Category Archives: Media Literacy

Why You Should Oppose The Censorship Of David Icke (Hint: It’s Got Nothing To Do With Icke)

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: Waking Times

Within 48 hours both Facebook and then Youtube have deleted the accounts of David Icke for posting “content that disputes the existence and transmission of Covid-19 as described by the WHO and the NHS.” Other platforms may soon fall in suit, as they did with Alex Jones in 2018.

This article is not about David Icke. I will say it again in italics for the especially dense: this article is not about David Icke. This article is about why we shouldn’t be okay with monopolistic billionaire-owned Silicon Valley tech giants with extensive ties to US government agencies controlling human communication.

I know next to nothing about David Icke, and I have done exactly zero research into his views for this article; for all I know he’s every bit the raving lunatic the narrative managers say he is. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re seeing a consistent and accelerating pattern of powerful plutocratic institutions collaborating with the US-centralized empire to control what ideas people around the world are permitted to share with each other, and it’s a very unsafe trajectory. Making this conversation about Icke and his views distracts from the very important topic we need to actually focus on discussing.

Journalist Matt Taibbi recently wrote an excellent essay about the dangers inherent in the increased demand we’ve been seeing for more censorship and deplatforming during the coronavirus pandemic, correctly arguing that more authoritarian control over the ideas people are allowed to discuss is vastly more dangerous than the ideas themselves.

“The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant,” Taibbi writes. “It’s astonishing that they don’t see this.”

“Instead of asking calmly if hydroxychloroquine works, or if the less restrictive Swedish crisis response has merit, or questioning why certain statistical assumptions about the seriousness of the crisis might have been off, we’re denouncing the questions themselves as infamous,” says Taibbi.

Taibbi argues against the increasingly normalized trend of elevating “authoritative” content while silencing content which does not wear that magical label in an attempt to fight disinformation. If you examine which content is considered “authoritative”, you’ll find a bunch of outlets who have consistently lied to the world about war after war, who spent years promoting the baseless conspiracy theory that Vladimir Putin had infiltrated and secured control over the executive branch of the US government, who consistently normalize a status quo which is wholly incompatible with the surviving and thriving of life on this planet.

Google, who owns Youtube, has been financially intertwined with US intelligence agencies since its very inception when it received research grants from the CIA and NSA for mass surveillance. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has called on the government to take “a more active role” in regulating “harmful content”, and has been actively collaborating with government agencies and government-funded think tanks to decide what content to remove. Social media executives are now routinely called before government hearings and lectured about the need to increase censorship under the implicit threat of antitrust cases being brought to bear. These massive corporations now consistently censor with an extreme bias against governments which refuse to bow to the demands of the US government and its allies.

In 2017, representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed on the US Senate floor that it is their responsibility to “quell information rebellions” and adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord.”

“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words,” the representatives were told. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”

Whenever anyone objects to censorship on these massive platforms they’re always told that those platforms are private companies who are free to do what they like on their private property, but how “private” is a corporation that is interlaced with government power with increasing inseparability? The reality is that in a corporatist system of government with vanishingly few meaningful distinctions between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship.

Proponents of increased internet censorship have already openly conceded this point. A recent Atlantic article by two legal professors subtitled “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong”, the case is made that western internet censorship will necessarily involve a collaboration with “private” corporations and government power.

“As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China,” the article’s authors favorably argue. “Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.”

Apart from the fact that they are here claiming that increasingly authoritarian speech control is good and necessary, these two bootlickers are absolutely correct. Human communication is indeed being controlled using the so-called “private sector” to circumvent constitutional limitations which prohibit the government from censoring speech directly.

These Silicon Valley tech corporations have ensured their continued monopolistic dominance by demonstrating their willingness to collaborate with establishment power structures, so there are no platforms of anywhere near the same size and influence that people can move to if they don’t feel like letting government-tied plutocrats police what thoughts are permitted to enter into their minds. This has given this corporate-government alliance the ability to control the thoughts that people are allowed to share, discuss and think about in the same way totalitarian governments can, with the false mask of freedom plastered over it.

A truly free being does not need an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to protect their mind from David Icke. A truly free being does not want an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to exert any control whatsoever over what ideas they are permitted to share and what thoughts they are permitted to think. A truly free being opposes with all their might any attempt to lock in a paradigm where human communication (and thereby thought) is controlled by vast unaccountable power structures which benefit from the absence of dissent.

Be a truly free being. Oppose this intrusion into your mental sovereignty.

