Tuesday 3 March 2020

Birdemic!

Corvidae - the invisible threat that justifies world totalitarian takeover: or, the return of The Raven King?

So this is it! The spring 2020 totalitarian power grab that I have been expecting - but (in an example of demonic improvisation) justified by an invisible virus (with a routine, tiny, global impact; covered by media censorship and selective over-reporting) instead of (the planned) invisible CO2 Global Warming/ Climate Emergency/ Extinction Rebellion Terror-Crisis

On the whole it is scarier to believe in a world plague than creeping sea levels. And so long as every international death is reported - with race, age and health details censored - it does indeed sound scary; even when the percentage affected is sub-detectable by normal standards.

The newspaper headlines today have described that the UK government has implemented a state of war, and control of public 'gatherings'. despite that - in global terms - nothing has happened. But nothing is (in fact) more than enough to create genuine chaos, a genuine 'emergency' requiring 'sweeping powers'...

So, we have it! - It Has Happened - and with support from a terrified mass public. 

My next prediction is that the demonic roots will quickly become evident (to those with eyes to see) in terms of what actually happens.

(As a small but significant instance; keep a particular eye on what happens to government regulation of Christian church 'gatherings' compared with other kinds of monotheistic church 'gatherings'.)

We can indeed see in practice that free-floating fear is a sin; the opposite of love - and in a Godless world, fear is readily created, amplified, manipulated and directed; without limit or feedback.


20 comments:

dearieme said...

Oh dear, I've been calling it CORVID-19 too. But then it was only months ago that I referred routinely to Jeremy Corvid (remember him?).

But my guess is that this is more likely to turn out to be serious than not. I base that not on Chinese "data" but on Chinese action. Of course their action might have been ill-judged. Who can tell? I await the development of data from South Korea and of final data from the Diamond Princess. I say 'final' because apparently there are still quite a few critically ill people from that ship, some of whom will presumably die.

dearieme said...

By the way, local rumour has it that dark chocolate and blue cheese will defend you from the disease. Perhaps you should try them as a smoothie with kale, broccoli, and blueberries?

George said...

I think *this* is the real reason they needed to impeach Trump first. They didn't want him to be the one having the official Emergency Powers.

George said...

Hysteria in the US. a 6 people have died over several days - mostly elderly in a nursing home. Note that about 6 people/day are dying in Chicago due to criminal violence. No emergency in Chicago over that, lol.

Space Monkey said...

It seems almost baffling that every single bureaucrat in the premier disease prevention of take-your-pick country are particularly incompetent and bumbling very close to complete buffoonery.
...and then I remember what the current year is.

David Earle said...

If this is it, it feels pretty underwhelming so far.

There are lots of professionals on YouTube that are growing in popularity every day because they are analyzing data and bringing the facts as best as possible to people, since government is failing to do so. But who knows, they could also be "in on it" and could change their tone at any day once they've grabbed enough attentive viewers.

Nevertheless, it appears to me that such people have helped to mitigate many people's fears in the meantime.

Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

John Fitzgerald said...

Rod Dreher's on the same page in today's American Conservative -

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/coronavirus-the-surveillance-state/

Bruce Charlton said...

@islanti - "If this is it, it feels pretty underwhelming so far.".

That, of course, is the idea - they've done a good job of manufacturing a problem - provoking a reaction - providing a plausible solution...

https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2017/08/we-need-to-cure-our-impatient-addiction.html

Of course, the solution to *every* problem is *always* more totalitarian bureaucracy, so that bit's easy.

Mainwhile - in the USA alone there have been 32 *million* cases of influenza (c 10% of the population) this winter; about 1% of them hospitalized; and about 18,000 deaths - six times the number of Corvid victims, and that's just in the USA.

https://wmbriggs.com/post/29566/

It's another scam. Of course the media have hyped the *reaction* into a genuine crisis. But the UK, and The West, have been tricked into docile submission to asked-for tyranny; by the same serial liars who have done it so many times before.

Well, it has happened - the question is what will happen next, and will reality be recognised? Because disease is more observable, experiential, than climate change; people are more likely to notice that they have been scammed.

If the Establishment have struck with too much haste, they may provoke the kind of backlash they most fear - which is not physical, but spiritual. Some of the 'measures' for fake-disease control being discussed are potentially a spiritually 'Good Thing', in terms of detaching people from addiction to virtual reality and the echo chamber of lies.

stef said...

