From the Narrow Desert

In yesterday's post "Light shining through yellow flowers," I discuss the etymology of pupil. It comes from a Latin word meaning "small child," and the ocular sense comes from the fact that if you stare into another person's pupil, you can see a tiny person -- your own miniature reflection -- in it.

I was curious about that because I had just started reading Iris Murdoch's novel The Philosopher's Pupil. Although the juxtaposition with Iris should have been enough to make me think of the ocular sense of pupil, what actually made me think of it was the Galahad Eridanus videos I had recently watched, which include these lines about a solar eclipse:

Ascend, O moon
Into the sun
Eclipse's eye
Thy will be done.
Lo, Abraxas!
To thy pupil cometh sight,
For from thy shadow shineth light!

The idea of a "little man" in one's pupil put a song in my head: Pink Floyd's "The Gnome," which begins with these lines:

I want to tell you a story
'bout a little man, if I can

In my April 2021 post "Gadianton Canyon syncs," I had associated that song -- or rather a reference to it by Terence McKenna -- with a scene from the Tintin comic book Prisoners of the Sun, in which there's a speech bubble from Tintin full of dozens of stars and squiggles and other random symbols -- like comic-book "swearing," but unusually prolonged -- after which he says, "Hip-hip-hooray!" This had synched with McKenna talking about "visible language" and "a new way to say hooray."

I went to bed with "The Gnome" in my head, and I dreamed about poring over that Tintin speech bubble, trying to decipher the secret meaning of his "visible language."

In the morning, naturally, I had to look it up and see if there was in fact any secret meaning to be deciphered. I had forgotten the immediate context, which turns out to be highly synchronistically relevant:

Tintin speaks his "visible language" just after noting "an extraordinary coincidence" in a scrap of newspaper. What he has read, we later find out, is the date of an upcoming total solar eclipse in South America. He uses his foreknowledge of this eclipse to take advantage of the superstitions of the Inca and prevent them from sacrificing him to the sun.

Just yesterday, as related in the post "In which I read the news," I saw a scrap of newspaper blowing across the street and felt the urge to pick it up and read it. The paper was dated April 21, 2023, but what I found significant in it were references to two then-future dates: April 27 and April 22. Tintin also found a future date in his newspaper.

The two dates mentioned -- April 27 and April 22 -- were significant to me because they were anniversaries. I've been having lots of anniversary syncs lately. Then I remembered that the reason I'd been reading an old Tintin book back in 2021 was that someone had emailed me a scan from it -- and I'd received the email on what turned out to be the anniversary of its original publication. What date was that? I looked it up, checking my old post "St. George, stake for the sun, and inevitable 'miracles'":

I've just discovered that Le Temple du Soleil, from the English translation of which the above scan is taken, was originally published serially in Tintin magazine -- and the final installment was published on Thursday, April 22, 1948. I received the email with the scan in the early hours of Thursday, April 22, 2021, and posted it here later the same day. The panels in question are near the end (on page 59 of 62 in the English version), so I assume that they were part of the final installment and that I received and posted them on the anniversary of their original publication.

Here are the panels I was emailed:

The accompanying comment, connecting Tintin's eclipse with the birdemic and peck, was this:

I reckon we are seeing this exact same thing playing out. The eclipse corresponds to the "deadly birdemic", and Tintin's god-like powers correspond to the peck. Now that most people are pecked, all They need to do is reduce media coverage on the "cases" and make out as if the peck has saved the day. The bridemic will vanish (miraculously), and they will then write history according to their narrative, using it as artillery in the pro-peck propaganda war as an example of how effective GM pecking is. 

That's not quite how things ended up playing out, but the eclipse/peck connection is highly relevant.

After having visions of an eclipse, Galahad Eridanus looked up the date of the next solar eclipse and found that it would be December 14, 2020 -- in South America, like Tintin's.

The first birdemic peck to be administered to a member of the public, outside of clinical trials, was given to nurse Sandra Lindsay at Long Island Jewish Medical Center on December 14, 2020.

