Viewing complex phenomena through multiple lenses: war, covid and jabs.

One needs to examine any complex phenomenon from a number of different perspectives. The angles from which I am observing this war in Ukraine are many.

First, I have my own observations from living in Kyiv. They are limited – I am confined to my neighborhood. I observe and listen to people talk about the war. I hear my wife discuss it with her friends. I see what's happening on social media.

Every day I read Bob Homans, whom I post on this site. Bob's account describes the events taking place in the war.  He assesses events and diplomatic activity around the world.  He is mainly dealing with facts, though he shares a bit of other writers' opinions and predictions.

I read the Institute for the Study Of War, which Homans often cites. They give a daily overview of the progress of the war and offer their own assessments of likely actions and outcomes.

I glance at the other side.  Russia Today, surprisingly, remains available here in Ukraine. There is a piece dated April 22 with the headline Russia reveals crew losses from sunken warship. During the struggle to save the ship, one soldier died and another 27 crew went missing, the Ministry of Defense has said.  Moreover, a fire on board was the cause of the problem.  I looked hard but could not find any RT explanation of what happened to the alligator class landing ship Orsk in the harbor at Berdyansk.  Perhaps nothing at all?

I observe that western writers tend to align themselves into predictable constellations. People like me who are skeptical of climate change also tend to be skeptical of Covid and the New World Order/World Economic Forum. We are generally critical of Joe Biden, the Democrats, the left in general and the intelligence community/deep state.  We disapprove of Biolabs wherever they are – Fort Dietrich, China or Ukraine.

This latter skepticism bled into skepticism about NATO. Why did NATO want to extend itself right up to the Russian border? Why did NATO evangelize, seeking converts among the nation's bordering Russia? Couldn't they simply leave Russia alone?

The answer at which I have arrived, just over the past two months since the beginning of the war, is that no, we could not afford to leave Russia alone. I had been wrong. However nonsensical it may have been, Russia did nurture a long-standing desire to reestablish the Russian Empire/Soviet Union. Philosopher and Putin confidant Alexander Dugin was not just blowing hot air. He really believed that Russia should dominate Eastern Europe.

Every time Dugin returned to the blackboard the chalk lines seem to move to the left. Russia was never content to remain within her own borders. The question has been how far West it should expand. Should it simply incorporate the predominantly Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine? Should it stop at the Dnieper River? Should it fold in all of Ukraine? Should it engulf all Slavic peoples?

The presumption on the part of these expansionists was that the people in question would desire to be ruled by Russia in the first place. Whereas members of the Roman and British empires, and the EU, sought or were at least not averse to membership, no nation in history has volunteered to accept the Russian yoke.  Those saddled with it have often rebelled.

Never in history have the Russians allowed the question to be put to an honest test. In 2014 we in Kyiv were flooded with refugees from Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk who fervently wanted to escape the Russians. The best and brightest voted with their feet. The remainder were dragooned into participation in hastily contrived referenda that were only convincing to Russia's most ardent fans.

Conservatives have been the most gullible among westerners.  The people who most strongly oppose helping us do so because Ukraine had aligned itself closely with the neocons in the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton and the United States' intelligence community.  They call Ukraine a hotbed of corruption.  Perhaps true, but compared to both Russia and the United States, Ukraine's corruption isn't all that bad. Moreover, both countries actively fostered Ukrainian corruption. See Hunter Biden.  And, besides, our hypocrisy is negligible compared to theirs.

At any rate, those of us who are skeptical of both Russia and Covid and the jabs seem to be a relatively small group. Pretty good company nonetheless – Alex Berenson, Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald. 

Taibbi spent years as a journalist in Moscow and still has strong contacts there. He has set up the Russian Dissidents Substack as an outlet for journalists he knows.  Their top piece now is entitled Russia's Titanic, about the sinking of the Moskva.  The article describes the propaganda gyrations that Russia is going through now (see the RT link above), and the maneuvers that Russian officials are employing to avoid the finger of blame.

The frequency with which Putin shuffles his top military, diplomatic and espionage teams is a good indication of how badly his war is going. Since Putin cannot accept blame for things going badly, he has to place it on others. Many have been fired. Some are under indictment and even in prison. Voltaire wrote "Mais dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de tems en tems un Amiral pour encourager les autres."  Every now and again you have to execute an admiral to encourage the others.  It would seem to apply to Russia as well as the England to which Voltaire was referring. One wonders how much encouragement the top brass in the Russian military feels at the moment.

