I mostly agree with your conclusions (and your methods are spot on), and I'd like to hear your more detailed version of the emergence of the Covid virus and the spread of the disease.
The part you mentioned that I don't agree with, is that this was an intentional development of the virus and a conspiracy to intentionally spread it for nefarious reasons. Like the other conspiracy theories, that is way too complicated to be a realistic possibility. It also has no real facts to back it up as you point out.
The development of the virus itself (irresponsible, especially in such a poor safety or quality control environment) and the lab leak (unintentional and incompetence) and spread appear to be an example of people and various governments having a common interest in covering their mistakes.
Even if they are due to gross incompetence, as I believe this was, it's a holocaust level event and deserves a timely, better and more honest accounting. This needs to be done as soon as the information is out there, not 60 years later when most weren't even alive to remember or care.
You sound like the guy with the proper approach to do a credible version of this story.
I have spent some considerable time researching the lab leak (which I now believe is the most credible version of what happened). My problem thus far is I keep running into road blocks that are answerable only in China or in the U.S. intelligence community. I am hoping for some progress in the latter with the Trump administration promising transparency.
Nice analysis brother. We all have access to the same information - it’s some who have less ability to understand what that means - we call them conspiracy theorists. People who think they have been able to read between the lines and discover something that the rest of us can’t see. It’s kind of sad.
Another factor is the unreliability of news reporting right now by eg the nyt. In fact, that's what I thought your article was going to be about from the title!
After seeing what they,the Washington Post and the medical journals have been publishing about gender medicine (though the nyt and wp have gotten better now in some articles), and the political left right angle being pushed on many issues apparently just to get tribal issues tangled up where they don't belong, I think many people don't have a reliable source for facts.
I mean the nyt reporting on the Eitan Haim case was crazy. It went on about people who wanted him prosecuted - he'd blown the whistle on a Texas hospital doing gender procedures on kids after saying they weren't. The administration I voted for tried to destroy him. They went after him for accessing patient records on one particular day....he was doing surgery at the hospital that day so yes he did look at patient records that day. It was that crazy. None of that, ,the charges or lack of evidence, appeared in the nyt. It was cast as a political pardon or something!
You're right, the issue is not simply poor reporting, but 'facts' distorted to fit a political narrative in the legacy press. The NYT coverage of Dr. Haim was a particularly egregious example.
I think my favorite conspiracy theory is that the moon landings were faked. This may be because in December, 1970, on my way to take an English final at The University of Texas, I had the idea occur to me that it would be great fun to see if I could get a rumor started that Apollo 11 and 12 had been faked, and that NASA had faked Apollo 13 the previous April to preempt any public suspicion that the two fakes had been faked. I thought I could try easily, but that no one would buy it. All I would have to do was send letters to the editors of all the major Texas newspapers in which I claimed to have a brother - in - law who was an electrical engineer at NASA, and that at our family's Fourth of July barbecue several months earlier, he had gotten a little too drunk, and opened up about the fakery of the whole thing.
I thought it was a funny idea, but that it wouldn't be worth the trouble. Imagine my reaction when in 1975, I read an article in The Houston Chronicle about the significant number of Americans who believed the moon landings had been faked.
I've tried to argue with some of these people on Facebook, pointing out the obstacle which the thousands of people who would have had to be in on such a thing would have constituted to the success of it, not to mention the pride of the astronauts, which Tom Wolfe wrote about so brilliantly in The Right Stuff.
It does no good.
A high class version of contemporary conspiracy theories which has been around for centuries is the Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare obsession. I'm particularly fond of the one which holds that Marlowe wasn't murdered, he slipped away into anonymity and wrote the plays. That one reminds me of the loonier JFK assassination conspiracy theories, such as the switched coffins and the two Oswalds.
Thanks GP, you've solved my dilemma regarding a close friend that instilled the knowledge into her kids "from a very young age" that people can be born in the wrong body.
So utterly disappointing and frustrating, but, I'm going to drop my plans for an intervention (😁) (Difficult to convince a mother she's spent years indoctrinating her children with an Ideology that lacks all logic and evidence 🙄).
Thank you for your thoughtful and reasoned essay (though I can see from other comments here, you were so right. Those who thrive on conspiracies have no interest in hearing any dissent). I agree with all that you said, and consider you a source that can be trusted. Conspiracies are born from fear and uncertainty, and the desire, as you said, to bring "order" to what appears disorderly. But life - and events - have their own "order", and we are meant to be participants in that order, not the directors of it. Keep writing what you do.
Great piece. I think it is worth adding that the withholding of information itself contributes to the formation and continued existence of these theories.