Stanford Study Proves Covid-19 Was Overhyped. “Death Rate Is Likely Under 0.2%”

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By Tony Cartalucci

Source: Global Research

MIT Tech Review’s hyped coverage of the Covid-19 outbreak is led by the tag-line, “Navigating a world reshaped by Covid-19.”

Their articles reflect an eager embracement of the public hysteria prompted by Covid-19’s spread, the socioeconomic paralysis it has created, and the many profitable solutions – particularly those involving technology – proposed to “shape” the world post-Covid-19.

It should come as no surprise that a corporate-influenced outlet hiding behind academia and technology would take issue with anyone casting doubt on just how warranted all of this hysteria really is or isn’t – going as far as labeling them “pandemic skeptics.”

This is particularly the case when MIT Tech Review covered the work of researchers at Stanford University who found a much larger number of people are infected with Covid-19 than reported – meaning that the death rate is much, much lower than we’ve been told.

In fact, MIT Tech Review had to admit that the actual death rate is likely under 0.2%, which means its is about as “dangerous” as the common flu. If the common flu isn’t “reshaping the world,” Covid-19 certainly isn’t – at least not the pathogen itself.

An Oblique Smear 

Instead of acknowledging the work of Stanford University as an important advancement in our understanding of Covid-19 and a check against public hysteria – MIT Tech Review peppered their article with oblique smears against the team who carried out the study.

The headline includes the subtitle (emphasis added), “A study from a noted pandemic skeptic suggests the virus is more widespread but less deadly than people think.”

We know that the suffix “-skeptic” is added to undermine the credibility of people who call into question widely promoted narratives. The article also uses the term “data skeptic” to describe John Ioannidis who helped carry out the study.

MIT Tech Review continued by adding:

Ioannidis, a Stanford medical statistician and a coauthor of the new report, made waves in March by suggesting the virus could be less deadly than people think, and that destroying the economy in the effort to fight it could be a “fiasco.”

Ioannidis’ statement regarding Covid-19 – even without the results of this study – is already self-evident even if looking only at available and limited statistics regarding Covid-19 infections versus deaths and the demographics hit hardest.

But Stanford’s findings not only bolster Ioannidis’ statement – the findings were predictable.

An RT article titled, “How likely are you (yes, you) to die from the Covid-19 virus?,” published over a month ago predicted (emphasis added):

When the worst of the crisis is over, the real overall death rate will potentially be significantly lower than the reported one — since many people will contract the virus but remain asymptomatic or display only mild symptoms and will never get tested at all.

Indeed, Jeremy Samuel Faust, a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital wrote in Slate that the frightening death rates are “unlikely to hold” as time goes on and that the true fatality rate is “likely to be far lower than current reports suggest.”

Stanford’s study confirms this. And it makes sense. Infection and death rates can only be determined by actually testing people – and the narrative the world has been presented is that not enough testing can be done because of a lack of testing kits, and those being tested are people who are already ill and showing symptoms.

Obviously if many more people have little to no symptoms and aren’t being tested – they also aren’t making it into Covid-19 infection statistics and thus “death rates” are artificially high because of this. If many more people are getting the virus and not dying, the death rate obviously goes down – in this case – drastically so.

The Guardian in an article titled, “Antibody study suggests coronavirus is far more widespread than previously thought,” would report:

The study from Stanford University, which was released Friday and has yet to be peer reviewed, tested samples from 3,330 people in Santa Clara county and found the virus was 50 to 85 times more common than official figures indicated.

The article would also reluctantly note that (emphasis added):

That also means coronavirus is potentially much less deadly to the overall population than initially thought. As of Tuesday, the US’s coronavirus death rate was 4.1% and Stanford researchers said their findings show a death rate of just 0.12% to 0.2%.

MIT Tech Review is based out of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology – the university the magazine is named after. Why – instead of an oblique smear against the Stanford team who carried out the study – didn’t MIT go out into their local community and carry out a similar study to compare results?

Isn’t that what real scientists are supposed to do?

MIT Tech Review closes its article on the study by reasserting a narrative meant to stoke panic and allow the publication to continue on with its “a world reshaped” theme, claiming:

Overall, there are more than 30,000 covid-19 deaths in the US, more than in any other country, so it’s hard to find good news in the blood surveys even if you are looking for it. If the Santa Clara study is accurate and the death rate is lower than many think, covid-19 is still going to lead to a shocking accumulation of bodies if it moves through the rest of the population, which explains the extraordinary stay-at-home measures in place in most of the country since March.

