardless of any moral or ethical considerations? And are this triad’s just-asserted constituent groups in fact the result of an ideological perspective, a mirage-like emergence of our acquired cultural reflexes around wealth?

Hold those thoughts.

Hierarchy

Hierarchy is a social structure that tends to emerge from advanced specialisation. Decentralised, more anarchic/democratic structures can emerge from specialisation but are far less likely, as history attests. Currently and for a while yet, hierarchical social forms have their hands on history’s steering wheel. 

What does this mean, fundamentally speaking? It means politics’ function as protector and distributor of wealth operates within a hierarchical dynamic that must, by virtue of this dynamic’s structuring pattern that is ever operant, ‘autonomically’ favour the pyramid’s upper over its lower layers over time. I would argue this is the case in state communism and socialism, in ‘free-market’ capitalism, indeed in any institutionalised hierarchy. In other words, the wealth-power any hierarchy generates flows cumulatively to the top. The degree to which a rising pyramid lifts all boats depends on circumstances, which include but are by no means limited to the relative balances of power available to each level. One contemporary example would be trade-union relative to corporate/business power.

To continue with trade unions by way of further explication, they tend to be structured hierarchically. This is hardly surprising; in societies that have been hierarchical for centuries, we would expect almost every member therein to be reflexively hierarchical, to reflexively expect leaders and followers and to not know how to organise differently. To be effective, trade unions must have power and wealth. Hunger for power is probably the best predictor for which personalities within a union’s membership will make it to leadership positions and be effective in those roles. As such, they are likely to have more psychological affinity – even if hidden from conscious view – with the leadership of corporations and politics than with the members they represent. This makes them easy to corrupt and separate from their members. I don’t mean this disparagingly, I’m simply teasing out logical derivations from the components under discussion.

To recap, organisations, groups, unions, political parties, etc. have particular defining dynamics. If these happen to be inflexibly or ideologically hierarchical, the decisions, solutions and discoveries they will tend to favour will conform to or serve the dynamic outlined above; favouring upper over lower levels of the hierarchy over time. And yet despite this systemic tendency, the vector history takes cannot be controlled completely; unintended consequences will slip out from under all attempts to control history and have their unpredictable way with it.

In the case of politics generally, this tendency will underpin, in both the most hidden and obvious of ways, how politics continues to conceptualise its role – romantically and pragmatically – and will also reinforce its perception and understanding of the wealth it is solemnly sworn to protect. Systems structure perception. And all of this somewhat in the manner of a positive feedback loop that one day must crash against the mounting cliffs of perpetual change.

Groupings: antipathy, mistrust, conspiracy

Combined, the two civilisational building blocks presented above generate seemingly endless groupings: sub-groups within groups, fringe groups, dominant groups, tiny groups and huge meta-groups, and we may not be particularly conscious of the many groups to which we belong; sociology does a dizzying job of discovering new groups, and most laypeople have probably never heard of them. The more we look, the more we reveal. Who can say what part fantasy and what part reality play in this process. 

Not all groups have antithetical interrelations but any two can be coaxed into that relationship. Propaganda, public-relations and behavioural-programming powers are by now highly advanced skills. Should it serve the interests of those with the means to wield these skills – those at the very tip of the hierarchical pyramid whose duty is to sustain that pyramid by any means possible –, they can create new groups as if out of nothing, and set them against each other. Of course, to be effective, such efforts must be sufficiently psychologically grounded, e.g. those who fear viruses and those who fear authoritarian power, or those wanting the freedom to question claims made about vaccines and those believing such criticism leads to widespread disease and death. It seems fault lines develop along axes of fear. Fear goes viral in ignorance, and ignorance is a hard thing to defeat in highly specialised societies, especially when education is designed to dumb down the vast majority of us.

But this tempting civilisational tool is something of a double-edged sword. Societal continuity over time is an existential matter. Our ideas around what reality is about – pursuit of happiness, property accumulation, success and accomplishment, humble service to God, humanism, science, etc. – are cohering forces that power us through time, structure us, guide us, unite us. Were an entire civilisation to lose faith in their deepest convictions and beliefs over night, the resultant chaos would be terrible, regardless of how noble or cynical the establishment of those cohering beliefs had been. Hence, the continuity that is the core remit of the political layer in guarding and distributing generated wealth – one critical part of which is sustaining consensus about what wealth is – is fiercely protected. No individual or group is as valuable as that continuity; every group and individual would be plunged into the abyss were that continuity to suddenly snap. Of course, this does logically make the group guarding continuity the most important group, and there’s the hierarchical rub. 

These hard facts mean states and other powerful interests will play groups against one another if such is perceived to be helpful in protecting societal continuity. This sort of realpolitik could be termed conspiring. As Stalin put it, you have to break eggs to make omelettes. I’d add that one tends not to reveal which eggs are going to be sacrificed, to extend the metaphor to its logical limit. Such decisions are thus made in secrecy (for the good of the realm!).

The problem is the temptation to abuse this great power that politics must wisely manage – forever. This challenge is made steadily more difficult as the pyramid’s tip loses touch with its lower levels, as it loses connection with ‘reality on the ground’, as it struggles to properly understand specialist advisors, as it fails to resist the persuasive charms of lobbyists etc. It takes a rare set of individuals indeed to handle these sorts of pressures: making life-and-death decisions at mass scale while staying wise and compassionate.

Recalling the communication issues that bedevil specialisation and how this relates to the above paragraphs, we might recast this phenomenon as one of several co-factors eroding community cohesion over time. For example, a 50-strong hunter-gatherer band is going to be a far more cohesive community than, say, the population of Great Britain. The social complexity of the latter far exceeds that of the former. This complexity can be viewed as a rich attack surface offering an endless number of fault lines that might be exploited for divide-and-conquer purposes. In other words, because we don’t know each other very well, we can easily be induced to become suspicious of each other. Some have called this the atomisation of society. An episode from the first season of “Black Mirror” (“Fifteen Million Merits”) depicts one dystopian version of extreme atomisation. And it is dystopian, not utopian, precisely because humans are social animals. Distrust is poison to us, depresses us, corrodes our emotional, psychological and physical health.

So what are we to do if we want our civilisational cake and eat it too? My answer is that we have to revisit what we mean by wealth, by hierarchy and anarchy, value and other foundational concepts. The concluding section will now turn to these matters.

Closing observations towards a Better Way

Underneath both building blocks discussed above, and I believe also under any others we might advance, lies value. All decision making is guided by our value systems, whether ‘civilised’ or ‘primitive’, ‘humanist’ or ‘animal’. Value is thus somewhat synonymous with wealth; wealth is what we value. But neither is a distinct object impervious to change. Over the last two or three centuries, both terms have become profoundly influenced by materialism. Materialism requires the measurement of all things so as to mechanically describe and thus control them. Measurement is of course nothing new, but materialism’s dominance has reached unprecedented levels in this time period, though is now past its zenith, in my view. 

Value, it is claimed, is measured by money. One effect of this peculiar claim is that we have come to see value as almost entirely contained in and created by money, and is thus expressible in numbers. 

