patrick.net

https://jamesroguski.substack.com/p/stopthewhocom

Booger says

Confirmed to be true - IF I can trust this copy of the book is authentic anyhow.

The world's largest institution pushing unlimited migration:

@Booger Please keep the overt antisemitism to the political incorrectness thread.

https://patrick.net/post/1285044/2015-09-19-national-political-incorrectness-day?start=-1#last

AmericanKulak says

The world's largest institution pushing unlimited migration:

The Catholic Church is an ancient institution that thrives best in a world of Rulers and Priests with the masses being ignorant and poor. That institution would love to destroy the middle class of Europe and the US by flooding those places with the world's destitute people.

HeadSet says

AmericanKulak says

The world's largest institution pushing unlimited migration:

The Catholic Church is an ancient institution that thrives best in a world of Rulers and Priests with the masses being ignorant and poor. That institution would love to destroy the middle class of Europe and the US by flooding those places with the world's destitute people.

The Catholic Church certainly has it's problems. but they've never gone down to televangelist levels where they demanded the poorest and most desperate to give them money for a new private plane.

I'm suspicious of religion, but the evangelicals I think are the most rapacious and exploitative.

I see value in religious belief, it's a sort of bedrock, and I'm pretty much an atheist, however, I can see it as a benefit and a bedrock against the insanity of society. I know they exploit, I know they deceive, but they are consistent - and our government is not, it changes rapidly to exploit. Government is more dangerous.

I believe that the majority of the wealth of the Catholic Church is from wills. People donated land and other things of great value upon their death, because that made sense to them.

Good business model really.

Patrick says

I believe

I see what you did there...

richwicks says

The Catholic Church certainly has it's problems. but they've never gone down to televangelist levels where they demanded the poorest and most desperate to give them money for a new private plane.

Wanna buy an indulgence?

HeadSet says

richwicks says

The Catholic Church certainly has it's problems. but they've never gone down to televangelist levels where they demanded the poorest and most desperate to give them money for a new private plane.

Wanna buy an indulgence?

No thank you.

Purgatory no longer exists anyhow. Pope John Paul II decreed it!

richwicks says

The Catholic Church certainly has it's problems. but they've never gone down to televangelist levels where they demanded the poorest and most desperate to give them money for a new private plane.

I'm suspicious of religion, but the evangelicals I think are the most rapacious and exploitative.

I see value in religious belief, it's a sort of bedrock, and I'm pretty much an atheist, however, I can see it as a benefit and a bedrock against the insanity of society. I know they exploit, I know they deceive, but they are consistent - and our government is not, it changes rapidly to exploit. Government is more dangerous.

In the 14th-18th centuries, they didn't have airplanes. Instead, they built cathedrals and basilicas. Luther's 95 theses were a rebellion against the worldliness of the church, specifically that Tetzel was selling advance indulgences (if you're planning on raping someone, then pay in advance for a "get out of hell" pass for the future commission of that sin). Tetzels efforts at collecting funds from these indulgences were used to pay the loans from the Fuggers off which were borrowed to construct St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

It took nearly 400 years of barbaric and bloody wars to curb the worst of the rapacious and exploitive tendencies by the psychopaths who ran (and probably continue to run) the catholic church.

Acton said it best, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/rebuild-sovereignty-rule-of-law-united-states/

How to Rebuild Sovereignty: ‘Stop Financing the Enemy and Start Financing our Friends’
Observing the unraveling of sovereignty and the rule of law in the U.S., citizens are pondering an array of tactics that could help rebuild sovereignty.

National sovereignty — in the sense of “the power of a country to control its own government” and “freedom from external control” — is a concept that has resonated strongly with “We the People” in the U.S. since the time of the American Revolution.

However, as law school professor Jeremy Rabkin warned in 2009, “It is possible to lose sovereignty rather quickly.”

Rabkin highlighted as a cautionary tale the European Union — where regulations crafted by Brussels-based bureaucrats “supersede both parliamentary statutes and national constitutions” — but he dismissed as “fantastical” the idea that the “trend away from the sovereignty of national constitutions” could ever lead to “world tyranny.”

By 2020, that idea could no longer be considered far-fetched.

In fact, loss of sovereignty and its replacement by “world tyranny” have emerged as pressing challenges, as citizens in country after country have seen leaders parrot identical Orwellian talking points and abuse endlessly extended emergency powers in order to impose draconian policy agendas.