"Mainwhile - in the USA alone there have been 32 *million* cases of influenza (c 10% of the population) this winter; about 1% of them hospitalized; and about 18,000 deaths - six times the number of Corvid victims, and that's just in the USA."

Only sorta -- these *estimates* that include tested people, clinical diagnoses, and projection against models. Whole lotta assumptions built into their models, the models change, and the statistics can be pushed in all sorts of directions depending on the desired outcome or biases of whoever is picking things up. Lots of squish.

How many netted in the "Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network" are one virus vs another? There are reports of Coronachan extending all the way back to November, after all.

dearieme said...

I've done a little googling. The official numbers for flu deaths are not what the layman might assume them to be. They are intelligent guesses - how intelligent depends on the success of all the modelling and assumptions that go into generating the guesses.

Which brings me to a point that a medic might care to explain. What's meant by "cause of death"? I mean, the doc could presumably write down "his/her heart stopped" for every case. So we retreat one step. "His heart stopped because he had been stabbed in the heart" - OK, so murder is the cause of death. Or road accident. Or ...

But what about the endless parade of deaths that are old folk each with a multitude of problems? Mustn't there be a large element of arbitrariness in what's written on the death certificate? Presumably that's why flu deaths are a matter of intelligent guessing?

Andrew said...

Thanks for the links. I had not seen those articles.

Hari Seldon said...

Respectfully, I disagree with your assessment.

If anything, the Establishment has *downplayed* the severity of the threat from COVID-19, until the past week or so, when the media realized it was a useful stick with which to beat the Trump administration.

Until then, the coverage has focused on two themes: the extraordinary mass controls that China has imposed on its population, amounting to the largest quarantine in human history; and the purported "racism" and "xenophobia" of those who associate COVID-19 with Asian people, or who demand travel bans on certain countries. The global establishment, including the WHO, has made it a priority to chastise Western people for their alleged hateful attitudes and irrational overreaction to the virus.

The incredible measures taken to contain the virus in East Asia, seemingly without any prompting from the global Establishment, may or may not be justified, but my understanding is that this disease is highly contagious and has a relatively high fatality rate, reported by China's CDC to be 2.3% of confirmed cases. You mention influenza. But based on the numbers you cite, influenza has a fatality rate of less than 0.06%. Perhaps the coronavirus fatality rate will come down (dramatically) as more cases are reported.

Even so, if this virus is not aggressively contained in the US, it seems likely that many tens or hundreds of thousands of people (or more) will die, while the number of cases could easily overwhelm our thinly stretched hospital system. Media hysteria should always be viewed with skepticism, but there is real reason for concern here.

Bruce Charlton said...

We would do well not to be distracted by pseudo-epidemiological discussions about disease characteristics that we do not know (I was a university lecturer in Epidemiology for three years, and am familiar with these issues).

The only thing *solidly* known about Corvid globally is that *Not* very many people have died from it.

But I woke up yesterday morning to read that because of this non-emergency, the UK government has taken wartime (totalitarian) powers - greater than for 80 years (when invasion was imminent). The talk from the Prime Minister was of mass and pervasive population control, troops on the streets, coercive direction of labour (civilian conscription) etc.

Since I have been expecting this kind of power grab for a while, I was not surprised - my point is that this is an opportunistic power grab; exploiting a situation but probably not, initially, creating it.

(As I have said; I believe Plan A was to be linked with the fake Climate Emergency; and the fake Epidemic Emergency was Plan B, a chance that just came along and offered itself.)

My impression (from the nature of media coverage) was that the decision to *use* the epidemic for this polotical purpose was not made until a couple of weeks ago - perhaps at the point when it was recognised that the global threat was Not real; and could therefore be 'managed'.

Anyway, now the decision has been made, and the intent is for a qualitative increase in totalitarian bureaucracy across as much of the world as possible. It is an interesting irony (or revelation of reality?) that a *supposedly* post-Brexit UK was perhaps the first to implement the full-on take-over agenda, beating the EU to it!

The UK under Boris Johnson are now even better globalists than the EU! - which is perhaps why Brexit (in name only) was allowed to happen.

Hari Seldon said...

Thank you for clarifying/restating your view of this - that is both reassuring and disturbing. I obviously have no clue about epidemiology but am trying to wrap my head around the reported numbers.

I am probably taking a US-centric view of this, where the authorities appear to be reacting in more of a deer-in-the-highlights fashion than elsewhere. It is interesting. however, that the Federal Reserve took the opportunity to slash interest rates yesterday, citing coronavirus as the rationale for this "emergency" step.

