The Pandemic, the great conspiracy, the World Ecomomic Forum and ‘The Warning’.
A Covid Coda post.
As I sit down to write, it’s a cool and damp Monday morning which feels a lot more normal for England , especially in summer, than the uncomfortable ‘heatwave’ we had last week – I should say that I am writing this at the end of July 2022 just as the schools break up for their summer holidays so of course it’s raining……why wouldn’t it be ?
As many readers will know I started this series of posts originally to talk about my practical response to the pandemic rules in the UK, mainly that my daily life meant being at home and every day walking the short distance down the yard , pulling the covers back on my boatbuilding project and deciding what to get on with that day. My daily routine was either that, making a token effort at weeding in the veggie garden or sat here at the keyboard working on one or other post, well, for the last couple of weeks it’s been too warm to control the epoxy glue or to keep a wet edge while painting so iv’e spent a lot more time than I planned at the keyboard and inside the old cottage where it’s a lot cooler than under the boatbuilding shelter.
1. Crazy neighbour and conspiracy theory.
Like a lot of people going through the strangeness of the first year of pandemic rules and lockdown I spent a lot of time at home without much that I had to do, in the second year I just ignored the world by starting my boatbuilding project – in that first year though I spent far too much time in front of the computer. I did keep up some blog output but that wasn’t great because I wasn’t creating new original material by going sailing ; had I ended up deployed back into one of the so called ‘Nightingale’ hospitals I might have had something interesting to say but it never happened.
I did try to write properly…..properly that is in terms of working on my book project rather than just being a blogger which comedian Stephen Fry tartly calls ‘graffiti with punctuation‘…..only on a good day do I manage the punctuation part. Instead, I spent a lot of time watching whatever Youtube video’s that my recommendation feed gave me and trying to find something interesting that wasn’t just somebody copying someone else’s ideas ; a couple of things came along that I really enjoyed, one being an arts programme presented by an art critic and the other was an alternative take on camping called ‘camping with Steve’.
In camping with Steve his basic idea is that of doing ‘stealth’ camping in the most unlikely of places such as the middle of a roundabout or a small patch of woodland behind the police station – he also has an occasional sidekick whom he calls ‘crazy neighbour’ which is a kind of segue into my own ‘crazy neighbour‘ or at least ‘eccentric neighbour‘ and his take on covid conspiracy theory. As iv’e said before, I and therefore we, live in a small village in east Cornwall that definitely has it’s problems – few jobs, less prospects and an underlying drugs and alcohol problem ; not saying here that my eccentric neighbour has those problems just that he goes off one one when it comes to the Covid 19 virus, the illness and deaths that go with it and mostly about the ‘safe’ vaccines.
As iv’e said here before I am a former ICU nurse and had things worked out a different way then I might easily have been sat next to a ventilated patient with multiple other health problems plus the ARDS (Adult respiratory distress syndrome) which would, most likely, kill them. We were dealing with ARDS from unknown strains of viral pneumonia at least as far back as when I started my ICU career in the 1980’s so I regard Covid related pneumonia as a reality…..my eccentric neighbour calls it ‘Pfizer-Flu’ and just a means for a few big pharmaceutical companies to make lots of money.
The funny part of the ‘pfizer-flu’ comment is my neighbour seems to know nothing about the flu (infuenza) pandemic of 1918 which killed perhaps as many as 50 million people worldwide*.
When it comes to Covid , vaccines and conspiracy though you can both choose your side and ‘choose your poison’, on the one side we had governments like the NZ one stating that they and only they could be the one trusted and true source of information……yeah right Jacinda…..while the social media tech giants really did seem to conspire to shut down or censor any different opinion. Another ‘side’ was the mainstream media view that anything other than ‘the correct opinion’ was nothing more than ‘conspiracy theory’ – try telling that to all the people directly harmed by the vaccine.
I don’t go for conspiracy theory simply because it’s not needed when discussing and understanding the Pandemic, the role of Big Pharma, Big Tech, governments and international organizations such as the World Health Organization. It’s almost like applying Occam’s principle, often called Occam’s razor and realizing that we just don’t need to muddy the waters and add another entity (conspiracy) into the mix.
If instead we just see the major pharmaceutical companies working towards their ends – making huge profits while evading liability, governments doing their own thing which is always to gain and apply more control and power, and the media doing their thing which is to create and profit from fear, then we have no need for conspiracy. Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t conspire together somewhere along the line – it hardly matters to the various outcomes. If though you like the idea of conspiracy then there has certainly been lots of viable material to work with and with the end point for many people being a huge distrust of governments, mainstream media and the big tech giants who control social media.
Sadly, just by saying ‘conspiracy theory’ it was far too easy for mainstream media and those that control and censor the social media platforms to dismiss any real sense of discourse , reason, rationality and ultimately truth.