The iron-fist policies — including masking, lockdowns, not-fit-for-purpose tests, social distancing and contact tracing — were demonstrated to be useless long before and then again during the pandemic.

And yet, as perplexed scientists and citizens discovered to their dismay, “no amount of evidence … had any effect on ending these socially destructive measures.”

The dangerous experimental COVID-19 injections — reportedly administered to two-thirds of the planet — proved equally impervious to rational critique.

For many, these events have led to an unpalatable but ineluctable conclusion, namely, that entities operating largely outside the law have launched a “crime against humanity” that is “supranational” in scope — using the faux pandemic and unconstitutional emergency powers as a battering ram against national and personal sovereignty, including against the sacred principles of bodily autonomy and personal integrity enshrined in human rights law.

And now, with discussions underway to craft a legally binding global pandemic treaty nominally led by the World Health Organization (WHO) — and calls to implement global “WHO-standardized” vaccine passports — the supranational plan seems to be accelerating.

As the Brownstone Institute’s David Bell recently wrote, while the WHO may operate “in the spotlight,” it is likely a “bit player” in a much wider network of unaccountable, behind-the-scenes players — including central banks, international organizations, Big Pharma, large corporations, nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, serving as front groups and bought political leaders.

These players and their conflicts of interest, Bell pointed out, tend to elude transparency.

Operating above — or outside — the law

The bedrock of sovereignty is the rule of law, characterized by accountability, transparent government, evenly applied and just laws, and justice that is “accessible and impartial.” ...

In his sovereignty essay, and in an interview with Children’s Health Defense Chairman and Chief Legal Counsel Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and elsewhere, Titus zeroes in on a central problem: “any entity that can commit crimes with impunity” — a growing list that includes Big Banks, Big Pharma, Big Chemical and others — has, by definition, “risen above a nation’s sovereign law.”

Also above the law — or in fact operating “entirely outside of the law” — are entities like the Switzerland-based Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the “central bank of central banks,” which has enjoyed “complete secrecy and immunity from the laws of sovereign nations” for nearly its entire existence.

Some of the BIS immunities also extend to a wider “syndicate” of “systemically important” banks, financial institutions and payment systems, with “trillions of taxpayer dollars and printed money [moving] through these organizations and banks with no transparency or accountability.”

As described in “Laundering with Immunity,” a comprehensive article by Corey Lynn about this shadowy control network, many organizations also benefit from “immunities, privileges, and tax exemptions” conferred through vehicles such as executive orders and “sneaky” international treaties.

The weaponization of international treaties and their use to circumvent domestic political process and law, according to legal scholar Amy Benjamin, constitutes a globalist legal war that diminishes the ability of nations to have a say in international lawmaking while protecting sovereignty.

As another writer put it, “International Law is by definition authority higher than the State.”

At the domestic level, the abuse of emergency powers during the pandemic did not pass unnoticed.

A Scottish legal inquiry concluded that the “range of new laws introduced … have not been subject to adequate parliamentary scrutiny, with government guidance and ministerial statements often failing to set out the law clearly, misstating the law or laying claim to legal requirements that did not exist.”

The chair of the committee issuing the Scottish report warned:

“When scrutiny is limited through the fast-tracking of legislation, or the extensive use of secondary legislation [that is, legislation created by ministers or parties other than parliament], essential checks on executive power are lost, and the quality of the law suffers.”

The decline, everywhere, of the rule of law

Following the sweep of developments in finance and governance over the past several decades, Fitts and Titus agree that the trillions that went “missing” from the U.S. government beginning in the late 1990s, “followed by the financial bailouts of 2008, and now the pandemic fraud, represent the takedown of ‘We the People’ and the reinstallation of rule by a self-styled ‘elite’ — led by central banks — that is unanswerable to law and admittedly criminal.”

The World Justice Project confirms that the rule of law is declining both in the U.S. and worldwide.

The organization publishes an annual 140-country “Rule of Law Index,” which, in country after country, has documented the steady deterioration of lawful government behavior over the past five years.

The U.S. emerges in a particularly unflattering light, however.

The index shows that as of 2022, the U.S. ranked No. 26 (below countries like Latvia, Korea and Uruguay), having fallen seven places from the No. 19 ranking it held from 2015 to 2018.

