Month: April 2021

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Corporate Censors and Fact Fabricators

Every Little Thing is Going to be Alright

If you get your news from the likes of the BBC and the Guardian, billing themselves as bastions of liberal progressivism, you might be forgiven for knowing little about the biggest anti-establishment protest in London since the massive February 2003 demonstration against the invasion of Iraq. No doubt, if such a large anti-government protest had taken place in Minsk or Moscow, this would have been headline news. You may have just heard that a few thousand demented antivaxxers staged a super-spreader event, undermining our collective struggle against the virus, and attacked brave police officers whose sole mission was to protect public safety.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Hundreds of thousands of people travelled from all over the UK to stand up for basic civil liberties, scientific truth and humanity as we have known it for countless generations. I feel guilty only because I could not take time off to join the crowds. Many ethical issues may divide us, but the prospect of a permanent bio-security state should horrify anyone concerned about society’s steady drift towards a technocratic dystopia.

Luckily, the event was livestreamed on alternative media. Unlike other large gatherings in the English capital over the years, the mainstream media did not publicise it at all, in stark contrast with the mass-marketed pro-EU and anti-Trump demos. Despite coronavirus restrictions last year, the venerable BBC gave favourable live coverage of the much smaller Black Lives Matter protests. They downplayed the scale of violence against police who had earlier taken the knee, while completely ignoring regular episodes of police violence against peaceful anti-lockdown protesters. The only minor skirmishes at yesterday’s demonstration occurred after the police attempted to break up crowds of youngsters playing live music in Hyde Park. The police were massively outnumbered and unwisely attempted a baton charge against hundreds of fit young men and women, who did little more than hurl food scraps at retreating officers. I feel sorry for the police forced to wear face nappies on a sunny day and enforce scientifically flawed public safety measures detrimental to people’s emotional and physical health.

Ministries of Truth

As my week-long Twitter suspension neared its end, I checked reactions to yesterday’s events. Two stood out. One from BBC’s notorious Marianna Spring would not look out of place in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, effectively denouncing hundreds of thousands of ordinary working people as dangerous conspiracy theorists intent on undermining the UK’s glorious mass vaccination campaign.

We may note Ms Spring’s obsession with the QAnon phenomenon and her constant reference to false claims. The adjective false is meaningless unless you can refute an assertion you claim is false. Just because the government and the BBC’s corporate partners such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation claim that an assertion is false does not make it true. Tony Blair dismissed any suggestion that his government supported the occupation of Iraq to retain control of the oil supply as wild conjecture you may read on the Internet, which was still in its infancy back in 2003. Subsequent events proved the so-called conspiracy theorists right, although keeping the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency also played a role. Caitlin Johnstone and Wikileaks have exposed how the QAnon movement was most likely a CIA-driven pied piper operation, focusing on claims that Trump had someone code-named Q embedded in the Deep State to expose the cabal’s widespread ritual satanic sexual abuse. Back in the real world, Trump not only appointed war hawks to the highest levels of his administration, but he also collaborated with the biotech industrial complex in the roll-out of experimental mRNA injections going so far as to claim credit for Operation Warp Speed. However, most disturbingly Marianna Spring has lent her rhetorical weight to calls for the censorship of any means of communication that big corporations cannot control. She disparagingly refers to Telegram as an encrypted channel that facilitates conspiracy theories. Both Labour and Tory politicians have already called on the government to take tougher action against vaccine misinformation. Yet even the government’s own Yellow Card reporting system has detailed over 160,000 serious adverse reactions as of 14th April 2021 and admits elsewhere this accounts for fewer than 10% of actual adverse events. We do not know how many of the excess deaths of frail nursing home residents in January and February this year, assigned to covid-19 were expedited by adverse reactions to the Astra Zeneca or Pfizer injections. However, testimonials by nurses and carers would suggest much higher numbers than those revealed in the Yellow Card reporting system.

Classic smear tactics

Another message retweeted by the NHA Party (who amazingly still follows me) accuses protesters of antisemitism because they likened the prospect of medical apartheid via vaccine passports with the plight of Jews forced to wear yellow stars in Nazi Germany. If Christine Williams had done her homework, she would know mainly Jewish protesters in Tel Aviv made the same comparison. Are they antisemitic too? More important many prominent scientists, such as Dr Mike Yeadon and Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi, have warned us of the prospect of death on an unprecedented scale as corporate forces take full control of every aspect of our private lives and are busy building a new urban landscape clearly designed for fewer people. All the warning signs are there, discrimination, dehumanisation and polarisation.

