1. The Sound of Silence
What is the sound of one hand clapping? This ancient Zen koan is not actually meant to be answered but to stimulate new ways of thinking. However, in the post-coronavirus social context, that sound is deadly silence. You need both hands in order to generate the sound of applause. You need two hands to do most jobs. What’s the relevance of this today? According to a Fox News report, “nearly 70% of employers worldwide are having a difficult time filling vacancies…” [1] The Toronto Star reported “chaos” at Pearson International Airport due to “‘pent-up demand’ for air travel” after two years of lockdowns that also resulted in “a significant number of layoffs in the aviation industry, including security screening staff.” [2] NDP MP Matthew Green reported on Twitter that the line-up to the boarding gate was at least 500 deep. Many of those missing flights were sleeping on conveyor belts. The mainstream media acts as if there’s some great mystery to why this is happening. Some prefer to blame it on laziness induced by two years of CERB government handouts.
But there’s another reason being hidden by the media: thanks to short-sighted Covid-19 vaccine mandates adopted by everyone from Canada’s federal government to private employers such as airlines, a chasm of vacancies has opened up in the employment market. As both Dr. Jessica Rose and Steve Kirsch have been reporting on Substack, the extent of damages and deaths caused by the experimental Covid-19 gene therapy injections is far greater than the media or government is reporting. Kirsch has been doing his own polling to determine the true extent of vaccine injuries and deaths, since the US CDC refuses to, unsurprisingly. To verify his results he has also hired Zogby Polling and so far the results align with one another. Kirsch estimates that in the US alone there may have been 1.8 million people added to the disability rolls since the injections were rolled out. [3] That’s certainly going to put a dent in the employment market. Even more so is the death toll related to the “vaccines.” Kirsch believes the CDC may be under-reporting these deaths by a factor of 10—a conclusion supported by many experts—and that the actual American death toll from adverse vaccine reactions lies somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000.
The Canadian government, as Dr. Byram Bridle has explained, has so fouled the waters of our own vaccine injury reporting system by setting the bar of causation so impossibly high that the database is effectively useless. Dr. Bridle—like Steve Kirsch—has invited anyone in science or government to debate him, prove him wrong. So far—no takers. [4] This was one of the Socratic questions that continually plagued me throughout the lockdowns: If the government’s position is so iron-clad, then why are they afraid or unwilling to enter a debate? In “Doctors on Tour Informs the Kootenays,” I reported on the fact that the medical profession seems to have abandoned the Bradford Hill criteria for causation:
“One article goes so far as to call the Bradford Hill criteria “the forgotten predicate,” although Sir Austin Bradford Hill did not use the term “criteria” in his original lecture delivered to the Royal Society of Medicine January 14, 1965. Still, Dr. Bradford Hill’s research was a key factor in settling the association between smoking and lung cancer—a conclusion tobacco companies fought desperately to avoid.” [5]
In North America pharmaceutical companies managed to negotiate the sweetest deal in history—a government subsidy both in research in development, guaranteed taxpayer-funded mass purchase of vaccines, AND zero liability for adverse reactions or deaths. Wow, that’s some business model! Still, it’s no surprise they’re not anxious to have a causal connection proven with their new generation of gene therapy coronavirus treatments. This is their biggest cash cow in history, estimated at $32 billion.[6]
Despite its shortcomings—a serious under-reporting bias that experts estimate at a factor of 10 or even 100—the US VAERS system produces more useful information than Canada’s vaccine injury database, especially when combined with the investigative work Kirsch is doing. “It turns out that 69% of all deaths in VAERS (limiting ourselves to US only deaths) are from the COVID vaccines. So this means that the COVID vaccines have killed 2.3X as many people as all the 70+ other vaccines over the past 32 years.”[7] Kirsch compares the results of 18 different surveys and concludes, “the COVID vaccines are 500 times more deadly than all 70+ vaccines combined.”[8] So much for “safe and effective”!