If 30,000 have died in the US because of Covid-19 since the virus appeared in December, that means another 30,000 would need to die this month and next in order for it to even match a moderate to severe annual flu season which runs from December to May.

So – no – there is not going to be a “shocking accumulation of bodies” unless Covid-19 deaths are presented to the public by the media out of context deliberately to shock uninformed audiences. And thus – obviously – it does not “explain the extraordinary stay-at-home measures in place in most of the country since March” or the hysteria promoted by MIT Tech Review in its other Covid-19 articles.

Studies will continue to emerge proving what many have already known – that Covid-19 the pathogen is nowhere near the threat we were told and nowhere near justifying “Covid-19 the hysteria.” Society is in the crosshairs for transformative policies enacted by the very interests who hyped the outbreak in contradiction to scientific fact, not because of it.

It is important to expose this and more importantly to resist it. It is also important to ensure that the governments, politicians, “experts,” institutions, and corporations that were involved in hyping Covid-19 and all the socioeconomic damage it has done never be allowed to do so again.

 

Reactions to the Corona Virus Hint of a Wider Agenda

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By James O’Neill

Source: Land Destroyer

The western world has gone into a phase of unprecedented lockdown. Major airlines have ceased international operations. It is an open question is to whether or not they will be able to resume operations when and if the current draconian restrictions are lifted. In Australia, the Federal government has ceased to sit and the government has announced that this parliamentary closure will extend until at least August.

Quite why such a lockdown is necessary is unclear. No convincing explanation has been offered by the government and it is an extreme step that comparable nations in North America, the United Kingdom and all of Europe have found unnecessary. One of the most alarming consequences of this fundamental attack on the notion of Parliamentary accountability is that the decision was met with acceptance by the official Opposition and muted negative comment, if at all, by the major mainstream media.

Media coverage of the pandemic has been extraordinary. At least half of the nightly main television news bulletins have been devoted to coverage of the pandemic, although whether it actually adds to our degree of knowledge is at best debatable.

The statistics as to those affected, dying and recovery are presented each night like some grizzly football score. How accurate or complete those statistics are is a very open question. They are presented however as some form of immutable truth with nary a question as to their accuracy or reliability.

There are serious questions being asked as to the real origins of the current pandemic. We are constantly told by the mainstream media that it originated in China, and that “fact” is presented as something beyond question. The more we learn however, the less reliable that complacent assertion appears to be.

It is true that the first mainstream media reports of the virus came out of China’s Wuhan City, and urban agglomeration of some 12 million inhabitants. That reporting betrayed a number of assumptions that are difficult to sustain.

Where a virus is first reported does not automatically equate with where it began. One reason for this is that people being infected or dying are not necessarily correctly defined as to the cause of death or illness. This is particularly the case here with multiple instances of the illness were initially defined as the current illustration of the annual influenza epidemic which inflict and kill millions of people each year.

A second factor is that a virus can be imported into a country, either by accident or deliberately, by those acting for or on behalf of another nation. This is not idle speculation in the present case. There is now very good evidence that the virus was imported into the city of Wuhan at a time contemporaneous with the holding in that city of the quadrennial Military Games.

Representatives of more than 100 nations attended and participated in those games. The United States contingent was of particular interest for a number of reasons.

The first is that its soldier participants had their worst medal performance since the games were first held a half century ago, not winning a single gold medal and finishing well down the medal table.

The second factor was that the hotel where the United States military participants stayed was itself a hotbed of infection, recording more than 40 cases of employees and guests infected by the virus. This is a remarkable coincidence that challenges the laws of probability theory.

A third clue is the way the western media have reported the Chinese experience. They have given prominence to United States President Donald Trump’s description of the pandemic as the “Chinese virus”. We know from 100+ years of experience with the Spanish flu of 1919 how a false label can be used to define an entire country on a wholly false basis.

The record clearly shows that the Chinese government alerted the World Health Organisation as soon as they had established the reality of the virus they were dealing with. This was before most western countries had even acknowledged that there was a problem.

This suspicion has been reinforced in recent weeks by the reporting of western media of the actions of the Russian and Chinese government to provide assistance where it was asked for. The Italian government for example was refused assistance by its European Union “partners” and it was the Russians who flew in giant planes full of urgently needed medical supplies, taking a lengthy roundabout route because of obstructive flyover permission.

This assistance was greeted with a sneer by the western media who contrived to find some sort of Russian plot in a selfless humanitarian exercise. A similar result was seen in the media’s response to Chinese aid which was denounced as either medically inadequate or done with ulterior motives.

