Tag Archives: Panic

The media’s addiction to Covid-19 ‘fear porn’ is perpetuating an ever-worsening cycle of societal damage across the world

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By Eva K Bartlett

Source: In Gaza and Beyond

Over the past year and a half, hysterical media reporting on matters Covid-19 has reduced some people to a fearful state of unquestioning compliance – including a great number of otherwise critically-thinking journalists.

With screaming headlines in bold and large font such as, ‘Will this nightmare ever end?’ and ‘Mutant virus skyrockets…’ and ‘Fear grows across the country: VIRUS PANIC’, and ‘Coronavirus horror: Social media footage shows infected Wuhan residents ‘act like zombies’, it is no wonder many people are in a state of panic.

In times when many are suffering mentally and physically under unnecessary and prolonged lockdowns, the incessant fear porn is causing excessive anxiety, which in turn will affect the health & mental well-being of some, if not many. 

In government documents from the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) dated from March 2020 advice was given saying: “The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging… This could potentially be done by trained community support volunteers, by targeted media campaigns, social media” 

I’d say the UK media campaigns certainly did the job, and other Western nations got similar directives. The UK government also became the nation’s biggest advertiser in 2020, make what you will of the potential ramifications that could have on cash-strapped newspapers and their supposed ‘independence’.

Having myself been deeply focused on exposing war propaganda and other media lies around Syria, Palestine, Venezuela, and elsewhere over the years, my default position has become one of deep cynicism on mass media reporting. Yes, you can find nuggets of truth, or even excellent journalists in mainstream publications, honestly challenging the narratives.

But those are few and far between, generally you find copy-paste propaganda emanating largely from the bowels of the USA and the UK.

A study by Swiss Propaganda Research (SPR) noted, “most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.” 

Those agencies are AP, Reuters, and AFP. SPR notes:

“The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world.”

Given all of this, I’ve come to believe that with regard to media reporting on Covid-19, my cynicism is well-deserved.

Covid-19 reporting has increasingly been utterly absurd, with stories of people dropping dead in the streets, ice rink morgues to cope with the mountains of bodies, footage of an overcrowded New York hospital (that just happened to be of an Italian hospital), claims of animals testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, and more recently reports of people dying post-jab but we are told ‘it could have been worse!’

This campaign of fear caused the public to massively overestimate the lethality of Covid-19, which as un-alarmist voices note has a survival rate of over 99%. 

When months into the outbreak it became apparent that SARS-CoV-2 was far less lethal than first predicted, the media and talking heads moved from talking about ‘Covid deaths’ to ‘positive cases’. 

Although relatively early on a goat and pawpaw tested positive for Covid-19, instead of then scrutinizing the accuracy of the PCR test as a means of ‘detecting Covid-19’, the media continued to hype the rise in Covid ‘cases’. 

In lockstep, ‘Covid testing’ was increased dramatically using the PCR test (recently revoked by the CDC). This inevitably pumped up the number of ‘cases’, which mass media have in turn promoted non-stop, this in turn gave ammunition to those enforcing lockdowns and vaccines.

By now hundreds of vocal doctors, nurses, virologists, immunologists, and other professionals actually worth listening to, whose data and experience counter the hype pumped out in media have very quickly disappeared from social media, or otherwise deemed quacks, and are thus largely silenced. This leaves the general public mainly getting their information via hyped-up media. 

Alongside this, there have been relentless ad hominem attacks on journalists who pose legitimate questions and uncomfortable truths about the official narratives around Covid-19. 

For offering perspectives which contradict the standard narratives around Covid-19, journalists have been deemed conspiracy theorists, pandemic-deniers, right-wingers, selfish… I’m sure I’ve missed quite a few slurs. 

When it comes to matters Covid-19, it is suddenly unacceptable to question ‘The Science’, question the authorities, or question the same media that sold us WMDs in Iraq and chemical attacks in Syria.

Media are the drivers of Covid hysteria, and it is the daily bombardment of fear porn that confuses average people and enables tyrannical powers to be brought in, largely unchallenged. 

As it is the responsibility of journalists to expose lies around wars of aggression, it is also the duty of journalists to do so around Covid-19. For some journalists who have stubbornly refused to hold power to account, instead toeing the line on all things Covid, it appears their fear is of losing an audience and not of a virus.

