Author: neilg63

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Is the Party over?

What goes up, must come down.

Ever since the birth of Keynesian economics and the abandonment of the Gold Standard in 1933, the world’s economy has thrived on material growth. The more people who could transform their labour into greater consumer demand, the merrier. This model was so successful that by 2019, obesity had replaced undernourishment as the world’s leading cause of preventable illnesses. Yet for many decades we’ve been living on spiralling debt. The 2008 financial crisis should have been a wake-up call, time to transition to a steady-state economy focused on social and environmental stability by letting the big banks go bust and bailing out the people. Instead, Western governments chose to bail out the bankers and extend more dodgy loans to the people to keep the consumer economy afloat.

Over the years I’ve explored all angles of the irksome population debate. The idea that the world may have too many human beings can feed the wildest fantasies of eugenicists. However, sometimes we have to separate science from dogma. It is all too easy to let deep-seated ideological convictions and emotions cloud our interpretation of conflicting scientific evidence.

Let's look at the rise of the world population since the industrial revolution. There is no doubt that it has grown exponentially and most of this growth has taken place over the last 70 years as infant mortality has declined across Southern Asia, Africa and South America. Before the covid scare, most forecasts suggested the world’s people count would peak between 9 and 11 billion in the mid 21st century. Most of Asia and South America were well on course to reach replacement-level fertility rates within the next decade without the need for coercive constraints on natural procreation. Urban lifestyles and compulsory schooling for all girls and boys have led young couples to choose smaller families, especially with the rising cost of raising children in a high-tech society. If your ten-year-old daughter can no longer help out on the farm, you may need to set aside some cash to buy her a laptop. The dire forecasts of population pessimists have, despite civil wars and occasional famines, proven mostly wrong. In his 1969 book, “The Population Bomb”, Paul Ehrlich predicted extinction-level starvation by the end of the 20th century. In the event the fertility rate declined in much of the developed world, while malnutrition and childhood deaths plummeted across India, Africa and South America, mainly due to improvements in agriculture and sanitation. More Africans starved in the 60s and 70s than in the 90s and early 21st century.

Nonetheless, rapid urbanisation brought about new conflicts and challenges, not least the demise of traditional extended families and job insecurity as new city-dwellers could not easily keep pace with fast-evolving technology. As I’ve stressed in some earlier posts, the real question is no longer the prospect of 10 billion human beings but the environmental challenge of 5 billion cars with the massive infrastructure such an automotive utopia would require. Back in 1970, the world had around 200 million motor vehicles. Today that figure has risen five-fold to over a billion, while the human population has merely doubled.

Historically, our numbers have adapted to environmental conditions amid spouts of internecine violence, famines and plagues. If our habitat can accommodate more people, our instincts to go forth and multiply will prevail as opportunities abound for young adults. Conversely, as environmental conditions deteriorate, fewer people survive without modern welfare systems and easy exit routes. In the 1840s, the Irish potato famine triggered an implosion of Ireland’s population due to a mix of starvation and emigration of the Emerald Isle's fittest young adults. However, our environment is not the wildernesses we inherited from our distant forebears, but the urban and rural landscapes we have engineered over many generations. We may contrast the natural geosphere, as might exist in our absence, with the much smaller technosphere. Over half of us live in the 1% of the world’s land area that’s urbanised and the other half in smaller settlements in the 10-11% of available land fit for farming and animal husbandry.

Any concerns about the long-term sustainability of the world’s population inevitably lead to calls for concerted global action that logically undermine the self-determination of peoples at local and national level. When investment bankers in Zürich or Singapore worry about demographic trends in Nigeria or Pakistan, self-determination is unlikely to figure high in their list of priorities. Rather global planners prefer to use applied behavioural insights to guide people towards more sustainable ways of life. By sustainability technocrats do not mean the conservation of our ecosystem so much as political stability as they shift gear from an economic model based on consumption-led growth to one based on micromanagement of all human activity, treating most denizens of our planet more as zoo animals than working consumers.

Wishful-thinking Progressive Cornucopians

For the last 30 years or so, mainstream economists and opinion leaders have downplayed the significance of the population factor, often welcoming immigration from poorer countries with growing populations to wealthier countries with ageing populations. One of their favourite arguments was the need for more young workers to pay taxes and boost consumer demand. I’ve covered the fallacies of this theory before. The existing population only benefit materially from immigration if newcomers pay more in tax than they consume in services. While we may reasonably debate the pros and cons of high levels of net migrations in times of economic growth and low unemployment, it makes a lot less sense with millions stranded at home on furlough and economic activity suffocated by medical martial law. It only took a few months for liberal progressives to abandon their love for the free movement of people across outdated national borders to become the staunchest proponents of internal borders, preventing people from leaving their region or county and gathering in large groups. Other human beings have suddenly turned into biohazards. It baffles me how we can love all other members of our species, while simultaneously avoiding social proximity and hiding our facial expressions.

Green New Deal policies make absolutely no sense if you naively believe that trendy progressive types want to embrace humanity in all its wonderful cultural diversity and celebrate our growing numbers. Multiculturalism has only ever served as a transitionary phenomenon to undermine native cultures and usher in a global super-culture that would make it easier for the intellectual elites to micromanage the urban masses. Since the turn of the millennium two competing visions of globalism have divided Western electorates. Some see a wider range of restaurants and the cultural enrichment of well-educated colleagues who have moved from other parts of the world. Others see divided communities, congestion, crime and alienation in their country of birth. Academics and affluent professionals tend to view mass migration much more favourably than the home-grown working classes. How could the population of Greater London, which grew from around 6.4 million in the early 1990s to over 9 million by 2019 and was once projected to hit 13 million by 2050, meet Agenda 2030 sustainability goals? How could the conurbation’s teeming residents make drastic cuts in their true carbon footprint, while importing almost everything from other regions and exporting their pollution? The answer is simple. It could not. Any honest city planner should have known that within a decade most short-term service sector jobs would be either outsourced or fully automated. By 2010 the city had already started to resemble a giant airport terminal with shopping malls, luxury apartments and bedsits for transient labourers. After 10 months of corona-containment measures, the city’s once-bustling streets and markets have been emptied. As many as a million workers have already fled. It simply doesn’t make any sense for remote workers to rent a studio flat in an unfriendly city where spontaneous socialisation may land you in trouble with the covid police. While some may argue the corona crisis was an unforeseen cataclysm that demanded emergency measures, once again the affluent professional classes have abandoned the working classes. Greater London grew rapidly in the 19th and early 20th century mainly with newcomers from other regions of the British Isles, but with a fair sprinkling of adventurers from overseas. By the 1930s it had reached chronic levels of overcrowding with its characteristic pea-soup smog. Wartime evacuations in the 1940s and post-war redevelopment prompted a steady exodus to the suburbs and satellite towns. Old settled communities and industries moved out and new communities moved in. London began to grow again in the 1990s as a hub of the global banking and media industries. Employers could easily exploit a new breed of international commuters. The same chattering classes that once tolerated racism against the indigenous peoples of the British Empire and later blamed Britain’s strike-prone home-bred workers for post-imperial industrial decline are now indifferent to the mass exodus of their Eastern European neighbours, whose services they no longer require. For every highly qualified doctor or engineer who has added to London’s human capital, there are 10 to 20 temporary office workers, caterers, builders, lorry drivers, hairdressers, nurses, nannies, decorators and cleaners. The covid scare has merely accelerated the rate of smart automation. If you have to order your caffè latte via a mobile app and then pick it up from a local coffee shop where you may only briefly exchange greetings with a masked barista, you might as well interact with a robot.

A World of Metropolitan Snobs

2020 marked a watershed in human development. The trendy managerial classes revealed, amid platitudes about saving lives, their unspoken eugenicist tendencies. They may not target a specific ethnic group, but they have a deeply ingrained contempt for independent-minded unbelievers or rather the politically incorrect plebians who fail to worship at the altar of scientism. Most wishful-thinking middle managers may still believe they’re working for the common good of humanity, but have become increasingly intolerant of nonconformists who fail to fall into line and internalise the new orthodoxy on covid, gender identity or climate change. Political correctness, obsession with equality and diversity and identity politics have long concealed a much more sinister agenda. How could we transform the world into a giant adventure playground or a kind of hipster paradise populated only by trendy progressive types with robotic slaves?

Unlike empirical science, scientism is the unquestioning faith in official experts, the high priests of global technocracy. Scientism teaches us to follow the science. By contrast science teaches us to subject each hypothesis to rigorous tests and analysis, explore alternative hypotheses and challenge orthodox theories when new evidence comes to light. Scientism suppresses dissent, while science welcomes open debate. Scientism is inherently elitist, while science thrives on an enlightened citizenry with constant interaction between different groups of concerned citizens and technologists with full accountability within an open and fair democratic process. Today the issues with the largest impact on our lives, from atomic energy to artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, natural families and bodily autonomy, depend on our understanding of science. Very few of us can be experts in all these fields, spanning nuclear physics, molecular biology, medicine, programming, nano-robotics and bioethics, although some of us may claim a degree of expertise in some specialist areas. By deferring our analysis to experts favoured by large media outlets, who in turn are closely allied with the biotech industrial complex, we reduce democracy to choosing which management team should carry out policies that remote technocrats have devised.

Slow Development in a Steady State Economy

The biggest challenge we face as a species is not so much overpopulation as over-development. We have become too reliant on technology that most of us can neither understand nor control. The problem is not change itself, which may good, bad or indifferent, but the sheer speed of psychosocial disruption that rapid technological transformation inevitably engenders. Accelerated progress always empowers the new elites at the expense of the more conservative underclasses. However, when technology evolves more gradually, ordinary people have time to adapt technology to better suit their needs and put themselves back in the driving seat. An alternative to the global utopia that Klaus Schwab envisaged in his Great Reset, is the decentralisation not only of political power, but of technology. Why, you may wonder, should Africans, Indians and South Americans, develop independent solutions for telecommunications, clean energy, irrigation, potable water and food security? The answer is simple. If you can control the technology on which your life depends, you are once again master of your own destiny. If you place your trust in a few technocrats employed by a handful of multinationals, they may decide if you are surplus to requirements.

