Category: All in the Mind

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Covid Cultism in the Age of Experts

Covid cult

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

Cultists

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

Heretics

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

The Acquiescent Majority

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

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

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Another Twitter Suspension

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

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

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

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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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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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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.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics War Crimes

The Abolition of Britain and the rise of Global Governance

How the quest for greater independence is being usurped by power-hungry control freaks

I make no bets on the outcome of the snap General Election scheduled for 12th December. Last time a healthy Tory majority seemed almost certain until a couple of weeks before polling and after a disastrous Conservative election campaign. For the first time in recent history Labour did much better than expected. My hunch is Boris Johnson's party will win a comfortable majority of seats because the core working class electorate have lost all faith in Labour, but I doubt the resulting managerial team will do much to protect British workers from the excesses of globalism. I hope the government's ineptitude may oddly strengthen the resilience of ambitious youngsters as they realise the state will not help them fulfil their dreams and thus avoid succumbing to a prevailing culture of victimhood and entitlement.

We may well see another shift among the affluent managerial and business classes from the Tories to the misnamed Liberal Democrats (or the illiberal unDemocrats as I call them), while many traditional Labour voters either sit at home, strategically vote Conservative or flirt with the Brexit Party to keep out Labour, whom they now see as the party of unlimited mass migration, toxic identity politics and undeliverable spending commitments. However, in Scotland Labour will lose out not only to the Conservatives, but to a resurgent SNP capitalising on fashionable anti-English sentiment. They see Brexit as the brainchild of English Tories eager to resurrect the British Empire. If we assume current polling is correct, the political map of mainland Britain will be split into four. The Tories will dominate English shires and towns, the Liberal Democrats will do well in the most affluent neighbourhoods, while Labour will keep most of its metropolitan strongholds among its special victim groups, welfare-dependents, social engineers and trendy students. By contrast, owing to the vagaries of the First Past the Post system, Nicola Sturgeon's cult movement look set to snap up most Scottish seats, as the anti-SNP vote is too evenly split. The Brexit Party will be lucky to gain 1 or 2 seats in former UKIP strongholds, but they may succeed only in letting Labour hold on to a few more marginals.

The ongoing Brexit saga amid yet another General Election with very uninspiring choices has revealed two unwelcome realities. First most nation states have limited independence from global banks and corporations, supranational institutions and a well-funded network of nominally independent non-governmental organisations (NGOs) posing as humanitarian charities. Second, and perhaps more important, it has exposed what our ruling classes really think about democracy. If they cannot persuade the great unwashed masses to endorse their social engineering plans by electing a bunch of middle managers who will cooperate with the agents of change, they will destabilise your country and have you begging for their intervention.

Whatever the relative merits of the European Union may be, the outcome represented a huge kick in the backside for the metropolitan elite, who for decades have presided over the steady transfer of power from time-honoured local institutions to more remote international entities in the name of progress. Let us be under no illusions the EU is only a means to an end, not the end itself. There are many good reasons to welcome close cooperation among Europe's disparate peoples to protect our cultural heritage and defend us against the worst excesses of what we once viewed as neoliberal globalism, especially as a counterbalance to the North American and Chinese models with their extreme forms of plutocracy. Just 15 years ago in the aftermath of the joint US and UK occupation of Iraq, many of us wanted to distance ourselves from the British and American foreign policy establishment. Many of us hoped a Europe Community of independent peace-loving and democratic nation states with strong protections both for personal freedom and social justice could offer an alternative to Anglo-American capitalism.

While many other countries appeared insecure and in imminent danger of fragmentation, civil war and greater subjugation to imperial forces, Britain seemed impervious. Only the Northern Irish conflict ever posed a security threat, although behind the scenes the British Civil Service has long viewed the province as more of a burden than a strategic asset. Scottish and Welsh nationalism remained relatively tame disputes, quibbling mainly about the extent of autonomy within the United Kingdom. Few thought any major part of the UK would join another major superstate. The Republic of Ireland has since its inception remained steadfastly neutral, so even if Northern Ireland voted to join the Republic, there would be no fundamental shift in the balance of power. Leaving aside widespread opposition to the deployment of the Trident nuclear missiles in Faslane just northwest of Glasgow, Scotland has long been way too reliant on tight integration with the British military industrial complex for mainstream politicians to advocate military independence from the rest of the UK and from NATO, although this was the official SNP position until 2012.