In neither case was that View shared by the governments involved, the medical staff of the overstretched and under resourced hospitals, or the citizens of those countries aided by the Russian and Chinese medical supplies.

The writer Dimitri Orlov, who recently returned to live in Russia after many years residence in the United States, had a cynical but arguably realistic view of the virus. On 8 April 2020 he had this comment to make on his Patreon:

“China has just taught the world a major masterclass in biowarfare defence. It doesn’t matter whether SARS-Covid-19 was concocted in a United States biowarfare laboratory or not. The point is, it could have been, because why else would the United States have bio- warfare laboratories scattered around the globe? And why were they collecting DNA samples from local populations except to target them using bioweapons? And so after some amount of uncertainty and vacillation China opted to treat the SARS-COV-19 outbreak as an act of war and won! Russia has followed suit, and although it is too early to declare victory it too is likely to score a win on the biowarfare front.”

I respectfully share Mr Orlov’s view. We also have the curiously unexplained events at the United States’ Fort Detrick biowarfare facility. In July 2019 the facility was forced to temporarily close, reopening at the end of the year. It is one of the literally hundreds of such United States facilities scattered around the globe.

What makes Fort Detrick of particular interest in the current context was that it was known to be working on a Covid-19 type biological weapon. That the United States had succeeded in developing such a weapon was publicly proclaimed by Johns Hopkins University in October 2019. The timing of this announcement, the problems at Fort Detrick and the outbreak of the coronavirus goes beyond mere coincidence.

The wall to wall media coverage of the outbreak in the western media nonetheless fails to raise these fundamental and clearly relevant points.

It is one of the grim ironies of the present pandemic that the United States may well turn out to be the principal victim, at least among western nations. Even there, some questions exist. We know from the published data thus far that 70% of the fatalities in the United States have been in the black population, that represent only 10% of the national population.

Television pictures showing mass graves being created in public parks will do little to assuage growing public concern that allegedly “the richest country in the world” cannot even properly treat or bury their own disadvantaged citizens.

The consequences of this pandemic are likely to be vastly greater than originally thought. The average citizen would do well to strap themselves in for what is going to be a very bumpy ride.

Saturday Matinee: Out of Shadows

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Source: OutofShadows.org

The Out Of Shadows documentary lifts the mask on how the mainstream media & Hollywood manipulate & control the masses by spreading propaganda throughout their content. Our goal is to wake up the general public by shedding light on how we all have been lied to & brainwashed by a hidden enemy with a sinister agenda.

This project is the result of two years of blood, sweat and tears by a team of woke professionals. It’s been independently produced and funded and is available on many different platforms for FREE for anyone to watch. Patriots made this documentary with the sole purpose of getting the truth out there. If you like the documentary, please share this video.

Why are some respected alt-media embracing a police state?

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By Catte Black

Source: Off-Guardian.org

It should be obvious by now to anyone that the covid19 pandemic, whatever its origins, is being used to fast forward a “new normal” world of unparalleled government power, surveillance and curtailment of individual liberty.

We are looking already at:

  • Compulsory DNRs for some elderly.
  • Biometric chips or bracelets to monitor whether or not you have permission to be outside your home or engage in work
  • Drone surveillance as normal.
  • Apps on your phone that can detect any breach of the self-isolation policy.
  • Huge new police powers of arrest and detention for anyone suspected of carrying the virus.
  • Suspension of elections for indefinite periods at government discretion

And this is only the starter course. We can be pretty sure they are currently just easing us in. The real stuff will be rolling along in the next months or maybe years (depending on how quickly they feel able to get this on)

This is the fabric of nightmare. A worst-case horror story that is the absolute quintessence of everything the alt-media is supposed to oppose.

Surely, you would think, any self-respecting alt-media person would be opposing this with everything they have while they still have a voice.

Well, some of us are of course. And we’re going to be posting links to other sites currently doing great work challenging this rollout.

But, weeks into this crisis, there are some very prominent voices still refusing to either question the official narrative of the pandemic or unequivocally condemn the fast dawn of the “new normal” Brave New World.

We’ve held off from confronting this for a while now. We figured people needed time to adjust or wake up to the reality of what was happening. It’s shocking after all, and deeply disorienting, and different individuals need different amounts of time to get their bearings when something that shakes their worldview comes along.

But adjustment time is long over by now.

Let’s also be clear, we’re not condemning people for simply disagreeing with us. We expect disagreement on some issues. It’s a source of strength for all of us.