For over twenty years I have ranted and railed in the wilderness against the unsustainability of endless economic growth. Now I find myself warning of the tragic human consequences of its polar opposite: planned economic decline and the dehumanisation of those who fail to comply. However, it may not be too late. We need a people’s reset that irreversibly transfers power from the tech giants to the people. Can we do it? It’s up to us.

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Power Dynamics

Is this the End of the American Dream?

How the virus scare empowers Big Tech Oligarchs

The global establishment has almost universally welcomed the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the presidency of a republic that is still the world’s largest economy. All the usual suspects rejoiced in the ousting of the much-reviled former President, Donald Trump. We may never know for sure whether electoral fraud occurred on such a massive scale to reverse initial reports of an electoral college win for the incumbent and to assign a sizable 5 million lead to the winning ticket. Owing to the USA’s changing demographics a Trumpian candidate, appealing to a broad cross-section of socially conservative middle-class Americans, may never again win a majority. Critics have long observed the fusion of the Democratic and Republican Parties into one big business party. Their brands appeal to different electoral bases, whose composition has changed dramatically over the decades. While both Democrat and Republican senators have spoken out against the military industrial complex, a term that Dwight D. Eisenhower coined in 1961, once in power both red and blue administrations have pursued interventionist foreign policies. The Republicans once appealed more to the urban professional and business classes winning states like California and New York, while the Democrats retained a large base of redneck supporters in states like Arkansas and Alabama. Now the Democrat base is split between the metropolitan elites and the welfare-dependent classes, namely the people who have least to lose from the ongoing destruction of the middle classes.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the American Dream spread to Western Europe, Japan and Australasia. It promised hundreds of millions the chance to prosper through their endeavours either as well-paid workers of larger firms or small business owners in an age of opportunity. If you worked hard, acquired sought-after skills and kept out of trouble, you could aspire to a comfortable life with a house, car and holidays. That’s not to say there were no conflicts or struggles as industries modernised, laid off workers and transferred operations to new more highly automated plants overseas. Nonetheless, until recently our economies revolved around wealth creation through hard work and consumption. Whereas as once the manufacturers and retailers of consumer products would dominate economic activity, today’s biggest growth sectors, the infotech and biotech industries, manage information and genetic sequences. Put another way, while people would once consume products, now we are the products, more useful to our new technocratic masters as guinea pigs than as workers. The aspirational middle classes have branched into three. In the middle, we have the remaining blue-collar workers who struggle to make ends meet on devalued salaries. When their skillsets become obsolete, they may either move down to lower-paid short-term service-sector jobs or try their luck in the more intellectually demanding tech and creative sectors. As smart automation gathers pace amid medical martial law, we can expect more and more to leave the labour market for good. The current crisis has wreaked havoc for millions of small businesses who need real-life contact with customers and cannot easily adapt to the rigours of covid safety. Online firms may give their owners the semblance of independence but rely on infrastructure owned and controlled by big tech and often provide services ripe for artificially intelligent automation. In the US, corona-containment measures have been much stricter in the more densely populated Democrat-controlled states. This will only accelerate the cultural divide that became so obvious in the Trump years between the old and new Americas. On the one hand, we have family-oriented workers and tradespeople who want to be masters of their own destiny in a land of opportunity. On the other, we have a parallel society micromanaged by a network of corporate and state actors with shrinking spaces for personal initiatives and independence of mind. America has long struggled to reconcile the benefits of private enterprise within a free market and the concentration of power in a handful of large corporations. NASDAQ 100 companies can buy influence in government, fund academia and charities and thus subvert democracy. Until recently they have tolerated the first and second amendments of the US Constitution that enshrine free speech and gun rights because they controlled the printing presses and airwaves and could rely on the police and national guard to outgun any small insurgencies. Now most social, educational and commercial activity has moved online, the tech giants call the shots and have not shirked from exploiting the corona scare to justify the suppression of free speech on all key scientific and geopolitical issues. Beyond doubt, corona containment measures have drastically curtailed economic independence and with it the American Dream itself.

In the first two weeks of his presidency, Joe Biden’s team has reversed most Trump-era initiatives that sought to resurrect American Exceptionalism and its core entrepreneurial spirit. Big Tech has now joined forces with radical Democrat politicians to undermine the very basis of Western democracy, free speech.  Opinion leaders now talk openly about re-educating Trump supporters in the same way as the occupying Allied Powers sought to denazify Germans in the bitter aftermath of WW2. Yet the American military industrial complex committed its worst war crimes under successive Democrat and Republican administrations, often via proxies, with the full approval of the same corporate media that now tries to blame the short-lived Trump administration for everything that’s wrong with the USA. Did Trump build an economic model reliant on unsustainable mass consumption, automotive extravagance and sky-high personal debt? No, that’s been the mainstay of US economic policy since Roosevelt. Did Trump start wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and Syria? No, he merely carried on where his predecessors left off. Let us not forget Billion Clinton and Barrack Obama had both voiced their disagreement with past US military adventures, respectively in Vietnam and Iraq, only to let the Deep State start new wars once in power. Indeed, even Trump’s rabble-rousing about illegal immigration only attempted to slow a rapid demographic transition that is already destabilising the federation’s delicate social cohesion at a time when most low-paid manual jobs are subject to smart automation.

The great irony is that American Deep State, for want of a better term, now seems happy to distance itself from the last 70 years of US Foreign policy as it merges with an evolving multipolar One World Government. Many on the notional left will welcome this, but the wars against restless natives and non-compliant local governments will not stop. They will simply be joint ventures with the Chinese, Indians and Europeans.

Biden will oversee the transformation of the United States from the world’s dominant economic, cultural and military superpower to a mere province of a global empire that looks to Beijing and Brussels as much as it looks to Washington DC. To the likes of Walmart and Amazon, North America is a mere market that must now be regulated to consolidate their grip on power. American CEOs now look on the Chinese model with envy. They want compliance and loyalty without the inconvenience of civil liberties for the great unwashed.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Censorship is a Licence to Kill

Free speech saves lives

The ultimate irony of ironies is that we should rely on the government, the mainstream media and social media giants to protect us against dangerous misinformation for the greater good. Allegedly such misleading information could discourage impressionable people from following official guidelines. This paternalistic attitude relies on the flawed assumption that our rulers have our best interests at heart in the same way as most parents set boundaries on their children’s behaviour. Our new guardians of truth, masquerading as fact-checkers, would have us believe that we can still hold our administrators to account, but only if we choose safe candidates of which the mainstream media approves.

If we have learned nothing since the outbreak of the covid scare in March 2020, it’s that politicians, including prime ministers and presidents, play second fiddle to a global network of technocrats. Out of the blue, scientific advisers appear on TV to promote radical solutions to perceived emergencies that would otherwise be very unpopular. Medical emergencies may justify almost anything. Even the spectre of suicide bombers killing innocent commuters, shoppers, revellers and concertgoers failed to persuade the public to forgo basic civil liberties such as the freedom to walk around one’s neighbourhood and mingle informally in public spaces.

All of a sudden, every aspect of our public and private lives is under the scrutiny of remote experts, whose wisdom we may no longer challenge for fear of being smeared as miscreants. The message we get from our middle managers could not be clearer. They do not trust us to look after ourselves without their endless guidance. No doubt, most human operatives within our mushrooming people management apparatus sincerely believe they have our best interests at heart. However, behind their apparent good intentions lies an assumption of moral and intellectual superiority. Most disturbingly the notional political left, once known as the liberal intelligentsia, have called on the state to tackle the perceived scourge of misinformation from dangerous covid deniers and anti-vaxxers, often likened by mental association with Holocaust deniers and Luddites. Those who claim to stand up for disadvantaged communities no longer trust commoners to think independently, manage their private affairs or even retain full bodily autonomy. Our representatives act like teachers debating how to deal with troublemakers in their classes. They do not fear ruffians, whose ill-tempered antics may justify more surveillance and psychiatric screening, as much as they loathe free-thinkers who challenge them intellectually. Over the last nine months, we’ve witnessed the police crack down not just on peaceful protesters opposed to creeping technofascism, but on birthday parties, weddings and small businesses such as gyms, shops selling non-essential goods, restaurants, pubs and hairdressers. One may wonder whether police officers have any time left to investigate burglaries, muggings, rapes or murders.

The professional classes seem relatively unaffected by the rollout of harsher corona-containment measures. They can retreat to their comfortable townhouses and country villas and continue working remotely on full pay. They may virtue-signal their compliance with the latest health and safety edicts by dutifully wearing designer face-masks and observing antisocial distancing guidelines in public spaces. Their gut instinct is to side with the experts that their favourite media outlets and employers promote. The chattering classes suffer from an early 21st-century variant of cognitive dissonance. All objective reality is filtered through the lens of manufactured emergencies and virtuous campaigns for endless social engineering. Yet their priorities mutate so fast that yesterday’s heroes may become today’s villains and yesterday’s solutions can easily turn into today’s problems. Once upon a time, the bourgeois left adored the home-grown working classes who powered the industrial revolution. They were the salt of the earth. By the 1960s steady improvements in education, housing, healthcare and general living standards had enabled millions of people from humble working-class backgrounds to join the growing middle classes. After this brief golden age of growing social equality and upwards mobility, the left has shifted its focus away from the working classes to disadvantaged identity groups. At different times they have championed the rights of immigrants, ethnic minorities, gays, lesbians, disabled people, single mothers, female professionals, religious minorities and more recently transgender individuals. Many of these campaigns may be worthy causes, at least those that pertain to natural groups of human beings, but often sow the seeds of new divisions by creating new categories whose interests may appear at variance with those of society as a whole.  Social engineers may exploit conflicting interests between subgroups to educate and regulate the ignorant masses. When immigrants clash with angry natives or Muslims are at loggerheads with the gay community, the managerial classes relish the opportunity to intervene for the common good. The authoritarian right differs only in its traditional emphasis on God, queen and country, which appear outmoded in today’s technologically advanced world empire. We may have mega-billionaires instead of monarchs and scientific advisors instead of deities, but the commoners must show the same deference to their superiors.