If airline customers are peeved at the 500-deep line-ups at Pearson, they ought to be even more concerned about the staff shortage that may be developing among pilots. American Airlines pilots, who—like the Canadian government employees—were forced to accept vaccination or lose their jobs, are now succumbing to career-ending “vaccine” injuries. Captain Robert ‘Bob’ Snow suffered a heart attack minutes after landing an AA plane. As he explains to Steve Kirsch in an interview,[9] a pilot with a heart condition such as he has now developed with myocarditis is a permanently grounded pilot. Only in rare cases will a pilot with a pacemaker be allowed to continue flying. In a follow-up interview with Josh Yoder of US Freedom Flyers, Yoder estimates that “30% of the pilots may need to be disqualified due to heart conditions caused by the vaccine.”[10] Normally I try not to rely so heavily on a single informant in my research. However, Kirsch is doing yeoman’s work both gathering data and reporting it, since the majority of journalists have abdicated this role. And here it is from the horse’s mouth:
“Two American Airlines-owned regional carriers will hike pilot pay by 50% through the end of August 2024, the latest sign airlines are willing to pay up in hopes of ending a pilot shortage that has left some travelers with fewer flight options.” [11]
“It’s gotten so bad that experts estimate by next year the airline industry will be short about 12,000 pilots. However, the effects are already being felt by airlines and passengers as thousands of flights are being cancelled, leaving fewer options and driving up ticket prices. United Airlines has reported that they’ve grounded at least 150 of their regional jets, and Southwest Airlines has cut more than 20,000 of their flights.” [12]
But short of hiring newly trained pilots—preferably unvaxxed and therefore healthy—to fill these vacancies, a 50% pay hike isn’t going to be of much use solving this staffing crisis. “Republic Airways which flies for American, Delta, and United has petitioned for the government to cut back flight training hours from 1,500 to just 750 as a part of their new pilot training program with the hopes to incentivize pilots to come on board.”[13] Note that neither of these two mainstream news outlets mentions anything about vaccine-injured pilots, with CNBC merely noting that “airlines encouraged pilots to take early retirement after demand cratered in 2020 and were left with too few when travel rebounded.”
In the medical profession in BC alone, it’s estimated we’ve lost between 2,500–5,000 healthcare workers. Although the government naturally isn’t commenting on why, groups such as Canada’s Frontline Nurses or “Hire Back Our Heroes”[14] explain that it’s due both to those injured from the jab and those who opted out of the injections and were fired for it. The situation was already dire in this province prior to Covid-19, with chronic staff shortages over a period of many years. That’s what I discovered while volunteering to do research for our local medical services committee, formed when Interior Health threatened our medical clinic with closure a few years ago. According to “Hire Back Our Heroes,” “900,000 BC residents are currently without a family doctor… capacity issues existed long before Covid. The current situation is beyond dire.” As several nurses testify in the video, the BC government is refusing to hire back those who for conscientious reasons chose not to get the jab. According to the BC Nurses Union, the number of vacant nursing positions doubled over previous years to over 5,000 in 2021. [15] The suspicious part of me wonders if the government is deliberately collapsing the healthcare system.
2. History as Pattern Recognition
As a writer I look for patterns that point to unavoidable conclusions. I generally start with my gut instinct, my intuition, then quickly follow up with research. As I write in Words from the Dead, “In history, pattern recognition is everything…” [16] And what I’m seeing is a pattern of collapse in staffing across multiple sectors. Granted, some of my evidence for this conclusion might be termed anecdotal. But remember that many great discoveries in science began with anecdotal reports. Once followed up by research, these often lead to clear conclusions. For example, in all my decade or so on LinkedIn, I’ve never seen so many jobs opening up for journalists. Just in one day recently there were four different job postings for CBC-Radio Canada. My father told me that a friend has had his truck at a body shop in Williams Lake for a month waiting to be fixed. The apologetic shop owner tells him he just doesn’t have enough staff to keep up, and can’t seem to find more to hire. Recently a spam email arrived in my inbox from Staples, the big box store for office supplies, letting me know they’re on a hiring spree. Add these anecdotes to the verified information reported above and it’s not hard to see a pattern developing.