Good point. I've been a long time critic, for instance, of the government sealing so many JFK files for decades. It leads to the natural, widespread public suspicion that the government must be hiding the evidence of a conspiracy.
Gerald: I take no pleasure in writing this. I enjoy your work, which is normally quite disciplined, but this is utter rubbish. You can't throw a stick without hitting a conspiracy nowadays. Let me give you one example. You will never hear a parent of an autistic child say we had a vaccine scheduled but missed the appointment, and the very next day my child stopped talking! How many close personal associates do you know who died under the most implausible of circumstances? The Clintons know dozens! I'm shocked at your failure to grasp basic probability. The reason we don't have the evidence of the greatest crime in human history to hand is because FOIA responses were hidden. The statutory requirement for responding is 10 days; the FDA wanted 77 years! This was/is a planned cull. If you read anything from Mike Yeadon, arguably the world's leading expert in this area, he will tell you that the odds of Warp Speed not being a planned cull are zero, not slight, zero.
Basic probability. Yes, I get it. I see the smoke. I've written in depth in Pharma about it. I'm just waiting for the evidence that you and many others are convinced is hidden. Maybe this administration will live up to its promises of transparency and it will be released. I'm just stubborn, Timothy, about evidence.
The problem with your thinking is that you are shifting the burden of proof to the victim. I am stunned as to how many people don't get this. Take elections for example. The burden of proof is not on me, the voter, to prove election fraud; the burden is on the government to prove the election could not have been stolen. Recent German elections were done on paper, and it was over in 8 hours with zero complaints because each party counts the other's votes! https://timothywiney.substack.com/p/voting-portuguese-style Shifting the burden of proof to the victim is a complete inversion. Are you waiting for Hillary to confess? Is that the evidence you seek? If so, it's going to be a long wait. https://timothywiney.substack.com/p/levels-of-proof
The burden of proof is on whoever is making the claim. You don't make a claim and then demand that other people disprove it. You make the claim, you provide the proof.
Me: 'I accuse Hillary of deleting federal records.'
Hillary’s lawyers: ‘They were just private emails about Chelsea’s wedding.’
Me: ‘When you mix personal emails with your government emails, they all become federal records, the deletion of which is a felony.’
Hillary’s lawyers: But she only deleted private emails.
Me: ‘Prove it.’
Hillary’s lawyers: We can’t; they’re deleted and scrubbed with BleachBit.
Me: It’s a felony to mix emails then selectively delete.
Hillary’s lawyers: ‘You can’t prove she selectively deleted.’
Me: ‘That’s because she feloniously deleted federal records. Even if no government business was deleted, a deleted private email using a government address is still a federal record.
Thanks for the clarification. Is the idea that anyone who would take the vaccine is so dumb he should be culled? If so, there is a huge factor which militates against it, the government's intelligent wish to keep its population alive.
Because the pandemic was real and many of us knew people who died or nearly died from Covid, many highly skilled people would take the vaccine, and because of it, would die or be brutally impaired.
Well, if you look at the statistics, there was no pandemic. That's not to say there wasn't something called Covid (I caught it in late 2019 before it was a thing), but it was no deadlier than a moderate flu season. The early deaths were medical murder (ventilators, witheld treatment, budesonide, atibiotics, etc.). Deaths only exploded after the jabs were rolled out which is born out in life insurance actuaries. Basically, Covid deaths were swapped out for flu deaths before the jabs were rolled out. I wrote about this. Celebrities, athletes, even most politicians are viewed as useless eaters.
The difference between fiction and fact is that, while they both bear the marks of storytelling and author license, the latter has empirically been proven to have happened, whereas the former, despite any faked evidence to the contrary, has not. But it's a small difference...
I enjoyed reading this article and I agree that basing conclusions on evidence rather than vice versa is essential in assessing claims - more than ever nowadays.
The other day I was reading another author who suggested that had Oswald been exposed as an extreme right winger rather than left then most likely the early conspiracy theorists such as Mark Lane, Sylvia Meagher and Josiah Thompson would not have been interested as he wasn't, broadly speaking, 'one of their own'.
However, given William Manchester's scales analogy, maybe Oswald's defenders would still have come out in force, except probably from the other side of the political fence.
I mostly agree with your conclusions (and your methods are spot on), and I'd like to hear your more detailed version of the emergence of the Covid virus and the spread of the disease.
The part you mentioned that I don't agree with, is that this was an intentional development of the virus and a conspiracy to intentionally spread it for nefarious reasons. Like the other conspiracy theories, that is way too complicated to be a realistic possibility. It also has no real facts to back it up as you point out.
The development of the virus itself (irresponsible, especially in such a poor safety or quality control environment) and the lab leak (unintentional and incompetence) and spread appear to be an example of people and various governments having a common interest in covering their mistakes.