With the fusion of large corporations, banks, charities and supranational governments, the old left-right schism has lost any true meaning. It’s now more an expression of one’s cultural allegiance than a coherent political platform.  A charity or non-governmental organisation may pose on the left, while a large commercial concern such as Walmart may appear the ultimate manifestation of capitalism and thus be deemed right-wing. Yet both types of organisations seem totally on board with our Brave New Abnormal, championing draconian restrictions on social behaviour. Big supermarkets, hospitals and TV stations work in unison to promote a new more regimented lifestyle, in which any indulgences are carefully monitored. Once all entertainment, informal socialising and dating moves online, remote organisations can keep tabs on our moods, habits and innermost thoughts. We may have briefly harboured the illusion of a permissive society where anything goes. Yet as our expressions of personal freedom migrated to the digital world via our smartphones and social media outlets, the state began to interfere more and more in our private and social lives. Increasingly you could let all hell loose online via first-person shooter games or hardcore porn but had to mind your language in real life. Youngsters may no longer have feared social opprobrium or arrest if they experimented with risky sexual practices or recreational drugs. Instead, they came under concerted pressure from peers, teachers and the mainstream media to conform to a new politically correct normal that demonised traditions and championed disruption of viable societies.

Once we may no longer investigate and openly debate the veracity of official claims, the authorities may easily manipulate facts to suit their narrative. This empowers them to hide any evidence that links their policies with mass murder. Several studies have shown that lockdown policies, even in countries with advanced infrastructure and welfare systems, may lead to significantly higher mortality than could be caused by mutant viruses.

According to research by Prof. Philip Thomas of Bristol University, lockdowns may claim more than 500,000 lives in the UK projected over a year once we take into account the social, economic and health impacts of long-term worklessness and diminished possibilities for personal development. Dr. Ari Joffe, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases and a clinical professor at the University of Alberta, reached a similar conclusion. In a paper titled COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink he finds lockdowns do ten times more than than good.

Lockdowns do not just stop many people, better suited to hands-on practical jobs, from working, they make it much harder to form new friendships. People’s emotional and physical health depend on complex family and community networks. It’s hard to measure the health benefits of enjoying a meal with friends, having a neighbour pop around to check everything is okay or playing cards or dominoes at a local club. Yet police officers have prevented such activities in the name of public health rather than focusing on crimes. The health service has been transformed beyond recognition with direct access to emergency departments and general practitioners denied without first making an appointment online. Sick people are thus left to languish at home. The criteria for attributing deaths to covid-19 are so lax that in recent weeks covid has been mentioned as many as two thirds of death certificates without any statistically significant increase in the seasonally adjusted mortality rate. Only last week Debbie Hicks was arrested for filming empty corridors and wards in a large Gloucestershire hospital. Similar footage has been captured in the UK and overseas. Security guards prevent the public from approaching or filming hospitals, effectively out of bounds to citizen journalists. While the media focus on a few busy intensive care units, we may no longer verify their claims in person with new restrictions on free movement around towns and cities. We’re at the mercy of official reports, occasional whistle-blowers and anecdotal evidence. We have no way to prove whether someone died of covid, with a related viral infection that may have hastened their death or from medical neglect exacerbated by lockdown measures. If early reports of adverse reactions to the new generation of mRNA (messenger RiboNucleic Acid) are correct, we may soon expect our new technocratic establishment to cover up the extent of any resulting deaths.

Technofascism represents a much bigger threat to humanity than any novel mutant genetic sequence.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

How did it come to this?

The steady drift to technofascism

Earth with useless face nappy, a symbol of our Brave New Abnormal

As governments roll out a fresh set of lockdowns in country after country, more and more of us wonder if this is really about a virus. Many people who supported the first lockdown, as a temporary measure to save lives in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, are beginning to doubt the true motives behind these draconian restrictions on basic civil liberties and the complete restructuring of our society and economy. To say that the cure is worse than the disease is a monumental understatement. The adverse effects of lockdowns are highly predictable. They engender greater reliance on remote organisations, lethargy, lack of self-worth, depression, drug addiction, domestic abuse and loneliness. Lockdowns stop children from playing with friends and prevent people from visiting elderly neighbours, friends and relatives with mild dementia. These measures seem tailor-made to wear us down as independent free-thinking human beings. Why would a government spend £500 billion, or over 60% of total public expenditure, on corona-containment measures that not only restrict personal freedoms, but destroy livelihoods and drive small businesses to bankruptcy? In Scotland alone we have seen a 34% increase in home deaths as fewer people access clinics for regular check-ups and life-saving operations. There are no historical precedents for governments around the world inflicting such draconian measures in such a coordinated manner to tackle a nanoscopic virus. Many cite the misnamed Spanish Flu from 1918 to 1920, but governments were too busy dealing with uprisings in the aftermath of the Great War and Russian Revolution to police the private lives of families and regulate social interaction. Any attempt to quarantine the healthy in squalid dwellings without basic sanitation would have almost certainly led to an even higher death toll.

It’s becoming clearer by the day that the covid narrative, as game-planned at Event 201 in October 2019 at John Hopkins University, is not about a virus, but reorganising society around a new post-growth paradigm. While I have long advocated a steady state economic model that focuses on gradually improving our quality of life within natural environmental constraints by adapting to levels of consumption and population that we can sustain in the long term, my goal has always been to save humanity as a whole, not to save the lump of rock we call home. Planet Earth will manage just fine without us. It may take its ecosystem a few thousand years to reconquer the urban landscapes that occupy less than 1% of the world’s landmass, but house over half of the human population, and possibly a million or so years to bury to the last artefacts of the Anthropocene, but the planet has happily shrugged off much more cataclysmic events in its 4.5 billion year history. Demographers and epidemiologists have to clearly distinguish the evidence-based science of the earth’s carrying capacity and the sustainability of our current economic system from the ethical implications of any extreme projections one way or the other. If we underestimate the planet’s long-term human carrying capacity, we run the risk of unnecessarily imposing coercive restrictions on procreation and consumption that could lead not only to untold human suffering and early deaths but could make life a misery for those of us who survive the democide deprived of youthful vitality. On the other hand, if we overestimate the earth’s potential population, we may at some stage encounter technological limits to endless growth with catastrophic repercussions for our species. What goes up, must come down, but what matters most is who guides any changes we may need to make to our lifestyles. If the impetus for more sustainable living comes from local communities via greater resilience and relative self-sufficiency, then ordinary people remain very much in control. By contrast, if most people are fully integrated into the global distribution chain and thus reliant on large corporations, the impetus for lifestyle changes to deal with sustainability will come from the top down and will inevitably reflect the priorities of the world’s richest powerbrokers. The immense wealth accumulated by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates may be dwarfed by hidden assets controlled by the world’s leading banks, largely in the form of debt, which they can harness to dictate government policies and crash vast sectors of the economy at a whim.

Technocratic Coup

While large corporations and local administrations have joined forces to promote the new abnormal by flooding the airwaves and cyberspace with mixed messages about fighting viruses, remote working and greener living, they are busy reorganising society around the new mantras of collective responsibility and rule by experts (or as Jason Brennan calls it epistocracy). Alongside persistent fearmongering about a deadly virus, the media began to champion a new tightly regulated puritanical lifestyle. The cultural revolution that for many had begun in the 1960s has in many ways come full circle. Across much of Europe and North America the old left – right dichotomy morphed into a new schism between the socially conservative working classes and the woke professional classes pretending to represent their rainbow coalition of special interest victim groups. The latter category often calls itself, especially in North America and the British Isles, liberal because they lay claim to a tradition that championed greater civil liberties, enlightenment principles and personal freedoms. However, their tolerance does not extend to the sanctity of family life, privacy and traditional cultures. Under the pretexts of upholding children rights, monitoring mental health or tackling prejudice, progressive lawmakers have expanded the role of myriad agencies to encroach on the private lives of commoners. Yet we retained the illusion of choice and expanding horizons with easier travel and instant telecommunication. The authoritarian trend that raised its ugly head among faux-progressives in the twenty-tens as they obsessed with political correctness and identity politics has now in the post-corona era metamorphosed into full-blown hostility to personal freedom, privacy and bodily autonomy. The same people who once chanted “my body, my choice” when it came to sexual relations and abortion now support mandatory vaccination, which will inevitably lead to mandatory psychiatric screening linked to digital health passports. The state could be empowered to regulate our moods as well as our procreation. New aspiring parents may need state approval to visit a fertility clinic to conceive a child whose every move and utterance will be analysed.

The Abolition of the Working Class

One key difference sets the current crisis apart from all previous crises since the advent of the industrial revolution. Our technocratic masters no longer need such a bountiful supply of obedient workers. In the early 21st century growing demand for electric vehicles in Europe and North America may fuel the exploitation of children and adult workers in Congolese cobalt mines, but at least they have jobs and can feed their families. In the near future, smart robots will supplant not just relatively well-paid workers in rich countries, they will displace unreliable human resources in poorer countries too. With the worldwide roll-out of universal basic income, it may soon not matter so much whether you happen to live in Lubumbashi, Lima, Lahore or Liverpool, except for the local weather, if you owe your existence to the benevolence of global corporations coordinated by NGOs. Once you have relinquished your bodily autonomy to get a digital health passport so you can travel and regain access to public venues, there is nothing stopping the authorities from regulating your reproductive freedom and thus determining who may procreate and raise the next generation. Many workless denizens after the Great Reset may not qualify for parenthood at all leading the rest of their lives as overgrown children indulging in supervised recreation. Klaus Schwab and Thierry’s utopian book, Covid-19: The Great Reset, may appeal to many wishful thinking professionals eager for a cleaner, greener and leaner tomorrow, but excludes most of the 7.8 billion people alive today. What’s worse if we are temporarily confined to our homes under medical martial law, we have no way to chronicle the activities of our ruling elites. They can simply write off unexplained deaths as consequences of a viral pandemic and dismiss naysayers as dangerous conspiracy theorists intent on undermining the battle against elusive pathogens. At the heart of techno-elitist thinking is that flesh-and-blood human beings are the disease, while artificial cleanliness via transhumanism and augmented intelligence is the final solution.