Sea Change

Before around 2012 the European issue seemed very much off the radar. Transnational bodies like the EU, NATO and the UN were just facts of our increasingly internationalised lives, but not things we felt affected our everyday lives. Broadly speaking most Europeans opposed further centralisation preferring to keep control of economic, social and military policy at a more accountable national level, but many still believed our politicians somehow represented our interests at various international gatherings. We saw this in referendums in Ireland, France, the Netherlands and Denmark where voters rejected new treaties (respectively of Nice and Lisbon) only to see their votes either ignored or to be forced to vote again after cosmetic changes. However, we could also argue that the public have grown so disillusioned with the sorry state of national politics that they'd rather place their trust in shiny new progressive institutions that transcend traditional boundaries. For decades the establishment media has tried to persuade Europeans that they can trust the EU and NATO more than their local regimes with their chequered history of corruption and despotism. In the early 1970s not only was most of Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain, but Greece, Spain and Portugal still had military dictatorships appealing to traditional Christian values to ward off the dual dangers of Eastern communism and Western decadence. Not surprisingly millions of younger Europeans welcomed the fall of these paternalistic regimes and embraced a new era of mass consumerism combined with a comfortable social safety net. While millions of Greeks, Spaniards and Portuguese may be critical of the budgetary constraints imposed on their governments to keep alive the Euro, they still tend to associate the EU with the greater prosperity they've enjoyed since the 1980s. The situation in Britain is very different. The golden era of the British working classes was the 1950s and 60s. Sure we lacked many of the modern conveniences made more affordable by recent technological progress, e.g. many had outside toilets, coal fires instead of central heating and cars were still a luxury for many, but what mattered most is that the relative quality of life was steadily improving with a high level of upwards social mobility. A typical school leaver could aspire to getting a decent skilled job as an apprentice and earn enough to be able to marry, buy a house and start a family by his or her mid to late twenties, all without welfare handouts. We hoped progress would empower families to lead more independent lives while still enjoying the fruits of a civil society with a high degree of social trust and mutual respect. Little did we know that many of our mission-critical jobs would be first outsourced and then automated as big business had to rein in the collective bargaining power of trade unions. The long-drawn-out demise of British industry, kept on life support during the 1970s, weakened the resolve and resilience of the working classes, blamed for demanding unmerited pay rises, being too lazy and lacking the industriousness of their European and Japanese colleagues. Yet to this day, many observers simply blame Thatcher for turning off the life support machine that squandered countless billions on trying to save outdated industries that could not survive the challenge of global competition able not only to tap into a seemingly limitless supply of cheap labour, but to quickly close or retool outdated manufacturing facilities with little regard to job security.

I noticed even as long ago as the 1979 General Election that saw Margaret Thatcher's Tories win a healthy majority of seats, Labour had begun to shift its focus from standing up for workers' rights to championing welfare and public services. Thatcher managed to appeal to the aspirational working classes, the kind of people who wanted to own a house, drive a car, holiday in Spain and earn a decent living through a career in the growing service sector. While some workers adapted and some new light manufacturing outfits took the place of heavy industry, many youngsters in Labour's working class heartlands outside the more prosperous South East of England inherited the helplessness of their parents who had failed to adapt and thus became trapped on welfare or short-term jobs in call centres leading inevitably to dysfunctional households and social dislocation. Nonetheless a major rebranding effort saved the Labour Party as it embraced Thatcherite reforms, the information revolution and pop culture while promising not to raise taxes. I was an early sceptic of Blairite Magic. Somehow his soundbites lacked substance or analytical integrity, but one slogan stuck in my mind "Education, Education, Education". If you believed the hype, we were on the verge of a quantum leap in scientific excellence. The next generation would become talented doctors, inventors, bioscientists, software developers and robotics engineers. Alas very few did, but many more became recruiters, public relations officers, graphic designers, creative directors or worked on the peripheries of emerging high-tech industries in new-fangled specialisations such as forensic science or environmental science, learning how to engage with technologies that someone else developed to monitor other people's behaviour, market goods or ensure minimum health and safety standards. With such a dearth of tech-savvy innovators and entrepreneurs, British professionals have focused mainly on people management and persuasion, a sector encompassing not only advertising, public relations and entertainment, but behaviour and attitude modification through charities and education. For every engineer developing new technology to help us solve practical environmental challenges, there are many more climate change awareness officers or busy bodies lecturing parents on how to deal with tantrums without smacking. The net result is a dual culture of dependence, either on state handouts or on corporate largesse, and greatly reduced personal resilience. The first Blair government famously rebranded Britain as Cool Britannia, more about rock stars than scientific pioneers. Now the last gasp of British cultural innovation has been co-opted by the multibillion dollar entertainment industry and blended into a global culture disconnected from the specific locales of post-imperial suburban Britain. In the same period Global English has begun its shift from a high-status international language modelled on standard British or American English to a rapidly mutating form of NewSpeak inspired by a worldwide intelligentsia with little reference to the speech patterns of the transient residents of London or New York City. Native speakers have thus lost the relative advantage they once had over those who acquired the language later in life.