Note added (4:24 p.m.): Just after posting this, I checked /x/ and found this:

Prisoners of the Sun was originally titled Le Temple du Soleil. Demiurge comes from the same Gnostic vocabulary as Abraxas. I can't make out what is inscribed on the ceiling above the sun, but it begins with A and ends with S.

Last night I watched the latest video from LXXXVIII finis temporis, about the 1968 movie What's So Bad About Feeling Good and how it foreshadowed the birdemic. There are some pretty striking links there, and I highly recommend the video:

In the movie, the mayor of New York considers force-pecking all the citizens but thinks the people won't go for it, so they instead decide to treat everyone secretly by mixing an inhalable cure into all the gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel and releasing it into the atmosphere as air pollution.

Near the end, there's a shot of an airliner with clouds of exhaust coming out of it, with the implication that this is one of the ways the cure is being spread. This led one commenter to write "They put 'The Cure' in the chemtrails."

The commenter's handle is Batman. See my last post, "Are you not entertained?"

⁂

This morning, I started reading the H. G. Wells story "The Valley of Spiders," which I haven't finished yet. So far, we have three hombres riding through a valley when they see this:

And then he saw first one and then a second great white ball, a great shining white ball like a gigantic head of thistledown, that drove before the wind athwart the path. These balls soared high in the air, and dropped and rose again and caught for a moment, and hurried on and passed, but at the sight of them the restlessness of the horses increased.

Then presently he saw that more of these drifting globes -- and then soon very many more -- were hurrying towards him down the valley.

They became aware of a squealing. Athwart the path a huge boar rushed, turning his head but for one instant to glance at them, and then hurling on down the valley again. And at that all three stopped and sat in their saddles, staring into the thickening haze that was coming upon them.

"If it were not for this thistle-down --" began the leader.

But now a big globe came drifting past within a score of yards of them. It was really not an even sphere at all, but a vast, soft, ragged, filmy thing, a sheet gathered by the corners, an aerial jelly-fish, as it were, but rolling over and over as it advanced, and trailing long cobwebby threads and streamers that floated in its wake.

"It isn't thistle-down," said the little man.

Going from the title of the story, I'm going to assume that these objects have "long cobwebby threads" because they are cobwebs -- cobwebs flying through the air.

⁂

This evening, I glanced at /x/, and one of the threads caught my attention because it had a picture of the Maid of Orléans and said "Say something nice about Joan of Arc, /x/." I clicked in spite of myself. The first few comments were about the level I was expecting -- "she cute" -- "most based woman ever" -- so I was going to close the tab, but then this caught my eye:

Why was this posted in a thread about Joan of Arc? I don't know, probably the same reason Gay Pride Batman saying "Are you not entertained?" was posted in a thread about Yahweh. However it got there, it's a reference to chemtrails as cobwebs in the sky.

The LXXXVIII finis temporis video focuses mainly on the birdemic, but it also points out several 9/11 references in What's So Bad About Feeling Good. September 11, 2001, was just two weeks before Yom Kippur, making it "near the day of purification."

I wrote this in a comment on my own "Are you not entertained?" post -- the one featuring Gay Pride Batman:

Russell Crowe is etymologically “red crow,” not too conceptually dissimilar to a rainbow bat. Ted Hughes called the crow “a black rainbow.” Crowe has played Noah, a link to the dark arc/ark.

"A link to the dark arc/ark" is obviously also a link to Jeanne d'Arc. Joan was also the creator of the first rainbow flag.

This is Kristin Peck

She used to work at Pfizer & is now CEO of Zoetis, a Pfizer spinoff and the largest animal vax manufacturer in the world

She sits on the BlackRock board & is lobbying the Biden regime to vaccinate every US chicken against bird flu

Say her name pic.twitter.com/L76argnomi

— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) March 6, 2023

If I did some research and put together a list of Ten Reasons We Know Pro Wrestling Is Fake, that would only invite people to pick apart the ten reasons, and to present counterarguments of their own (like that one time Stone Cold Steve Austin broke his wrist for real and went to a real hospital or whatever), and there we would be stuck, ever "learning" and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth. In fact, the only fully honest thing to say is, "It just is fake! I mean, just look at it!" So that's what I'm going to say [about the birdemic].