Whether or not you agree with dissenting voices’ questions and criticisms, we have the right to ask and make them. We do so, knowing that remaining silent in the face of the brutal Covid measures is a guaranteed path to tyranny.

Dr. Peter Gotzsche On Coronavirus: “A Pandemic Of Panic, More Than Anything Else”

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By Richard Enos

Source: Collective Evolution

Peter Gotzsche, a Danish physician and medical researcher, is well placed to comment on the measures being imposed to combat the Coronavirus. And he has his reasons to be suspicious of some of those measures.

In 1993, Gotzsche co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration, an international and independent non-profit organization that produces and disseminates systematic reviews of healthcare interventions and diagnostic tests, and promotes the search for evidence in the form of clinical trials and other interventional studies. As I examined in-depth in a previous article ‘Bill Gates Donation Turns Respected Independent Research Company Into HPV Vaccine Supporter,’ a massive donation of over $1M USD from Bill Gates was part of the transformation of Cochrane from an open and independent research company to a top-down hierarchy in which ‘there is stronger and stronger resistance to say anything that could bother pharmaceutical industry interests.’

In an unprecedented move, Peter Gotzsche was expelled from the Cochrane Collaboration in 2018 by a powerful minority within the newly-instituted Governing Board. Gotzsche’s outspoken and independent scrutiny of the pharmaceutical industry, highlighted in his 2014 book Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How big pharma has corrupted healthcare, made him an insufferable opponent to Cochrane’s new agenda. Suffice it to say, when we hear Peter Gotzsche’s opinion on health-related issues, they are sure to be direct, thoughtful, and unaffected by the prevailing narratives.

Weighing In On The Coronavirus Pandemic

Gotzsche, a specialist in internal medicine that has worked for two years at a department of infectious diseases, is not shy about calling out the ‘Elephant in the Room’ regarding the Coronavirus pandemic, even as some of our governments and medias organizations are treating it like the future of humanity is at stake if draconian measures of the highest order are not instituted across the board for the foreseeable future.

Gotzsche wrote in a recent blog post that he and most of those around him, both lay people and colleagues, ‘consider the Coronavirus pandemic a pandemic of panic, more than anything else.’ He believes that fear and panic are propagated by those with an agenda of control, not those who put the health and safety of citizens first. He cautioned that if people with mild symptoms are made to panic they are liable to flood the hospitals, which does more harm than good.

I do find it very prudent that they told people to stay in their homes in South Korea if they fall ill, and only if they become very sick, will a car come and bring them to a hospital that is not overcrowded. If the infectious dose is high, mortality will also be higher because there will not be sufficient time to establish an immune response. Therefore, overcrowded hospitals will have higher mortality rates. The panic does just that: leads to overcrowded hospitals.

The Perils Of Panic

Panic, in and of itself, is never useful. And during a crisis, it is even more dangerous. We see different types of recommendations coming out from our elected leaders, doctors and scientists, and mainstream media commentators. Often these recommendations are made based on unduly dire predictions about the danger of the virus.

It is important to have fine discernment around who is advocating for calm and who is actually stoking the fires of public panic. Whenever our elected leaders, with the power to legislate societal rules, try to instigate fear in our hearts, and threaten huge sanctions and punishment if we do not obey their decrees, we need to pay close attention to what the real motivation may be.

In a broader sense, we need to ask ourselves: how much are we agreeing to continue to play into the old parent-child relationship that has long existed between our elected leaders and ourselves? Do we really need to be shamed and threatened into a certain type of behavior if we really believe that such behavior will be beneficial for our community and world? And if a small percentage of people are not obeying in lock-step, does this justify the implementation of threats and more draconian measures for the rest of us?

As citizens, it is our duty to avoid following our elected leaders blindly. We actually need to be self-responsible for our actions and their impact on the health and well-being of the community around us. In the long run, it is much more beneficial for society to cultivate self-responsible citizens rather than blind followers. Of course, our leaders might not see it that way. They are aware that self-responsible citizens are more able and likely to hold them accountable and compel them to represent the will of the people, not their own agenda.

How Much Is Too Much?