Addendum

Don’t believe me? Prof. Graeme Ackland from the University Edinburgh has simulated potential excess deaths with and without lockdowns and concluded rather cautiously that lockdowns may only delay some deaths, while actually causing others and that’s before we factor in the long-term effects of destroyed livelihoods.
It’s all very well if you have a spacious house with a secluded home office and can easily network with colleagues and fiends online while continuing to earn a good salary. It’s not so good if you have limited private space at home or your job relies on regular real-life social contact. While technology does indeed allow many professionals to work remotely, we all need some real-life human contact and, most important, a sense of purpose in life. As its name suggests, the whole hospitality industry thrives on our desire to mingle informally with other flesh and blood human beings we would not otherwise meet if confined to our own homes. We don’t eat out just because we’re too lazy to cook as we could just as easily buy a takeaway or have a restaurant meal delivered to our homes. We eat out to soak up the atmosphere, interact with human waiters and casually observe other diners. The same is true of cafés, pubs, theatres and cinemas. Anti-social corona-containment measures dramatically limit capacity and spoil customer experience. They are unworkable for all but the largest and best organised businesses. Most rules introduced since the start of the corona-scare earlier this year have had three effects, to limit natural socialisation, to spread distrust in other human beings (either because we might harbour the elusive virus or flout new rules) and most ominously to isolate dissidents and subdue protests.
The mainstream media leads us to believe that technofascism is a price worth paying to prevent the spread of a novel coronavirus. We must accept 24/7 surveillance via track-and-trace apps with regular viral load tests, have our media censored, heed the advice of remote experts whose qualifications and independence we cannot ascertain and obediently follow rules that make our social and professional lives a misery, all because of a nanoscopic virus we cannot detect without a powerful electron microscope.
The key to this scam is the infamous PCR test (polymerase chain reaction test). It amplifies DNA strands by adding a reagent in successive cycles to detect a genetic sequence resembling the target pathogen. If you amplify DNA samples beyond 30 cycles, fragments of older related infections can be revealed. Test centres in the UK regularly amplify DNA extracted from swabs as many as 45 times leading to a large number of false positives. While only 1% of the results yield false positives, that’s 10 times more than true positives, meaning fewer than 1 in 10 positive results are genuine. Moreover, the respiratory complications originally associated with sars-cov-2 may have many other causes such as seasonal flu or pneumonia. Dr Mike Yeadon, former CSO at Pfizer Research, has exposed the statistical flaws that underly the government’s covid-19 narrative. Perhaps the best book available in English on the planned overreaction to covid-19 is Corona, False Alarm by Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi, formerly of Mainz University, and Dr Karina Reiss. It details how vested corporate lobbies swayed public opinion to promote an apocalyptic narrative that warranted an unprecedented overreaction.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Private and Public Opinions

How affluent liberal progressives think of themselves as a master race

We all tell white lies from time to time, preferring to tell others what they want to hear rather than what we really think. This may seem fine when commenting on your partner’s new hairdo. You may prefer her old style, but you don’t want to hurt her feelings. White lies may be more sinister when someone cheats on you and stabs you behind your back, while claiming to be your friend. You may not want to hear that your business partner is having a salacious affair with your wife while you work overtime to keep your company afloat, but when your marriage breaks down you may wish you had learned earlier.

The same kind of mendacity occurs in public administration, but on a much bigger scale. Progressive influencers have public and private opinions. Publicly they preach greater equality, diversity and tolerance for all, namely they want to be your friend, but only if you behave. Privately, they see themselves as a master race of enlightened professionals entrusted with the task of managing everyone else’s lives, rewarding compliance and penalising the self-determination of sovereign individuals who may threaten social stability.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s the incipient moral superiority of some overzealous health and safety managers and social workers may have seemed a little condescending at times, but basically benign. Health visitors would advise new parents on how to deal with tantrums without smacking and food standards inspectors would visit fish ‘n chip shops to replace old salt-shakers with new ones with fewer or smaller holes. Both sets of well-meaning professionals believed they served the public good because they knew better than most unsophisticated commoners who might otherwise beat their naughty children senseless or die of salt-laden heart attacks. Many such professionals have attended NLP or neurolinguistic programming courses, so they do not come across as arrogant or condescending when interacting with the great unwashed. One approach is to appeal to collective wisdom rather than suggesting the other person is in any way negligent, e.g. “Did you know some people fail to brush their teeth properly for at least two minutes?”. This technique drops a gentle hint that only fools would fail to heed official advice and forget to brush their teeth methodically. We are thus motivated not so much by a self-determined survival instinct, but by a yearning for social acceptance and thus appealing to a pseudo-intellectual hive mentality, i.e. doing what appears to be for the greater good rather than in our own interests. That doesn’t mean we should not listen to good advice from people we can trust, but we should ask whom we can trust and, more important, who has our best interests at heart?

Could the Covid Scare really be about Population Control?

For decades we have lived under the illusions of liberal democracy with full respect for human rights and growing prosperity. Many of us failed to realise the fragility of the short-lived neoliberal age that seemed to have space for a wide range of people from different walks of life and cultural backgrounds. The apocalyptic forecasts of the 1970s oil crisis never quite materialised. The world’s population continued to grow with rapidly declining infant mortality and lower levels of famine as hundreds of millions moved from small traditional communities to large conurbations. By 2015 most people in the developing world had access to clean water, electricity and telecommunications. At the turn of the fourth industrial revolution, most people on earth are somehow connected and aware of better economic opportunities in far-off lands, but only a tiny minority have the niche intellectual skills that 21st century high-tech businesses needed. We may have over 6 billion consumers, if we exclude off-grid subsistence farmers, and hundreds of millions of potential sales assistants, office clerks, drivers, production line workers or cleaners, but most will be made redundant by rapid smart automation. Over the last twenty years economic migration has mainly allowed employers to keep wages low and make it much easier to hire and fire expendable human resources that will soon be delegated to artificially intelligent robots. In an interconnected world population control has two related meanings, namely controlling our behaviour and potentially controlling our numbers. Once our livelihoods depend almost entirely on corporate welfare, with limited bargaining power, we are at the mercy of the hand that feeds us. The Australian government already operates a “no jab, no pay” policy that withdraws child support and other welfare to parents who refuse to vaccinate their children. As long as most families have at least one breadwinner on a good salary, they can opt out of some state-mandated behaviours. Antivaxxers have become the new unclean outsiders, as powerful lobbies have over recent decades spent billions persuading us of the critical role vaccines play in warding off potentially lethal diseases. Concerns about vaccine safety are often dismissed as scientifically illiterate quackery, despite many widely documented cases of adverse reactions to heavily promoted vaccines such as MMR, HPV and swine flu. However, vaccines may only be a means to an end, another way to bind our survival to the biotechnological industrial complex. If we let natural herd immunity win the day, potentially sacrificing a few vulnerable individuals we cannot protect through common sense precautions, at least we remain in control with stronger immune systems. By contrast once we succumb to the lure of DNA-altering wonder drugs, our survival as species will forever more be intimately bound with biotech giants responsible for micro-managing our immune responses and certifying our health.

Sweeping controversies under the carpet

The biggest taboos of the late 20th century and well into the first two decades of the current century are the earth’s human carrying capacity and eugenics. Talk of the latter unwelcome dilemma fell into disfavour in the aftermath of the Second World War. Democracy relies on the notion that we should respect everyone’s needs, wishes and opinions, not just those of the anointed classes. As long as governments and big business can keep their people happy with bread and circuses, they can afford a high degree of public consultation and tolerate dissent, although the mainstream media has long channelled public debate into a narrow range of acceptable opinions, manufacturing consent over protracted periods for far-reaching social changes. However, that era may well be coming to an end as Western Democracy morphs into epistocracy, as envisaged by Jason Brennan in his 2016 book Against Democracy, namely rule by experts. In such a world anything that runs counter the experts’ narrative is deemed heretical. In today’s language dissidents are invariably dismissed as either as far-right or conspiracy theorists. In the recent past the establishment press would worry more about the far-left, intent on destroying our thriving free market economy, or about anarchists, intent on destabilising our cherished civil society. The old left versus right divide has now given way to a growing rift between the universalist outlooks of the affluent professional classes and more socially conservative perspectives of commoners. Who would have guessed that many of the same people who last year championed the free movement of workers and sexual liberation everywhere have now become some of the most fervent proponents of social distancing, face-masks, travel bans and mandatory vaccines. This cognitive dissonance is strongest within the green movement. While back in the 1980s ecologists advocated a back-to-nature approach to long-term sustainability supporting greater local self-sufficiency and often critical of high-tech solutions such as pesticides or genetically modified organisms, today’s Green leaders are very much in bed with cybertech and biotech giants. Indeed Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Bayer- Monsanto, GSK and AstraZeneca are all keen advocates of the much-flaunted Green New Deal.

The End of Endless Growth

The world’s business elites have now ditched the mantra of endless economic growth. Smart automation has dispensed with the need for a large working class. The mega-rich can consolidate their power and privileges without a large army of loyal workers or the need to milk profits from mass consumption. Since the worldwide roll-out of corona-containment measures the accumulated wealth of the planet’s top billionaires has risen exponentially. In the US alone their wealth had risen by a staggering $434 billion by the end of May this year. Jeff Bezos is now worth over $200 billion, more than the whole GDP of many countries. In public Bill and Melinda Gates may talk about empowering the poor through better education and healthcare, which usually means more vaccines and drugs. In private they consider the great unwashed useless eaters. As the United States teeters on the brink of a civil war, the metropolitan elites have struggled to hide their disdain for American rednecks and blue-collar workers, whose love of SUVs, private houses and guns makes them a huge liability. Our new technocratic masters will only tolerate the masses as long as our behaviour and thus our environmental impact on the planet can be micromanaged. The covid-19 narrative provides the perfect pretext to track not only the movements of all 7.8 billion human beings alive today, but to monitor our actions and ultimately our thoughts. Mental health screening will serve not just to identify depression or psychosis, but problematic critical thinking. To the likes of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, polar bears, Amazonian rainforests, giraffes and lions are as worthy of protection as the working class tribes of Europe, North America or anywhere else for that matter. They may not yet have immediate plans to cull the global population, as some in the anti-lockdown movement believe, but they certainly want to tame us like wild animals in a zoo.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Down the Rabbit Hole !