Money, being little more than numbers attached to some currency symbol and imbued with purchasing power, simplifies and thus cheapens how we conceptualise and structure the economic domain. Economics should concern itself primarily with wise husbandry of the environment by protecting biodiversity. Instead it casts itself as an impartial science of market mechanisms, which are asserted as laws of nature steered by price discovery via supply and demand in the market place of life. If market forces are left to their own devices, the rest of reality will take care of itself, including the environment, which is conceived as an endless pool of idle resources. This intellectual framework actually places money at the heart of society, but this reality is artfully concealed by the orthodoxy that money is a “veil”, or almost meaningless consequence of buying and selling, a necessary but neutral tool invented to make trading more efficient. 

Money is so much more than this disingenuous description.

Money, being made of numbers, can grow forever, especially when it is created as interest-bearing debt. Try as humanity might, its attempts to anchor money-as-numbers to something real, like gold, always fail. Money’s core logic – more is better than less –, combined with human invention and ambition, tends to grow the economic domain beyond what is sustainable. Only the big and powerful survive (until they collapse). Numbers can grow forever. Human imagination can grow forever. The constant battle for scarce resources adds fuel to this growth conflagration, whispering into our collective ears to escape constraints, to completely ‘tame’ the ‘wild’, to get everything under control. But resources are only scarce because human imagination is inexorably steered towards greed by the poor definition of value under discussion: tautology as positive feedback loop.

Health, on the other hand, isn’t like money. Health is an expression of biological systems that cannot grow forever. Perpetual growth of health makes no sense, not even as an idle notion. Health is something we must always tend, much as we might tend a garden, not that it expands, but that it stays functional, perhaps beautiful. Health and beauty can be thought of as synonyms. 

Something about perpetual economic growth appeals to our civilisational instincts to escape the limits of reality (see transhumanism). What we value governs what we choose, how we steer our lives. If money is value, then money and its ‘infinite’ potential governs our lives. Were we instead to perceive health as value, how different would civilisation be? What effect would such a simple but profound change have on specialisation and hierarchical systems?

Aside from measurement, number and the illusion of control emerging from mastery thereof, another consequence of materialism is a pervasive victim-centred passivity that leads to depression, apathy, cynicism, nihilism, etc. ‘What’s the point? I’m just material stuff knocked this way and that by forces beyond my control.’ ‘There’s no such thing as free will; I’m a biological robot.’ 

This psychological stance sees health in a mechanical light, a perspective that makes health seem less attractive, dull somehow. The greeds and appetites that are the products of this stance desire primarily what cannot nourish: pornography rather than love; romance instead of relationship; quick and easy junk, not inconvenient home-cooked, food etc. Such desires, expressed as economic demand, end up rewarding those powers that need our needs to forever remain in that narcissistic frame, in that painful emptiness. How is this a recipe for health, for meaningful success?

Hence too-big-to-fail banks, hence Big Pharma, hence Big Ag, hence dumbed-down populations who prefer not to think for themselves, who don’t have the time to do so anyway, who just want a ‘quiet life’ in the face of all the existential angst around money, career and meaning. It’s a vicious circle and there can seem no way out.

All this adds up to one sad truth: humanity is suffering an unprecedented crisis of trust. There’s too much divide and conquer, too much hierarchical control, too much nefarious meddling and nudging … all to keep the system going as it fights to survive rapidly accelerating technological change. And though this basic pattern – dawn to decadence – is as old as history, there is far more at stake now than there has ever been. Whether our response to the crisis takes us in a healthier or a yet more dysfunctional direction depends on whether we can learn to wisely manage the structural tensions and challenges detailed above. The healthier way is the harder; the slippery slope into totalitarianism the easier, the more passive.

The causes of this crisis are of course more complex than I have captured here, but concealed beneath them all is, as argued, the low quality of our cultural reflexes around value and wealth. As the saying goes, we know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The wholly out-of-date constitutions and instincts of our governing bodies confront a situation they can only respond to with ever more control. These instincts – civilisation’s DNA as it were – are, naturally enough, honed to self-protection, but this time the ‘elite’s’ egotistical inflexibility may prove catastrophic.

At root, cultural and societal reflexes become unfit for purpose for the simple reason that change is the only constant. The way things were is not the way things are. “Systems prepare for their overthrow with a preliminary period of petrification.” And we cannot stop change unless we transform reality into absolute nothingness. Can we be more flexible and wise in how we handle inevitable change? I strongly believe so. The trick lies in redefining, or newly appreciating, value.

I should point out here that I do not advocate throwing all babies out with all bath waters, nor do I advocate a return to any prior ‘normal’, an ugly concept at the best of times. Besides, despite repeating patterns, return itself is an impossibility. As Heraclitus put it, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”

In pursuit of the healthier path and as far as we are able, we should try to rid ourselves of all ideologies; they censor perception. Traditionalism (conservation of the good) partners radicalism (perpetual change) via trial-and-error, seesawing exchanges. Patterns repeat eternally while the contexts within which they iterate, great and small, are always changing. Spring comes every year, but every spring occurs within a unique context and is composed of only unique events. Further, spring itself can be seen as a symbol for life cycles that characterise conscious processes of growth and decay that both precede and will last beyond this planet’s existence, a claim that takes us neatly to the nature of reality.

As chance would have it, I recently came across an article entitled “Scientists Reveal a Multidimensional Universe Inside the Human Brain”. Though still rooted in materialism, I believe it is indicative of a turn in science that will inexorably lead to a cultural acceptance that consciousness is reality’s true foundation. Donald Hoffman’s investigations into consciousness are another indication of this turn. 

For a large number of reasons that I won’t set out here, I am confident almost to the point of certainty that what we call matter and energy, or rather what we experience as matter and energy, occur entirely within consciousness, not the other way around. In much the same way – metaphorically at least –, pixels on a computer screen behave like ‘real’ trees and rocks to the pixel-based avatars we conscious humans operate when playing, say, League of Legends. From the point of view of a character within the game, the rules (code) defining the matter-like behaviours of trees, rocks, light, gravity, etc., are invisible, or behind the scenes. Similarly, the set of continuous experiences we call physical reality is governed by rules – we could think of them as the Laws of Physics – that structure our universe. A switch from matter to consciousness as foundational would not mean all scientific discoveries would have to be discarded, just that they are couched in an error of perception that puts the cart before the horse. In Hoffman’s terms, physical reality is a constructed user-friendly “interface” that enables us to do what consciousness generally feels it needs to get done … for some as yet unknowable reason. Our lives on earth serve some conscious purpose we cannot as yet discern.

In my view, the crisis of trust that is the bitter fruit of decadence includes the erosion of materialism this time around. One of materialism’s tenets is a universe of lifeless objects. As touched on above, this foundational perception (weltanschauung is perhaps a better word) fosters the objectification, and by inexorable extension the commodification of nature/reality. Materialism undergirds the hubristic notions that nature (Other, NotMe) is a subset of the economy (experienced as ‘my material needs and desires’), and that perpetual economic growth is possible and good, and so has ultimately given rise to soulless, narcissistic consumerism. 

As humanity increasingly dislikes what it sees in the mirror, as modern humans search in vain for a soul, as economic growth refuses to reignite, as advanced robotics and the historically rapid approach of AI turn most of humanity into little more than vessels of demand through which to pour a very conditional universal basic income, so the structures that got us here desperately need a redesign. To co-create something healthier and wiser than previous versions, for our co-creation to be lovingly open rather than psychotically totalitarian (i.e. The Great Reset), a profound evolution of consciousness is needed. Though profound, however, this required evolution is in fact quite simple conceptually – once the unnecessarily complicated and superfluous detail of modernity is pierced. As Charles Eisenstein has it, though the sky seems impossibly far away, it starts at the ground and rises from there.