But this is not about relatively minor differences of opinion or interpretation.

This is sophisticated analysts, with resources and experience, failing to condemn, and even supporting, what amounts to de facto international martial law.

This is Labour activists who mere weeks ago were calling Boris Johnson a murderer and psychopath, now cheering as he is handed total control of their lives and their children’s lives.

This is respected journalists, commentators and academics who loudly condemned the cynical lies about WMDs or ‘chemical attacks’ in Douma, the fake videos and fake White Helmets, suddenly and uncritically accepting the veracity of every government virus narrative, every unsourced video and media meme that has #covid19 as a hashtag.

This is people who have campaigned against the Patriot Act for 19 years, signing off on the new US anti-covid19 legislation without a murmur; who know that governments always abuse their powers, thinking they somehow just won’t abuse these.

This is people who know about Guantanamo and who have seen Julian Assange humiliated and abused, somehow thinking the people who did these things won’t use the new post-covid police state to do them even more.

This is something more than simple denial. It’s – what?

Are they simply paralysed with fear, either of the hyped-up virus, or the scary dystopia we are all suddenly inhabiting? Is it Stockholm Syndrome? Is it still possible some of them will wake up or unfreeze and see what is going on?

Are some of them gatekeepers, sleeper assets being activated in this extreme situation specifically to divert and delude the questioning and sceptical people who tend to follow them?

Well, I guess we can’t completely rule that out, can we, though I wouldn’t want to make that claim about anyone.

Are some just being self-serving and shallow, playing at being dissident while the price was low enough? Did they think writing a popular alt media blog was an easy way to be cool, but never had any intention of standing by any of it once it got a bit risky to do so?

I mean you are not gonna get that coveted slot on RT or Buzzfeed by taking on this major ‘new normal’ narrative are you? So that’s a factor potentially.

You can see the appeal of just sitting on the fence and talking in vague terms about how this fascism malarkey is a bit worrying, but stopping short of actually condemning it. That way you keep the option open to be ‘radical’ again once it looks safe enough to do so, but also don’t risk your comfy and lucrative relationship with the Establishment Left, who are all eagerly embracing the new age of mass incarceration and really want you to do the same.

Are some, as has been unkindly suggested, just too stupid to see what’s going on? Do epidemiology stats hurt their brains? Does thinking too much take up valuable psychobabble time? Is it hard to see the black clouds of tyranny rolling in when your head is too firmly planted in your own delightfully quirky posterior?

Or – we have to ask this – are a number of them simply, well, fascists? Do they actually support tyrannical top-down authoritarianism? Has their beef with the PTB merely been that they themselves are not currently high enough up that hierarchy? And do they see the covid19 rollout as some sort of revolution that will launch them and their chums into the positions of sweet supremacy they always knew they deserved?

Easy to preach permanent lockdown and biometric implant slavery when you figure none of it will apply to you and your family, I suppose.

All of these potential explanations may be the answer in some cases. And there could be a hundred other reasons besides.

But, in the end, do the explanations really matter? Do they change anything? Excuse anything?

The fact is these people stood at the barricades cheering and rallying the masses until the tanks could be seen rolling down the street – when they promptly upped and went over to join them.

Is there anything else to be said about that?

And where do we go from here?

Saturday Matinee: All Governments Lie

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All Governments Lie

Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone

Source: Kanopy

Independent journalists expose government lies and corporate deception, inspired by the legendary investigative journalist I.F. Stone.

With government deception rampant, and intrusion of state surveillance into private life never more egregious, independent voices like Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Amy Goodman are crucially important. All three are inspired by the iconoclastic rebel journalist named I. F. Stone, whose fearless, independent reporting from 1953 to 1971 filled a tiny 4-page newsletter which he wrote, published and carried to the mailbox every week.

This documentary will change the way you look at the mainstream media. Giant media conglomerates are increasingly reluctant to investigate or criticize government policies, particularly on defense, security and intelligence issues.

 

Watch the film on Kanopy here.

The Culture of Fear: Coronavirus and the Human Animal

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By Steve Attridge

Source: Waking Times

Fear is a weapon. It is also a deadly disease, far more potent than Corona virus. It also tells us much about our society, our relationships and ourselves. Fear inhibits thought, it restricts freedom, it limits imagination and it isolates us from each other and ultimately from ourselves. It is also a useful political and cultural tool to bend and even break people.

A dictionary definition of fear is that it is an unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger, pain, or harm.