Returning to that other theater of propaganda, Covid and the inoculations, I recommend a very big picture guy. Joel Smalley, posting on Substack as Dead Man Talking or Metatron, zooms out as far as you can go. All cause deaths for the entire world in the period of Covid. Deaths for people of all ages have risen dramatically since the rollout of the injections. Not Covid, but the jabs. The developed world, and conspicuously not Africa. He has assembled this 28 minute video.  My recommendation: stop the video and simply page down through his graphs. You get the picture in three or four minutes. 

Matthew Crawford's Rounding the Earth Substack is a bit more granular. There are 35 presentations in his series The Vaccine Wars, each one a fairly digestible nugget.  Number 35 is entitled Confirmation of the Efficacy Illusion Out Of Denmark.  It's a simple story of how a proper understanding of the data released by Pfizer itself about their randomized controlled tests (RCTs) show that the vaccines are ineffective.

It is impressive what inspired private citizens like these can do. I doubt these guys make enough from Substack to support themselves, but they love deconstructing the establishment's deceit and misdirections.

Brevity is the soul of wit. Whatsherface packs an incredible punch with her very short videos. Here's everything you need to know about mask mandates in 37 seconds.  She takes 5 ½ minutes to discuss Canada's scheme to implant microchips in everybody in order to implement a digital currency, vaccination registry, electronic medical records and a social credit system.

In my view they would not even need to get everybody implanted like dogs at the vet. I suspect something sneakier is going on.

It is well known that there is a lot more in the sera they inject into you than is on the labels. Several researchers have found that they include quantum dots – digital identifiers – that are magnetically or optically scannable. Inserting these would be equivalent to injecting people with QR codes.  In my view getting these things into people, if that's what they are doing, has been easy. Making them unique would have been almost impossible, but not necessary.

Close enough will do. Facial recognition offers an analogy. The technology identifies a person by a set of measurements, such as the width of the mouth, the width between the pupils of the eyes, the width between the temples, the height of the head and so on. While facial recognition may not be able to positively identify an individual, it can confidently narrow it down to a small pool of likely matches.  Other factors, such as location, voice, gait, height and so on can be used to identify a single person within that pool.

The collection of quantum dots that a person amasses through being injected and boosted multiple times will be close enough to unique to serve the government's purposes. In must-know situations, such as financial transactions, the individual could be subjected to an iris scan, voice scan, thumbprint or other additional form of biometric identity confirmation. Passively identifying people for social credit purposes – such as knowing who is patronizing this or that bar, identifying with known malcontents, or shopping for suspicious items - would not demand an ironclad mechanism.

My hope is that the widespread fear and disgust prompted by the Covid control measures, and mounting evidence that the Covid jabs are leading to early death will turn people against future vaccination campaigns. Humanity may be waking up.  That could be, however, just my wishful thinking. Generation after generation of cattle continue to follow one another up the ramps into slaughterhouses. We citizens may be battling government for our freedoms for some time to come.

I took the three kids on the Metro for the first time since February. Our destination was the frozen foods store at the Lisova market at the end of the line. We were able to pick up frozen corn, peas and strawberries. It was disappointing that half of the kiosks were still closed. None of the meat stalls were selling beef, and only about a third of them were open at all.

Zoriana has recently become concerned about her own mortality. Her mother and her grandparents listen to the news. We say prayers for the servicemen at every meal. We hear air raid sirens every couple of days, though I have not read anything about missiles hitting Kyiv.

Zoriana is learning to grapple with the problem that we all do, assessing relative risk. She asks why we are still in Kyiv while most of her friends are gone, her nursery school remains closed and our nanny Anna remains in Poland. I try to explain things like likelihood, relative risk and opportunity costs, but those are hard concepts even for adults. Our lives will not be without risks even after the war ends, but it will sure be nice to stop talking about them.

Grandpa Sasha went back to the hospital this morning. Oksana told me that he is in constant pain and ready for them to amputate his leg. He seems to be reconciling himself to the fact that this game cannot go on forever. Grandma Nadia will have her own decision to make whether to live with us. Though she appears happy enough to me, Oksana assures me I don't hear everything. I should count my blessings.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong men, good looking women and children alike await the return of normalcy. I'm not sure we would even recognize it after two years of Covid and war.

Graham