Systems structure perception. We are each constrained by a matrix of beliefs that filters what we perceive. Fear of identity collapse, of betraying the group, of losing face, of being wrong, of dying, of being a powerless incompetent fool … all of it is currently rooted in a now instinctive belief (oddly we rarely believe it when pressed) that value = money = price = property accumulation. The antidote to fear is always courage. Courage is – among other things – a readiness to be wrong and the strength to persevere in developing understanding and wisdom regardless of setbacks along the way, and not permitting ourselves to be held back by beliefs. In short, being scientific in the noblest sense of that word. This is our healthiest path as conscious beings. 

There are many ways to pierce the convoluted matrix of modernity but each would be assisted greatly by the realisation that there is nothing but God, that there is only God. Or, that there is only consciousness. I believe this realisation is dawning. It’s not the only way to break the spell, but it might be the most effective and lasting because it describes reality more accurately; consciousness cannot arise from matter but the experience of ‘matter’ can occur within consciousness. 

Whatever path we take, rerooting our cultural sense of value in health and love will produce wealth-generation systems that enhance beauty, fecundity, freedom and truthful living everywhere. Were we to earnestly take on this task, I suspect social-organisation systems – politics – would become a fluid mix of anarchic and hierarchical. Natural authority is a beautiful thing, authority by brute force is not. Anarchy – leaderless decision making – is at its healthiest when our systems of education promote independence of thought and a willingness to be wrong, to learn by doing, to know in youthful excitement that learning never ends. As such, anarchy and hierarchy are not opposites at all; they are compatible decision-making modalities that can be used like any tools: as needed. The desire to treat Other with respect, to want its health to flourish and prosper, is simply a healthier way to be. It is love’s way. Love exposes how deceptive the selfishness-selfless dichotomy is; as I do unto Other, so I do unto Self. And all this would sustain civilisational complexity while presenting a minimal attack surface to divide-and-conquer tactics. 

What’s not to like!

A crazy conspiracy theory that can be tested

What if the following crazy conspiracy-theory roadmap comes true?

This roadmap was ‘leaked’ by an ex-member of Germany’s Green Party (David Siber). It makes for shocking reading but closely dovetails with one leaked from Canada.  I don’t have a link to the former leak because it’s published in a Telegram channel I follow (David Siber’s). However, I don’t really think the validity of its source matters anywhere near as much as its possible predictive power.

My translation of the German leak (I’m guessing it was an September/October leak, like the Canadian):

1. Introduce second lockdown. Secondary lockdowns must be extended from the cities into the surrounding areas in a creeping manner. Deadline: end November 2020.
2. Establishment of isolation centres in all federal states and municipalities. Deadline: end December 2020.
3. Daily COVID-19 infection numbers are rising so rapidly that authorities are reaching the limits of their testing capacity. Deadline: end November 2020.
4. Complete and final lockdown (stricter restrictions than the first lockdown). Deadline: end December 2020 - beginning January 2021.
5. Reform of unemployment-benefit and Hartz IV programme towards universal basic income. Deadline: First quarter 2021 - i.e. by end March 2021.
6. Mutation of the COVID-19 virus into a more dangerous virus called COVID-21, which initiates a third wave of infections with a high mortality rate and higher infection rates. Deadline: by February 2021.
7. Daily new COVID-21 infections overwhelm clinics and hospitals. Deadline: quarter 1 - quarter 2 2021.
8. Introduction of the third lockdown with further restrictions on remaining public life. Travel between federal states and even cities will be prohibited. Deadline: quarter 2 2021.
9. Introduce everyone into a universal-basic-income programme. Deadline: mid quarter 2 2021.
10. Great economic instability leads to the collapse of supply chains and thus to shortages of goods in shops. Deadline: quarter 2 - quarter 3 2021.
11. Domestic army operations within major cities and on motorways. The aim is to prevent the movement and travel of citizens and to provide logistical support in the cities. Deadline: by quarter 3 2021.
12. Citizens are given the opportunity to cancel all personal loans under the so-called "World Debt Reset Programme". The state receives the necessary financial resources from the IMF (International Monetary Fund). To join this programme, citizens must transfer all ownership rights to existing and also all future property. In addition, the citizen undertakes to accept the COVID-19 & COVID-21 vaccinations without resistance. With the new vaccination pass, all restrictions are lifted each compliant citizen. Citizens who oppose vaccination and the debt-repayment programme will become a "risk to the health of others". They will only be released from lockdown restrictions after agreeing to the debt-repayment programme and allowing themselves to be vaccinated. 

Bill Gates is featured in the video linked to above. He states flatly that “pandemic 2” will be worse than “pandemic 1”. The video also shows him and wife Melinda looking oddly pleased at the prospect of the more deadly variant yet to come. How can he know these things? Why is the press not all over these extraordinary claims? Who is responsible for these possibly leaked schedules? Are the schedules credible?

Regardless of any possible answers to such questions, a theory is a good one if it can be falsified. Clear predictions fulfil that criterion here. What with The Great Reset, “Build Back Better” being used simultaneously across the English-speaking world, a one-tune mass media worldwide and more-than-transparent predictions about future virus mutations and lethality from an ex-head of a large software company, should this set of predictions (statements) start to come true – and they appear to be already –, that would prove the “conspiracy theory”, wouldn’t it? What other explanation could explain all these facts?

If my logic is sound, then sharing this information to all and sundry is of paramount importance. I'd like this schedule to be the produce of some crazy person somewhere, but things have been beyond crazy for eight months, so I think this deserves attention.

I'll get back to the continuation of the previous post in due course.

Why I ‘support’ Trump over Biden

From what little I know of Trump the man, I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. From what I’ve seen of the distance between the Trump myth and the reality it conceals, I wouldn’t put money on him “draining the swamp” any time soon – not if left to his own devices. He seems to me a creature of the establishment, albeit with a heavy slice of the jester or imp about him. What I’ve seen of Biden, man and myth, alarms me. The more I learn, the more alarmed I become.

But neither observation matters all that much, and that is one part of what this post is about. To put it succinctly, I’ve been wholly unengaged in left- and right-wing ideologies and politics for about 20 years. What matters to me is what makes most sense beyond ideology, if such is possible. For the record, I think such is possible, though to a somewhat limited degree. The attempt to remain free of ideology is itself partly ideological. Anything that patterns our approach to politics and societal governance is going to have a slice of ideology to it. As we confront the devilish details when applying that pattern in daily life, politics enters the scene, heavily, awkwardly, and won’t go away. When we deal with Other, compromise is the name of the game. Loving, creative compromise keeps the game healthy. That takes courageous transparency. And transparency is one thing we need a lot more of.

Trump’s myth attracts my attention regardless of how true it is. Not because I’m attracted to it per se – it’s too cartoonish for me –, but because “draining the swamp” is sorely needed. There is corruption aplenty in every nation on earth. How could it be otherwise; power corrupts. Power attracts those who hunger for power, a civilisational dynamic we must live with. So evidence of voter fraud, properly exposed, would flush out much corruption. So much so, in fact, that few of the horrifically partisan mass-media outlets, social and conventional, will escape unwounded, and many might perish. 