Peter Gotzsche is the prototypical self-responsible citizen in this regard. And he characterizes some of the responses and measures applied to the Coronavirus as too much. He infers that if we had responded to the viral infection and mortality rates in previous years the way we have with the 2019 Coronavirus, the whole world would have had to be shut down permanently years ago!

Our main problem is that no one will ever get in trouble for measures that are too draconian. They will only get in trouble if they do too little. So, our politicians and those working with public health do much more than they should do. No such draconian measures were applied during the 2009 influenza pandemic, and they obviously cannot be applied every winter, which is all year round, as it is always winter somewhere. We cannot close down the whole world permanently.

Should it turn out that the epidemic wanes before long, there will be a queue of people wanting to take credit for this. And we can be damned sure draconian measures will be applied again next time. But remember the joke about tigers. “Why do you blow the horn?” “To keep the tigers away.” “But there are no tigers here.” “There you see!”

Since politicians have little to lose by overreacting, the citizens have to be vigilant about the current response to make sure we are not being drawn into dangerous precedents. Gotzsche calls out the ploy of the political establishment, which constantly seeks to gain more control over the people while making decisions based on what will make them look the best in the end. And the point he made that ‘we can be damned sure draconian measures will be applied again next time,’ is worth a much deeper examination–especially in the context of comments made by none other than Bill Gates.

Bill Gates Gives Chilling Forecast

In a recent interview with TED Talks founder Chris Anderson, Gates is given full latitude to speak from his home about the things we should be learning from the Covid-19 pandemic. The following is a summary of what Gates states in the interview:

(1) Covid-19 will fade away within a few months
(2) There will be fewer casualties than predicted
(3) That will be credited to strong action taken by governments
(4) Pandemics serve the purpose of testing and improving response
(5) The correct response centers on the development of vaccines, an industry in which he is heavily invested
(6) Pandemics and global warming have the common advantage of being sufficiently frightful to motivate the public and governments to accept drastic changes to society
(7) Leadership for this must come from technocrats, not politicians

What is most striking in this interview is the way Gates begins to pivot towards his vision of a post-Covid-19 world. Perhaps he had already given up on what may have been his original goal to orchestrate worldwide Coronavirus vaccine mandates; however, he takes the opportunity to explain that future pandemics will be met much more swiftly with medical interventions, and central to those interventions will be the timely development and implementation of vaccines for the entire population. He urges that scientists and technocrats, rather than our elected leaders, should be the decision makers regarding such policies, further alienating the general population from their individual sovereignty.

To listen to Bill Gates without understanding the agendas that truly drive those with power, it may be difficult to discern that he is not actually trying to help humanity. Perhaps for just that reason, it may be interesting to listen to the full interview to see if you can detect any signs of Bill Gates’ agenda of personal profit, depopulation and the creation of a global technocracy in which elite rulers like himself wield even more power than they have today.

Peter Gotzsche certainly has personal experience with how Bill Gates came into a company that was standing in the way of his vaccine-fueled profits and used his money and influence to turn that organization into an ally for his agenda. He has reason to believe that some of the way the response to the pandemic is playing out is aligned with that agenda.

Of course many in the public may dismiss the need for our vigilance and simply spout “it’s better to be safe than sorry.” And in principle I would agree with that sentiment. However if this motto is simply applied to the Coronavirus pandemic in a lazy and uncritical way, and we don’t collectively question seemingly unnecessary draconian moves by our leaders, then a society led by technocrats which further takes medical freedom away from individuals may be the future we are contributing to.

The Takeaway

I’ll be honest. Some of the restrictions and cancellations that have been put in place in our society have benefited me in terms of allowing me to take care of things around the house, reflect on my own life and spend more time with my family. But let’s not get lulled into complacency here. This should not stop us from being vigilant about the response to the Coronavirus in our communities and contemplating and talking to others about whether the response is measured and appropriate.

This applies as well to the responses going on all around the world. I certainly believe that many who are part of our global authority have agendas that are not in the best interests of humanity. It is imperative that we not assume the position that our political leaders and the medical ‘experts’ that are paraded out in mainstream media have the answers and we should blindly follow them. Would you not agree that the current goal for a humanity awakening to what is going on is to break the bonds of authority and become self-responsible and self-governing? In order to make this happen, we need all hands on deck.

