Paranoia, the destroyer, comes knocking on my door
You know the pain drifts to days, turns to nights
But it slowly will subside
And when it does, I take a step, I take a breath
And wonder what I’ll find
Too much blood, too much hate, turn off the set
There’s got to be something more
When Mohammed, Allah, Buddah, Jesus Christ
Are knocking down my door
I’m agnostic getting God, but man
She takes a female form
There’s no time, no space, no law
We’re out here on our own
Guess it’s life, doing it’s thing
Making you cry, making you think
Yeah life, dealing it’s hand
Making you cry and you don’t understand
Life, doing it’s thing
Making you cry now, making you think of
Pain, doing it’s thing
Making you cry yeah, making you sing
Don’t say it, don’t say it’s too late
Don’t, don’t say it’s too late (It’s never too late, it’s never too late)
Don’t, don’t say it’s too late (It’s never too late)
Don’t, don’t say it’s too late
The human condition, the big decisions
The human condition, the big decisions
Richard Ashcroft, Check the Meaning
For one year and nine months now, I’ve been reading and hearing about “the Great Reset”, which is supposed to be rolled out by the World Economic Forum, headed by Klaus Schwab. It’s something I am not acquainted with, so, until now I haven’t mentioned it. But I do observe that a lot of people are very concerned about that. With them, I share the fear of what the future will bring us. Why? Not for myself. But for my children, who will have to find a safe place in this world after I’m gone. And I want them to live in a safe country, a country where they can breathe freely and not have to be afraid of authoritarian leaders. I don’t want my children to have a totalitarian medical state where they must redeem their “freedom” from those in power by donating their bodies to the government; actually, to the extremely lucrative experiments of Big-Pharma.
Nevertheless, ever so often there’s something to laugh about. When I read bits and pieces of Klaus Schwab’s “The Great Reset” in places on the internet, I look at the utterances of someone who considers himself a great visionary, fantasizing and imagining a totally different world than the present one. A man who thinks that all problems can be solved by applying advanced technology. On the other hand, I do never read about any solutions to the really large and globally occurring problems, like extreme poverty, overpopulation, famines, natural disasters, wars and the depletion of natural resources such as oil, gas and precious metals. And no, COVID19 does not belong in this list and, in comparison, is a very minor problem. There really are no simple solutions to these problems, not even technological ones. Unless one is already recycling Klaus Schwab’s mobile phone, as the raw materials of it can be far better used. Concerning the environment, one must start with oneself, including Klaus Schwab.
Poverty-stricken people who – rightly so – are looking for a better life without hardship, violence and starvation that befall them in Africa. Perhaps they don’t want this so much for themselves, but, like me, especially for their children. As a result, they pound harder and harder on the gates of Fort Europe. Who can blame them? The imbalance between rich and poor is immense, and ‘rich’ acts like an increasingly strong magnet to ‘poor’. And where those differences become too large, the poor and displaced will come to claim their share. With all its consequences.
Hannah Arendt got it right when, in her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, she stated – in terms of imperialism – that any system that pursues more land, more power, and more money, is ultimately doomed. Perhaps this is the moment in which capitalism and neoliberalism begin their death march.
I didn’t buy Schwab’s book but read bits and pieces. Like a very good friend of mine who has collected a list of books and titled it: ‘To read before I die’, I meanwhile have such a list too. And for Schwab’s foggy frills there’s no room on this list. The ability of self-proclaimed visionaries like Schwab, to predict the future is generally no better than that of Neil Ferguson, Jacco Wallinga and the weather guy. For today the forecast works well, for tomorrow reasonable, for the day after tomorrow even less and the weather forecast for next week can just as well be done by the neighbor’s dog. Schwab’s book is destined to end in eternity’s book burning, where most of this kind of bumbling decadence ends. When I read a section about a microchip that can ‘read minds’, I immediately burst into laughter. Localizing an epileptic focus using a ‘grid’ is already a daunting task for neurophysiologists, even where it emits a very clear electrical signal that can be measured. But trying to locate thoughts in the brain is an unprecedented laughable absurdity, which only confused economists can conceptualize. The search for ’thoughts’ in the brain, by means of microchips, is comparable to the intention to build a wooden house on the sun. Star Wars in the brain, extremely suitable for science fiction films, but devoid of any sense of reality. His fantasies deserve a place in Harry G. Frankfurt’s book “On Bullshit”. Continuing to read, to learn of Schwab’s grandiloquent delusions, would be a waste of the limited time I have left in this life.
