Category: Power Dynamics

Categories
All in the Mind Computing Power Dynamics

The Lying Classes

Pinocchio

The well-to-do managerial classes suffer from an extreme form of cognitive dissonance. In public, they love to express their sympathy with the plight of the underclasses, especially those who belong to perceived victim groups. In private, they dream of a society where everyone shares their narrow worldview and the uncooperative great unwashed masses have either embraced new more malleable childlike identities or have disappeared into oblivion. They can only tolerate the underclasses if they know their place and do not question official experts. In a new virtual reality, the guardians of truth may hide unspeakable crimes against humanity while treating whistle-blowers and dissidents as terrorists or psychiatric patients. If you think this sounds far-fetched, just consider the plight of former school chaplain, Dr Bernard Randall, who was reported to the UK’s counter-terrorism body, Prevent, for delivering a sermon on respectful free speech. It is now clear our technocratic masters want to ensure the next generation is unaware of alternative perspectives. They can only trust the upper echelons of the managerial classes to resolve controversies. Everyone else should internalise and recycle the authorised scientific consensus, even if it conflicts with our first-hand experience, common sense intuition and earlier scientific orthodoxies.

We could see the warning signs of our current drift towards progressive totalitarianism long before the covid scare. While politicians posing on the liberal left may be well-intentioned, their advisors have consistently promoted policies that disempower the working classes. Comprehensive education in large high schools stifles excellence and creativity. Teachers spend more time on dealing with inevitable conflicts in oversized classes than imparting a passion for learning. Such an approach rewards conformity and penalises critical thinking. Schools no longer teach children how to think but rather what to think. The same well-paid consultants support welfare incentives for smaller and more malleable non-traditional family units, while also favouring the influx of new communities with a stronger work ethic. Ironically new immigrant communities often prefer traditional families and retain more socially conservative attitudes. As a result, millions of working-class youngsters have been deprived of meaningful job opportunities. First they had to endure dumbed-down schooling that failed to inspire them, then they encountered intense competition at the lower end of the labour market unable to compete with better disciplined newcomers and finally, they succumbed to the allure of welfare dependence and became the clients of mental health outreach workers.

For much of the 20th century the upwardly mobile middle classes continued to grow, while the numbers of traditional blue-collar workers gradually shrank. Big business first outsourced and then automated manufacturing. By the turn of the millennium, the burgeoning service sector employed the lowest paid workers such as temporary burger flippers, toilet cleaners or fast-food delivery drivers, with gruelling farm labour and food processing assigned mainly to transient migrant labourers. A dwindling minority of the working people now make essential goods or provide mission-critical services. Since the advent of medical martial law in early 2020, we’ve learned to call such people key workers. Policymakers now consider everyone else expendable or in modern parlance non-essential. Seriously, our authorities seem more concerned about covid compliance and vaccine acceptance than helping young people gain fruitful employment and start natural families. In the UK a nominally Conservative government has overseen the largest expansion of welfare dependence ever and the decimation of independent small businesses. The other main parties all support the rapid transition to a new economy that will exclude most adults of working age from any meaningful participation, except as cheerleaders, rule enforcers and carers.  Via the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Huawei, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, the global high-tech industrial complex has swept aside the old debates over public ownership, EU membership and Scottish independence. The National Health Service has now effectively become a subsidiary of big pharma with central government merely dishing out digital cash underwritten by banking cartels.

The Equality Myth

In classic NewSpeak we are “the same but different”. Learning disability charities love the slogan and shamelessly recycle it for very different categories of people with additional support needs. Expressions such as differently-abled may make us feel good about our assigned disability but really mean that some people are more equal than others, i.e. not equal at all. Since the early 2000s I’ve chronicled a growing trend to broaden the definition of learning disabilities to cover anyone who has challenges in any intellectually demanding task. Dyslexia is both hard to define and may affect as many as 10% of the population. A much larger percentage could be mathematically challenged and the vast majority of mobile phone users would struggle with rudimentary programming concepts. Eventually, learning disabilities may apply to anyone below the top 10% of the IQ range (approximately 120+). As smart automation gathers pace, more and more workers within the medium intelligence range (80 to 120) will lose their jobs to AI. With moves afoot to roll out universal basic income, people will soon be rewarded not for their labour but for their compliance and good behaviour with social credits. Many may earn a little extra as part-time as carers, customer relations managers or narrative enforcers. However, these roles are non-essential and serve only to manage the moods and behaviour of other members of the underclasses. We can see that now with store staff employed not to serve customers - something machines can easily do these days - but to ensure visitors comply with new covid measures. It should come as little surprise that over the last 15 months governments around the globe have targeted independent small businesses that are not subservient to larger corporations. This follows in the wake of a three-decade-long worldwide onslaught against small-scale farmers. It hardly comes as a surprise that Neil Ferguson’s wild projections of mass death also served to bankrupt family-run livestock farms in the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, leading to the incineration of over 6 million animals.