For specific dimensions of the index like “constraints on government powers” (“the extent to which those who govern are bound by law”), “civil justice” (“whether ordinary people can resolve their grievances peacefully and effectively through the civil justice system”) and “fundamental rights” (“the “menu of rights … firmly established under the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights”), the 2022 rankings for the U.S. were even lower than its overall ranking — Nos. 28, 36 and 37, respectively.

In the pandemic year of 2021, the index revealed that the rule of law in the U.S. “declined more than any country in the European and North American region,” with the decline cutting across all but one factor measured.

Was it a coincidence that during the same increasingly lawless pandemic time period, the already sizable gap between life expectancy in the U.S. and life expectancy in peer nations widened further, with the premature death rate increasing in the U.S. “by more than it did in most peer countries?”

Invest in friends, not enemies

Observing the unraveling of sovereignty and the rule of law — and also the alarming signs of a depopulation agenda — citizens in the U.S. and elsewhere have pondered the tactics needed to rebuild sovereignty.

Some individuals have tried to reestablish sovereignty by various atypical means, such as tax protesting. However, the U.S. Constitution is the instrument that historically has afforded U.S. citizens the most protection, so trying to resign from it leaves a person exposed, particularly at a time when the government is weaponizing the term “domestic terrorism” to go after anyone who questions government policies.

Another challenge is that, in a complex and interdependent world, it is essentially impossible for lone individuals to make a dent in areas such as taxation.

There is one area where individual actions do make a major difference, however — as Fitts noted at the October 2022 Children’s Health Defense conference in Knoxville, Tennessee, we “get the world we build, and the world we invest in.”

As she told attendees, each of us must “stop financing the enemy and start financing our friends. You cannot get from here to there if you finance your enemy,” she said.

At the individual level, this means withdrawing financial support from the entities that are building the global “digital gulag,” using cash as much as possible and doing business only with — and being employed only by — high-integrity individuals and institutions.

For example, we can choose to bank with well-managed local banks or credit unions instead of New York Fed member banks. We can invest in real assets — young people, land, organic farmers — instead of building investment portfolios populated by the companies of pandemic profiteers who just spent the past two years destroying the small business economy.

We can bypass Big Tech companies that surveil and spy on our families. And we can shun and boycott the individuals and companies that are poisoning our children.

Financial Rebellion offers many other examples of positive actions each week.

At a broader level, we can work to restore government sovereignty at the local and state levels, while also supporting the U.S. Constitution and the constitutional rights that underpin health freedom and financial freedom.

Fitts does address the topic of taxation in another Solari report, “Taxation: With or Without Representation,” voicing the central question on the minds of so many frustrated citizens: “Can we take action to stop our taxes from being used in an unlawful, illegal, or criminal manner?”

The report’s main essay highlights 16 examples of “illegal uses of taxpayer funds by the U.S. government carried out with the help of banks, contractors, and a variety of private parties” and then lists an extensive series of collective actions people can take to shift taxes back to lawful use.

https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/is-the-usa-no-longer-a-constitutional

For the last 49 years of the Roman Republic, the fate of the citizenry was determined not by laws and institutions, but by the decisions and actions of competing, ambitious men. First Julius Caesar challenged the authority of the Senate by leading his army across the Rubicon River and into the Italian peninsula, which inaugurated twenty years of civil war. This period of strife ended when Octavian—the nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar—defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 30 BC. Three years later, the Senate gave Octavian the titles Augustus and Princeps, along with greatly augmented powers, thereby ending the Republic and inaugurating rule by Emperors with direct authority over the army (the final instrument of power over unruly human beings).

Since President George W. Bush invaded Iraq under false pretenses in 2003, the United States of America has increasingly resembled the last twenty years of the Roman Republic. We, the People, seem increasingly at the whim of competing oligarchs and their friends in the Administrative State. The Bushes, Clintons, Trumps, and Bidens resemble the powerful Roman families of the 1st Century BC—sometimes quarreling, sometimes uniting, always primarily serving their own interests and those of their friends. In recent years, the FBI has come to resemble the Roman Praetorian Guard during the waning days of the Republic, whose loyalty to a particular man was more a matter of preference and perceived promise of gain than law.

The success of America’s baleful, competing oligarchs depends on how well they co-opt financial, industrial, media, and institutional actors. Their relationship with the citizenry is mostly a matter of propaganda, manipulation, virtue signaling, and flattery by pretending to endorse the (faddish) ideological preferences of their constituencies.