Notes on the abject dishonesty of the technocratic elites

We are well and truly entering a twilight zone, in which a frighteningly large number of our neighbours see us either as potential traitors or biohazards. Only a year ago refusing to shake someone’s hand because of their skin colour or some other immutable trait would rightly be condemned as intolerant, although it’s only natural to be a little cautious with outsiders. Now the rules have changed. Unprotected social proximity is to be avoided at all costs for fear of an elusive virus that has yet to be isolated. Some may have dreamed of a bright future of well-educated global citizens sharing the planet and working together to put in place the infrastructure we will need to empower us to lead meaningful lives with a sense of purpose and compassion. Alas only a tiny minority of elite policy planners and engineers will shape our destiny. At no time in history has it been harder to know whom we should trust as we depend on technology controlled by a dwindling section of humanity.

Let us delve briefly into the mindset of the conformist chattering classes who dominate academia, schooling, social surveillance and healthcare. Typically, they view themselves as left-of-centre progressives standing up for the rights of the vulnerable and sensitive to the presumed needs of special victim groups. In the heyday of the former British Empire many would have been missionaries. Although most trendy progressives consider themselves agnostics or atheists these days, one can detect a certain religious zeal in their convictions, not least in their relentless urge to educate the masses and engage with local communities, a euphemism for the helpless plebs unable to think for themselves without paternalistic guidance from outreach workers and experts. I can understand their way of thinking because I grew up in a Guardian-reading household of Labour activists. To some extent I can thank them for helping me hone the art of critical thinking in regular family discussions. We could rebel against some perceived wrongs associated with some aspects of the British ruling classes. We could go on Rock against Racism demos together and I would love Reggae bands and subversive counterculture atmosphere. When Labour lost the 1979 general election, many blamed the Murdoch press, i.e. the mass circulation Sun newspaper, for appealing to the worst reactionary instincts of local working class communities. I recall one upper-middle class activist, living in one of the town’s posher neighbourhoods, refer to his nearest council housing scheme as “our council estate”, namely “our block vote” of grateful factory workers and welfare dependents.  Over the last 40 years Labour’s focus has moved from the former to the latter group. They now rate someone’s worthiness as a human being in terms of their dependence on the system and more important on their compliance. University lecturers, social workers and the long-term unemployment trapped in dysfunctional households with a history of mental health challenges have one thing in common that sets them apart from artisans, builders, mechanics, farmers, shopkeepers or lorry drivers. They all depend 100% on state and/or corporate welfare, while traditional tradespeople depend largely on their own endeavours.  

Merging of Corporate and State Power

The old left clung to the notion that democratically accountable states could somehow rein in the growing power of large corporations or even take them over to protect the interests of the general public and workers alike. By contrast the new left, both in their neoliberal and radical chic garb, sing almost from the same hymn sheet as corporate PR departments. My Web-hosting company proudly supports Black Lives Matter and my bank advertises its support for annual LGBTQ++ Pride events, while the big supermarkets urge customers to donate to local foodbanks. In the mid 20th century many Western governments took natural monopolies and failing industries of strategic importance into public ownership. In the mid 1970s the UK’s largest manufacturers of cars, aircraft, coal and steel were all nationalised concerns as were the national airline, the railways, the post office and telephone network alongside gas, electricity and water supply. The Tory governments of the 1980s and early 90s privatised most of these operations in the hope of stimulating competition, improving services and lowering prices. Privatisation was the hallmark of neoliberalism, promising a new age of enterprise and shareholder accountability. In practice failing industries were allowed to fall by the wayside with the more successful parts getting snapped up by large multinationals, while telecommunications and aviation could adapt more naturally to technological innovations. Minor shareholders either failed to make much money or sold out to the big players to cash in on small returns. However, many former nationalised industries continued to behave very much as an integral part of an emerging global state, especially those involved in public private partnerships. Rather than renationalise key public services, New Labour expanded the reach of state power in lockstep with its corporate partners, by adding new tiers of public sector bureaucracy to manage outsourced services. To confuse matters further, charities evolved from makeshift voluntary organisations campaigning to help people neglected by the system into professionalised operations tightly integrated with their corporate and state partners. The State may well sentence you to a term in jail, but your prison and probation service may be managed by nominally private contractors. Likewise your rehabilitation may be managed by a mental health service that technically qualifies as a charity. Local authorities often outsource operations to private contractors or charities to evade being held accountable for their potentially unpopular activities. Indeed the main purpose of many charities is not so much to help the downtrodden regain control of their lives, as many of us once believed, but to raise awareness of new concepts and thus promote radical social change that empowers the surveillance state and engenders a culture of dependence. If a charity raises awareness of gender identity among primary school children or seeks to normalise risky sexual practices among preadolescent children, local authorities can wash their hands of direct responsibility while still covertly funding the organisation. Today charities rely heavily on corporate donations, either directly or via trusts such as Joseph Rowntree Foundation or  the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and from slush funds from supranational organisations that can more easily evade direct democratic scrutiny, again often via proxies and other charities, e.g. Children in Need, in theory an admirable cause, have donated to Mermaids (promoting gender confusion). More disturbing and returning to the corona-virus scare is the massive corporate funding of academia and the mass media, again often working in lockstep to promote hidden agendas. It should come as little surprise that broadly the same kind of organisations that promoted alternatives to traditional two-parent families and mass migration as the new normal have also thrown their weight behind strict lockdown measures.

Carefree Lifestyles or 24/7 Surveillance

Back in the 1960s and 70s most advocates of laid-back lifestyles with laxer dress codes, greater self-expression and sexual exploration among consenting adults considered themselves, at least in the West, on the liberal left. I loathed wearing ties at school so much that I ripped my tie off as I left the school gates and have avoided wearing ties ever since. I’ve always associated uniforms of any variety with authoritarian regimes. Fast forward to 2020 and trendy lefties are among the most vehement advocates of mandatory face-masks in public places, anti-social distancing and mass vaccination. All of a sudden Glaxo-Smith-Kline, the Tony Blair Institute, EU flag-wavers, Stonewall, the Green Party and Momentum are toeing the line that we must fundamentally change our way of life to tackle a hidden threat irrespective of the long-term damage it causes to millions of livelihoods and most of all to personal freedom and basic civil liberties. The common thread is the faux-progressive and semi-intellectual media that captivates the chattering classes and sets the bounds of permissible dissent among the general population. Why did we bother fighting for sexual liberation in the 1960s despite the obvious risks of sexually transmitted diseases if today we can’t share public spaces with people outside our household without keeping safe distances and/or wearing masks, visors or goggles? Why did we bother campaigning against outdated blasphemy laws if now we let the authorities police social media to censor politically incorrect opinions shared by most people until the day before yesterday?

Public Safety and Scientism

Medical martial law provides the perfect pretext to transition away from a belief system that emphasises personal freedom and democratic accountability, though the authorities still pay lip service to these concepts, to one that focuses on public safety and scientism, i.e. deference to the technocrats favoured by vested state and corporate interests. The authorities can now justify almost anything by referring to the science, as if true science emerges from an ideological commitment to find evidence that fits a pre-determined conclusion and to dismiss any inconvenient evidence to the contrary as the dangerous musings of ill-informed wild conspiracy theorists. While our local politicians still try to give us the impression that they are still in charge rather than just following orders from on high, transnational agencies refer increasingly to governance rather than government, while redefining democracy to mean allowing the public to choose between a narrow range of options approved by anointed experts. The Western press would once deride the former Soviet Union for holding elections with only candidates vetted by the ruling Communist Party. Yet we are now heading in the same direction, except instead of the Politburo and myriad subcommittees we have the World Health Organisation, the World Economic Forum, transnational agencies, tech giants and mega-billionaires.  Future historians will wonder how so many people could be persuaded in such a short period of time that wearing face-masks in normal public settings could somehow save lives and thus change their lifelong habits and succumb to a form of collective OCD. Little does it matter that the average human body has over 1 trillion nanoscopic viruses, people have been conditioned to sanitise their hands, baskets and/or trollies before entering a supermarket and thus view other shoppers as bio-hazards. Many dutiful wishful thinkers take it unto themselves to confront rule-breakers such as those of us who either refuse to wear masks or, as in my case, only do so temporarily to avoid potential fines or unpleasant confrontations, but prefer to go mask-free wherever possible (I will simply not wear a mask for longer than 10 minutes). No doubt, these wishful thinkers believe their verbal warnings serve the greater good. They’re only doing their bit in a heroic battle against an evil virus by calling out virus deniers addicted to fanciful online conspiracy theory channels. It hardly matters that only 4 months ago leading government advisors in the UK warned that mask-wearing in common social settings could be counterproductive as the masks themselves would soon become vectors of disease. However, face-masks may soon be the least of our worries as the real aim is to control every aspect of people’s lives in the name of public safety.

Why bother raising the next generation of engineers?