As Fox News reports, “To combat this struggle, about 67% of employers are offering up more flexibility with work schedules and are being more lenient on where the work gets done, according to the survey. About 41% are investing in training, skills development and mentoring.” [17] As a historian, this reminds me of the 14th century Black Death or bubonic plague which killed between 30–50% of Europe’s population. (Although statistically there is no relation whatsoever between the Black Death and Covid-19, with an average Infection Fatality Rate of 0.19–0.3% for those below age 60 (depending on gender), rising naturally in the highest-risk age group (80-plus) to a mean IFR of 8%. [18] According to renowned epidemiologist John Ioannidis of Stanford University, the mean IFR in his seroprevalence data is 0.24%.) [19] The chronic, cross-sector labour shortages we’re seeing post-Covid are reminiscent of what happened in post-bubonic plague Europe. As historian Philip Ziegler wrote:
“Perhaps the most radical of these changes was the new desire, even determination on the part of the medieval labourer to have a say in deciding his terms of employment and to seek his fortune elsewhere if such a right were denied to him… The Black Death introduced a situation in which land was plentiful and labour scarce. The scales were thereby tipped against the landowner… The pattern of several centuries was breaking up; not only the pattern of society but the set of men’s minds as well… the Black Death was a stimulus towards greater mobility of labour and hence towards the disintegration of the manorial system.” [20]
Ultimately, as so often happens, the landowners and aristocracy managed to game the system to their advantage, although at least labourers were no longer tied for life to a single estate.[21] As I write in Words from the Dead, “Europe’s culture took nearly two centuries to fully recover from the Black Death.” [22] This point is certainly arguable. However, as support for my conclusion I offer Lewis Mumford’s magisterial work Technics and Civilization. Mumford provides a handy Appendix listing technological innovations and inventions starting from the 10th century AD. You can see a steady upward curve of technological advancement, but it only begins to crest in the 16th century, exploding fully into abundance in the 17th to 19th centuries. [23] The century of the bubonic plague itself boasts only a modest list of inventions, no doubt due to the medieval Little Ice Age causing repeated famines. “The climate played a major part in the mischief 70 or 80 years before the Black Death,” writes Ziegler. “The intense cold led to a striking advance of the glaciers, polar as well as Alpine… The most grave consequence was a series of disastrous harvests. There were famines in England in 1272, 1277, 1283, 1292, and 1311. Between 1315 and 1319 came a crescendo of calamity. Almost every country in Europe lost virtually the whole of one harvest, often of two or three…” [24]
With the current climate chaos, including one of the wettest, coldest springs in Western Canada in recent memory, and the curtailment of grain shipments from Russia and the Ukraine, we’d best pray we’re not in for historical déjà vu. What’s most shocking about all this is that the collapse in the labour market, along with the disastrous shutdown of the economy during lockdowns, is deliberate, the result of truly idiotic government policies. (Or deliberately malevolent policies, if you subscribe to the population reduction explanation for this agenda.) In an attempt to institute a totalitarian global system, the elites may well have just shot themselves in the foot. It’s hard to keep a complex civilization running when half your population is either sick or permanently disabled. (The long promised robots the elites are salivating over have a long way to go before they can replace human labour.)
While I lack space here to delve into Arnold Toynbee’s highly astute analysis of the collapse of civilizations, you can read more about that in an entire chapter in my book devoted to his masterwork, the modestly titled A Study of History.[25] But here is how he sees it:
“…the destruction which has overtaken a number of civilizations in the past has never been the work of any external agency, but has always been in the nature of an act of suicide.”[26]
Philip Ziegler, in his book The Black Death, cites sociologist J.W. Thompson, who sees parallels between that plague and World War I in terms of the social breakdown that followed both events:
“In both cases, he says, complaints of contemporaries were the same: ‘economic chaos, social unrest, high prices, profiteering, depravation of morals, lack of production, industrial indolence, frenetic gaiety, wild expenditure, luxury, debauchery, social and religious hysteria, greed, avarice, maladministration, decay of manners.’ …In both, in a word, the whole population was ‘shell-shocked,’ a state from which they were not fully to emerge for many years.” [27]
3. Emerging from Post-Collapse Shell-Shock
I can certainly attest to feeling “shell-shocked” in the aftermath of the “plandemic.” As Ziegler concludes of post-plague 14th century Europe, “Assumptions which had been taken for granted for centuries were now in question, the very framework of man’s reasoning seemed to be breaking up.” [28] In many ways this is a good thing; long-held assumptions—like the safety of vaccines, or the benevolence of those in government—tend to harden into dogma and thus need to be broken up from time to time. The only constant in the universe is change. According to evolution, we either adapt or we die. But to do so successfully will require reframing many long-cherished assumptions.