As a historical paradox the country that has given the world its dominant lingua franca now suffers from an acute identity crisis as progressive opinion leaders attempt to deny there is such a thing as a native English person. This mirrors trends in other European countries with almost identical claims going mainstream in Germany and Sweden too. National identity for many in cosmopolitan areas has been reduced to mere temporary allegiance to your country of residence in occasional sporting events.

What's left of Britishness anyway?

Many Ulster unionists are none too happy about Boris Johnson's deal to keep their province in regulatory alignment with the EU's Customs Union and Single Market with customs checks in the Irish Sea rather than along the meandering border with the Republic of Ireland. Increasingly only the Democratic Unionist Party defend traditional values, while Sinn Fein, claiming to represent the Catholic community, has recently endorsed positions on gay marriage, LGBTQ-friendly sex education and abortion perfectly aligned with the cultural left, but at variance with Catholic teachings. However, a growing proportion of the younger generation identify neither with Protestantism nor Catholicism and are very open to unification with what has become a secular Ireland. The British Deep State seems more concerned about the perceived Russian threat than subsidising Northern Ireland.

The begs the question whether the CEOs of UK PLC really care that much about the constitutional status of Scotland, now they know a nominally independent Scotland would both stay in NATO and join the new European Defence Union. Universalist media outlets treat Nicola Sturgeon's SNP much more favourably than the Brexit Party or even the Tory Party.

However, I sense a split between the Atlanticist and Europhile wings of British intelligentsia. Recent statements from Emanuel Macron, Guy Verhofstadt and the EU's new President Ursula von der Leyen have revealed a gradual shift from a unified European military command working within NATO alongside the USA to a European Army taking over from the USA in global policing operations in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia. More disturbing is the growing hostility among the Western European elites towards Russia. In just a few years neo-conservative war hawks have shifted their lobbying operations from Washington DC to Brussels. To match US military spending, the Europe Union would have to double spending, something that would be very unpopular at a national level, but could only be justified by the spectre of a Russian and/or Chinese threat. Even if Trump is re-elected in 2020, US military adventurism has peaked. The federal government can no longer justify such a massive defence budget when they have bigger challenges at home with rapidly changing demographics. It's only a matter of time before someone like Tulsi Gabbard or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez becomes the president of a debt-ridden federation in a post-dollar world order, dominated by the Chinese and Indian economies.

Without Scotland and Ulster, England and Wales would be a very disunited place with London behaving more and more like a city state divorced from its geographic hinterland and parallel communities in many other towns and cities.

In all likelihood Boris Johnson's BRINO or Brexit In Name Only will avert Scottish Independence for a few years before other events overshadow it, Ulster quietly merges with a post-Christian Eire and the Scots turn against the SNP. Meanwhile continental Europe will struggle to cope with the fast pace of cultural and demographic metamorphosis, a looming banking crisis and an escalation of the civil unrest that has spread across France over the last year. We may just be able to salvage a federation of the British Isles, but with waning faith in traditional British institutions such as Monarchy (and far be it from me to comment on Prince Andrew's close friendship with American sex predator Jeffrey Epstein) this island seems ripe for Balkan-style destabilisation with the people's splat over Brexit serving as a trial run for a much deeper conflict over culture, identity and power.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Getting a taste of your own medicine