I first became aware of massive investment in special needs education around the turn of the century. Before working in an adult daycare centre, in a hiatus in my career, I just assumed that some children needed extra help and in our more enlightened times we were at last integrating learning disabled children with the mainstream. Over the years not only has special needs education expanded, but the focus of schooling has shifted from traditional academic and scientific subjects to social justice and pastoral care. Richard Lucas of the Scottish Family Party has documented amply the Scottish Government’s obsession with promoting LGBTQ++ concepts in primary schools as well as emphasising children’s rights rather than responsibilities. What kind of society would dedicate most of its education budget to manufacture social compliance rather than raise the next generation of conscientious and industrious workers? Some may believe successive governments have simply listened to the wrong advisors and wasted valuable resources on trendy teaching techniques that have failed many children from the most deprived backgrounds. All this assumes future industries will need millions of tradespeople rather than just a small core of well-remunerated engineers, doctors and surveillance managers assisted by a larger group of enforcers and carers. Teaching unions seem much more concerned about protecting children and themselves from elusive nanoscopic viruses than the damage inflicted on the academic and professional future of working class children from chaotic households. It may be all fine and dandy for the offspring of the professional classes with computer desks in their bedroom growing up in an intellectually stimulating environment. They can do all their schoolwork online and probably learn much more from a wide range of Web-mediated courses and tutorials on every conceivable subject. Today gifted children are often bored at school anyway, fed up with hearing teachers explain simple concepts over and over again to the rest of the class. Life is very different in compact households dominated by loud home entertainment systems and game consoles with little private space for study. Stressed parents are often stuck between a rock and a hard place. They either risk confrontation with their children by getting them to do their homework or they just opt for the easy life and let their children do as they please, e.g. binge on ice-cream while playing video games into the wee hours. The latter option may please the teacher more by taking on board their lesson on children's rights and body acceptance. Yet outside the home children may no longer play freely. It seems teachers care more about whether children masks, socially distance and wash their hands every five minutes than whether they will ever grow into responsible adults with a sense of purpose and some control over their destiny. It's becoming clearer every day that most of our youngsters are being primed for a life of subservience, a kind of extended childhood on universal basic income. If they're lucky they may get a job as social distancing marshals or charity awareness raisers. Otherwise, they may win extra social credits for showing their support for the latest exercise in social engineering.

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Power Dynamics

Blaming the Naughty Plebs again!

How our rulers rewrite history to dissociate themselves from their earlier crimes

Ever since the corona scare started earlier this year, the mainstream media has raised the profile of assorted opinion leaders, movers and shakers, closely aligned with what we may call the biotech industrial complex, a curious outgrowth of the better-understood military industrial complex. Some players such as Neil Ferguson, Chris Whitty and Anthony Fauci had stayed away from the limelight outside biomedical circles, but have suddenly risen to prominence in daily televised briefings. Others are seasoned public speakers. Most notably the venerable BBC have given regular prime time slots to the likes of Bill Gates, Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell. Now they’re not selling us proprietary software or regime change wars, but a synchronised global response to an overhyped pandemic, which leading virologists such as Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt of Stanford University believe is no worse than a strong seasonal flu. Every perceived crisis seems to warrant solutions leading us in the same direction: greater surveillance, less personal independence and more global governance. Meanwhile powerful well-funded non-governmental organisations, egged on by the mainstream media, orchestrate campaigns against the symbology and cultural paradigms of what we may best call the Old World Order.

It seems only yesterday when the British establishment draped itself in the Union Jack and took pride in the kingdom’s role in the industrial revolution, the liberal enlightenment and more recently in helping to defeat the Nazis in the Second World War. I’m old enough to remember the long-gone days before 24/7 TV, when the BBC’s daily schedule ended with the national anthem (God Save the Queen), a reminder to turn the telly off. As a critically thinking opponent of imperialism in all its forms I often wondered if the British establishment, as victors in many imperial battles and two world wars, had successfully airbrushed British war crimes out of history books. George Orwell recounted in his 1934 book, a Clergyman’s Daughter, how the history and geography textbooks used in private schools would view the world entirely through the prism of people’s adaptation to superior British civilisation as it emerged in the Victorian era. Books would show missionaries civilising grateful natives. The more people adapted to British values, the worthier they were as human beings. This begs the question, whose relevance will soon become clear, just who belongs to the British establishment? Is the British establishment, as I once naively thought, simply the most influential wheelers and dealers in England, Scotland and Wales who have some sort of connection with the common folk of this island kingdom? Did the East India Company colonise many parts of Southern Asia to help the peasants and labourers back home or to expand their own mercantile empire? One may argue that the immense wealth that large trading companies and banks accrued from their exploitation of the colonies eventually filtered back to the middle and working classes, but these modest rewards did not really bear fruit until the post-war boom of the 1950s just as the ruling classes decommissioned the remainder of their Empire. Certainly the Empire required much larger managerial and engineering classes to support their expansionist endeavours, but let us not confuse the likes of Jeff Bezos, currently one of worlds’ richest influencers, with his relatively well-paid middle managers and software engineers, let alone with low-paid warehouse and delivery workers whose jobs may soon be delegated to smart robots. In times of rapid geopolitical and technological transformation, the ruling elites are quite happy not just to discard their loyal underlings, but to switch their public allegiance to religions or states. It appears the remnants of the core British establishment do not really care either about Britain or its longstanding inhabitants. They may have co-opted a variant of the English language and promoted some English-medium writers and artists, but only when it suits them. Their true goal has always been world domination by any means necessary. In the early 21st century the British establishment has been subsumed into a much larger global network who see nation states and traditional cultures as obstacles in their quest for total control. In many ways the arbiters of political correctness today view the native peoples of the British Isles in the same way as their forebears viewed the hapless indigenes of far-flung colonies. To them the great unwashed masses need to undergo re-education to adapt to our Brave New World.

When Tony Blair won his famous landslide in the 1997 general election, but with only 43.2% of the popular vote, the choreographed celebrations showed crowds waving Union Jacks with Britpop music playing in the background. The same spectacle accompanied a few months later several days of national mourning for the tragic death of Princess Diana. Yet while many ordinary citizens continued to take pride in their British identity, the ruling elites were already rebranding old Blighty as a social engineering playground detached from its roots, but still featuring a few iconic landmarks and historic relics. British values were redefined in terms of pop culture, multiculturalism, LGBTQ++ tolerance and love for the NHS, all at odds with the stoicism and self-reliance of past generations. Yet even Cool Britannia did not last long as Tony Blair trashed the brand’s reputation by joining George Bush’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq. In the 2003 Eurovision Song Contest, the UK notoriously scored null points, despite English being the most popular language and the UK nearly always finishing in the top ten. It was no longer cool to wave the Union Jack with imagery of The Who, the Rolling Stones or the Beatles.  The last blast of Britain’s past grandeur was over and now only the English and Welsh working classes and a few aristocrats of the Jacob Rees Mogg breed cared about the British Brand. The Brexit saga may well have been the very last gasp of British patriotism. The forlorn hope that it may restore some control to the peoples of the archipelago lingers on. Boris Johnson’s lockdown represents the ultimate trump card. If Boris truly believed  in civil liberties and favoured herd immunity, as he once claimed, then he could have sacked Matt Hancock and called on alternative experts such as Professor Sunetra Gupta from Oxford University, who supports the Swedish model. This begs another question: who is really in control? We may love to channel our anger at politicians for calamitous policies. Some may blame Tony Blair for destabilising the Middle East, but he simply represented a clique within the US/UK foreign policy establishment who saw regime change wars as a means to a greater end, world domination. More or less the same cabal now support medical martial law and once again with humanitarian pretexts. The Tony Blair Institute even proudly announced on social media that their teams are “.... now embedded in governments around the world, helping them to keep their people safe during this pandemic - not just in respect of Covid-19 itself but also the political and economic collateral damage. “ Behind our top politicians are always teams of advisors working alongside corporate lobby groups, think tanks and NGOs. While in January it may have appeared that Boris Johnson was at loggerheads with some sections of the global establishment over the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, this was always a façade. Boris’s advisors knew that by March 2020 the UK’s relationship with the EU would be irrelevant because all Western countries would have to the follow the self-destructive diktats of the World Health Organisation.

The world’s elites have now dissociated themselves not only from the former British, French, Dutch,  Japanese, German, Portuguese and  Spanish Empires, but amazingly from the American Empire too. They have disowned the very superpower that oversaw the biggest rise in prosperity and living standards in human history. Donald Trump may well be the last nominal President who claims to believe in American exceptionalism. The new breed of US-based super-billionaires do not care about protecting the living standards of their fellow citizens. They grew rich by outsourcing most of their manufacturing to the Far East and relying on cheap-imported labour. Meanwhile US foreign policy has hit a roadblock. They spent trillions of dollars attempting to reshape the Middle East and succeeded mainly in losing the trust both of the local peoples and their rulers. Pakistan and Iran do not need the US anymore. They can trade much more easily with nearby China and India.

Rather than adapt to Asian superpowers with strong regional roots, the world’s elites have embraced a new form of global welfarism that will enslave the workless masses and only reward the much smaller managerial and engineering classes. The deceptive language of identity politics serves to conceal a massive transfer of wealth and power away from the general population, up to their eyeballs in debt, to the chosen few. In our emerging Brave New World we will see two rival belief systems: The official doctrine of equality and diversity, parroted by social workers and the brainwashed masses alike, and the classified reality of a rigid caste system that condemns most of humanity to complete subservience.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

No Human Being is Illegal, really?

Unpersoning social misfits

Cast your mind back to the recent past when refugee rights activists adopted the powerful slogan “No Human Being is illegal”. Unless you’re a psychopath lacking the most basic compassion for other human beings on the planet, it’s hard to disagree. Of course, the statement in and of itself does not mean endless waves of economic migration are either socially or environmentally sustainable. Migration is not a black and white issue in complex societies, but hold that thought while we consider what it could mean in our post-lockdown world.

Did anyone see this clampdown coming? In little more than a month, jurisdictions spanning much of our planet have placed billions of human beings under virtual house arrest, severely limiting our freedom of social interaction and movement, not so much across national borders, but within our towns, cities and surrounding countryside. Never before have so many people followed the diktat of so few. From Singapore to Saint Tropez and Manhattan to Milan, people have been forced to adapt their lifestyles to comply with new rules that turn us all into potential transgressors if we step out of line. The authorities seem to facilitate only activities controlled either by the state or by big business. The big retailers, and especially the likes of Amazon and Apple, have all done wonderfully well as the only ones geared to meet the new logistical challenges imposed by lockdown restrictions. Tesco rolled out its new human traffic management system with almost military precision. They now employ people not to serve customers, prepare food or stack shelves, but make sure their customers stay 2 metres apart.