Human Anxiety in Late-Stage Capitalism

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By Phil Rockstroh

Source: Consortium News

A number of recent press articles, including an over 8,000-word feature piece in The New York Times have asked, to quote the Times’ headline, “Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety?”

Although the question was proffered, the reporters and editors responsible for the articles remain resolutely obtuse to the obvious: The bughouse crazy environment of late-stage capitalist culture evokes classic fight-or-flight responses attendant to episodes of severe anxiety and panic attacks.

The word panic has its derivation in reference to Pan, the Greek god of wilderness and wildness, of the animal body encoded within human beings and its attendant animalistic imperatives. To wit, deracinate an animal from its natural habitat and it will evince, on an instinctual basis, a fight-or-flight response.

If caged, the unfortunate creature will pace the confines of its imprisonment, chew and tear at its fur and flesh, become irritable, enervated, languish and even die from the deprivation of the environment it was born to inhabit. A caged animal, even if the unfortunate creature endures captivity, is not the entity nature conceived; the living being has been reduced to A Thing That Waits For Lunch.

Human beings, animals that we are, respond in a similar fashion. Experiencing anxiety is among the ways our innate animal spirits react to the capitalist cage. Inundate a teenager with the soul-defying criteria of the corporate/consumer state, with its overbearing, pre-careerist pressures, its paucity of communal eros, its demands, overt and implicit, to conform to a shallow, manic, nebulously defined yet oppressive societal order, and insist that those who cannot adapt, much less excel, are “losers” who are fated to become “basement dwellers” in their parents’ homes or, for those who lack the privilege, be cast into homelessness, then the minds of the young or old alike are apt to be inundated with feelings of angst and dread.

Worse, if teenagers are culturally conditioned to believe said feelings and responses are exclusively experienced by weaklings, parasites, and losers then their suffering might fester to the point of emotional paralysis and suicidal inclinations.

No Real Remedies

What does the capitalist state offer as remedy? Obscenely profitable, corporately manufactured and widely prescribed psychoactive medications. Treatment, which, at best, merely masks symptoms and bestows the illusion of recovery.

As R. D. Laing observed: “What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being.”

In short, it is insanity to be expected to adapt to socially acceptable insanity. Yet we are pressured to adapt to, thus internalize odious, groupthink concepts and tenets. To cite one such groupthink example: homelessness is natural to the human condition and is a communally acceptable situation.

Closer to fact: The problem of homelessness is the result of a societal-wide perception problem — the phenomenon is the very emblem of the scrambling, twisting, dissociating, and displacing of perception that capitalist propagandists specialize in. Homelessness would be considered a relic of a barbaric past if this very simple principle was applied: Having access to permanent shelter is a human right and not a privilege.

What kind of a vile, vicious people would deny that simple proposition? Those conditioned by a lingering Puritan/Calvinist mindset to believe: Punishment for resisting the usurpation of the fleeting hours of one’s finite life must be severe. If the over-class can no longer get away with, as was once common practice in the Puritan/Calvinist tradition, public floggings to whip the labor force into line, then those who will not or cannot comply will be cast onto the cold, unforgiving concrete of a soulless cityscape.

It comes down to this, societies that are ridden with vast wealth inequity, due to the machinations of a rapacious over-class, create the obscenity known as homelessness. Moreover, the situation is only one of the numerous obscenities inherent to state capitalism. Obscenities that include, events that are dominating the present news cycle, e.g., the predations of a lecherous movie mogul, to the sub-cretinous doings and pronouncements of a Chief of State who is a bloated, bloviating, two-legged toxic waste dump.

Trump, No Aberration 

How is it then, liberals fail to grasp the fact that the Trump presidency is not an aberration; rather, his ascension to power should be regarded as being among the high probability variables of late-stage capitalism and empire building? The psychopathic, tangerine-tinged clown Trump is the embodiment of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a development that is concomitant to over-expanded empires. Thus he will continue to flounce deeper into the quagmire of crash-engendering, economic legerdemain and perpetual war.

Empires are death cults, and death cults, on a subliminal basis, long for their own demise. Paradoxically, the collective mindset of imperium, even as it thrusts across the expanse of the world, renders itself insular, cut off from culturally enhancing novelty, as all the while, the homeland descends into a psychical swamp of churning madness.