Now that they've released the 2022 numbers, here's how things stand:

As discussed in my July 2022 post "Reports of the 'depopulation of Taiwan' may have been somewhat exaggerated," the claim (started by Igor Chudov and spread by Karl Denninger and Vox Day) that there had been a 26-sigma drop in Taiwan's birthrate was grossly exaggerated and was the result of a very basic error in statistical analysis. As the chart shows, birthrates have been falling steadily since well before the birdemic and peck, and there have been no sudden and inexplicable plunges.

Deaths, on the other hand, did jump significantly in 2021 and even more so in 2022. Of course there is no reliable information about causes of death. In my own circle (people known to me personally and their first-degree relatives), five have died of Suddenly and zero of the birdemic.

Taiwan's mask mandate, which is still in force, allows masks to be removed in special situations -- including (last I checked) eating, drinking, walking, riding a motorcycle, taking a photo, and lecturing -- so I'm pretty much good. My students, who have to sit at their desks without doing any of those things, not so much.

A few days ago, one of my private students said, "It's not fair that I have to wear a mask but you don't!"

"It certainly isn't," I said. "Feel free to take it off if you like."

"I can't!" she said. "Big Ben says I have to wear it."

Big Ben! I wish I had thought of that.

The Minister of Health and Welfare -- "Taiwan's Dr. Fauci" and the world's most powerful dentist -- was called Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), and his given name is a perfect homophone of 時鐘, the Chinese word for "clock." The Chinese for "stupid" is 笨, pronounced ben, and so Big Ben in London is called 大笨鐘 -- literally, "Big Stupid Clock."

It's just a perfect nickname -- a very clever Chinese-English pun, and (much like "Let's go Brandon") indirect enough to make it playfully irreverent rather than just rude. Forget the old "Tooth Fairy" nickname; I'm never calling him anything but Big Ben from now on.

So imagine my mixed feelings when I discovered, just days later, that Big Ben had resigned! Not in disgrace, mind you, but to focus on his run for Mayor of Taipei -- a position which is generally recognized as a stepping-stone to the presidency. The good news is that Big Ben will likely be in the public eye for many years to come, giving me ample opportunity to talk about him. The bad news is that he hasn't really stepped down but stepped up, and the new guy will probably be just as bad but without the awesome nickname.

Igor Chudov recently posted an article called "Depopulation of Taiwan: Birth Rate Dropped by 23% in ONE YEAR -- And it is NOT the Birdemic," a claim which was later picked up by Karl Denninger and then Vox Day, and so was presumably read by a fair number of people in this corner of the blogosphere.

Taiwan is of special interest, not just to me personally because I happen to live here, but because of its unusual timeline. Pecking started in March 2021, when there had only been a negligible number of birdemic "cases," and by September 2021 half the population had been pecked. The birdemic itself didn't take off until April 2022, when around 83% of the population had already been pecked. Therefore, any widespread public health changes between mid-2021 and mid-2022 must be due to the pecks, not the birdemic itself.

Chudov's sensational claim is based on the fact, reported by the Taiwan government, that 23.24% fewer babies were born in May 2022 than in May 2021. To get an idea of how unlikely such a difference is to occur by chance, Chudov employs this rather extraordinary method.

I inputted historical birth rate data from Macrotrends for the years 2009-2021, and added the year 2022 as year 2021 adjusted down by 23.24%. Obviously, 2022 is not over and the number of Taiwanese babies to be born this year (or during the next 12 months) is unknown. So the chart below is an illustration of what would happen in the next 12 months if the 23.24% drop stays constant.