2. What about the WEF and the ‘great reset though ?.
This is where the idea of a genuine conspiracy gets a lot harder and i’m a bit with Schrodinger on this one in that the conspiracy cat is both alive and dead in the box at the same time. What I mean by that is yes the World Economic Forum represents a massive conspiracy of players from multiple governments all working together towards nefarious ends and none of which are good for you the individual – the other side is that the cat is dead because what they are doing is being done in plain sight , not behind closed doors in secret meetings and being actively promoted by themselves and their acolytes as the way forward for the proles…..that’s you lot by the way.
Put simplistically I guess that there are three ways of looking at and understanding what the WEF is trying to do – firstly what they say about themselves and how they act, secondly as an unelected body of powerful individuals combined with large corporations that want to influence or control the whole future of society and lastly……. the wacko but ‘what if it’s true’ chain of thought that says that the WEF is a manifestation of the end times…..and that’s the biblical version by the way.
So….if you don’t mind the ideas of not owning your own property, in fact not owning anything, of only eating what they say you must eat, of shutting down large areas of agriculture during an international food shortage, of actively promoting a total surveillance state, of developing the technology of implanted chips , of taking away your rights to travel, to speak or even think independently while also controlling what and how you spend money……then fine.
Oh….and you will be happy !
Genius or evil overlord ?
3. Right then…..just how weirdly weird do you want to go today ?
There’s a famous line that goes something like “there are lies, there are damned lies…..and then there are statistics” so lets go straight for the Jugular vein of weirdness with a side dish of ‘might be happening’ just for flavour.
So, lets say there is standard everyday covid conspiracy theory which could be true or false, then there’s anything to do with the World Economic Forum which is probably all true but not really a conspiracy unless it’s just hiding in plain sight ; then there’s the ultimately scary one that was written about , oh lets say a couple of thousand years back, ring any bells yet ?, no, then what I’m talking about is what’s known as the ‘End Times’ and which is getting talked about all over again.
This was very popular back in the 1970’s and 80’s – oh so very ‘last century’ especially on the hardcore bible thumping right wing of evangelist revival USA and then it seemed to go quiet again when the cold war kind-of ended and down came the Berlin wall. Now, I can get a bit salty about the extreme fundamentalist right wing of the various American churches, especially the ones that deny evolution and promote the idea of an earth that is only 6,000 years old. However….when serious thinking Catholic scholars start discussing ‘The Warning’ then my spidey senses start tingling.
Right then, you may ask, what’s this warning all about ? – well, grab yourself a drink and be prepared to either very skeptical…….or very scared – rather than me making a total pigs ear of this and getting it wrong I have instead linked to a video about the subject….. the video link here is to a Catholic priest and scholar (Fr Ralph Martin) who seems to be as sane as can be.
The final question is I guess why are my spidey senses going off with this one ?.
Put one way it’s a bit ‘conspiracy theory’ because it’s not one specific thing aside from the content of The Warning itself, rather it is the whole mass of things going on in the world right now – and specifically in the so-called rational western world, which all point to a society that is going/has gone totally off the rails. If you follow any commentary about societal and cultural changes going on then maybe just fill in the blanks yourself…..choose your own poison if you will.
To me it is the combination of a society that has mostly turned away from it’s Christian roots and turned instead to a state controlled and mass media driven fear and authoritarianism while losing it’s own rationalism and sense of ‘up and down’ (Nietzsche) . At the same time it is becoming much more ‘me‘ orientated or narcissistic if you prefer while placidly accepting the new agenda of woke/trans , climate alarmism , the slow but inexorable loss of basic rights and all coupled with the rise of hitherto unknown levels of corporate greed.
As for any comment about the various responses and stance of whichever flavor of church (mostly) you look at then look at the main church in the UK (the Church of England) then just see how weak and limp, apologetic and ‘squashy’ they have become on any social issue and how much of their own original teachings they have ignored just because it is somehow not accommodating enough and nowadays not ‘woke’ enough.
I’m surprised, to say the least, about my change of thinking here and I don’t fully understand it either but having once been a hardcore rational atheist who basically said that there was no evidence for and no need for ‘God’ – in the creation of the universe for example – that the best I can say now is ‘really don’t know’ except that I find it better to be a lot less arrogant and sure about things that I don’t understand. Finally I would just like to add a small personal factor or experience and that is that I think I have recently experienced something like an examination of conscience ….and it wasn’t a pleasant experience.
4. The mother of all conspiracies.
There are those that say that the Covid 19 virus was a form of biological accident just as H1NI most likely was because that one happened really before anyone knew anything about bacteria and viruses, others say that it was an error, accident or incompetence and was released from a lab that was working on it and lastly some hold that it was a deliberate act by the Chinese communist party , so once again …..choose your poison.