Despite the utter madness and hysteria that has poured over us during the past two years, I still believe that most of the defining events in history are the result of a combination of lust for power, status, and money. Many add sex to that, but I think this is an epiphenomenon. It’s not primarily sex that power, money, and status-hungry figures are looking for, but for many powerful leaders it’s a result of this craving. Sex also gives power, status, and prestige. The pursuit of this goal is often accompanied by boundless overestimation, but generally little knowledge, let alone wisdom, and sometimes even unadulterated stupidity. Based on the tiny bit I’ve read of this technology pope; Klaus Schwab is no exception.
Powerful people regularly have grand plans and far-reaching visions, but the tenability of their ideologies is generally limited. The Third Reich lasted for five years, the Communist Soviet Union a little over half a century, and the Roman Empire for several hundred years, and the end of the latter was partly caused by political instability and widespread corruption. What else is new? Every ideology has its emergence, rise, and fall, and the science- and vaccination ideology will be no exception. And while the heyday of eugenics as the penultimate medical scientific ideology spanned several decades, as did the ideology of science, the first cracks and fissures in the vaccination ideology are already clearly visible.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who I believe is one of the great thinkers of our time, wrote two books that have strongly influenced my thinking in recent years. In “The Black Swan” he very convincingly argues that the events that fundamentally changed the course of history were almost never predicted. Nor did those in power foresee these events. He writes the following about it: “Man-made complex systems tend to develop cascades and runaway chains of reactions that decrease, even eliminate, predictability and cause outsized events. So, the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable. An annoying aspect of the Black Swan problem— in fact the central, and largely missed, point —is that the odds of rare events are simply not computable.”
My mother, from whom I inherited my melancholy, already realized this, without ever having read Taleb’s book, when she said: “Fear not; things will change anyway.”
In his book “Antifragile” Taleb explains what he means by this term: “Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. This property is behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes (say, chicken soup or steak tartare with a drop of cognac), the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance … even our own existence as a species on this planet.
Next, he defines what fragility means: “Crucially, if antifragility is the property of all those natural (and complex) systems that have survived, depriving these systems of volatility, randomness, and stressors will harm them. They will weaken, die, or blow up. We have been fragilizing the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything by suppressing randomness and volatility. Much of our modern, structured, world has been harming us with top-down policies and contraptions (dubbed “Soviet-Harvard delusions” in the book) which do precisely this: an insult to the antifragility of systems. This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.”
As Taleb defines it, everything about our society is fragile. And the more complex this fragile system is, the more likely that even a small disruption will be enough to destabilize the system. One hacker with a laptop, a connection to the World Wide Web, and a cozy attic room turns out to be able to shut down crucial websites with a – for hackers effortless – DDOS attack. Consequently, it is obvious that nowadays many ‘ethical hackers’ are employed by IT companies, but there are still many more computer nerds worldwide, who are not employed by them. And it’s still a firm rule that the “attacker” always has the advantage. Only after an attacker has come up with a new strategy, the ‘defender’ can respond to it.
Incidentally, it was Nassim Nicholas Taleb himself who completely lost his way mentally due to the corona crisis. Ironically, he either didn’t see the black swan coming, or the animal hit him so hard that he became dazzled. He only dared to get out on the street with a splash guard and a double face mask. However, it was not the coronavirus that brought the black swan, it was the global approach to the pandemic that he also failed to see coming. Like mother and child, the genius walks behind the pram, in which madness sleeps under a warm blanket.
It is a year and ten months after the start of the corona pandemic, and the first conclusions on how the crisis was handled can be drawn. The alleged lethality of the virus turned out to be not that bad, and people did not spontaneously drop dead as soon as the virus entered their nose. It is especially the elderly and vulnerable who become seriously ill and die, and who should have been targeted to be protected, just as the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration recommended.