Manufacturing Reality

Well-funded fact-checkers, as promoted by the mainstream media, academia and establishment politicians, employ a simple modus operandi. They focus on a few obvious falsehoods, which may have enjoyed some limited currency in the alternative media space, while either dismissing or ignoring the big questions. Once they have impressed the gullible with their cogent debunking of a claim of little consequence (e.g. do facemasks contain worms?), they proceed to cite peer-reviewed research favourable to the interests of their corporate funders. Very occasionally, fact-checkers will try to win public trust by highlighting a few cases of genuine corporate malfeasance or political corruption, but usually only to distract us from larger crimes or to discredit outmoded practices or expendable politicians.

Free speech, as in intellectual freedom, logically lets anyone make any claims about current and historical events. Many conscientious political activists may make claims based on limited knowledge or second-hand sources. Few of us can employ researchers to verify each claim we make. However, we can report what we see and hear with our own eyes and ears. Once we go down the road of subjecting all pronouncements to moderation by official experts or artificial intelligence, we will have no way to verify if the official experts are lying.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Covid Cultism in the Age of Experts

Covid cult

Over a year has passed since the Global Government's Scottish branch imposed the first virus-inspired lockdown. Of course, the authorities rolled out variants of the same policy first across much of Europe and the Americas. We may note a few partial exceptions in Europe, such as Sweden and Belarus, and some US states, such as South Dakota, that never enforced antisocial distancing and mandatory face masks. Just as the UK technically left the EU, we began to hear much more about the four countries’ approach to the pandemic, with Nicola Sturgeon trying to outdo Westminster in her apparent resolve to defeat the virus. All of a sudden power-hungry regional leaders started to read from the same pseudo-scientific script. Behavioural psychologists had probably concluded that people were more likely to listen to leaders who speak the same vernacular. We didn’t see very much of Boris Johnson, especially as he had a bout of flu or, as we call it now, covid. Instead, we were treated to daily press conferences from the UK health secretary Matt Hancock and medical mandarins such as Chris Whitty, Sir Patrick Vallance and Jonathan Van Tam. In Scotland, we regularly heard from former Clinton foundation groupie, Devi Shridnar, who used her skills in neurolinguistic programming to win public support for tougher restrictions, more testing and more surveillance. From the outset, the mainstream media drove the agenda, sensationalising reports of a new deadly coronavirus first in Wuhan, China, and then in Lombardy, Italy, with harrowing scenes of overburdened intensive care units chock-a-block with patients on ventilators. This was the dreaded Spanish flu all over again. The media went into overdrive to promote social isolation and get us to view our neighbours, friends and relatives as potential bio-hazards, unless they adhered strictly to new draconian social regulations. The greater freedom we enjoyed over the last 60 to 70 years went into rapid reverse as a new bio-security state took charge of our private lives.

Cultists

Society is now split into three broad categories of atomised individuals. At one extreme we have the covid cultists on a mission to educate the wider community on the benefits of our Brave New Abnormal. The followers of this new religion like to attribute all illnesses either to sars-cov-2 variants or to the new mysterious catch-all sickness long covid. They see covid everywhere and not uncommonly claim to have had it themselves. These are the kind of people who will loyally install the official track-and-trace app on their mobile devices and voluntarily have a PCR test at the slightest hint of symptoms we would normally associate with the common cold. On social media they love to publicise their adherence to the new medical safety regime by posing with colourful face masks, often championing other causes or institutions that undermine traditional families and personal autonomy. Many proudly sport NHS logos with LGBTQ+ rainbows and EU emblems to signal their support for top-down social engineering. Such people have blind faith in corporate science. They seldom challenge the logic or competence of official experts when they move goalposts or make 180º turns in official guidance. One moment they welcome free movement of all peoples across anachronistic national borders and the next they welcome strict border controls around public buildings to check everyone’s medical records. One moment no human being is illegal and the next any unvaccinated person represents a major biological threat to those you have dutifully participated in mass-marketed medical experimentation. I find it very hard to reason with many covid cultists because they will always dismiss any critiques of the official virus narrative as dangerous conspiracy theories before they dutifully direct your attention to an official fact-checker. Disturbingly, if you try to counter their arguments with links to well-researched online resources, social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, will flag them as misinformation. One recent example is Prof. Denis Rancourt of the Ontario Civil Liberties Association whose peer-reviewed study on the harms of face masks was banned from the academic publishing site ResearchGate after being viewed over 200,000 times. A covid cultist would instinctively assume such censorship serves the greater good as it might discourage people from wearing masks and lower their guard in our collective struggle against the virus.