The promising opportunity I see here lies in a Trump victory. His victory would necessarily be accompanied by exposure of massive voter fraud. Once out, this cat will not go back in the bag. The chance We, The People would then have to wrest narrative control from the globalists would be far larger than it is now. And the shock would wake many from the Stockholm Syndrome slumber cocooning them, blinding them.

I want neither the Old Normal, nor the New Normal so aggressively pushed by globalists. The latter seems appealing only because it’s shinier than the ugly chaos erupting all around us. But squeaky-clean totalitarianism isn’t the only alternative. We can do better than total surveillance, total servitude, total serfdom, in short total subjection to The Powers That Be. And we can also do better than the Old Normal that led inexorably to this mess. More on that “better” a little down the page.

Obviously, those selling snake oil of totalitarian flavour want total control. Those who want total control should not be in charge of anything, let alone the whole planet. It’s a soul sickness nothing can satisfy, not least the illusion of total control that must always remain out of reach, pulling its acolytes forwards to their destructive demise via some unknowable number of illusory victories along the way. The Book of Revelation is a mythical roadmap that describes this process. 666, the number of the beast, symbolises total control, six being the number of order, of mechanical perfection.

In other words, in Trump’s case it’s the myth that matters; a Trump victory combined with a sufficiently large shock would mean the direction of travel then chosen will be exposure of ever more corruption. If Biden wins, We, The People are far more likely to be sleep-walked to a nasty – though nice and tech-shiny – dystopian future very few of us actually want. Even if our fear tells us we do.

All that said, the ideological divide – a false dichotomy in my view – is not going to dissolve into peace and harmony this side of a painful cultural catharsis. Regardless of how the election aftermath shakes out, bad actors will remain in charge, bad blood will be boiling and vested interests will continue to push our buttons and pull our strings, shepherding us whither they will. The point here is the window of opportunity a Trump victory might afford us. We will make best use of that window by staying calm but firm, persistent but polite, open but skeptical. In short, by remaining loving.

Back to the promised “better”. An enormous improvement on all the above can be the only consequence if loving level headedness prevails. The path that improvement will be – the journey is the destination – opens when we commit to love. Those still lost to the dark spell cast so perniciously over humanity will need help and guidance. The route out will not be obvious and likely longer than we would like, possibly decades. Thus the more sobriety and joy we bring to this grave challenge the more rewarding it will be.

My next post will examine in detail the nature of that challenge.

No going back

There’s no going back any more.

The survival of all political and media actors depends on the existence of this pandemic. Without a pandemic, the entire state apparatus would have but one option: resignation.

If there were no pandemic, there would be no trust left in any state institution. A total societal catastrophe!

And that’s why we have this pandemic; it’s needed to justify the immense damage caused by the measures taken against it. Retreat is impossible. And it really doesn’t matter how serious further damage caused by sustaining the pandemic will be.

The people are not being protected from a sickness. The government is protecting itself from the consequences of its own error – at the cost of the people.

Adrian Bauer, business leader, lecturer at the University of St Gallen

The above analysis closely matches my own, but I’d add two things. First, somewhere behind the “error” is some kind of coordinating conspiracy. Only this addition can explain facts such as the continuing assertion that a “second wave” was coming – corona and influenza viruses are seasonal; there are endless ‘waves’ – and that only global vaccination can get us out of this ‘pandemic’, both repeatedly asserted with calm conviction before there was any clarity on the matter. The monies raised for and indemnity from liability guaranteed to the pharmaceutical industry speak volumes. Second, we’re not just talking about institutional state apparatus. Large portions of national populations across the world are locked in to this insanity as well. But the mirage generated by propaganda and public-relations machinery, working 24/7 to sustain the fearful, wide-eyed delirium, hovers seductively above a cliff edge. Only the insane, hypnotised and terrified want this evil to go on.

Back in March, when I first came across independent-media opinion that the corona-virus pandemic was some sort of conspiracy, my initial reaction was “impossible!”; the risks are too high, the fallout if the gambit fails too massive. Then I saw the contents of the Coronavirus Act 2020 and similar laws being enacted across Europe, and agreed that a conspiracy was underway. It has taken me a long time to process the enormity of it all but I could and can still see no better explanation. 

I am thus a “conspiracy theorist”: I’ve analysed the facts from official bodies, watched the actions of media and politics, and can only fully explain the situation as a conspiracy. That said, much of what is unfolding in medicine, politics, media and business can indeed be explained by uncritical loyalty born of unwitting fear, but somewhere this extraordinary event, unprecedented in human history, is being deliberately coordinated to some end. One component of that end is The Great Reset, but there is likely more to it than that alone. The roots of the Why behind all this are to be found in rapidly advancing automation/robotics technologies, the threat presented to the current global power structure by the internet, the demise of the global fiat money system, the end of growth, and perhaps that old devil eugenics, a variant of a civilisational peculiarity I like to call “patrician disdain”. 

We stand at a critical historical juncture that could head towards far flatter and more peace-loving power structures. The beneficiaries and thus guardians of the current order want instead to steer history a direction favourable to their interests. 

I am aware most people disagree with this view. Be that as it may, the truth of this conspiracy will likely emerge soon and become impossible to ignore. If history indeed takes this course – I strongly suspect it will – the consequences are going to shock peoples and cultures across the planet to their core. The societal damage that would follow exposure of this crime against humanity is unimaginable. 

As I write, hundreds if not thousands of lawyers are bringing various legal cases to court in several countries. Firstly, the PCR test is not and cannot be suitable for diagnosis. Positive test results are NOT “cases”, they are simply positive test results of little to no clinical value. Without positive-PCR “cases”, there is no pandemic. Its unsuitability to diagnosis and unreliability through its adjustable ct (cycle-threshold) value also mean we cannot know if anyone has died of covid-19, an alleged ‘disease’ with no basis in medical fact. 

Secondly, asymptomatic infectivity is a contradiction in terms (pre-symptomatic a possible outlier). The ‘science’ behind this novel notion is Germany’s Patient 1, a Chinese national said to have infected several Germans while asymptomatic. This claim was made by ‘Professor’ Christian Drosten, Germany’s chief virologist and creator of the first rapidly approved PCR test for SARS-CoV-2, now a highly controversial figure and himself the subject of various legal proceedings and academic scrutiny. It turns out Patient 1 did in fact have symptoms and was taking paracetamol to suppress them. And it is also emerging that Drosten has no PhD and is not a professor. The mainstream press in the German-speaking world are beginning to refer to him as “virologist Drosten”. 

If we add to these facts the absence of excess mortality worldwide and the statistical disappearance of influenza deaths globally in 2020, we must at the very least conclude that the pandemic is over, and likely that there never really was one. This shocking logical conclusion has precedent. In June 2009, the WHO declared the swine-flu a pandemic, shortly after changing their criteria defining a pandemic to no longer include large numbers of deaths and sicknesses. After investigating the matter in 2009/10, the Council of Europe ruled the swine-flu a “fake pandemic”. 