Mass vaccinations do not appear to be the solution to the crisis, nor are they the way back to freedom. Where the impact of the virus decreased, freedom-restricting measures increased. As could have been predicted, vaccination does not protect the people most in need of protection, if only because the manufacturers excluded virtually anyone with a weakened immune system from the registration trials. Six months after vaccination, additional transmission of the virus appears to be hardly or not at all inhibited, causing all vulnerable and elderly people still encountering the virus. Something that specifically happens a lot in home care facilities and nursing homes, where people ad absurdum ‘mourn’ the death of people approaching their centenary.
The coronavirus entry pass, instituted to limit the number of infections, is barely two weeks after its introduction a fiasco already. The number of infections – as far as relevant – continues to rise unperturbed and does not care about testing or a QR code. Equivalently to be expected because at the time of introduction already at least five good scientific studies were available, showing that six months after vaccination transmission of the virus is not at all affected anymore. Extensive testing is done because it is necessary – it has not yet saved a single human life – but just because it can be done. And if you have a new toy, it is difficult to distance yourself from it, as evidenced by the members of the OMT and many other ‘scientists’. Big-Pharma wraps its arms around it, as does Jan Kluytmans, who purchased a beautiful villa from it. Jan Kluytmans becoming rich of it, where Armand Girbes fights it.
Mass vaccination of the population also did not appear to be the remedy to relieve the burden on healthcare. Hugo de Jonge, assisted by the OMT, are betting on vaccinations while failing to increase care capacity. The pressure on healthcare led to even more nurses giving up, further reducing the already very limited care capacity in nursing wards and ICUs.
And now the technocratic managers, who agreed on mass vaccinations as the ultimate remedy to defuse this crisis, are suffering their biggest defeat yet: recognizing that ICU capacity still needs to be increased to prevent healthcare from coming to a complete standstill next winter. Which is about to happen anyway as the disciples of Francis Taylor’s economic religion assume that there are always more than enough pawns on the social chessboard to move forward, thinking they can sacrifice those pawns whenever it suits them. Unfortunately, this may be the case for BOAs (Special Investigating Officers) but is definitely not the case for experienced and well-trained nurses. These undervalued pawns in the healthcare organization need to be properly trained, something that should have been initiated already two years ago. If Ernst Kuipers and Diederik Gommers really wanted to do something essential, they should have pleaded passionately for that, instead of proudly standing on a poster with a face mask on their vain snouts, or ad nauseam terrifying the Dutch population during the chitchatting TV gatherings at Jinek and Op1. I can’t remember where I have originally read it, but it’s now in my book of important quotes: “Vanity blossoms but bares no fruit”. How appropriate.
All of this supported by useless paper pushers of expensive consultancy firms like KPMG, Deloitte and McKinsey, organizations populated with clones of David Ikkersheim and Xander Koolman, people suffering from the most severe form of ‘Taylor’s disease’. Windstorms releasing one crazy recommendation after another from their alienated heads. First came the foolish proposal for a ’test society’, through which society could be ‘opened up’ by large-scale testing of asymptomatic persons, without even briefly thinking whether the tests used were suitable for this, and without any idea of the consequences of Bayes’ theorem. The ’test society’ proposal died a quick death, but for its burial hundreds of millions of dollars were paid. It did not block these two bean counters for a moment to proclaim their following idiotic recommendation to Rutte et al.: the introduction of the coronavirus entry pass, without even considering the question whether vaccination is at all capable of preventing further transmission of the virus. And, as mentioned before, at the time of introducing the coronavirus entry pass it was already clear that such wasn’t the case.
On TV, Hugo de Jonge is seen walking around in a Frisian hospital and without hesitation, saying that unvaccinated people are in fact not entitled to occupy an ICU bed. His statements become grimmer; his tone more bitter. He shall not rest until the population’s vaccination rate reaches 110%. The fact that many serious illnesses and deaths are partly caused by one’s own actions is entirely missed by this man. That shouldn’t really matter, as everyone can do with his or her body and life to their own liking, and a physician should not let his actions depend on that. Otherwise, we can leave traffic victims on the pavement because they were stupid enough to participate in traffic. Similarly, we can leave winter sports enthusiasts with broken legs and arms on the ski slopes; after all it was their own choice to go skiing? And everyone who plays football, hockey, cycling or falls off their bicycle intoxicated, should not be brought to a hospital, in case their bones are broken. Moreover, people with liver cirrhosis due to alcohol abuse, are then no longer entitled to a liver transplant. After all, they themselves chose to get drunk repeatedly, right?