So it is a mental state. An imaginary act, and the key word is threat. There are well over five hundred fears and phobias, and the list is growing as our culture becomes increasingly terrified of itself, narcissistic and neurotic.

There is real fear and there is manufactured fear. If someone is running at you holding a machete and saying they want to kill you then flight or fight kicks in and fear is good. If a suicide bomber jumps at you shouting Allah Akbar fear is good. It will also help the adrenalin to kick in when you run away. To stay put and ignore your fear is just silly.

But manufactured fear is something else altogether. It may be based on something entirely imaginary, such as four years ago if the majority voted for Brexit the economy would collapse overnight. People actually said that. It didn’t. Or it may be based on something real, like coronavirus, but then be distorted. In that case the fear is not a healthy response, it’s kneejerk reaction that paralyses us from proper understanding.

The manufacture of fear has three steps to it; one. Seed it. Two – let it grow. Three – harvest it. Why frighten people? Because frightened people are diminished. They shrink. They eventually lose their humanity. They are easy to manipulate. The holocaust is a terrible example of this.

Just think of the things that have been used to frighten us: Brexit, the Corona virus, financial collapse, political correctness, global warming – all of these things have a currency of fear. Even something like the TV license is designed to create fear. You get a letter from the TV Licensing agency – of course outsourced by the BBC with tax payers money to get someone else to do their dirty work. You’d think if the BBC was so great they’d say – look what amazing things you’re getting for your money – re runs, WOKE dramas and propaganda – who wouldn’t want to pay for that. But no – the letter is a threat, full of words like warning, enforcement, penalty, criminal, which criminalise you in advance and is designed only to frighten you into paying their absurd tax – over five billion a year to supplement ludicrous salaries, exorbitant expenses, and substandard programming that fewer and fewer people want to watch.

The coronavirus is the latest example of fear mongering and it is part of a bigger picture. In a surveillance society and where police are already being used to monitor people, it only takes a few emergency powers to crank up the law telling us where we can go, who we can go with and how long we can stay there. The army is on standby.

In terms of a Fear index this virus also shows how far we have come along the road of expecting others to do our thinking for us.

This virus is nasty but it does not justify the global terror unleashed by constant media fear mongering. In the UK 6,600 people have died of flu and 120,000 people have been hospitalized with it during the 2019-2020 flu season, but we haven’t got our knickers in a twist over that. At the time of making this video 71 have died in the UK of coronavirus. It seems that most people recover from the virus. It is real but it is distorted in how it is presented and perceived. And we must guard against false perceptions. Science is still grappling with this virus so we should be wary of those who espouse certainties.

We live in a world of manufactured fears because in a sense they are easier to deal with than real fears. And so many people think they know best. And they can’t shut about it and themselves. I was in a coffee shop in London’s Soho about a month ago. Next to me was a man wearing expensively scruffy jeans, a little goatee beard hiding a double chin, and talking very loudly. It was clear he was a metropolitan liberal and, I had to smile, it turned out he worked in television. The woman he was talking at, rather than to, nodded furiously at everything he said and constantly furrowed her brow to create the illusion of thought. In fifteen minutes he poured ridicule on Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Brexit, Nigel Farage, global warming – all the usual suspects for metropolitan liberals – as well as Israel, the virus, the Syrian government, racists, fascists – these last two seemed to be everyone who didn’t think like him. He said he found all these things terrifying and only the ignorant wouldn’t be scared shitless by them. As he pontificated he scoffed a panini with ham and lettuce and smashed avocado on the side. He also had a double expresso. The woman held a Pierre Cardin bag.

Four things about this. One. The ham came from a pig. If motormouth with a beard really wanted to experience fear, indeed terror, just visit an abattoir. Two. Avocado farming is causing deforestation, destroying ecosystems, funding drug cartels, and contributing to climate change. In the biggest avocado producing region in the world in Mexico, farmers are illegally razing pine forests in order to plant lucrative avocado trees. Three. Coffee is often used by drug cartels to smuggle drugs. Drug cartels are often used to protect coffee production. Migrant workers are paid poorly and are at the mercy of seasonal variations. Many die. Four. Pierre Cardin has repeatedly come under fire for using suppliers that employ child labour that amounts to slavery. Fear of starvation often forces these kids into slavery, and many become ill. Many die prematurely. So while Motormouth was pontificating his litany of moans the real holocaust of fear and suffering was on the little table in front of him where the ghosts of a thousand stories went unheard.

My point is that people prefer their fears when they can blame someone else and not take responsibility for the actual concrete details surrounding them. That requires real thought and real responsibility.