It will also require a return to a truly democratically governed society, not the sham democracies we live in now. Perhaps these too will naturally disintegrate, leaving us free finally to emulate the democratic model established in ancient Greece by Cleisthenes and Solon two and a half millennia ago. A system where a process of random selection (sortition) of trusted candidates replaces the current corrupt system of professional politics, with its expensive “leadership” campaigns that devolve into vicious character assassinations of political opponents. A system based, not on a central authority that seeks to control our every move, but the system of “mutual aid” described by quietist anarchist Peter Kropotkin in his book of that name. A system based on local governance and autonomy, leaving people free to do as they’ve done for hundreds of thousands of years—to trade with their neighbours for food and labour.
This is how German-American lawyer Reiner Fuellmich puts it:
“We’re going to have to start from scratch, build up our own supply systems as far as energy, as far as food systems are concerned—in our regions, and then connect with each other, exchange ideas. But never again will we allow people to rule from above, from very far away.” [29]
I can hear the sound of many hands clapping already.
[1] “Staff shortages still affecting nearly 70% of businesses worldwide,” Daniella Genovese, Fox Business News, September 14, 2021: https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/jobs-hiring-businesses-workers-employment
[2] “Security staffing shortages lead to long lines at Pearson airport,” Dorcas Marfo, Toronto Star, May 3, 2022: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2022/05/03/security-staffing-shortages-lead-to-long-lines-at-pearson-airport.html
[3] “A cool new way to get an estimate of the death toll using disability data,” Steve Kirsch, Substack, June 10, 2022:
[4] “Dr. Byram Bridle and 2 colleagues challenged Canada's health authorities to a debate,” Steve Kirsch, Substack, February 7, 2022:
[5] “Doctors on Tour Informs the Kootenays,” Sean Arthur Joyce, April 9, 2022:
[6] “Pfizer and Moderna Could Earn $32 Billion from Sales of Covid-19 Vaccines,” Yahoo Finance, December 13, 2020: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pfizer-moderna-could-earn-32-223700849.html “Pfizer Forecasts Record Vaccine Revenue for 2022 as Billions Remain Unprotected,” Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, February 8, 2022: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/02/08/pfizer-forecasts-record-vaccine-revenue-2022-billions-remain-unprotected
[7] “Game Over. We Won,” Steve Kirsch, Substack, June 5, 2022:
[8] “Surveys show that the COVID vaccines have killed more people in just 18 months than all 70+ vaccines combined have over 32 years,” Steve Kirsch, Substack, June 2, 2022:
[9] “Steve Kirsch Interviews American Airlines Captain Robert Snow,” Rumble, May 17, 2022: https://rumble.com/v154b6d-steve-kirsch-interviews-american-airlines-captain-robert-snow.html
[10] “My interview with Josh Yoder about American pilot Bob Snow's cardiac arrest after landing,” Steve Kirsch, Substack, April 20, 2022:
[11] “American Airlines regional carriers hike pilot pay more than 50% as shortage persists,” Leslie Josephs, CNBC, June 13, 2022: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/13/american-airlines-regional-pilots-get-big-pay-hikes-as-competition-for-pilots-intensifies-.html
[12] “Pilot shortages causing headaches for airlines, travelers across U.S.,” Fox13, Tampa Bay, June 13, 2022: https://www.fox13news.com/news/pilot-shortages-causing-headaches-for-airlines-travelers-across-u-s
[13] “Pilot shortages causing headaches for airlines, travelers across U.S.,” Fox13, Tampa Bay, June 13, 2022: https://www.fox13news.com/news/pilot-shortages-causing-headaches-for-airlines-travelers-across-u-s
[14] Freedom to Choose, “Hire Back Our Heroes”: https://www.freedomtochoose.ca/hire-back-our-heroes/
[15] Freedom to Choose, “Hire Back Our Heroes,” video: 4:00 mark.