Corporate censorship

How hate speech laws have come back to bite their proponents

This week Corbynites, who often call for the no-platforming of social conservatives, were on the receiving end of antisemitism allegations. Yet the same BBC stands accused of suppressing the scale of rape gangs to appease the Muslim community. It seems we must now think twice before expressing any opinions that may be deemed misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, antisemitic or in any way critical of our emerging Brave New World of rootless world citizens. For a while it seemed these constraints only applied to the evil far right or rather those who took a firm stand against social engineering, but now censorship hinders dissent on the left too.

More and more people with different political outlooks are getting well and truly fed up with the BBC's lack of objectivity, its narrow focus on a small set of perceived threats, its elevation of minor news stories to push an ideological agenda and its dismissal of much more important events as mere side effects of progress. In short, the BBC does not, as it claims, dispassionately report on a changing national and global reality with a wide range of divergent perspectives. It selects which news stories best serve its preferred narrative, often turning reality on its head by choosing exceptions rather than rules, and counteracts what it paradoxically calls fake news from the alternative media.

Yet the BBC does not just piss off opponents of UK involvement in endless wars in the Middle East, critics of unbalanced mass migration, social conservatives not totally on board with the LGBTQ++ agenda or dissident scientists concerned with the adverse effects of mass medication. It has now alienated hundreds of thousands of leftwing activists in Jeremy Corbyn's enlarged Labour Party, who take a strong stand against the Israeli government's repression of Palestinians and its role in destabilising other countries, not least the well-documented close collaboration between Israel and Saudi Arabia in a fateful triangle with the Pentagon.

The BBC's flagship current affairs documentary programme, Panorama, has a long track record of carefully timed hit pieces to smear opponents of British foreign policy, defame dissidents or destroy the reputation of organisations who in some way challenge corporate interests. In 2013 on the eve of a crucial parliamentary vote to authorise RAF airstrikes over Syria, the BBC aired Saving Syria's Children, in which crisis actors reacted to a staged chemical attack, purportedly launched by Assad's air force against innocent civilians. Robert Stuart has spent the last six years compiling evidence to conclusively prove the whole event was faked before the term #fakenews gained currency in everyday speech. The BBC's John Sweeney is a propaganda veteran of the British government's campaign to win support for Tony Blair's ill-fated invasion of Iraq when he championed the cause of Iraqi Kurds. Later the same journalist targeted the Scientology church, bankrolled apparently by a few wealthy Hollywood celebrities like John Travolta and Tom Cruise. Neither of these controversies are open and shut cases. The Kurdish people, spread over parts of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, have long wanted an independent homeland, but their cause has also long been exploited rival regional powers in their quest to destabilise their enemies. While the British government has historically turned a blind eye to the repression of Kurds in Turkey, US, UK and, dare I say, Israeli secret services have given logistical support to Kurds in Iran, Iraq and Syria. To put it another way, it's in the geopolitical interests of the main corporations behind the US and UK Deep States to destabilise all regional powers who undermine their hegemony and to seek alliances with any disgruntled factions. However, the military-industrial complex today encompasses the growing biotech and mind control sectors. While an independent Syria may be a thorn in the side of US and Israeli plans to prevent China and Russia from gaining greater influence in the Middle East, the Church of Scientology is an arch opponent of psychiatry and psychoactive medication and thus a threat to the biotech industry's grip on the collective psyche. I would add that Ron Hubbard's cult is an easy target that has merely co-opted a radical 1960s critique of psychiatry so they can present their behaviour modification system, known as Dianetics, as the only solution to our emotional challenges. I'm naturally sceptical of any well-funded cult-like organisation, but I suspect the BBC's main target here was not the Church of Scientology at all, but critics of psychiatry and their relentless drive to reframe all personal challenges as mental health issues.

An objective account of the Syrian civil war would look not only at the government's human rights record, which in the Middle East is unlikely to be very clean, but also at the funding and ideology of the various rival militias who controlled vast swathes of Syrian territory between 2011 and 2018. Before 2011 almost uniquely in the Middle East the Syrian government had somehow managed to prevent its disparate ethnic and religious communities from killing each other and to avert the menace of Islamic fundamentalism. To do so, it sometimes had to resort to repressive means, such as torture, and incursions against insurgents, most notoriously President Hafez al-Assad's 1982 crushing of Muslim Brotherhood rebels in Hama. Sadly all regimes in the Middle East have to deploy coercive means to subdue internecine warfare among rival factions.