Bruce Charlton said...

As I've said - the data on deaths is the only reasonably valid measure of severity - and even then there is strong a tendency to over-count with a new disease, only detectable (and with false positives) by a test.

China has a population about 1.4 billion compared with the UK approx 70 million - that's fifteen times larger.

So 3000 dead in China corresponds to 150 in the UK - spread over (more than) 60 days means about 2.5 deaths per day - which is essentially *undetectable* with a normal-ish respiratory virus *unless you are specifically looking for it*; or if it is killing young healthy people (which we would be being told, IF it were happening).

We are only detecting these many deaths - which is so very few - because we are looking for this specific cause.

IF China had instead experienced a million deaths in January, and then 2 million in February - that would be worth noting at a global level, but still not that impressive compared with influenza - unless it was affecting the young and healthy - but we are a *thousand* times less than that, even on raw numbers.

We are So Very Far Away from anything singnificant in terms of deaths, that the crisis is revealed as fake. However, a fake crisis is better - from an Establishment perspective - than a real one; as it can be controlled.

And, after all, it is just as easy to make a real political-social crisis (as we now have) from a trivial-undetectable-fake epidemic as from a real one; once the population have decided to believe the mass media and politicians, get afraid (and fear of the unkown and unreal cannot be reassured) - and start clamouring for *something* (anything!) to be done, for immediate *action*.

Adil said...

The media is baiting people into fear as always. Climate change creates a form of abstract superstition, where protesters who'd like to save the climate actually seem to have lost touch with nature - or become neurotic towards it. So the environmental movement seems to be composed of the most docile of urbanites, susceptible to Authoritarian measures.

Coronavirus seems to be doing approximately the same thing, driving people into hysteria, hypochondria and fear. If your hypothesis is true, this means people will welcome increasing bureaucracy and a sterile environment. From this POV, it is the omni-surveillant eye of Sauron being implemented, seeking to suppress all dissent and unmonitored activity. I suspect that in the near future no one will be off the radar, not even in their own bathroom.

The state will be your new omnipotent Daddy. Secularism FTW!

Jacob Gittes said...

Wow, Bruce. I tried to share this post on Facebook, to my select tiny group named "waking up," but Facebook wouldn't let me post it, because it was "against Community Standards."
I posted it anyway, by simply pasting the text in. I'm giving you credit, don't worry lol.

But really - this short post of yours is being actively censored. You are on to something.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Eric - Indeed. The spiritual question is how we react to this. For instance, Russia from 1917-89 was subjected to retty much the worst that anti-Christian evil could devise; but upon release from this oppression there was a most unexpected Christian revival, which continues.

Of course, Russia was (apart from its ruling class) maybe the most actively Christian country in the world when it was forcibly put under the Bolshevik heel - but it is remarkable that the faith survived the decapitation, then subversion of the Orthodox Cleregy and religious orders (I once calculated that in addition to the Bishops (who were exterminated in their hundreds) and priests; there were about 2% monks and nuns in Russia - which was at least twice as many as in medieval Europe.

We in the UK, by contrast, have tiny and dwindling numbers of serious Christians - and their faith makes zero perceptible difference to the majority of self-identified 'liberal' Christians; including clergy.

But I would predict that the saving Christian faith will secretly thrive under this latest enhancement of already-existing totalitarianism. Indeed, since the corruptions of pleasure and distraction are the hardest to resist; it makes things very clear and simple for us!

Serhei said...

Wherever the present order is enforced through mass-gatherings (concerts, conferences, parties, weddings (!), compulsory schooling most importantly), the Corvid fear will tend to undermine it. Such gatherings will be replaced either by solitude, or by one-on-one and small-group gatherings.

Where solitude is the outcome, the question is, what will that solitude be filled with? The continued availability of glowing-screen technology presents the main remaining threat to careful thought and reflection.

Otto said...

"(As a small but significant instance; keep a particular eye on what happens to government regulation of Christian church 'gatherings' compared with other kinds of monotheistic church 'gatherings'.)

Well done, your predictions about "other kids of monotheistic chuch 'gatherings'" were correct! While churches and synagogues go virtual for services, mosques in the UK are packed for Friday prayers:

- Yesterday for Friday prayers the Baitul Aziz Masjid in SE1 was full note the shoes at one of its doors. I saw shopkeepers running to join the prayer. Super spreaders?
- London coronavirus: Why the city's busiest mosque is still open for prayers