Thankfully there is one enormous difference between the United States now and the final decades of the Roman Republic—namely, the use of U.S. military units on American soil still seems to be off limits. To be sure, the Department of Defense has played a strong role in developing, manufacturing, and distributing the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. We are now seeing increasing evidence that the DOD holds final authority over the entire program.

The above reflections have been percolating through my mind for some time, causing me to wonder if we are no longer a Republic in which all of us—including our august billionaires, political dynasties, federal police and intelligence agencies—are governed by our United States Constitution. This morning I saw that Victor Davis Hanson—Senior Fellow in Classics at the Hoover Institution—has been having similar thoughts.

His essay, The Coup We Never Knew, is well worth reading.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/04/the-coup-we-never-knew/

Not a Musk fan, but read that last tweet again. The market is rigged. It's not an investment, it's a Ponzi scheme.

Patrick says

His essay, The Coup We Never Knew, is well worth reading.

Just wait until you drill down into the history of Livia and Julia with Octavian, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero.

The gaslighting and lies and manipulation...

AmericanKulak says

Patrick says

His essay, The Coup We Never Knew, is well worth reading.

Just wait until you drill down into the history of Livia and Julia with Octavian, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero.

The gaslighting and lies and manipulation...

How else could there be more short interest than shares outstanding?

How can you lend more shares than shares existing?

How else could it be that when you own 100% of a share, you notice trading volume in the thousands daily?

https://slaynews.com/news/klaus-schwab-address-global-elites-world-government-summit/

Klaus Schwab to Address Global Elites at World Government Summit

"World Government Summit"?

https://www.worldgovernmentsummit.org/press/releases/world-government-summit-2023-to-kick-off-on-13-february-bringing-together-10-000-international-government-officials-thought-leaders-global-experts-and-decision-makers

Someone should nuke that place when much of the evil is concentrated there, like right now.

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/who-is-pulling-the-strings

I think Vivek Ramaswamy has offered up the clearest explanation to the bigger picture of how things changed and why they changed, at least from the top down. He calls it the Great Reset vs. the Great Uprising. His book, Woke, Inc explains how corporations have evolved since the Wall Street bailout of 2008. The idea is that, in order to take the heat off of themselves they began pivoting toward the identity-focused politics of the Left. Now, all they have to do is virtue signal and that gives them unlimited power. ...

Ramaswamy’s focus is more on “Woke Capitalism,” the massive monopolies are using the new religion of the Left to amass more power by appealing to Generation Z and, in effect, taking us to global totalitarianism.

https://freebeacon.com/california/the-powerful-lgbt-group-behind-californias-most-radical-laws-is-setting-its-sights-on-washington/

The Powerful LGBT Group Behind California's Most Radical Laws Is Setting Its Sights on Washington
Bolstered by corporate cash and Democratic allies, Equality California rose from obscurity to dominate Sacramento

Founded 20 years ago as an LGBT advocacy group, Equality California has since grown to become a major player in California politics. Fueled by millions of dollars in donations from corporations like AT&T and Comcast to advocacy groups like Planned Parenthood, the progressive group has emerged as the savviest user of Sacramento’s legislative system. Together with its Democratic allies, Equality California helps set the legislative agenda and has pushed all manner of "woke" policies that help minors get sex changes in secret and let men into women’s prisons.

The group now wants to make its mark on the rest of the country. From its Washington, D.C., office, the group lobbies for federal legislation to legalize abortion, grant amnesty to illegal immigrants, and ban guns. Donors who give $50,000 or more to the group are given access to Equality California’s highest donor tier, "National Trailblazer." ...

Still, some Californians are fighting to dismantle Equality California’s legislative record. Mothers are suing school districts whose employees, they say, pressured their children to undergo sex changes. Female inmates have mobilized against a law that lets biological men into women’s prisons, and cops are speaking out against a 2022 law that allows prostitutes to loiter with impunity, which they encourages sex trafficking.

https://www.wionews.com/world/covid-in-uk-leaked-whatsapp-messages-show-matt-hancock-wanted-to-deploy-new-variant-to-frighten-people-568758

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/yet-another-leak-reveals-that-covid?publication_id=268621&post_id=106612876&isFreemail=true

Isabel Oakeshott is a journalist and critic of pandemic containment policies who was unaccountably hired by disgraced former UK health minister Matt Hancock to write the Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle Against Covid. Hancock hoped that this exercise in autohagiography would rehabilitate his reputation after revelations of an extramarital affair forced him out of office. The joke, it turns out, is on him. Apparently, he gave Oakeshott an archive of over 100,000 WhatsApp messages to assist in her writing. She’s now leaked that archive to the Telegraph, who are gleefully and selectively publishing them in an ongoing series they call The Lockdown Files. ...