Traditional skillsets, of the kind farmers and craftsmen once had in abundance, rely on multiple facets of intelligence, experience and conscientiousness. Devoted generalists could succeed in life with a can-do attitude. This is no longer the case. A broad range of mediocre skills no longer suffice for anything but personal care and hobbies in a world where big business with its vast economies of scale and smart automation can undercut any talented artisan. There remain niche markets for millionaires prepared to spend £13,000 on a handcrafted record player, but the rest of us may enjoy superior sound from a digital download at a fraction of the cost. Craftspeople work today more as artists who sell their creative spirit more than their actual products. An overpriced custom turntable is a work of art whose market value depends on its uniqueness and authentic embodiment of a bygone technological era. However, only a tiny minority of the millions of skilled workers who once formed the bedrock of modern industrial societies will transition to new roles as celebrity artisans. Alas most young adults have chosen to pursue tertiary-sector professions that are neither mission-critical nor immune from smart automation. We live in a world with more recruiters than engineers and more social workers than fishermen.

The once culturally homogenous working classes have now morphed into a motley collection of atomised individuals that social scientists may categorise by employability and mental health. A new social structure is rapidly emerging:

  1. Non-academic people, i.e. within the low to medium intelligence range:
    1. The caring classes: Well-socialised and compliant members may earn extra within the social care and awareness-raising sector. Their jobs may be non-essential but serve to give people a sense of purpose and participation.
    2. The idle classes: Well-socialised but lethargic members may rely on UBI (universal basic income), but occasionally earn social credits for compliant behaviour. In practice, most people will flow between these groups at different stage in their lives.
    3. The victim classes: This growing subsection of emotionally unstable and often uncooperative individuals, prone to drug abuse and risky behaviours, will be subject to intensive surveillance and act as guinea pigs in social and medical experiments. As long as their noncompliance is expressed through recreational drugs, junk culture and sports, social workers can prevent the brighter elements within this subgroup from succumbing to the lures of personal independence and associating with subversive intellectuals.
  2. Academically gifted, i.e. within the upper 10 to 20% of the intelligence range.
    1. The Managerial classes comprise the better-socialised and more cooperative among the new upper classes, they will vary from low-ranking social engineers to high-status policy analysts but will rely increasingly on artificial intelligence.
    2. The Engineering classes: This more creative but cliquey group will be rewarded for their technical expertise and afforded greater personal freedoms within their exclusive clubs.
    3. The critically thinking classes will form a subversive subset of the first two subgroups. They may be tolerated to a limited extent to allow some innovation but must be carefully monitored at all times. When dissident academics overstep the mark, they will be treated as psychiatric patients but kept well away from other potential troublemakers.

I have just outlined a likely outcome of the Great Reset within the next 10 to 20 years, assuming it all goes to plan, which I hope it will not. The policy planners at the World Economic Forum seek to phase out the middle and skilled working classes as they roll out UBI and social credits while restricting private ownership of real estate and motor vehicles. Our challenge is to build an alternative and avert this drift towards a Huxleyan dystopia. Meanwhile, the progressive chattering classes, from media pundits and leftwing politicians to trade union leaders, have betrayed us by denying us any meaningful bargaining power. Among the biggest cheerleaders for the so-called zero-covid strategy favoured by many progressive think tanks such as the misnamed Independent SAGE in the UK, are the trade unions. They perpetuate the founding myths of the corona scam, through their dogmatic embracement of face masks in workplaces and schools and their abject failure to oppose experimental gene therapy injections in school children, despite ample scientific evidence of their potential for long-term neurological adverse effects. Many wishful thinking lower-ranking middle managers may mean well, but they serve the interests of their technocratic masters.

It beggars belief how anyone with half a brain could let an obsession with infection rates destroy the freedom of future generations.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Corporate Censors and Fact Fabricators

Every Little Thing is Going to be Alright

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

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

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

Ministries of Truth

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

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

Classic smear tactics

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

Manufacturing Reality

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

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

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Covid Cultism in the Age of Experts

Covid cult

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

Cultists

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

Heretics

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

The Acquiescent Majority

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

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

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Another Twitter Suspension

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

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

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

Categories
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.

Categories
Power Dynamics

Is this the End of the American Dream?

How the virus scare empowers Big Tech Oligarchs

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.