To be clear, the 23.24% drop is not about 2022 so far or anything like that; it's just comparing one month to another one 12 months previous. In May 2021, there were 12,300 babies born in Taiwan, but in May 2022, there were only 9,442. From this, Chudov concludes that it is reasonable to assume that the entire year of 2022 will have 23.24% fewer births than 2021! Here is his chart.

That looks like an impossibly sharp drop, and it is. As Chudov writes, "When expressed in 'sigmas', units of standard deviation, the 23.24% drop in the birth rate in Taiwan is a 26-sigma event!" (As a point of reference, a man 26 sigmas taller than average would be about 12 foot 4.)

But Chudov's underlying reasoning -- that a 23% difference between two months makes it reasonable to assume a difference of the same magnitude between two years -- is insane. Obviously, month-to-month variation will be much greater than year-to-year variation. As an example, I've just checked my financial records, and it just so happens that my business made 6.8 times the income in December 2021 that it made in December 2020. Given that information, how confident would you be in assuming that my total revenue for the year of 2021 was also 6.8 times that of 2020? In fact, the total for the two years was almost exactly the same, differing by less than 1%. That's just how it is, especially when the absolute numbers are relatively small (as in a small business, or a small country like Taiwan). Some months are high and some are low, for no particular reason, but over the course of a year, things have a way of averaging out.

If we plot actual month-by-month data, as reported by the Taiwan government here, it looks like this. (I only went back to 2018, not 2009, because I'm lazy like that.)

Just eyeballing this, there's a lot of random noise, probably a slight overall downward trend in births, and certainly nothing at all like a "26-sigma event." (Check out that 45.28% drop from December 2020 to January 2021, though! What is that, 51 Chudov-sigmas or something?)

Or let's strictly follow Chudov's method of comparing months of 2021 to months of 2022.

If, as Chudov reckons, the May-to-May difference "can be described as 'unimaginable' in terms of the likelihood of happening due to random chance," take a look at January-to-January -- an even bigger change, and in the opposite direction!

If pecks are in fact causing a decline in fertility, this is not yet clearly evident in Taiwan's birth rates.

⁂

Note added: Here's one more chart, showing the number of births per 12-month period. (Only calendar years are labeled. The first bar is 2018, the second is Feb 2018 through Jan 2019, and so on.) The pattern is one of steady decline, starting well before the peck and unchanged thereafter. If the peck is going to cause a sudden drop, it hasn't happened yet.

During a press conference that afternoon, a reporter asked CECC head Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) to comment on reports that mask regulations would be relaxed in July and that the border will be reopened in August. Chen said that given the fluctuations in the outbreak, the CECC is not able to plan as far in advance as August, but will make adjustments in response to the epidemic situation.

Regarding the loosening of mask rules in July, Chen said "for the time being, we will probably not be implementing an overall relaxation of mask (rules) because, in addition to the birdemic, masks have a considerable preventative effect on other respiratory diseases." Chen did not elaborate on what other respiratory diseases the CECC is concerned about.

Chen said that even if the ban on masks is lifted, the relaxed measures will only apply to "special situations." Chen emphasized that generally, masks should continue to be worn at all times.

On October 6, 2021, exactly as I had predicted in August, the number of peck-attributed deaths in Taiwan overtook the number of birdemic-attributed deaths. A month later, I predicted that by Chinese New Year 2022, the pecks would have killed twice as many Taiwanese people as the birdemic.

That second prediction didn't pan out. Instead, we're seeing a "second wave" of birdemic-attributed deaths, while peck-attributed deaths have slowed to a trickle, so now the two a pretty much neck-and-neck. As of yesterday, the birdemic-attributed death toll was 1,436. Peck-attributed deaths are no longer reported anywhere near as regularly as they used to be, but on May 17 the total peck-attributed death toll was 1,477.

Curious as to what had changed, I looked up the relevant statistics and plotted the number of reported deaths per million doses for each of the pecks for two different periods: up to January 17, and from January 18 to May 17. It turns out peck lethality has changed a lot. Overall, peck lethality is about half what it used to be -- 14 deaths per million doses, down from 30.