Fifty years ago, the psychiatrist R.D. Laing said that we are becoming frightened of our own minds. Psychophobia. That the medical profession is constantly coming up with new illnesses, new phobias, new forms of depression, so that eventually everyone is ill, just as in WOKE thinking everyone is a victim or an oppressor. So, everyone is frightened of something. But what they are actually frightened of is themselves – of the body that harbours disease, of thoughts that are no longer allowed, ideas that are frowned upon, or even outlawed, of speech that dares to criticise and articulate uncomfortable truths. So this is the real virus – the manufacture and dissemination of fear. And it’s deadly.

Social media narrows our field of vision and experience too by placing us in discrete groups of like-minded people – and of course we collude in this – so that people start to feel the whole world thinks like them. Then when differences do strike , people either get ‘triggered’ or terrified or abusive.

The supermarket is full of murderous intentions. The person who last week was a good liberal is now considering hacking an old man to death to steal his toilet roll. The woman who last week was delivering meals on wheels is now thinking of battering her neighbour with her shopping trolley because she’s taken the last 23 tins of baked beans. At my local hospital people have ripped the hand sanitisers off the walls and stolen them and filched toilet rolls from the hospital toilets. In America there are queues outside gun shops as people panic buy weapons because of the virus. This is a culture that has been fed on fake news, news as propaganda, partial science, WOKE thinking and a popular culture that is addicted to zombies, invasions, virus stories, and an arts culture that has been sanitised to the point of banality. Walk into a crowded room and say you’ve got corona virus and sneeze and then see how long before people are smashing each other to the ground to get out.

We are so used to living in our little bubbles that we have lost touch with the real, with each other and with ourselves. We are slaves to fear. We are paralysed by it, from small nagging anxieties to full-blown pathologies. Peoples imaginations have become shrunken receptacles for fear.

The lion doesn’t fear attacking the antelope. The mosquito doesn’t fear biting. The hawk doesn’t fear flying or hunting. These creatures are simply being themselves and their natures are acting through them, that they may survive.

People will say – Oh but we have bigger brains. We’re top of the pile. But the question is not how big the brain is but how much of it is used. To judge by the behaviour of many, about one per cent, so in reality we may be on the bottom rung of the evolutionary ladder.

It is also impossible to separate the idea of fear from religiosity. Is the coronavirus some sort of punishment by something greater than ourselves, of retribution, of being judged, of something supernatural out to get us, of hell. And traditionally of course religions use fear to control people. If you think there is something out there that knows every thought you have then you might start to fear your own thoughts. In a largely secular society those primitive, animistic, religious fears leap into all kinds of strange territories – why doesn’t the government (i.e. a god substitute) save us? Is it a judgement and punishment from nature? And so it gets complicated and messy.

During this virus, there is much talk of communal solidarity, as in certain communities in World War Two. People helped each other. There will be cases of that, but it’s a bad analogy. During that war there was a perceived common enemy out there and a common purpose. With the virus the enemy is our own biology, our neighbours and the strangers around us. So there is fear everywhere, inside and out. Is he or she a disease on legs? Am I?

Fear weakens and diminishes us. Many have forgotten how to imagine the big picture. To join up the dots. I used to teach a course on Leonardo Da Vinci. The whole purpose of the course was to help people, including myself, to reawaken Renaissance thinking. Focus on detail but always be aware of the big picture. To put apparently isolated events and facts into the larger map. Like the elephant in the land of the blind, where one person touches the trunk and thinks that is an elephant, another the tail and thinks that is an elephant. But it needs someone to see that it is the sum of the parts that makes something what it is. To make connections, not based on wild speculations, but on what is there. And if people laugh at what you discover, or hate you for it, then too bad. Because it is more important to think fearlessly in the hope that you can then live fearlessly.

A few possible ways out of this (there are others, of course):

Magical thinking and Life Writing. Using language to explore and liberate rather than to inhibit or control or punish.

Imaging fear in order to control it, and not the other way round. Image making as a positive route through life. I carry a notebook and if something scares me I make a doodle of what I think the fear looks like. Pretty soon I’m smiling at it.

Reclaiming the unconscious as a journey full of delights and dangers and a place where ideas and thoughts and events can be rehearsed and explored. I think many of my books attempt this, and often fail, but at least I try. I do the same in my teaching.

Related to the unconscious is jettisoning the taboos surrounding certain words and thoughts. Reclaiming free speech, and therefore free thought. Then the world starts to crack open rather than shut down.