Panorama commissioned John Sweeny to do another hit piece against a rabid Zionist, someone who had himself photographed standing on an Israeli tank proudly waving the Star of David flag. Stephen Yaxley Lennon, mainly known by his stage name of Tommy Robinson, has made a career out of his campaign against the spread of radical Islam and some of the worst practices of the burgeoning Muslim communities in many towns and cities across the UK such as their failure to integrate with wider British society, their perceived takeover of entire neighbourhoods with vigilantes enforcing aspects of Sharia law, their apparent visceral hatred of British armed forces and, most notoriously, their grooming gangs targeting vulnerable non-Muslim teenage girls. For the sake of clarity, I can sympathise with any community that opposes the British role in the projection of US military adventurism. On the 2003 march against the Iraq war I marched for a while alongside one of the biggest contingents, the Luton branch of British Muslim Council. While I don't blame individual soldiers for joining the army, I do not think they helped defend anyone back home. Indeed British military adventurism has only made the UK and British ex-pats prime targets for terrorists. Tommy Robinson's home town of Luton now has a Muslim majority in its school-age population. Non-Muslims of all ethnic backgrounds tend to send their children to suburban schools with a lower Muslim intake, while thousands of former Lutonians have simply upped sticks and moved to outlying market towns and villages, a phenomenon once known as white flight, but it's by no means exclusively whites who are metaphorically running for the hills.

The radical left has struggled to come to terms with divided communities, preferring instead to paint a blissfully naive picture of a united working class battling a few isolated racists spewing their hatred. The main flaw in this argument is that internecine hatred comes both from some radical Muslims and the wilder elements of the former English Defence League who have now regrouped as the Football Lads Alliance. Contrary to the BBC's simplified narrative, the battle lines do not divide whites from blacks, but Muslims from anti-Muslims.

Much of the avowedly antiracist left rejoiced as the Old Bailey set a legal precedent by jailing Stephen Yaxley Lennon for the subjective crime of contempt of court, when all he did was announce the list of men convicted of gang rape of minors, which was already in the public domain, as they returned to court for sentencing. Compare and contrast reporting restrictions enforced on these sex abuse trials involving 1000s of innocent girls, with the media's lynching of disgraced entertainers like Rolf Harris and Cliff Richard. The BBC even hired a helicopter to take aerial footage of a police raid on Sir Cliff's property at enormous public expense. From a legal standpoint it's irrelevant whether Mr Yaxley Lennon had himself been found guilty of physical assault on more than one occasion, the law should be applied equally to all. More worryingly, no jury was present at the trial.

Some will argue correctly that Tommy Robinson merely jumped on a bandwagon and did nothing to expose the scale of rape gangs targeting non-Muslim girls. Indeed the whole Tommy Robinson phenomenon would not exist without a captive base of disaffected working class youths and a little financial help from pro-Israeli pressure groups, most notably Australian-based Avi Yemini and the Canadian social conservative group, Rebel Media. The latter channel has admittedly countered some mainstream media bias on topics as diverse as sex education and mass migration, but is unashamedly pro-Israel and critical of all major Palestinian resistance groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, which it defines as terrorists. We now have a distinctive political current that loathes Islam, loves Israel and champions national sovereignty and aspects of social conservativism with high profile advocates as varied as Katie Hopkins and Ezra Levant, to which we could add Gerard Batten's faction of UKIP and Anne Marie Waters' For Britain movement. This should be no surprise to anyone familiar with American politics where the Christian right has long been closely allied with the Netanyahu wing of the pro-Israeli lobby.

This must seem odd to some observers, as traditionally American Jews have been at the forefront of campaigns to relax immigration controls and promote alternatives to traditional families. Many on the radical right have blamed Hollywood, with its disproportionate Jewish influence, for subverting traditional Christian values.

Is the dispute really about anti-Zionism?