Heretics

At the other extreme, we have a very heterogeneous set of lockdown sceptics. It would be nice if we could conveniently pigeon-hole these heretics into neat categories such as antivaxxers, religious fundamentalists, white nationalists or far-right libertarians who believe personal freedom always trumps collective responsibility. In short today’s dissidents are anyone who fails to trust the holy alliance of big tech and big governments and suspects the current obsession with preemptive infection control is leading us towards a high-tech dystopia that may wipe out much of humanity. Was the late Tanzanian president John Magufuli a white supremacist? Is Dr Michael Yeadon, former head of research at Pfizer, an antivaxxer? Is Prof. Sunetra Gupta an extreme libertarian who would let the poor die if they cannot afford private healthcare? Obviously not, but if you get your news from the Guardian or, heaven forbid, the BBC, you might be forgiven for thinking otherwise. In true Stalinist style, if no other slurs work against a dissident, our new guardians of truth can simply play the insanity card. Both Dr Thomas Binder in Switzerland and Prof. Jean-Bernard Fourtillan in France have been detained in psychiatric hospitals for voicing their dissent from the covid narrative. Unsurprisingly, the former has recently been banned on Twitter. A clear pattern is emerging. Tech giants and governments are working in tandem to neutralise meaningful dissent. The current wave of social media censorship may have first targeted sensationalist outfits such as Alex Jones’ Infowars, but their real goal has always been to close down scientific debate when it threatens vested interests. If you’re unsure whether Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon or have any doubts about the Earth’s shape, Youtube can still offer you plenty of uncensored videos challenging the scientific consensus. I don’t mind if some people think the Earth is flat as astronomical observations can easily disprove such claims. I do not need some higher authority to protect me against bad scientists. I’m much more concerned about evil scientists, who have sold their soul to large corporations with nefarious agendas. Since February 2020 public health advisors have promoted behaviours that most of us would have considered harmful before the covid craze spread around the world.

The Acquiescent Majority

The first two vocal groups do not represent the population at large. The former come mainly from the chattering classes, academia, social services, charities and healthcare. While all major political parties in the UK have supported strict coronavirus containment measures, the woke left has taken the most radical stances cheerleading SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) and even setting up an even more radical Independent SAGE that wants, wait for it, zero covid, something only attainable through the most extreme form of medical martial law, literally transforming the country into a giant clinic. They build on people’s affection for the once much-loved National Health Service at a time when most bricks-and-mortar hospitals are effectively out of bounds to the general public. By contrast, covid dissidents come from an alliance of the thinking working classes and small business owners alongside outcasts from academia and scientific research.

Between these two extremes we have the unsuspecting majority who like to get on with their lives and go with the flow without getting too involved in political and scientific controversies. Such people are more likely to watch talk shows and soap operas on mainstream TV and be more easily swayed by celebrity endorsements. Behavioural psychologists have successfully exploited media pundits and celebrities to spread fear of a nanoscopic virus among people who until the day before yesterday had much less fear of fast cars, motorbikes, cigarettes, booze or junk food. By isolating people in their homes and flooding TV, radio, newspapers and social media with endless covid-themed propaganda, the authorities have inculcated in the masses a new sense of civic responsibility and expected social behaviour, partly by encouraging people to snitch on transgressors. Within a month of the first lockdown last year, the word covidiot was on the tongue of all social conformists. Soon entering a supermarket without a mask felt like being a lone Celtic fan in the Rangers’ home stand back in the days of endemic sectarianism. I often observe a stark contrast between my nearest large supermarket with over 95% mask compliance and the local park where most visitors do not wear a mask and interpret anti-social distancing rules very liberally. People often pay lip service to the covid narrative, speaking of relatives who had covid-19 on their death certificates, but scratch beneath the surface and it becomes clear that lockdown policies have further isolated the lonely, deprived people of a sense of purpose and made people feel guilty for attempting to go about their normal lives. Once the silent majority realise that experimental injections will not help them regain their personal freedoms and see their relatives die within months of booster shots, you can bet many so-called sheeple will wake up. At that stage, we must be prepared for greater state repression.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Another Twitter Suspension