Since the very beginnings of this plague chronicle, I’ve said that lockdowns flowed directly from China, through the WHO, to the West, where they rapidly became a self-reinforcing phenomenon in their own right. They were driven by autonomous political and institutional forces rather than nebulous globalist conspirators, and we have now had multiple leaks, from Germany, the United Kingdom and the US, which everywhere paint the same picture:

1) The earliest pressure for lockdowns came from within public health institutions, government-adjacent scientific advisors, and the bureaucracy more broadly – not the political arm.

2) Western governments feared non-compliance with lockdown measures and took very deliberate steps to terrorise their citizenries to ensure their cooperation. In this they enjoyed the wholesale collaboration of the press.

3) Cabinet officials and other politicians channeled bureaucratic pressure and growing popular alarm (in which they were complicit) to seize initiative and power from rival governmental actors. They regarded public panic as a resource and an opportunity to be exploited accordingly.

4) Measures were determined not by Science, or even by educated guesses or coin tosses – but by the limits of what was practically and politically possible at any given moment. Maximum masking, maximum lockdowns, maximum vaccination, everywhere and always.

5) Every slight uptick in infections set off a self-reinforcing cascade of messaging and restrictions. Bureaucrats and politicians struggled to satisfy what they perceived as near-bottomless public appetite for restrictions by issuing new rules, which required still more propaganda to enforce, and radicalised public sentiment still further.

6) The formulators of lockdown policy were increasingly disabused of SARS-2 risk after the first wave, but continued to press for all possible closures, above all because they feared the political consequences of failing to contain infections.

7) This entails that they had some measure of faith in their policies, in part because they were not immune to their own propaganda. Measures like masking, introduced because they were “effectively free” and have “a very visible impact” came to be trusted as genuine infection-controlling interventions.

It always irritates some people when I say this, but it’s just the truth: The people responsible for the last three years of economic destruction, psychological injury and mass pharmaceutical experimentation are callous and evil, but they’re also just really dumb. None of this meant anything, none of this was for anything, and that’s the bitterest pill of all. Every last person in these text messages, from Johnson to Hancock to other ministers to random experts and everyone else, has absolutely no idea what they’re doing or what the purposes of their restrictions even are. Lockdowns were every inch the crazy illogical senseless chaotic policies they appear to be. They are the fruit of shallow low-wattage government functionaries who have a planning horizon extending no more than two weeks, who judge their own success or failure via press coverage, and who regard the public as dimwitted cattle to be herded in expedient directions.

So the real pandemic was the stupidity of officials and the public, according to this analysis.

Patrick says

So the real pandemic was the stupidity of officials and the public, according to this analysis.

I dunno. Maybe this is a play for the guilty to be called "stupid" for their actions, rather than crooks who betrayed the public while taking bribes.

Good point. Can we find money from Pfizer influencing these idiots?

Booger says

https://www.wionews.com/world/covid-in-uk-leaked-whatsapp-messages-show-matt-hancock-wanted-to-deploy-new-variant-to-frighten-people-568758

HeadSet says

I dunno. Maybe this is a play for the guilty to be called "stupid" for their actions, rather than crooks who betrayed the public while taking bribes.

The thing is, don't stop with the punishment of the patsys, useful idiots etc. It needs to go all the way up to the Globalist puppeteers, don't let the cut the strings and flee to plot another day.

By all counts, people who know the governance of Britain say the politicians and their Caligulan excesses are the most depraved in recent memory.

Queen Elizabeth II was shocked when she found out what Edward was up to, so who knows.

HeadSet says

Patrick says

So the real pandemic was the stupidity of officials and the public, according to this analysis.

I dunno. Maybe this is a play for the guilty to be called "stupid" for their actions, rather than crooks who betrayed the public while taking bribes.

They always hide behind incompetence.