Even if they are due to gross incompetence, as I believe this was, it's a holocaust level event and deserves a timely, better and more honest accounting. This needs to be done as soon as the information is out there, not 60 years later when most weren't even alive to remember or care.
You sound like the guy with the proper approach to do a credible version of this story.
I have spent some considerable time researching the lab leak (which I now believe is the most credible version of what happened). My problem thus far is I keep running into road blocks that are answerable only in China or in the U.S. intelligence community. I am hoping for some progress in the latter with the Trump administration promising transparency.
Yes, me too.
Nice analysis brother. We all have access to the same information - it’s some who have less ability to understand what that means - we call them conspiracy theorists. People who think they have been able to read between the lines and discover something that the rest of us can’t see. It’s kind of sad.
Another factor is the unreliability of news reporting right now by eg the nyt. In fact, that's what I thought your article was going to be about from the title!
After seeing what they,the Washington Post and the medical journals have been publishing about gender medicine (though the nyt and wp have gotten better now in some articles), and the political left right angle being pushed on many issues apparently just to get tribal issues tangled up where they don't belong, I think many people don't have a reliable source for facts.
I mean the nyt reporting on the Eitan Haim case was crazy. It went on about people who wanted him prosecuted - he'd blown the whistle on a Texas hospital doing gender procedures on kids after saying they weren't. The administration I voted for tried to destroy him. They went after him for accessing patient records on one particular day....he was doing surgery at the hospital that day so yes he did look at patient records that day. It was that crazy. None of that, ,the charges or lack of evidence, appeared in the nyt. It was cast as a political pardon or something!
You're right, the issue is not simply poor reporting, but 'facts' distorted to fit a political narrative in the legacy press. The NYT coverage of Dr. Haim was a particularly egregious example.
I think my favorite conspiracy theory is that the moon landings were faked. This may be because in December, 1970, on my way to take an English final at The University of Texas, I had the idea occur to me that it would be great fun to see if I could get a rumor started that Apollo 11 and 12 had been faked, and that NASA had faked Apollo 13 the previous April to preempt any public suspicion that the two fakes had been faked. I thought I could try easily, but that no one would buy it. All I would have to do was send letters to the editors of all the major Texas newspapers in which I claimed to have a brother - in - law who was an electrical engineer at NASA, and that at our family's Fourth of July barbecue several months earlier, he had gotten a little too drunk, and opened up about the fakery of the whole thing.
I thought it was a funny idea, but that it wouldn't be worth the trouble. Imagine my reaction when in 1975, I read an article in The Houston Chronicle about the significant number of Americans who believed the moon landings had been faked.
I've tried to argue with some of these people on Facebook, pointing out the obstacle which the thousands of people who would have had to be in on such a thing would have constituted to the success of it, not to mention the pride of the astronauts, which Tom Wolfe wrote about so brilliantly in The Right Stuff.
It does no good.
A high class version of contemporary conspiracy theories which has been around for centuries is the Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare obsession. I'm particularly fond of the one which holds that Marlowe wasn't murdered, he slipped away into anonymity and wrote the plays. That one reminds me of the loonier JFK assassination conspiracy theories, such as the switched coffins and the two Oswalds.
Thanks GP, you've solved my dilemma regarding a close friend that instilled the knowledge into her kids "from a very young age" that people can be born in the wrong body.
So utterly disappointing and frustrating, but, I'm going to drop my plans for an intervention (😁) (Difficult to convince a mother she's spent years indoctrinating her children with an Ideology that lacks all logic and evidence 🙄).
Thank you for your thoughtful and reasoned essay (though I can see from other comments here, you were so right. Those who thrive on conspiracies have no interest in hearing any dissent). I agree with all that you said, and consider you a source that can be trusted. Conspiracies are born from fear and uncertainty, and the desire, as you said, to bring "order" to what appears disorderly. But life - and events - have their own "order", and we are meant to be participants in that order, not the directors of it. Keep writing what you do.
Great piece. I think it is worth adding that the withholding of information itself contributes to the formation and continued existence of these theories.
Good point. I've been a long time critic, for instance, of the government sealing so many JFK files for decades. It leads to the natural, widespread public suspicion that the government must be hiding the evidence of a conspiracy.
Gerald: I take no pleasure in writing this. I enjoy your work, which is normally quite disciplined, but this is utter rubbish. You can't throw a stick without hitting a conspiracy nowadays. Let me give you one example. You will never hear a parent of an autistic child say we had a vaccine scheduled but missed the appointment, and the very next day my child stopped talking! How many close personal associates do you know who died under the most implausible of circumstances? The Clintons know dozens! I'm shocked at your failure to grasp basic probability. The reason we don't have the evidence of the greatest crime in human history to hand is because FOIA responses were hidden. The statutory requirement for responding is 10 days; the FDA wanted 77 years! This was/is a planned cull. If you read anything from Mike Yeadon, arguably the world's leading expert in this area, he will tell you that the odds of Warp Speed not being a planned cull are zero, not slight, zero.