The alliances and demographics of the people who toe the establishment line and those who challenge the mainstream narrative have once again shifted. Only last December the UK seemed divided mainly over national and metropolitan identities. All of a sudden the arguments we once had over Brexit, mass migration and Scottish independence have faded into the background. How can any country be independent if we depend on tech giants not only to deliver life’s necessities, but to closely monitor all human movements and interactions and coordinate healthcare policy on a global scale?  The coronavirus scare has accelerated the transition from geographic to online communities and from human-operated machines and vehicles to robots. There were plenty of warning signs in the pre-corona world about creeping authoritarianism in the guise of hate speech laws, but few imagined that government ministers would soon talk openly of outlawing any challenges to the new scientific orthodoxy or welcome the corporate censorship of politically incorrect authors. The new divide pits social conformists firmly against critical thinkers. Social conservatives and latter-day hippies are in both camps. We now witness the ugly spectacle of Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and Boris Johnson agreeing on the need to limit basic civil liberties allegedly to combat an elusive virus. Boris Johnson played the clown by initially suggesting herd immunity as a strategy and stressing the importance of keeping the economy afloat, but in a matter of weeks he changed his tune 180 degrees. Perhaps we have learned who’s really in charge. Some of us may have been hoodwinked by a temporary obsession with the European Union and the false belief that Tory politicians somehow wanted to take back control, only to cave in to the diktat of another global organisation at the earliest opportunity. Some even believed the Tories better represented the desires of the core British working classes or would downgrade the BBC from the Ministry of Truth to a mere public service broadcaster. Yet it pains me to admit that in the pantomime squabble between Boris Johnson and the BBC, the latter won the battle of hearts and minds as millions now parrot the new pseudoscience of flattening curves, contact-tracing, miracle vaccines and saving the NHS by staying at home. The same talking points have been replicated on all the other leading news outlets and echoed by celebrities. Yet at the fringes of society social conservatives and transgressive types have found common cause in their resistance to a new breed of borderless totalitarianism at war with human nature.

You may well have been one of the trendy lefties who welcomed refugees at the height of the Syrian conflict, unaware they were mere pawns in a grand chess game over global control. I have no doubt that many so-called activists genuinely believed they were helping desperate human beings fleeing unspeakable horrors, oblivious to the role of the global Deep State (centred around the US, UK, France and Israel, but now merging with the EU, India and China) in arming rival factions of foreign mercenaries on Syrian soil, and turning a blind eye to large numbers of economic migrants who had learned via social media about generous welfare in far-off lands. Remember the iconic picture of a Syrian boy drowning as his father failed to board a boat from Turkey to a nearby Greek island? No human being is illegal became a rallying cry for metropolitan elitists and revolutionary communists alike in their common desire to destroy anachronistic nation states and transform the whole world into a giant theme park. Do you really think our ruling classes promoted global governance because they cared about starving Africans or the hapless victims of civil wars rather than exploit their desperation to build an empire that treats all jurisdictions as mere colonies? It should hardly surprise us that the prime advocates of global policing in the form of endless military interventions with humanitarian pretexts, mass migration and superstates have crept out of the woodwork to champion a global response to the current pandemic. Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Bill Gates have all lent their support to a synchronised global lockdown. Now their enemies are no longer local despots like Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic, angry nativists or terrorists, but flesh and blood human beings who in one way or another refuse to cooperate with their new medical martial law. Those who flout social distancing or face mask rules stand accused of endangering other people’s lives. Simple everyday activities that would until recently have been quite innocent with no ill-intent have suddenly been criminalised.

In the not too distant past, people would regularly break loosely enforced rules. Back in the 1970s and 80s, it was technically illegal to tape records for friends, yet everyone did it. When the Italian government first made it mandatory to wear front seat belts in 1989, most Italians ignored it and after a few half-hearted fines, the police failed to enforce the law. People would complain that seat belts were uncomfortable or prevented a quick escape if your vehicle careered off the road into deep water. Way into the late 1990s Italians regularly flouted crash helmet laws, especially in summer. Now they are expected to wear face masks for fear of catching an elusive virus and transgressors are routinely accused of wanting to kill others for the crime of being flesh and blood living organisms capable of transmitting pathogens to bystanders. This begs the question: Who owns your body? Yourself, your parents, your spouse or the state? Who has the right to decide what you do with your body? The usual caveat is that you may do anything that doesn’t infringe on someone else’s freedom or safety without their consent. However, such notions are subjective. In a dynamically integrated society, many of our actions may potentially harm others, but the risks to others are relative and usually outweighed by their benefits to our emotional wellbeing. Over recent decades the state has taken a greater and greater interest in our personal habits such as smoking, drinking and junk food. It treats us as children unable to look after ourselves without their constant guidance. On the one hand, the state undermines personal independence by subsidising dysfunctional lifestyle options often leaving us with little choice but to depend on welfare handouts, while on the other it seeks ever more invasive ways to regulate our behaviour and make key medical decisions on our behalf for the common good. If you take personal responsibility for your actions, then a healthy diet may help you live longer, but you are free to ignore advice and prioritise ephemeral pleasure over theoretical longevity. The world’s longest living woman, Jeanne Calmert, died at the ripe old age of 122 in 1997, but smoked and drank red wine with her meals for most of her life. Besides, there has never been a consensus about the healthiest diets. State agencies seem obsessed with recommended daily intakes for cholesterol, sugar and fat, often favouring sugar-free or low-fat alternatives that nearly always contain artificial flavourings that may also harm our health. However, if you can’t source your food from local farmers whom you trust or even better grow your own, you can only rely on the honesty of supermarket chains. It should hardly surprise us to learn that the same IT billionaire who has invested billions in worldwide immunisation programmes, now has plans to corner the market for synthetic meat to satisfy the demands of billions of new consumers.

Conscientious workers or useless eaters?

Let us briefly dwell on this confusing epithet for person, citizen or worker. We may well all consume to meet basic human needs and desires, but consumption has not until recently defined us. We could just as well call everyone eaters, breathers or defecators, all essential activities. While we may view a worker, mother or father as someone who contributes to the betterment of their family and wider community, a consumer is little more than a user of products or services that another entity else has created or in crude terms a useless eater.

In a complex society such as our own with a high degree of interdependence, workers retain bargaining power only as long as the ruling classes depend on the fruits of our labour. The lockdown has only accelerated the trend towards greater smart automation with a shrinking proportion of the nominal workforce responsible for mission-critical tasks. Well-paid jobs such as train drivers could have been automated years ago were it not for public distrust of malfunctioning technology, but now media-driven fear about covid-19 have led to louder calls for driverless vehicles. Smart remote-controlled robots could soon replace plumbers, hairdressers and dentists too this avoiding the need for close proximity to other human beings. Yet the mainstream media focuses mainly on teachers and carers employed to mould the next generation and micromanage the private lives of vulnerable consumers. All of sudden, we have all become vulnerable, unable to go about our daily lives without succumbing to a deadly virus. The disability industry has successfully labelled every mild medical condition or psychological challenge as a handicap that redefines our lives. Early 21st century corporatism has simultaneously deprived us of independent means of subsistence and then humiliated us if our intellectual or practical skills fail to find a niche in a rigged marketplace. Some of us feel trapped between successful professionals with substantial independent financial wealth and a growing army of state-dependants, whose livelihood depends more on social conformity than diligence or talent. We strive for greater personal independence, but have to sell our souls to large corporations to pay off mounting debts. No wonder, so many have welcomed the extended furlough that the covid-19 scare has provided kissing goodbye to any dreams of financial independence.

Social Credit Nightmare

We may soon have a new breed of unpeople, whose worthiness is diminished not by their skin colour, birthplace or parental wealth, but by their failure to fully cooperate with the authorities. The scariest aspect of mandatory vaccination, as promoted by health agencies and media organisations around the world, is not the vaccine itself, but digital certification. As any vaccine against an RNA virus is only ever likely to provide temporary immunity, we would need regular top-ups. Once a precedent has been set to only let those certified to be up-to-date with their vaccine schedule access public venues, the authorities may make such access conditional on other aspects of our social conformity. Have we had a recent mental health checkup? Have we taken meds prescribed for any mental illnesses we may have? Have we ever expressed politically incorrect opinions on social media? It’s not hard to imagine the rationale behind such invasions of privacy. It only takes a few tragic cases of random murders by mentally unstable individuals to justify the screening and forced medication of the general law-abiding population. You may be denied access to many public places not because you have committed a heinous crime, but because you have not submitted to psychiatric screening, whose purpose is not only to detect potential murderers, but to identify nonconformists who may challenge the dominant social order. Today opinion leaders may target antivaxers, as some sort of mad army of flat-earthers whose ideas endanger public health, but tomorrow they may target critics of psychiatry for the same reasons. More worryingly, once people have been trained to only trust official fact-checkers and to distrust outcasts, a totalitarian state can literally get away with murder. The covid-19 scare has already empowered governments to meddle with death certificates by allowing medical professionals, as opposed to doctors, to attribute deaths to covid-19 even if someone has other serious life-threatening conditions or is only suspected of carrying the virus without testing positive. The provisions of the 2020 Coronavirus Act now provide the state with the ultimate pretext for judicial murder of undesirables by forcing them to undergo unwanted medical treatment, potentially by being sectioned under 2005 Mental Health  act if they refuse treatment, and then ascribing their death to a new contagion. This makes anyone who resists medical martial law an illegal human being.

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Power Dynamics

One World Love turns to Global Panic

Have you noticed how the same managerial classes who had until yesterday been extolling the virtues of open borders and mass migration have switched gear in response to the COVID-19 pandemic? All of a sudden the same experts and pundits who claim to favour a melting pot of all peoples with an integrated world economy expect all responsible governments to restrict our freedom of movement around our neighbourhoods. This means following the Chinese and Italian examples by closing schools, sports centres, offices and other public venues and only allowing authorised workers to cross cordons sanitaires with heavy penalties for transgressors. Such draconian measures can only be effective with a compliant populace and a militarised police force. 