The tech media giants started with easy high-profile targets, either genuine white supremacists, à la Red Ice, or sensationalist purveyors of American Exceptionalism and half-truths à la Infowars. They knew blocking these channels would only annoy a small subset of their customers. Few politicians would dare speak up in defence of these fringe outlets. Next, they targeted the likes of Stefan Molyneux, with nearly 1 million Youtube subscribers, former President Trump with over 50 million followers and last week the Corbett Report. I find this unsurprising, but also rather perverse. I never subscribed to Stefan Molyneux, but YouTube algorithms would keep suggesting his videos. Before I figured out how to disable auto-play, his videos would often follow other videos on the free speech theme by the likes of Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad. I long suspected Stefan was controlled opposition. His philosophical videos targeted a huge reservoir of dissent among the disenfranchised working classes. If you were not paying attention, you may have dismissed the core precept of his belief system: the fundamental importance of genetics in determining intelligence and success, both within and between racial groups. Such opinions have been rather unfashionable in the public discourse since the end of WW2. However, it’s now becoming glaringly obvious that the elites have public and private opinions on many controversies. Superficially, they pretend to side with the people but behind the scenes, they work to sow the seeds of new divisions and prepare the public psyche for future policy shifts.

Now the likes of Twitter are targeting anyone who challenges the official covid narrative, even those of us with a modest following in the lower thousands responding to someone with fewer than 30 followers. It seems you may hurl all sorts of gratuitous insults and spout some of the wildest scientifically illiterate theories on Twitter, as long as you do not challenge narratives of strategic importance. I’ve read messages supportive of paedophilia. Indeed, one message contained a preview image of a pornographic scene involving a child. I blocked its sender immediately. I admit this represents a grey area in the debate on the bounds of free speech, but I always stress intellectual freedom rather than absolute freedom of expression. I’ve lost count of the number of flat earthers and moon landing deniers active on social media, but their accounts never seem to get blocked.

The usual excuse is to protect community guidelines. You may naïvely think this is just about good social etiquette in the digital space. Some may have worried that such guidelines prevented open debate on issues such as unsustainable migratory flows or the promotion of transgenderism in schools for fear of offending vocal lobbies or vulnerable individuals. Now the assault on free speech has extended to anyone critical of the biotech industrial complex. The covid scare has unmasked our ruling classes, who still hide behind the façade of saving lives. Big Pharma lobbyists have been very active for many decades. Since the advent of social media, they’ve employed people to counteract any claims they do not like. I recall a long thread about the massive over-prescription of antidepressants. This could potentially offend people dependent on such psychoactive meds. By the same warped logic vegans may not highlight the horrors of slaughterhouses for fear of offending meat eaters. Initially the thread involved genuine users with a range of views. The next morning, I received a deluge of unfavourable replies with all the hallmarks of professional copywriters and was stupid enough to waste valuable time interacting with someone who could almost immediately respond to any first-hand evidence I gave with peer-reviewed reports on the safety and benefits of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (such as Prozac). These people always claim to be mental healthcare professionals. None of these tweets were flagged as abusive. I first encountered the Twitter thought police in 2019 about a misinterpreted sarcastic reply with the trigger word “kill” I had forgotten about. My comment paraphrased someone’s illogical statement (Do you want us to kill ourselves?). I gladly deleted it to restore my access. Lesson learned: avoid certain trigger words unless you make the context abundantly clear. Now what kind of gratuitous offence could earn me a one-week suspension? Threatening to kill someone? Overt racism? Denying that anyone has ever died as a result of covid-19? Nope. I merely claimed that numerous trials have proven ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are safe and effective treatments for the kind of respiratory illnesses associated with sars-cov-2. Whom exactly is this offending? I can only suspect that my interlocutor, going by the handle of Justin Time, works for the social media monitoring arm of the biotech industrial complex. They want to suppress any suggestion that the new experimental gene-therapy injections, marketed as covid-19 vaccines, do more harm than good. If alternative treatments are proven to be safe and effective, then the new injections will lose their emergency use authorisation and the whole case for authoritarian bio-security measures, with its lockdowns, mandatory masking, antisocial policing and digital health certificates, collapses.