Understanding that orthodoxies invariably become corrupt and controlling, in religions and in politics and culture. The way to correct this is by teaching critical thinking – i.e. how to think and not what to think.

Refocusing on the individual as the prime focus for collective action.

Question Everything

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By Michael Krieger

Source: Liberty Blitzkrieg

Crises, like pandemics, don’t break things in and of themselves; they show you what’s already broken.

– Patrick Wyman

Big macro crises in any form are scary, massively disruptive, and in some cases, literally deadly. This is why governments and entrenched institutions always see such events as opportunities to further consolidate wealth and power.

The current global pandemic is no exception, as I detailed in last week’s piece: Power Grab. While it’s necessary to be aware of this reality — and to push back against it wherever possible — it’s equally important to recognize there’s a silver lining to all of this.

The paradigm we live under depends on us not thinking too hard about how power functions. It relies on us being so busy with the basics of survival, or distracted by superficial consumerism and endless entertainment, to contemplate how the system actually works. This method of social control has been wildly successful throughout my lifetime, but what’s interesting about moments of global crises is the mask is forced off for a period. In a desperate scramble to marshal all of the corporate-imperial state’s resources to save the interests of the oligarchy, we’re shown in full color who really matters and who doesn’t.

You do not matter. The imperial state doesn’t care about you. Oligarchs don’t care about you. Mega corporations don’t care about you. This truth is cleverly hidden from much of the public during “normal” times when the machine is humming along as intended, but it’s far more in your face during a crisis period. It’s much harder to hide the truth when the world gets turned upside down.

Aside from the grotesque spectacle of the U.S. government funneling all of its resources toward propping up Wall Street and large corporations, this crisis has exposed the rot and disfunction in another meaningful way. Our health experts, ostensibly there to help the public navigate exactly this sort of event, have failed us in spectacular fashion.

https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1233725785283932160

This is what political actors masquerading as experts do in a crisis. They either give bad advice, or intentionally mislead the public to hide the fact the U.S. simply doesn’t have adequate mask supply and sent its manufacturing capacity overseas. Which brings up an important topic worthy of further discussion: the crucial distinction between experts and expertise.

An “expert” in our society is someone with expertise in a particular field who’s been propped up by either the media, government or both as an authoritative source to listen to on a particular topic. This individual’s elevated stature is artificially created by an external source that’s selected this particular person as someone you should listen to. It tends to be a political appointment. This person has been chosen, not only because he or she has expertise (many others also do), but due to other attributes that appeal to those who’ve decided to prop them up. Anyone who’s worked in corporate America knows full well that many of those promoted to middle management, or higher, often end up there not because they’re particularly skilled, but because they’re good at playing politics and know the right ass to kiss. The same is true in all large organizations, and government is no exception.

In the days before the internet and social media, the public might know that government/media experts were behaving dishonestly, but didn’t have realtime access to competitive nonpolitical voices with equal or superior expertise to the government experts. What many of us discovered during this pandemic is people with expertise engaging publicly on Twitter provided far better and more timely advice than the government/media experts. This makes perfect sense because these people tend to not be political actors, but rather humans attempting to share information in an honest and selfless manner. If we’ve learned anything in the 21st century, it’s that actual track records don’t matter when it comes to media and government positions. In fact, the more catastrophically wrong you are in the interests of oligarchy, the more likely you are to be promoted and elevated.

Fortunately, I entered this crisis with a well established distrust of mass media and government, and therefore knew better than to look toward their experts for any useful guidance. Rather, I sought out the opinions of various nonpolitical individuals with relevant expertise who helped me see things for how they were very early on. Others have not been as lucky, but will no doubt emerge from this crisis with a deep distrust of established institutions and individuals, and with very good reason.

We’ve just witnessed a catastrophic failure of the centralized state in America, and the blowback will resonate within the larger culture for years if not decades. Similar to how many people were shaken to their core during the financial crisis a decade ago, I think this pandemic event will lead to an even larger wave of people awakening to how completely rotten, pernicious and corrupt the whole system is. Once you see that reality in all its glory, you can’t unsee it.

Of course, recognizing how broken things are isn’t enough. We need to have a thoughtful conversation about what we have too much of versus what we need. If we’re going to change the world, we need a vision. I have some thoughts on the matter.

Nothing is set in stone. The world as it is today is not some divine eternal paradigm beyond reproach. Humans shape the world through their choices, actions and mentality.

For additional thoughts on that and much more, check out my recent interview with Tales From the Crypt.