[16] Words from the Dead: Relevant Readings in the Covid Age, Sean Arthur Joyce, Ekstasis Editions 2022, Preface, p. 13.
[17] “Staff shortages still affecting nearly 70% of businesses worldwide,” Daniella Genovese, Fox Business News, September 14, 2021: https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/jobs-hiring-businesses-workers-employment
[18] “COVID Infection Fatality Rates By Sex And Age,” American Council on Science and Health, Alex Berezow, November 18, 2020: https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/11/18/covid-infection-fatality-rates-sex-and-age-15163
[19] “The infection fatality rate of COVID-19 inferred from seroprevalence data,” John P.A. Ioannidis, Departments of Medicine, of Epidemiology and Population Health, of Biomedical Data Science, and of Statistics and Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), Stanford University: http://biomechanics.stanford.edu/me233_20/reading/ioannidis20.pdf
[20] The Black Death, Philip Ziegler, Penguin Books 1969 (quoted from 1982 reprint), pp. 247, 255.
[21] “The laws may not have been intended to repress but they were administered largely by the landowners in their own interests. Inevitably it was the labourer who lost. For the most part the statutes did not operate so as to make the labourer worse off than he had been before, but they cut off a line of advance towards a new prosperity which had been opened by the plague. The fact that they were largely successful was an important factor in the compound of national issues and local grievances which was eventually to give rise to the Peasants’ Revolt.” —The Black Death, Philip Ziegler, Penguin Books 1969 (quoted from 1982 reprint), p. 257.
[22] Words from the Dead: Relevant Readings in the Covid Age, Sean Arthur Joyce, Ekstasis Editions 2022, p. 30.
[23] Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford, Harcourt, Brace & World Inc., 1934, First Harbinger Books edition, 1963, “List of Inventions,” pp. 438–446.
[24] The Black Death, Philip Ziegler, Penguin Books 1969 (quoted from 1982 reprint), pp. 32, 33.
[25] “Toynbee Charts the Life Cycle of Civilizations,” Words from the Dead: Relevant Readings in the Covid Age, Sean Arthur Joyce, Ekstasis Editions 2022, pp. 152–171.
[26] A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee, Oxford University Press, 1960 (1962 ed.), p. 419.
[27] The Black Death, Philip Ziegler, ibid., p. 286, citing J.W. Thompson, “The Aftermath of the Black Death and the Aftermath of the Great War,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. XXVI, 1920/21.
[28] The Black Death, Philip Ziegler, ibid., p. 287.
[29] Quoted in Words from the Dead: Relevant Readings in the Covid Age, ibid., p. 279.
Thankyou for such a comprehensive and wide angle view -from Canada even! I found my way to subscribe here via an older issue of “pandemic papers” found in a nutrition store in North Van. Your writing is very good. I think perhaps I visited your table at a vancouver rally in February (?). Your comment about the possibility of an intended health care collapse may be on the mark. It’s a radical statement but makes sense if we acknowledge that Health care is the single highest cost item (and rising) on federal governments’ budget in the over/developed world. That also makes healthcare by big tech and the vaccine-makers the biggest cash cow to wrestle from all-too-willing governments, eager to cut costs, eliminate the elderly at an earlier age.
As a Canadian I am of course concerned at a very basic level that our “leaders” have fucked up so royally, but that was to be expected. I am more concerned how Canadians en masse have flocked to embrace such BS from corporate media, big pharma and big gov’t with a level of uncritical ignorance that has boggled my mind for over two years- smart people, my radical artists friends, (normally) critical people. This makes us sitting ducks for future oppressive measures, so much that we won’t even know what hit us. I wouldn’t even call it compliance, as that suggests a kind of grudging acquiescence. I think there is a disease, now visible to eyes that can see, of an unhealthy trust in government. Perhaps it’s because we have had reasons to trust in the nanny state for so long now, even to the point of smugness vis a vis our US neighbours…and newer immigrants are just so glad to be free of former states of poverty and oppression that they are high among the blind. The propagandists won this hands down. But as Matthias Desmett writes, it only takes 10% of the population ( and some years) to keep finding ways to lift the veil off the face of tyranny, after things get worse. Years of cognitive dissonance. Cheers!