The so-called International definition of antisemitism is now so broad as to equate any criticism of the Israeli State or undue influence exerted by financiers and media executives, some of who may be Jewish, with the kind of pathological hatred of Jews that led to the Nazi Holocaust. Is it antisemitic to state correctly around 22% of all Nobel Laureates are Jewish, that the USA awarded Israel a $38 billion military aid package in 2016 or that 5 of the 7 Chairs of Federal Reserve since 1970 have been Jewish? I guess it all depends what conclusions one reaches from such easily verifiable facts.

Despite its close ties with successive US administrations, Israel is only one piece of a much larger jigsaw. To put the Palestinian conflict into context, more Muslims have been ruthlessly murdered by the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran and by Islamic fundamentalist militias than by Israel. The ongoing bombardment of Yemen is putting at risk the lives of as many as 20 million Yemenis, while the British RAF trains Royal Saudi Airforce pilots.

Many true Zionists accuse the BBC itself of antisemitism in its appeasement of the Islamic lobby in the UK. Few English, Scottish and Welsh people harbour ill feelings towards Jews, have very strong opinions about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict or are obsessed with undue Jewish influence in finance or media. Most strong views, one way or the other, inevitably come either from radical political activists or more commonly from those with family ties to the Middle East. So which community in early 21st century Britain would be most likely to distrust Jews, blame Israel for many of the world's ills and cast doubt on the orthodox version of the Nazi Holocaust? Let me give you a clue. They are not old age pensioners who still remember the Second World War or virtue-signalling refugee rights campaigners, but neither are they ordinary working class Christians or trade unionists. Even outspoken critics of Israeli government policy like George Galloway have taken a very firm stance against both Holocaust denial and against the likes of Tommy Robinson. So let's scratch our heads and think which group of disaffected people with strong religious views might blame Jews not only for the Middle East quagmire, but for Western cultural decadence and its addiction to debt? What kind of staunch labour voters would view world history since the 1917 Balfour declaration through the prism of an almighty conspiracy by Zionists to control the globe? It may sadden some, but there is only one logical answer to the above question. It also helps us explain how Labour could miraculously hold on to the marginal seat of Peterborough in a by-election with nearly ten thousand postal votes or around 30% of all ballot papers cast. While the Palestinian conflict may be just one of many causes that many leftwing activists like to champion when they're not fretting about food banks, disability benefit cuts, global warming, veganism or LBGTQ++ rights, in the minds of many radical Muslims it justifies their jihad against Jewish power. The problem is most Labour activists either turn a blind eye to rampant Judaeophobia among some of their radical Muslim comrades or they are blissfully unaware of it.

Besides, the Israeli issue has long divided the Jewish community itself. Some of Israel's most outspoken critics such as Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky and Gilad Atzmon are themselves Jews. One hundred prominent Jews signed a letter to Guardian defending Chris Williamson, suspended for claiming Labour was too apologetic about antisemitism. More perversely, the only associate of Jeremy Corbyn who has ever called into question the scale of the Nazi holocaust is another Islington resident coincidentally of Jewish heritage himself, Paul Eisen, who even more intriguingly is also a close friend saxophonist, Gilad Atzmon. A few Labour activists, such as the MP for Derby, Chris Williamson or Edinburgh trade unionist Pete Gregson, may obsess with the Palestinian issue and the pro-Israeli lobby, but they have both vehemently denied hating Jews as lifelong opponents of any form of xenophobia. Indeed both could be described as xenophiles generally welcoming high levels of immigration.

Freedom of Inquiry

A common error of analysis is to assign collective responsibility to an entire category of humanity for crimes committed by a tiny subset of such groups and then to censor debate about key issues that affect us all through guilt by association with a few bad apples. Censorship of ideas creates an atmosphere in which people are scared to ask important questions and challenge orthodoxy. The spectres of Islamophobia and antisemitism do not serve to protect either Jewish or Muslim interests, but to silence dissent. If you care about Muslim lives, why not protest against UK logistical support for the ongoing bombing of North Yemen? If you care about antisemitic hate crimes, then you might like to have word with a few radical Islamists who learn Judaeophobic diatribes in their mosques. If you care about historical truth and our future as a free-thinking species, you may want to join me in taking a firm stance against the steady erosion of intellectual freedom.