Mandated vaccines and immunity passports, still derided as conspiracy-theory nonsense by many, now stand before us, beckoning us away from meaningful freedom into the allure of safety, safely waged slavery, caged life. What makes this totalitarian control so alluring, what fears drive us into its embrace? Fear of death? Uncertainty? Risk? What would life be without them? Is a life of submissive cowardice something to strive for?

The media’s involvement in all this is pivotal. Extending Bauer’s reasoning, the human race is now systemically tied to the ‘pandemic’, to a monstrous lie. This orchestrated lockstep has been aided and abetted by a media that has failed to do its proper job: skeptically assess what is presented as the truth. Instead, media outlets have been repurposed as state-corporate stenographers. There have been expert critical voices from the beginning of this ‘pandemic’ but each has been doggedly suppressed and defamed. The price we will all pay for this coordinated censorship is incalculable. Hopefully we will relearn how important it is to remain vigilant, to have a genuinely free press: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Tyranny, totalitarianism, dictatorship are abhorred by patriots and democrats for very good reason. As the saying goes: if we sacrifice liberty in pursuit of security, we lose both. But in a state of long-lasting and profound fear, we look to authority figures who skilfully sell us their solution, and tyranny seems shiny, safe and good. A con as old as the hills. The devil does not seduce us by fully revealing his spiritual emptiness and bottomless hatred.

One way or another, humanity will need level heads to steady its ship as the consequences of global economic lockdown flood over us. I fear there won’t be enough; we have been dumbed down and kept infantile too long. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to at least be one of the many voices calling attention to this looming catastrophe in as clear terms as I can manage. With luck, the shock of what is coming will bring sufficient numbers of us to our senses, and we will weather the storm.

On thinnest ice

By Matthias Müller for Rubikon [Translation by Toby Russell]

The pandemic narrative has feet of clay in terms of its scientific foundations. Critics of the fear mongers do not take sufficient account of this pivotal fact.

The “Corona Witnesses” appear to have accomplished what science has long considered unacceptable: a reversal of the burden of proof when assessing scientific theories. Scientific theories have always been subject to the merciless dictates of empiricism: If even one single observation fails to support a theory, it was deemed falsified, even if ten thousand others apparently supported it. So say goodbye to the good old days of science. The promised “New Normal”, it seems, also promises rigorous fact avoidance – especially when those facts contradict the narrative of a few protagonists. Since Corona, we have seen how thousands of facts, studies and well-documented observations refute the pandemic theory, yet fail to change any part of its dogged propagation. This is profoundly heinous. It is time the gloves came off when dealing with fear mongers.

In recent months, countless independent researchers, doctors, scientific experts, but also accomplished independent journalists and observant thinkers have spoken out, whether through videos on social networks, through short or voluminous articles, or through compelling research. And in our private lives, too, we are often engaged in discussions [on this hottest of topics]. However, as the merciless hunting down by the mainstream media of the narrative’s critics proceeds apace, so the barrage of denunciation, denigration and defamation have turned everyday conversation into a highly explosive minefield.

Fearing that at the first sign of criticism they will be immediately insulted and branded as corona deniers, covidiots or right-wing conspiracy theorists, most knowingly compromise, even if minimally, in their argumentation. The opener “I am no corona denier / conspiracy theorist / belittler of its seriousness; we know the virus exists. But …” has become standard. Almost like an offering, a dinner-party gift, it is presented almost submissively to encourage a little mercy at the outset.

This is not only dishonourable, it is also nauseating. There is not even the slightest reason to bow before the fascistic dictates of opinion propagated by some elitist mouthpieces. Truth is not a matter of negotiation. It is time to put on our grown-up clothes when engaged in the close-quarter combat of evidence-based dispute and finally put the Corona Witnesses in their place. They like to call the critics of the panic narrative, self-righteously, “corona deniers”, yet it is they who deny: they deny the facts. Obviously, this is part of the ugly irony the “New Normal” brings in its wake; precisely those whose narrative is so conspicuously anaemic in evidential terms are the ones to aggressively demand “sources” and “evidence”. Fair enough. Let us talk theories and facts.

Theory 1: Sars-CoV-2

Let’s start with the initial hypothesis, the legendary “2019 novel coronavirus”, which – according to legend – leapt from a bat, landed somehow in a fish market in Wuhan and from there attacked its first human prey. This phenomenon is called a zoonosis; an animal virus suddenly develops a taste for human cells.

What are the facts of this story? Sources such as Wikipedia provide insufficiently accurate information, so we examined the original virus-identification paper. We learned that samples of respiratory secretions were taken from a total of nine patients in Wuhan in early January 2020. All samples were cleaned using the same procedure. In none of the samples was an intact, reproducible virus found. What was found were artefacts from different genetic material, which tested negative against only five to 18 known viruses and three to five types of bacteria to exclude these as possible triggers of the pneumonia observed in the patients.

Curiously, the paper’s authors were satisfied with the scope of these random exclusion tests. There are, however, at least 10 different bacteria strains, each with various subspecies, among them highly dangerous hospital germs all known to cause pneumonia, not to mention fungal diseases and toxins of chemical or biological origin, smog and exposure to radiation as alternative potential causes.

The city of Wuhan is among those with the worst air pollution in the world. Yet none of these obvious possibilities was considered as a possible cause of the lung diseases presenting in these nine patients. Instead, and remarkably, the team began a search for a “new” virus. The sampled material was replicated in cell culture and reconstructed by means of complicated genetic-engineering procedures using models and comparisons from gene databases. Missing pieces were added by means of genetic engineering – like completing a puzzle in which not all pieces are present.

The researchers were able to reconstruct a “complete” genome from seven of the nine samples. Sars-CoV-2 – to put it precisely – was not “discovered” but reconstructed; assembled from fragments of found RNA (ribonucleic acid), with the gaps filled in using computer modelling. To date, no complete, intact and replication-capable (i.e. “living” virus – this term is misleading because viruses are technically not “alive”) Sars-CoV-2 has been discovered, isolated and analysed anywhere in the world. Correctly speaking, the entire corona “discovery” should not therefore be referred to as “discovery”, but as reconstruction.

The reconstruction did not match any image of currently known corona-family members, so a new discovery was assumed. However, whether this virus actually exists, let alone whether it is new, cannot be validated in this way; the reconstruction process mentioned is not proof in the true sense of the word. An analogy may help by way of explanation. Suppose you buy a bag of Lego bricks for your son on Ebay, used, unsorted. Young Phileas later surprises you with a splendid red fire engine built from this material. Does this prove that an original Lego fire engine existed in the collection you bought? Or is its appearance the result of your son’s creativity and the availability of suitable individual parts from which this fire engine could be constructed? We cannot not know for certain.

Virologists have agreed to not embarrass each other with such uncomfortable questions. There is a “scientific consensus” to accept genetic reconstruction as “proof”. However, despite all virologists assuring each other that a reconstruction is a proof, it does not become a proof. A discovery is the first observation of something that exists [independent of human intervention] as a whole. A reconstruction, on the other hand, is the fabrication of a whole from individual parts – as per the theoretical assertion of a fictitious whole.