Don’t get me wrong. All early deaths from preventable illnesses are a tragedy. Every day over 3000 human beings die of tuberculosis, over 2400 of hepatitis B, over 2200 of pneumonia, over 2100 of HIV/AIDs, over 2000 of malaria, over 1600 of shigellosis, over 1200 of rotovirus, over 1000 of seasonal flu, over 500 of novovirus, over 400 of whooping cough, nearly 400 of typhoid and a similar number of cholera. So far this year 5547 people have died of a mutant strand of coronavirus out of a world population of around 7.8 billion. Coronavirus is an umbrella term for any of a group of RNA viruses that cause upper respiratory tract disease. Previous outbreaks were known as SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), but most types of influenza and the common cold are caused by rhinoviruses.

What’s so scary about COVID-19 with a death rate estimated varying from a low 0.7%, based on the projected infection rate, to a high of 5%,  based on the initial outbreak? As of 14 March 2020, in the UK only 26 thousand have been tested and even in Italy with the highest coronavirus mortality rate in the world, only 60 thousand have been tested out of a population of over 60 million. In all likelihood the authorities have seriously underestimated the total number of infected persons with suppressed or mild symptoms, but able to nonetheless to transmit the contagion, while highlighting the number of fatalities, which even in the worst-hit regions are a tiny fraction of all deaths. In Italy, now with over 1800 coronavirus-related fatalities, the average age of death is just over 80 with the vast majority of deaths affecting people over 70. Italy has one of the world’s most advanced health services and highest life expectancies.

Let’s get things into perspective. The three biggest factors that contribute to a longer life span are sanitation, diet and lifestyle. If you keep clean, but not obsessively so you develop natural resistance to pathogens, eat a healthy diet and get plenty of exercise, again without overdoing it, you may now easily live into your 80s, only resorting occasionally to medications such as painkillers and antibiotics. Vaccines work in theory by giving you a small dose of a potentially lethal disease in the hope your body will develop long-term immunity. Likewise before the introduction of measles, mumps and rubella vaccines, children were encouraged to catch these diseases before puberty to gain lifelong immunity. By the late 1960s the measles-related mortality rate had already fallen dramatically. It’s worth remembering that until the slum clearances of the early 1960s millions of people across the British Isles had to make do with outside toilets and only a washbasin instead of a bath and/or shower. Many would visit their local public baths, not to swim, but to wash their bodies. Being confined to a squalid dwelling is not good for your health. Believe it or not, exploring the great outdoors and swimming in unpolluted lakes and rivers is much better for your health. Anecdotally I recall my father claiming he was not allowed more than 4” (10cm) of water in his bath as a child in the 1940s to stop me using more than my fair share of our limited hot water supply during the 1974 energy crisis and coal miners’ strike. Now we no longer have weekly baths, but daily showers. Of course, we still catch the common cold and seasonal flu. However, vaccines have proven a blunt tool against these pervasive contagions, as they can only provide temporary immunity against specific strains. Vaccines adhere to the law of diminishing returns. A few well-targeted vaccines can boost your immune system and save lives. Herd immunity works by ensuring most healthy people have antibodies to fight viruses and bad bacteria (good bacteria are key to our digestive and immune systems) and thus not pass on these diseases to the frail with weak immune systems who would not respond well either to vaccines or the live pathogen. We have become so terrified of germs that we do not want to risk letting our immune systems adapt to constantly evolving infections as we have done rather successfully. Laboratories in China, Germany, Israel and Scotland are working on a vaccine. However, as Aaron Colen uncovered in the Blaze, the most frightening aspect of COVID-19 is its high reinfection rate among those who have recovered, meaning our immune systems may not respond to the virus and a potential vaccine may not protect against subsequent infections or may have severe adverse effects in otherwise healthy individuals.

The Medical Managerial Classes

Two schools of thought dominate the public discourse. One, supported by many leading virologists such as Prof. Karol Sikora and Dr Ranjeet Brar,  favours pragmatic steps to improve personal hygiene and protect the vulnerable, but not to panic unduly. If the virus has a long incubation period and many healthy people experience few symptoms that could not easily be attributed to other common transient ailments, then COVID-19 is probably already spreading through the general population. Our focus should thus be on protecting those most at risk. The other approach, favoured by international health agencies, many opinion leaders and healthcare managers, calls for an Italian-style lockdown with schools, colleges, pubs, bars, restaurants and sports centres closed, controlled access to shops to avoid panic buying and limit social contact. While such drastic measures may slow the spread among the general population, they cannot disinfect those who have already caught it, or help the frail and elderly who do not need to work and can more easily stay at home. Moreover, young people crave social contact and will inevitably find ways to meet up with their friends. The health effects of sitting at home glued to computer screens for weeks on end may be much worse than the ill-effects of the virus itself. Obesity, diabetes and, narcotic abuse, associated with sedentary lifestyles in small rooms, are much bigger killers than coronavirus in Wuhan or Lombardy. And who is going to look after school-age children in an era where either both parents work or children only have one parent or carer at home? Many key service workers such as nurses, doctors, plumbers, electricians and cleaners to name but a few, are also parents who may have to choose between staying at home to look after their children or providing services critical for public health. If self-employed plumbers cannot enter premises without special permits or additional health and safety checks, leaks will go unfixed. Without clean water and reliable electricity, we could see a rapid spike in other infectious diseases.

The managerial classes, often posing on the radical left, believe we cannot cope without their endless busy-body intervention. Should we really forgo hard-earned civil liberties in the name of public safety? It is with great sadness that much of the left has thrown its rhetorical weight behind the usual suspects, such as Hillary Clinton and Gordon Brown, calling for a complete lockdown with the police empowered to arrest transgressors. Only a few months ago the same technocrats wanted us to welcome open borders. Now they want us to stay indoors. The same actors support clamping down on free speech, while scaring us into accepting mandatory surveillance, probably under the guise of remote medical supervision via smart watches or RFID chips. 

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Power Dynamics

The End of British Exceptionalism

Scottish not English
Do our global policy makers welcome Scottish Separatism?

As the first exit polls came in after polls closed on Thursday 12 December, one key trend caught my attention. While the working classes in the Midlands and North of England had swung to the Conservatives, many voting Tory for the first time in their lives, Scottish voters had bucked the trend and shifted their support to the misnamed Scottish National Party, who in government have prioritised radical social engineering even more than Labour before them. As the Conservatives look set to win a comfortable majority, I monitored BBC coverage only to notice they displayed vote share for mainland Great Britain alone. Their reporters struggled to hide their glee that for the first time in history a majority of parliamentary seats in Ulster had been won by parties that support unification with the Republic of Ireland, with the moderate SDLP gaining two seats and the Alliance Party one seat. This clearly marks a move towards a secular Ireland detached from both the sectarian divisions in the North and from its cultural heritage. When Boris Johnson agreed a compromise with the European Union on the Irish backstop, did he know that sooner or later the province would merge back into Ireland anyway? It now seems the only distinctive features of Ireland's two jurisdictions, except for strong regional accents, are road signs in miles and prices in pounds Sterling in the North East, but in kilometres and Euros in the rest of the Emerald Isle. So Ireland may regain political unity just as it becomes a lot less Irish.

The SNP only really disagree with Corbyn's Labour on the constitutional issue and look set to emulate the transformative mass migration policies of Leo Varadka's Irish government (known as Project Ireland 2040). If the SNP had their way, Scotland may sever its ties with England but will become a lot less Scottish as is already evident in many parts of Edinburgh and Glasgow. However, unlike Labour, they ran a very sleek campaign that would meet the full approval of Guardian columnists and Blairites alike. Blair's advisors only really supported the Union to maintain social peace and keep alive the British wing of the Anglo-American military industrial complex. Traditional Scottish nationalists are correct in observing that the British Foreign office sees Scotland as a convenient location for their military toys. Now the European Defence Union is a done deal, international NeoCons like Henry Kissenger, Emanuel Macron, Guy Verhofstadt may turn to the Franco-German alliance for their global policing operations rather than the UK. Other big businesses really do not care about the Scottish constitutional settlement.

For the time being, England's new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson (and yes I know he's technically the PM of the whole of the UK), has turned down Nicola Sturgeon's request for a second referendum on Scottish Independence, but it may well only be a matter of time before he announces a policy shift. With growing support for Scottish separatism coming not just from international academics and economists, but from former Scottish Labour politicians such as Kezia Dugdale, the outcome may depend on the unpredictable stability of the British and European banking systems. If Boris Johnson not only passes the Withdrawal Agreement, but successfully agrees on a full divorce settlement with the EU in the form of a Free Trade Agreement by the end of 2020 that would keep Great Britain out of the Single Market and Customs Union, we may just see a run on the pound which may increase the price of imports and cause the markets to panic leading to temporary disruption and hardship. The SNP could capitalise on such a scenario to win a narrow majority in a referendum. However, in the same time frame, we may see the collapse of the Italian banking system prompting a continent-wide recession and widespread civil unrest as governments raise taxes to keep alive the Euro and bail out banks. Other European countries cannot expect German taxpayers to keep subsidising economic mismanagement in Southern and Eastern Europe when they are struggling with their own social problems. In a Europe-wide crisis, Britain may seem a safe haven and support for Scottish separatism may well dwindle. Some recent polls have suggested figures as high as 51%. However, if the central government can manage an orderly departure from the European Union and the UK as a whole outperforms most other European economies despite Brexit, then the case for Scottish Independence falls. The question remains whether our business elites really want to keep the Union or do they think they can play a nominally independent Scotland off against a future Kingdom of England & Wales, e.g. by demanding lower corporation taxes or de-regulations of biotech experiments (something like human cloning may be unpopular UK-wide, but may just win the SNP's approval if meant higher investment from biotech giants)?

I think most people on the ground crave economic stability and cultural continuity, i.e. do not want radical economic upheaval, top-down social engineering or rapid migratory flows. The SNP is building its entire case for Scottish independence on continued EU membership and a wishful assessment of Scotland's potential revenues from oil and other natural resources. That would only work if Scotland retained full control of both its territorial waters and banking system. As a separate member state within the EU Scotland would have neither. Norway prospered because it could invest the immense proceeds of its short-lived oil bonanza in education, infrastructure and training for just 5 million citizens.