Some say that the WEF are the good guys who will try and combat climate change , make corporations more environmentally accountable and work towards a greater economic equality in the world – they seem to act as though they believe that. Others of course see them as the evil overlords of a potential world government that want to control every aspect of our lives and then lastly there is the view that they are mere puppets of the evil one, the antichrist who will rise in the end days and dominate the world……at least for a while.
I assume now that most readers who are used to posts about small sailing boats and the sea will be doing the twirly finger over head thing while thinking ‘nutter’ …….so here goes.
As Iv’e said before in other posts I didn’t grow up near mountains or the sea but rather a small nondescript (read boring) market town in east Anglia, nothing ever happened there, in fact nothing had ever happened there and to the best of my knowledge nothing will ever happen there. However , sometime in the 1960’s two exciting things did happen and I was there to see them both ; the first being that a Scammell heavy tank tansporter rolled through the town with a mark 5 Centurion tank on the back and stopped at the pedestrian crossing where I was just about to cross – if you hadn’t guessed I was mad for tanks as a boy……and the second thing that happened is that I saw an unidentified flying object from my tiny bedroom window and more than 50 years later I still can’t explain that.
However, I grew up as a boy in the 1960’s, saw the Vietnam war play out almost live on black and white Tv and kind-of saw the social and sexual revolution happen in the shocking form of mini skirts , make up and strange haircuts. If the 1960’s were all about revolution and hope then the 1970’s went dark and sour – even the music changed from peace and love to ‘fighting in the streets’ – mods and rockers had already happened but the 70’s was the rise of regular Saturday afternoon fights on the terraces ; I remember that because I worked at the city stadium and it was utterly miserable.
To me, hope and change became nihilism, despair and then escapism as it seemed more likely that we could all just die quickly at the base of a mushroom cloud or later from radiation sickness or just the total breakdown of society. By some accident of time, place and inclination I got into the strange subject of biblical prophecy and warnings about the ‘end times’ , that’s the mother of all rabbit holes for a 17 year old to disappear down but it’s not as though the ‘signs’ weren’t there – the creation of the new state of Israel, wars and famine and so on and such like. Luckily I also found my true teenage calling as a mountaineer, rock climber and biker…..thus escapism.
Many blog visitors and readers will be less than surprised when I talk about cultural events in the 1960’s onwards and add at least one musical reference, thus I remember black and white Tv and the Vietnam war with a sound track courtesy of The Rolling Stones, The Doors and Credence Clearwater Revival – my own soundtrack would be Paint it Black, This the End and ‘Fortunate Son’. I was wondering just now, a bit playfully, if everyone was expecting This is the End because of what i’m talking about , but no.
My soundtrack to the 1970’s was hard, angry, raw and cynical……”Fighting in the streets”
‘Won’t get fooled again eh ?’……how bloody naive we were !
Of course we got fooled again, and again…….our fighting in the streets on a Saturday afternoon turned into a Sunday Bloody Sunday the very next morning – the new boss was at least as bad as the old one except he was wearing a nice shiny suit and a Teflon smile while playing fast and loose with the truth to take us into another unnecessary war. There were wars, I forget how many now, several famines and then the new ‘plague’ of HIV/AIDS in the 1980’s but the threat of an all out nuclear war seemed to lessen with the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin wall. Maybe I grew up a bit and my nihilistic teenage obsession with the end times faded, like most people I developed a mistrust of government while simply getting on with life.
So, why have I come back to this again at the other end of a life ?.
The best way I have of expressing this is with a line from J.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings which I first read as a young teenager in the 1970’s and it’s a line that Peter Jackson picked up and used later on in the film adaptation of ‘The Hobbit” and as spoken by the character Galadriel.
“Something moves in the shadows unseen…..hidden from our sight”
Right at the start of this series of posts I made a strange statement along the lines of many things happening in society appearing to be and feeling like a concerted attack and I used as starting point a verse from the Bible (Ephesians 6 : 12)
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.“
I say more simply that something seems wrong, very wrong in fact in almost every aspect of western culture and a lot of it can easily be interpreted along apocalyptic and end times passages in the Christian scriptures. It seems like the ultimate conspiracy and my slightly more mature mind urges both concern and caution, concern because I watch and listen wiser heads taking it seriously and caution because equally knowledgeable ones talk about the rise of conspiracy theory as an actual psychological feature to be wary of. I certainly don’t discount most of the above as ‘just conspiracy theory‘ because there’s plenty of evidence to support such ideas ; on the other hand I can see that we may have a natural and inbuilt tendency to see conspiracy – that might be just a form of pattern recognition.
I’m going to leave it there for this post because once again iv’e ended up writing a much longer piece than I intended – in the follow up piece I want to tackle the subject of why i’m listening to and taking seriously a mix of priests, friars and scholars from the catholic tradition.
“Get on my knees and pray…….we don’t fooled again” (The Who, 1971)
*The number of deaths from H1N1 (Spanish flu) are given as anywhere from 17 to 50 million.
Dirty Wet Dog, the great adventure. 