Iraq didn't have a WMD program? OOPS! Qaddafi wasn't causing a humanitarian crisis and the US bombed them and caused a humanitarian crisis? OOPS! Assad wasn't gassing his own people and the Douma chemical attacks were faked? OOPS! Trump WASN'T a Putin puppet and 50 intelligence officials lied about Hunter Biden's laptops being Russian "disinformation"? OOPS! The vaccines are worthless and were imposed for a minor disease that was never an emergency? OOPS!

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity, UNLESS it is the government. They always hide behind stupidity, without exception.

If stupidity explained the last 20 years, we would have seen people fired and prosecuted, but we never do. What is Victoria Nuland doing in government still, if she was just incompetent?

https://sashalatypova.substack.com/p/clarification-of-my-message-on-the

Here is the clarification of my position:

The mass injuries and deaths by the mRNA/DNA injections are intentional. They should be investigated as a crime of mass murder and attempted mass murder by poisoning.

The lack of any enforcement action by HHS on the injuries and deaths is also intentional. This is demonstrated by the now very obvious refusal of the officialdom to stop them or limit in any way, despite clear evidence of their harm.

HHS is following the orders of the National Security Council and the DOD as the Chief Operating Officer of the Operation Warp Speed, i.e. the HHS is operating under the military command structure. Debbie Lerman has identified NSC in charge of covid policy in her past writing, and I am grateful to her for pointing me in that direction.

The organizational structure that is responsible for the execution of this crime in the US can be described as follows: POTUS=>NSC=>DOD=>HHS=>state and local health authorities => owners/administrators of health delivery settings=>local vaccinators.

All men and women in positions of authority in the above organizational structure operate treasonously and under the color of law.

What organization is above the treasonous US officials, I can only guess. I do not believe it’s the “market forces” of investors wanting returns and new marvelous tech of the “mRNA platform”. I have familiarity with both, market forces, and with central command-control structures and I am convinced that there is a centralized global control of this operation due to the perfectly implemented global lockstep procedures and control of ALL governments. US alone cannot do this.

The DOD is in charge of funding and ordering the injections from complicit pharmaceutical manufacturers, bypassing pharmaceutical regulations, and utilizing opaque defense purchasing systems typically used for weapons manufacture. DOD is in charge of the distribution of injections to the intended targets - the people of the United States. The intended targets also include military service members, government workers and even expendable employees of the pharma companies.

The pseudo-legal statutory framework that the treasonous men and women are utilizing to commit these crimes has been described in detail by Katherine Watt.

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urgent-bill-gates-the-worlds-most

Bill Gates is becoming a menace.

He will not leave us alone.

And he’s learned all the wrong lessons from Covid.

At this point he is worse than merely clueless. As one of the world’s 10 richest men and controller of a $50 billion charitable honeypot, Gates has the power to drive public health policy in dangerous directions.

He appears hellbent on doing so. ...

The key fact of Covid is this: the elites were wrong about everything.

Every.

Thing.

This concept may seem difficult to accept. Everything? Could public health experts - and the governments and billionaires who funded them, and the media outlets that carried water for them - really have been wrong about everything?

Yes, everything.

To take a non-exhaustive list:

They were wrong about masks, lockdowns, school closures, and ventilators. Wrong about how well the mRNA vaccines would work, and what their side effects would be. Wrong about whether kids should even be offered them, given their pathetic effectiveness for children.

Wrong to encourage censorship and stifle debate. Wrong when they predicted Covid would hit the developing world harder than wealthy countries. Most of all, wrong about the risk the coronavirus posed to anyone who was not at death’s door either because of age, other illnesses, or both.

I’m sure they were wrong about other stuff too, but that’s enough. ...

Bill Gates made a fortune as a monopolist at Microsoft and a second fortune after he quit Microsoft and Satya Nadellab fixed it for him. Unfortunately, he is too rich and too in love with himself to spend his retirement owning sports teams, and not smart enough to try something truly weird like colonizing Mars.

Instead, he’s surrounded himself with a bunch of people telling him that pandemics are a mortal threat, without bothering to notice that their salaries and careers all depend on convincing him of the mortal threat of pandemics.

It would all be a big joke, except that gain-of-function research (and even the bat expeditions) are actually dangerous.

I don’t know how we stop these people - they have all the money, all the media, and most of the politicians - but we have to try.