If that is the future of medicine, care can be further scaled down and remediated as much as possible or wanted. One can then limit oneself to those people for whom fate has decided that they will be struck by a serious illness. Provided they have had themselves genetically tested, because anyone who has ‘unhealthy’ DNA is not allowed to have children, of course.
Hugo de Jonge’s attitude now radiates much less conviction than, say, a year and a half ago. Self-righteousness has given way to doggedness and stubbornness. An arrogant and incompetent minister can long pretend that he can solve problems adequately in ‘peacetime’, but in times of ‘war’ boys are separated from the men. And Hugo de Jonge turns out not to be a man, let alone a wise man. He continuously makes mistake after mistake, commits blunder after blunder, and leaves a trail of social destruction. Enthusiastically assisted by the Outbreak Management Team, which appears to be equally incompetent and unwise in tackling the corona crisis. There is nothing for them to look at, except smoldering social ruins. There is no turning back, one cannot but continue. Like Hans Koppies, I quote Godfried Bomans: “You can stop with sensible things halfway, but absurdities have to be completed, because they have no other justification than the consistent continuation of them”.
This phenomenon is beautifully described by Daniel Kahneman in “Thinking Fast and Slow”. The phenomenon is referred to as the “Sunk Cost Fallacy”. It is the continuation of nonsensical and harmful policies whose costs – in many ways – are far too high and can never be ‘recouped’. All explained by lack of recognition of the fact that the costs are much higher than the results achieved will ever justify, which is so unpleasant for those responsible, that they prefer to keep following the chosen path. It’s exactly what drives the compulsive gambler to gamble again and again, hoping to regain what he’s lost, but eventually needs relocation to Under the Bridge 1A, with only a mattress and a sleeping bag.
Anyone that becomes aware of this mechanism can intervene in time, take their loss, and retrace their steps, however painful. It should be clear that the triad Mark Rutte, Ferd Grapperhaus and Hugo de Jonge is not awareof this mechanism, and moreover, the damage done is already so immense that, for their life, they can impossibly turn back anymore. And the vast majority of members of the House of Representatives presumably is not acquainted with this principle either. Napoleon Bonaparte already knew it in his time: “In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.” On the contrary.
And to make matters even worse, reports of serious side effects and deaths have never been higher than during this mass vaccination campaign. This while knowing fully that there is generally a significant underreporting of passive reporting systems such as Dutch ‘Lareb’ and the American ‘VAERS’. Obviously, the relationship with the vaccinations should never be suggested. Excess mortality is seen in several countries, especially in younger-age groups, which is clearly not explained by the number of COVID-19 deaths. Every possible explanation is brought into the equation, as long as one does not have to acknowledge the mass vaccinations as a possible cause. The mortality among youngsters aged 15 to 19 in England and Wales is – depending on the reference used – 16 to 47% higher than the expected mortality, in close relationship with vaccination in this age group. And in this group, boys are disproportionately represented in the mortality rates. Again, COVID19 is not the cause. How could it be? It has been known for a long time that the virus poses little or no risk of developing serious illness or death to them. No justification is available – except for the explanation that is not to be mentioned: vaccination. These are particularly inconvenient truths, emerging from the official statistics. Vaccination fanatics have only one choice: Ignore these and remain silent. One must continue following the road of the ‘sunk cost fallacy’, more euros must be thrown into the slot machine of the vaccine manufacturers.
Big Pharma rules the world. The king is dead, long live the new king.
It is not without reason that ‘all-cause mortality’ is the most important result benchmark in scientific research on the effect of a drug, a vaccine or screening. In case of screening for breast cancer and cervical cancer, a (large) decrease in disease-specific mortality – death as a result of breast cancer and cervical cancer – is seen, but no significance on total mortality. This is explained by the law of competing causes of death. If dying of one cause is removed in the elderly, another cause of death is almost immediately ready to take over. My father would thus speak in unadulterated dialect: “You’re right, and you’ll die anyway”. And so it is.