Basic probability. Yes, I get it. I see the smoke. I've written in depth in Pharma about it. I'm just waiting for the evidence that you and many others are convinced is hidden. Maybe this administration will live up to its promises of transparency and it will be released. I'm just stubborn, Timothy, about evidence.
And the penny drops! https://jonrappoport.substack.com/p/dave-weldon-dumped-as-cdc-nominee?publication_id=806546&post_id=159028302&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=1mlb0p&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
The problem with your thinking is that you are shifting the burden of proof to the victim. I am stunned as to how many people don't get this. Take elections for example. The burden of proof is not on me, the voter, to prove election fraud; the burden is on the government to prove the election could not have been stolen. Recent German elections were done on paper, and it was over in 8 hours with zero complaints because each party counts the other's votes! https://timothywiney.substack.com/p/voting-portuguese-style Shifting the burden of proof to the victim is a complete inversion. Are you waiting for Hillary to confess? Is that the evidence you seek? If so, it's going to be a long wait. https://timothywiney.substack.com/p/levels-of-proof
The burden of proof is on whoever is making the claim. You don't make a claim and then demand that other people disprove it. You make the claim, you provide the proof.
Not when the accused controls the evidence implicating them.
https://timothywiney.substack.com/p/prefabricated-barriers-to-justice
Me: 'I accuse Hillary of deleting federal records.'
Hillary’s lawyers: ‘They were just private emails about Chelsea’s wedding.’
Me: ‘When you mix personal emails with your government emails, they all become federal records, the deletion of which is a felony.’
Hillary’s lawyers: But she only deleted private emails.
Me: ‘Prove it.’
Hillary’s lawyers: We can’t; they’re deleted and scrubbed with BleachBit.
Me: It’s a felony to mix emails then selectively delete.
Hillary’s lawyers: ‘You can’t prove she selectively deleted.’
Me: ‘That’s because she feloniously deleted federal records. Even if no government business was deleted, a deleted private email using a government address is still a federal record.
Hillary’s lawyers: ‘Tough shit!’
Who are they trying to cull, and for what reason?
You are a useless eater.
My God, why aren't you President of the United States?
Washington. Jefferson. Jackson. Lincoln. Roosevelt. Roosevelt. Truman. Eisenhower. Kennedy. Reagan. Winey.
Tim, injustice is the way of things in this fallen world. But thank you for favoring us proles with your magnificence.
I didn't mean I viewed you as a useless eater, only that Bill Gates does. PS, I am running for President. Sort of...https://timothywiney.substack.com/p/captain-gopro-for-president
Thanks for the clarification. Is the idea that anyone who would take the vaccine is so dumb he should be culled? If so, there is a huge factor which militates against it, the government's intelligent wish to keep its population alive.
Because the pandemic was real and many of us knew people who died or nearly died from Covid, many highly skilled people would take the vaccine, and because of it, would die or be brutally impaired.
Well, if you look at the statistics, there was no pandemic. That's not to say there wasn't something called Covid (I caught it in late 2019 before it was a thing), but it was no deadlier than a moderate flu season. The early deaths were medical murder (ventilators, witheld treatment, budesonide, atibiotics, etc.). Deaths only exploded after the jabs were rolled out which is born out in life insurance actuaries. Basically, Covid deaths were swapped out for flu deaths before the jabs were rolled out. I wrote about this. Celebrities, athletes, even most politicians are viewed as useless eaters.
https://timothywiney.substack.com/p/who-didnt-get-the-memo
Trust no one? Including you? Barber's paradox?
The difference between fiction and fact is that, while they both bear the marks of storytelling and author license, the latter has empirically been proven to have happened, whereas the former, despite any faked evidence to the contrary, has not. But it's a small difference...
I enjoyed reading this article and I agree that basing conclusions on evidence rather than vice versa is essential in assessing claims - more than ever nowadays.
The other day I was reading another author who suggested that had Oswald been exposed as an extreme right winger rather than left then most likely the early conspiracy theorists such as Mark Lane, Sylvia Meagher and Josiah Thompson would not have been interested as he wasn't, broadly speaking, 'one of their own'.
However, given William Manchester's scales analogy, maybe Oswald's defenders would still have come out in force, except probably from the other side of the political fence.
So you're saying that the population should simply trust in government because all conspiracy theories haven't been proven correct? Amazing.
No