The first thing to notice is that AZ pecks -- the deadliest of the lot, 28% of all doses but responsible for 57% of peck-attributed deaths to date -- have been quietly discontinued. (There were 28 new AZ deaths from January 18 to May 17, but no way to calculate deaths per million doses without dividing by zero.) I didn't know this until I looked up the data to make this chart. It was never announced. I guess they didn't want to admit, after administering 16 million doses to the trusting citizenry and killing more than 800 of them, that they'd made a mistake. They did discontinue it, though, suggesting they've developed some capacity, however limited, for learning from experience.

Eliminating AZ from the mix is only part of the story, though. Every one of the other peck brands has seen a dramatic change in lethality. Mod is killing half as many people as it used to, and Med just a third. What's going on? I can think of a few possibilities.

1. The first dose is the riskiest. If you survived the first dose, you're likely to survive additional doses of the same thing. By January 17, 81% of the population had already received a first dose, so most of the doses since that time have been second or additional doses.

2. The number of "cases" (positive test results) is much higher than it used to be. Before January 17, about 18,000 people had tested positive. From January 18 to May 17, there were 896,000 positive tests. This is partly because more people are being tested and partly because the definition of "case" has changed. Before, a positive antigen test had to be confirmed by a positive PCR test before it could be considered a "case"; starting this month, though, all positive DIY antigen tests are counted as "cases." People who die of peck side effects after testing positive for the birdemic are presumably counted as birdemic deaths, not peck deaths.

3. The pecks themselves could have changed. I mean, why wouldn't they? Quietly replacing most of the doses with normal saline would seem to be the best way of minimizing deaths without admitting anything.

Then there's the question of the Pfi pecks, which show the opposite trend. While the other brands have dramatically decreased in lethality, Pfi is now more than twice as deadly as it used to be. No idea what to make of that.

Driving through northern Colorado towards Wyoming yesterday, on the side of the road, I saw a raven (corvid, birdemic) eating a rattlesnake (serpent). And since the Synch Fairies seem to like numbers, I was on highway 287. As I drove by I immediately thought "William needs to know about this."

Interesting. The rattler (Gadsden flag) represents freedom, individualism, and a willingness to fight back against coercion, so a corvid eating one is a very appropriate omen-after-the-fact.

Send a tangerine-colored nuclear submarine

with a sticker that says STP

don’t go there because they are convinced the IFR is 0.17% instead of 0.8%. They don’t go there because they believe the herd immunity threshold lies at 25% instead of 90%. They don’t even go there because there is no significant correlation between lockdown stringency and excess mortality. And ultimately, they don’t even go there because they believe the WEF wants to implement a Great Reset.

No, those people go there, because what happened in March 2020, is incompatible with what we are. They reject it, the way your body would reject a pig’s heart implanted under your rib-cage. They reject it, because lockdowns are incompatible with Western values. Those values are interwoven with who we are as individuals, so many of you will have rejected it without even comprehending why.

A product of our Christian heritage is that we reject cruelty against individuals with a strict passion, even when it would benefit the societal good. This is what you and your ancestors have learned, what you had ingrained into your souls, for over a thousand years.

Yes, I am talking here about a notorious Jewish hippie, a young troublemaker who angered the pharisees. A man who went around violating Levitical law, by touching people with leprosy. What’s hard-coded into our brains, is empathy for individuals. It’s easy to forget that Christianity teaches that Jesus was both God and Man, a man who didn’t just bail you out of hell, but lived a life by example.

And whether you are today a Christian, a heathen, an atheist, a follower of the path of Dharma or something else entirely, the reality remains that you have grown up in a culture that is Christian in its essence, like the proverbial fish who fails to recognize water he has always lived in. And the great innovation that Christianity brought to the Roman empire, is the fundamental dignity of the individual.

Gandhi's patented method:

1. Be strictly non-violent.
2. Defy your enemies in such a way that their only options are to let you win or to resort to violence themselves.
3. Watch enemy morale evaporate and the tide of public opinion turn in your favor.