Even in the very early days of research into pathogens, people were aware of “discoveries” where nothing was actually discovered. Consequently, the four “Koch's postulates” were set as the gold standard for pathogen detection. These postulates, established by Robert Koch, ensure that the woods can still be made out through the sawdust clouds generated by the scientific zeal for new discoveries. They must be met for a proof to be “real”, otherwise it is considered that no proof was provided. Here are Koch’s postulates in brief:

1. The first postulate states that the suspected pathogen must always be associated with the disease it is supposed to cause. This means that the pathogen must be present in every case of the disease, whereas in healthy individuals the pathogen may not be present.
2. The second postulate focuses on the isolated, pure form. The suspected pathogen must be cultivated in pure culture. If it is not possible to culture the pathogen under laboratory conditions equivalent to those in its preferred host organ and to isolate it completely from other organisms, the pathogen shall be considered not to have been detected.
3. The third postulate demands that the pathogen, which has been bred in pure culture and completely isolated, must again trigger exactly the disease attributed to it in a healthy host organism. If this is not successful, the proof is not provided.
4. Finally, the fourth postulate is the crosscheck. After the cultured pathogen has again caused the disease in question in the healthy host organism, it must be possible to isolate it again and it must be identical to the original pathogen.

Only when all conditions are met is a pathogen considered to have been detected. In Wuhan’s first proof of Sars-CoV-2, none of Koch’s postulates were fulfilled; it was a pure reconstruction. In addition to the first pseudo detection in Wuhan in January 2020, further detection experiments for Sars-CoV-2 were conducted. There are a total of four other studies that claim to have performed an alleged detection. All of these alleged detection studies were genetic-reconstruction studies (1 to 4 below).

In response to an inquiry from Torsten Engelbrecht, an award-winning journalist, and the independent researcher Konstantin Demeter, all authors of the above-mentioned studies have confirmed in writing that Koch’s postulates were not fulfilled in their research. Moreover, they admitted that they had no proof that the RNA material used to reconstruct the Sars-CoV-2 genome was virus-like particles or cell debris, pure or impure, or viral particles of any kind. In other words, they all built red fire engines from a pile of colourful Lego bricks.

The experienced virologist Charles Calisher has also examined all studies ever published worldwide to determine whether Sars-CoV-2 has ever been isolated in pure form and proven to be a replication-capable wild virus. The result to his efforts is: No. From the first day of the “pandemic”, not a single true proof of Sars-CoV-2 has been provided anywhere on earth. So far, Sars-Cov-2 is merely a theory, a phantom image of an alleged pathogen, nothing more. All previous “proofs” were not proofs, but genetic reconstructions. In no case was even Koch’s first postulate satisfied, let alone all four. Worldwide, there is no experiment or study that, in compliance with the scientific principles of pathogen detection, demonstrates a causal relationship between Sars-CoV-2 and the disease – covid-19 – allegedly triggered by it.

These are the facts. Until proper proof is provided in accordance with genuine scientific rules, Sars-CoV-2 is nothing more than a vague claim that is nevertheless spread by the media with incredible aggression. Presumably this aggression is due to the alarmingly weak evidence; those without sound arguments usually make a lot of noise. However, aggression and noise cannot replace scientific evidence, nor can they suspend the obligation to provide it. But even though the new corona virus is a theory that has yet to be proven, it may still be true.

This cannot just be brushed aside. However, we would like to strongly disagree that so-called experts can make well-founded statements about the alleged properties and effects of this phantom. Statements that begin with words like “What we know about the virus is …” are nothing more than pseudo-scientific gibberish, vain posturing, boastful chatter.

These impostors know absolutely nothing about this virus, because no one on this planet, no doctor and no virologist has ever seen it. These are the facts. And if a discussion is held on the basis of the scientific evidence available so far, it should proceed from this fact: Sars-CoV-2 is still an unproven theory; everything we know about it is based on the genetically reconstructed model of an asserted new virus. The question of how to develop a working vaccine against a virus of which only a theoretical model exists so far can probably only be answered with a lot of imagination and a portly heap of business acumen.

Theory 2: Covid-19

"Covid-19" is the dramatic name for the disease that the Sars-CoV-2 is said to cause. This vague formulation is appropriate; the disease “covid-19” is not clinically detectable.

What does that mean? When a disease is clinically undetectable, it means there is neither a specific symptom nor a typical clinical progression that is sufficiently significant to allow the disease to be accurately diagnosed, i.e. “proven”. According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), covid-19 is clinically defined by “respiratory symptoms of any severity”. This is a common definition but is in no way sufficient to accurately characterise a disease clinically. So what are “respiratory symptoms of any severity”? Mild rhinitis? Absolutely. Sneezing? Check! Coughing? You bet. Fever? Not usually, but in this case... yep. Pneumonia? Ding ding ding! Slightly sore throat? Yup. Itchy nose? Right again!

“Respiratory symptoms of any severity” is any state any distance from completely healthy, somewhere in the area of the respiratory tract. Thus, without exception, every flu infection, every cough, every hay fever, every pneumonia and even banal cold is by definition possibly “covid-19”, but none of these can actually be “covid-19”. “Covid-19” has no specific symptom and no typical clinical progression.

There is nothing to clinically identify this ominous disease and nothing to rule it out. If there is anything at all that could be said with sufficient statistical significance to be typical of an “infection” from Sars-CoV-2, it is that the “infected” person is and remains completely healthy, as is recently the case in over 90 percent of those who test positive. This is remarkable for a global killer virus on whose account constitutional basic rights have been suspended and the world economy has been put into an artificial coma.

In eight out of ten “infected” people, the “killer virus” causes nothing at all, while the rest show symptoms similar to the flu. In only a tiny fraction is the (flu-like) symptomatology difficult, which also coincides with the seasonal flu, whereas flu viruses are much more effective in terms of their pathogenic potential. Sometimes months of exhaustion follow even after the illness has subsided, pain in the limbs, temporary loss of smell and taste, formation of blood clots, damage to the immune system, organ damage, brain damage, heart damage – all this is also caused by the influenza virus, for example, and is not an exclusive property of Sars-CoV-2. The question of differential diagnoses to clarify what exactly Sars-CoV-2 does and does not cause remains open.

However, some overzealous doctors and medical professionals have attracted considerable media attention by claiming to have seen particularly mysterious cases of this phenomenon. The Reinhold Messners of the Medical Society, those who have seen the incarnate epidemiological yeti in the form of an evil “covid-19”, report gruesome organ damage as well as destroyed lung tissue and vascular damage. These anecdotes would actually require a more detailed scientific evaluation, but strangely enough, in these cases – from a medical point of view highly interesting –, scientific examinations, autopsies and research are largely absent.

As lurid headlines, these boulevardesque individual case histories are good enough, but apparently not sufficiently motivating for the investigation of a global killer. The fact is, in many of these individual cases, either other causes for the unusual symptoms were subsequently discovered or possibly uncomfortable investigations were deliberately avoided. Could certain lung damage not also have been caused by contraindicated invasive ventilation? What does the documentation look like? Were experimental, inappropriate or unsuitable therapies carried out? Countries such as Italy, Spain or the USA have reported massive, hair-raising treatment errors.

However one may wish to categorise the descriptions from the aforementioned, media-oriented physicians, the fact is that they remain a statistically irrelevant marginal phenomenon. The overwhelming majority of the “infected” remain entirely free of these unexplained phenomena.