And now children of 13 years and older are being vaccinated against a virus that poses no threat to them. Because it is assumed to be “safe” and would help limit the transmission of the virus – so grandparents don’t have to fear their own grandchildren. What kind of sick mind do you have to be to sell this as solidarity. What kind of sick mind do you have to be as teacher telling this to your students. Although vaccination does not protect against further transmission of the virus, suffering from the infection itself strongly constrains transmission. Children’s immune systems are more than powerful enough to successfully fight the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but the healthy restraint that doctors should show has gone up as in the smoke of burning wood. Releasing a vaccine with a conditional admission to children, just to have psychotic virophobes with a QR code feeling safe in a restaurant, cinema, and theater. Without these people realizing that, in the rush to protect themselves by vaccination other people’s children, they expose these children and young people to risks that are not yet known.
The selfishness of these people is visible through their face masks.
I still don’t believe in conspiracies. If there are people who consider them, they underestimate the enormous complexity of our world and the enormous problems we face and for which there are no simple solutions. Of course, I do see the enormous interests and the shameful opportunism of the technological communists of Big-Tech and Big-Pharma, who both are enjoying their glory days by reason of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. But both follow the pattern as outlined by Hannah Arendt: in search of more power and more money, that power and their wealth will inevitably come to an end. They are not antifragile, but fragile. And everything fragile wears out, breaks down, destabilizes, and eventually perishes. The question is not if that will happen, but when.
When I close my laptop and turn off the TV, I don’t hear or see anything about the corona crisis and the world seems like it used to be. In my small village silence and peace prevail, something I have long thought of escaping from. It now feels like a protective wall against all these crazy and aggressive vaccination fanatics. I plant grasses, plants, and shrubs, press the soil down with my bare hands and enjoy nature as it can be seen, heard, and smelled in miniature around me. Once it gets dark, I see the moon shining between the walnut tree and the large sycamore tree. The light reflects off the fallen shimmering brownish-yellow leaves. Eons have preceded me, and eons will follow. And the same applies to the many virophobic fanatics. Even if they take a thousandth booster, ’they’re right, and they’ll die anyway’.
For me, that is a very comforting thought. The current corona-cowards, occupying the nursing homes in ten to twenty years, will hardly have any meat on their bones to inject the umpteenth booster against the umpteenth virus. Surrounded by Klaus Schwab’s robots, putting on their compression stockings and having to wash their bony asses with pale, almost translucent, flapping skin. Robots that must keep them company and feed them waxy Chinese potatoes and sticky rice, because, according to the current political idiots in the Netherlands, there is no longer any room to have our own food produced by our own farmers. And the crusty old virologists, microbiologists, managers and politicians can only hope that the satellite-guided container ships from China are not hit in the Suez Canal by, also satellite-guided, cruise missiles originating from Israel and on their way to Iran, and backwards, because some ethical hackers in both camps had their face mask jump in front of their eyes instead of their mouths while programming, hence causing these flying nuclear bombs to miss their target and land just a little later. At that instant, starvation is imminent for Koopmans, Kuipers and Gommers, resulting in even less butt to get rid of the vaccines.
Schwab’s robots, lifting the virological shysters and their admirers in their beds at night, “tenderly” covering them up as they had thrown all youngsters under the bus, resulting in lack of trained nurses and care givers to lovingly do that.
I haven’t read Klaus Schwab’s entire literary scribblings, but I dare to bet that the above superb visionary picture of the future, germinated from my brain, cannot be found in it. Although my predictions for the future are as valuable as Klaus Schwab’s.
You’re right, Klaus, but you’ll die anyway.
It doesn’t matter that much to me anymore. I’ve said farewell to a large part of my fellow human beings: the ego-trippers, the vaccination fanatics, the blind devotees of the new science-religion, the Holy Church of Vaccinological Science. I limit myself to those people who do want to and dare to be critical, whether they have been deliberately vaccinated or not. That causes peace of mind and a feeling of being safe. Provided my children are safe from Hugo de Jonge and his many deeply religious and fanatic vaccine worshippers. Provided my children are allowed – by grace of the Great Vaccination Lord, Hugo de Jonge – to go to school without a face mask and QR code, allowing them to mature into social and wise people. And I hope that many other children, being born after my children, will be entitled and able to do the same.
At least until the Church of the Vaccination Devotees has fallen to ruin throughout eternity, and Hugo de Jonge has long since been reduced to dust.
You’re right, Hugo. But you will die anyway. Even you.
And that too is a very soothing thought.