A draining of the swamp of the collective mind cannot come to pass, for the swamp and citizenry are one. Withal, the likes of leaders such as Trump rise from and are made manifest by the morass of the culture itself. In a swamp, the gospel of rebirth and redemption is heard in the song of humus. New life rises from its compost.

In the presence of Trump’s debased mind and tombified carcass, one is privy to arias of rot. While Hillary Clinton’s monotonous tempo was the dirge of a taxidermist — cold, desiccated of heart, and devoid of life’s numinous spark — Trump’s voice carries the depraved cacophony of a Célinean fool’s parade … its trajectory trudging towards the end of empire.

As liberals new BFFL (Best Friend for Life) George W. Bush might ask, “Is our liberals learning.”

In a word, no. For example, the collective psyche of U.S. culture as been enflamed by the revelations that actresses were coerced into sexual encounters with a movie mogul whose power in the industry was only matched, even enhanced, by his sadistic nature. The staff of his company assisted, was complicit in, or remained silent about his lechery, as did the whole of the movie industry and the entertainment press. All as NFL athletes are being threatened with expulsion from the League if they kneel during the national anthem.

The Great Unspoken 

Yet the great unspoken remains: The enabling of and submission to the degradation, exploitation and tyranny, and the lack of resistance thereof share a common and singular factor: The careerism of all concerned. The cultural milieu concomitant to capitalism is at the rotten root and noxious blossoming of the situation.

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 cinematic barnburner “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” should be required viewing for those unaware or in denial of the acuity of the film’s theme i.e., becoming enmeshed within the psychical landscape of dominance, degradation, and submission inherent to and inseparable from capitalist/consumer culture will cause one to become party to societal sanctioned prostitution. When life is negotiated within a collective value system that devalues and deadens the individual’s inner life thus warps every human transaction, anomie descends, the worst among a people ascend to positions of power.

“Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.” — William S. Burroughs, from Ghost of Chance

When friends visited me in New York, where I lived for decades, I would take them on walking tours through the city. We would cross the Westside Highway and stroll the pedestrian walk along the Hudson River, or cross the East River by walking across the Brooklyn Bridge.

The effect of these excursions on people was often profound … the combined elements of the elemental beauty of the rivers and vastness of the city’s architecture and scope, clamor, and the dense interweaving of traditional ethnic customs and ad hoc social codes of New Yorkers often would heighten the visitors’ senses and open them to larger, more intricate awareness of themselves and extant reality … the freeways of the contemporary mind (conditioned to be constantly engaged in manic motion, with one’s mind either frenzied by an obsession with performing (ultimately futile) maneuvers directed to saving time — or stalled at a frustration inducing standstill) were replaced by the exigencies of life at street level, i.e., novel situations that had to be apprehended and negotiated.

The possibilities of life seemed greater. The crimped eros of insular suburban thought became loosened before the city’s intricacies and expansiveness. Although: Not all, or even a scant few, New Yorkers can maintain the state of being. Few of us can live by Rilke’s resolve to “make every moment holy.” Life, in the city, becomes grotesquely distorted … High rents, inflicted by hyper-gentrification, in combination with the deification of success and its cult of careerism overwhelm one’s psyche … There is so far to fall.

Angst (the word originally can be traced to the ancient Greek deity Ananke, the immovable by prayer and offering bitch Goddess of Necessity and the root word of anxiety) clamps down one’s sense of awareness. Ananke dominates the lives of the non-privileged citizenry while Narcissus, Trump’s, the Clintons’, et.al. and their financial and cultural elitists’ patron God rules the day. The pantheon of possibility has been decimated, a cultural cleansing has been perpetrated, by the egoist caprice of the beneficiaries of the late capitalist dictatorship of money.

Hence, we arrive at the primal wisdom tacitly conveyed by anxiety-borne states of fight or flight. Due to the reality that capitalism, on both an individual and collective basis, drives individuals into madness, all as the system destroys forest and field, ocean and sea and the soul-scape of all who live under its rapacious dominion, our plight comes down to this: We either struggle and strive, by and any and all means, to end the system — or it will end us.