The difficult courses of events alone constitute sufficient reason to be critical. It is at least very evident that none of them has been diagnosed via differential diagnosis. A positive corona test is invariably enough; further examinations were not carried out on any of the patients worldwide, at least not systematically. But that would be the dictates of science. On its own, the natural desire to inquire more deeply should surely prompt every physician to take a closer look at a new, global killer disease. Why were no additional tests carried out to rule out infection by another virus – an influenza virus for example, or by various bacteria?

How do we know whether the “severe progressions” were not the result of an influenza virus or other pathogens in addition to Sars-CoV-2? There is not a single study worldwide that shows Sars-CoV-2 causes any disease at all. There is only one questionable “test”, which in some cases is associated with a more or less severe influenza infection, but in the vast majority of cases not even that. To speak of “evidence” here makes a mockery of medical and scientific work. The highly conspicuous, almost complete absence of typical annual flu cases this year should at least give food for thought. A statistically completely normal number of respiratory diseases in 2020 - but the annual flu is not part of that number? Did covid-19 defeat the flu?

In Germany alone, around 40,000 people die annually from outpatient-acquired pneumonia. Hospital germs are a huge issue worldwide and occupy top position among deadly infectious diseases. No other infection phenomenon kills more people in Europe. Could it not be that a large proportion of the alleged deaths caused by covid-19 are actually due to these extremely dangerous, but politically extremely uncomfortable pathogens? In Italy alone, there is much to support this theory, because over 80 percent of all covid-19 patients there were treated with antibiotics, which indicates a bacterial superinfection. Of all European countries, Italy has the biggest problem with multi-resistant germs.

In Italy, more than 50,000 people die every year from hospital germs, but strangely enough not in spring 2020. Amazing, isn’t it? It would be a matter of course to rule out this potential cause of a “severe progression” before assigning the cause of death to something that had not even been scientifically correctly researched at that time – actually until today. Or did they not want to do without certain financial “incentives” in connection with “case numbers” in pandemic practices and hospitals? After all, covid-19 patients trigger attractive bonus payments from health insurance companies, which can quickly amount to twice the normal billing rates …

Basically, these outlier cases collide grievously with Koch’s postulates and thus plunge the entire covid-19 myth into doubt: Koch’s postulates demand that a pathogen trigger a specific disease that essentially progresses along the same course, i.e. typically. Healthy individuals may not have the pathogen, sick individuals must have it – otherwise the alleged pathogen cannot be pathogenic. But now, with Sars-CoV-2, we face a particularly strange creature from the outset. As a rule – recently in 90 percent of “cases” – it does not make people ill and yet is “detectable” in them. This violates Koch’s first postulate.

The remaining 10 percent have symptoms, sometimes severe, but typically not. To make matters worse, there are an extremely large number of people who show the symptoms of “covid-19” – i.e. “any” respiratory symptoms – but in whom Sars-CoV-2 is not detectable. This is yet another violation of the postulates set down by Robert Koch, the pioneer of germ theory. So which is it? Does Sars-CoV-2 trigger a real, identifiable disease that deserves the name “covid-19”, or not?

The answer is sobering. After millions of tests, the answer is blindingly clear: No. In the vast majority of cases – well over 80 percent – the alleged virus does not cause anything at all and the rest of the cases lead to illnesses that essentially correspond to a normal flu-like infection in terms of symptoms and mortality. Covid-19 cannot be distinguished from a normal flu infection by any specific symptom or typical progression.

So when we talk about the global killer disease, the “pandemic”, our conversations rest on exactly this simple truth: “Covid-19” is clinically undetectable as a distinct disease. There is not even sufficient medical evidence for the claim that “Sars-CoV-2” would cause a disease in the first place, since it has not even been investigated, let alone proven, whether the diseases associated with a positive PCR test are merely a correlation or actually a causal consequence. The difference is huge: Every time Big Ben chimes in London, someone dies in Europe. Does this make its chiming fatal?

Theory 3: The RT-PCR test

The assertion “The virus is in circulation” is, strictly and factually speaking, not empirically verifiable. What is “in circulation” is, in fact, the RT-PCR test. If it is “positive”, it is deemed an “infection”. This interpretation is, however, scientifically inadmissible, as we will explain in detail below. The entire pandemic story is based solely on this test procedure. Without the RT-PCR test, the “pandemic” would never have got underway and would probably not even have been noticed.

The majority of the population knows nothing at all about the current “coronatest”. Maintaining this ignorance may indeed be the intention, but it is accepted, at least, by politics and the media. Although explaining the procedure to the people at least somewhat understandably is strenuously avoided. If the population were to understand this test, the “pandemic” would be over within the hour, so education is sorely needed. But even though many physicians, journalists with professional ethics and real scientists have attempted to do just that – sadly their efforts have still not been sufficiently effective.

The PCR test is a genetic-engineering procedure developed in 1983 by biochemist Kary Mullis. Mullis was awarded the Nobel Prize for the procedure in 1993. PCR stands for “Polymerase Chain Reaction”, “RT” stands for “Reverse Transcript”. To understand the procedure, you don’t have to dive into the depths of genetic engineering. Basically, the test uses a genetic “template” consisting of two “primers”. The template represents a very short gene sequence from the subject virus’ genome. It is important to note that it is not the virus’ complete genome that is being searched for, only that short snippet.

If the template finds its corresponding counterpart, i.e. the short gene sequence to which it is calibrated, it docks to it and makes copies of it. The copying process is controlled by enzymes and temperature cycles. Each cycle causes a doubling of the material found. An exponential multiplication takes place. After 30 cycles, for example, the amount of 2 + 2 to 29th power gene snippets is produced from one gene snippet. At some point, after 30, 35, 40 or even more cycles, there is enough duplicated material available that it can be made visible by a staining test.

This test procedure is extremely problematic if it is to be used for determining a virus infection, because it is not suitable for this purpose. Describing the method he developed, Kary Mullis stated that detecting virus quantity [load] using this method would be a contradiction in terms. In fact, manufacturers of PCR test kits explicitly point out in their product inserts that the method is not suitable for diagnostic purposes. This is not just a simple problem, it is a whole chain of problems:

• The RT-PCR test only searches for a tiny gene sequence of the suspected target virus. [Translator’s note: My understanding is that the test searches for two sequences.] For this to work, however, this small gene sequence would have to be absolutely unique and typical for the virus being searched for. No other virus would have the same gene sequence anywhere in its genome. However, this cannot be ruled out, since we do not know all the individual variants of, for example, the very extensive and largely harmless corona family. The prototype of all RT-PCR tests on the market [for covid-19] was developed by Christian Drosten in Berlin. He started test development as early as 1 January 2020. At that time there was just one unconfirmed rumour in social media about an alleged occurrence of seven Sars-infections in Wuhan, less than 48 hours earlier. As his own documentation shows, the test was calibrated to the gene sequences of various old viruses from the corona family (5). This means that the test cannot be used exclusively for the allegedly new Sars-CoV-2, but rather that it is positive for all strains that have this arbitrarily selected gene sequence. This fact was proven by the INSTAND ring study. All tests available on the market indicate cross-positive reactions with other viruses, in part also with animal viruses and flu pathogens, as Drosten himself confirms. Consequently, where this happens there is no infection with Sars-CoV-2.
• A positive RT-PCR test detects only the presence of this one gene snippet, not the complete virus genome. Viruses that come into contact with our body are regularly recognised and destroyed by our immune system. Viruses that are found in aerosols in the air or on surfaces are destroyed by UV light, chemicals (disinfectants), temperature and oxidation. Most of the foreign genetic material in, on or around our body consists of the remains of destroyed foreign organisms and viruses. Of the many millions of viruses that are released around us every second, only a handful survive long enough to find a new host. If a positive RT-PCR test is performed, it cannot be ruled out that it has only found an artefact of a virus that has already been destroyed. Consequently, in such cases there is no infection from Sars-CoV-2.
• Even if an RT-PCR test turns out positive because it detected the complete genome of Sars-CoV-2, this does not indicate an actual infection. It does not even say anything about the actual presence of the whole virus. If a person’s whole genome is detectable in a glass of water, it does not mean that the person is actually in that glass. An active virus consists of genome and envelope; both must be intact, by the way. For an infection to occur, millions of active viruses must be multiplying in the body. However, since the RT-PCR test is ultra-sensitive and detects even absurdly low amounts of genetic material that are completely insufficient to trigger an infection, a positive test is still not conclusive with regard to a possible infection, even if the material found does indeed originate from the active target virus. Consequently, in such cases there is still no [clear] infection from Sars-Cov-2.
• The RT-PCR method is not a binary test; it does not have a clear positive or negative result. The test procedure is a threshold test, the threshold value is given as its Ct value (cycle threshold). This value indicates how many doubling cycles should be carried out until the colouring test can be considered positive or negative. There is no scientific basis for the Ct-value and there is no specification; it is arbitrary. Every manufacturer and every laboratory determines the Ct value as they wish. Drosten recommends a Ct-value of 45 for his test. 17,592,186,186,044,416 copies are made from one gene snippet in 45 doubling cycles. In other words, only after the genetic material found is multiplied by the insane factor of 17.6 trillion is it detectable. In addition, with each doubling cycle the risk increases that even the tiniest errors or impurities are amplified absurdly and then produce a false positive result. Even absolutely virus-free samples tested positive in the "Instand" ring study in up to 1.4 percent of tests. With the standard tests, a rate of 0.5 to 2 percent of false positive results is assumed even by manufacturers. With more than one million tests per week, this leads to a huge amount of false positives. There is also evidence that the Ct value of 45 is far too high. From a Ct value of around 30, it was no longer possible to successfully cultivate virus strains in cell cultures. This means that with such small quantities of genetic material found, it must be assumed that no viruses capable of reproduction are present. An American study found that up to 90 percent of positive tests are highly unlikely to be infectious due to the much-too-high Ct values.
• The RT-PCR test is ultra-sensitive. Because it is able to detect even small concentrations of nucleic acids, strict demands are placed on implementation of the procedure. Even microscopically small contaminations make the patient’s sample unusable, and even the slightest mistake during sampling, packaging, transport or in the laboratory will invalidate the test. Basically, all samples must be taken under sterile conditions by medical professionals, sealed, packed, stored and transported under the strictest conditions. Laboratories must be certified and each test must be double-checked. Of course this does not happen in the current orgy of testing. The very idea of setting up multiple test stations along motorways is grotesque and testifies to crude political posturing. From a scientific point of view, it is utter nonsense. Not a single one of these tests is permissible by current standards; the medical significance of these tests is zero.

The PCR process is originally a genetic-engineering manufacturing process. It is not suitable for the detection of an intact, replication-capable virus, since no conclusions about pathogenic potential can be derived from the test result. In principle, the test cannot diagnose an infection, since an infection requires not only the detection of an intact virus, but also its active replication in the host. The PCR method cannot make any statement about possible transmission either, because the prerequisite for transmission is a significant occurrence of infection.

The RT-PCR test is a diabolical tool; it claims to be diagnostic, contrary to the facts. The test is also incapable of making a valid statement about the presence of the allegedly new coronavirus, and it certainly cannot diagnose infection with “covid-19”. “Covid-19” only exists because of the RT-PCR test, which assigns an entirely fuzzily defined, clinically almost arbitrary symptom matrix to an alleged virus. There are no studies worldwide that prove causality between a positive [corona] test and any specific disease.

“Covid-19” could be assigned to a patient’s eye colour with the same scientific validity. If she has blue eyes and coughs, it is “covid-19”, if her eyes are brown, grey or green, then not. It sounds absurd, and it is, disturbingly so: Statistically, the available data even argue against causality, because the great majority of the alleged “positives” have not lead to any illness, while the actual sick people show symptoms that are not uniform and are regularly triggered by all kinds of other pathogens and co-morbidities. The attribution of a disease to a positive RT-PCR test is therefore not scientifically tenable.

It should also be clearly emphasised that “the” PCR test does not exist. Instead, there are a large number of different tests; currently there are well over one hundred in use worldwide.

Some RT-PCR kits test two gene sequences simultaneously, some only test one, and this is not the same for all tests. France uses different tests than Germany, the USA uses still other tests and so on. None of the tests used worldwide have been validated – that is to say, it has never been independently verified that the test actually does what it is supposed to do. Depending on which gene sequence of the suspected Sars-CoV-2 is tested, the test is more or less susceptible to cross-positives and therefore false results for other pathogens. According to manufacturers, some tests react positively to influenza viruses, which of course makes the whole thing a complete farce.

This is the actual state of affairs. From an empirical and strictly scientific point of view, the “pandemic” stands on very thin ice. We have an extremely fragile virus theory. In addition, we have a provocatively vaguely defined theory of a supposedly new disease, the symptoms of which cannot be distinguished from normal flu infections and various other well-known syndromes. The connection between the two theories is arbitrarily constructed by a highly elastic test, which, however, is neither suitable nor approved nor validated for this purpose and is known to be very prone to error.

The right thing to do is to point out this weak foundation to the propagators of this destructive narrative. They have been able to frighten us long enough with creative number games and genetic-engineering sleight of hand. It is high time to put an end to it.

Sources and notes

(1) Study 1: Leo L. M. Poon; Malik Peiris, “Emergence of a novel human coronavirus threatening human health”, Nature Medicine, March 2020.

(2) Study 2: Myung-Guk Han et al; “Identification of Coronavirus Isolated from a Patient in Korea with Covid-19”, Osong Public Health and Research Perspectives, February 2020.

(3) Study 3: Wan Beom Park et al, “Virus Isolation from the First Patient with Sars-Cov-2in Korea”, Journal of Korean Medical Science, February 24, 2020.

(4) Study 4: Na Zhu et al, “A Novel Coronavirus from Patients with Pneumonia in China”, 2019, New England Journal of Medicine, February 20, 2020.

(5) See results.

[Translator’s comment: As with the previous article I translated, my interest here is in uncovering the truth. Considering what's at stake, there is easily enough smoke here, and more besides, to demand that virology explain what it means by viral “isolation” when Koch’s postulates are not met, and why Koch’s postulates might be ignored or replaced by some updated set (e.g., River’s postulates) that are non-controversial and scientifically rigorous/valid. For the record, I have no dog in this fight. I am simply a concerned citizen looking for answers regarding what strongly looks to me like a global conspiracy to cajole and trick most of humanity into a new, very authoritarian planetary system of rule.]