The emergence of the internet was met with hope and enthusiasm by people who understood that the plutocrat-controlled mainstream media were manipulating public opinion to manufacture consent for the status quo. The democratization of information-sharing was going to give rise to a public consciousness that is emancipated from the domination of plutocratic narrative control, thereby opening up the possibility of revolutionary change to our society’s corrupt systems.
But it never happened. Internet use has become commonplace around the world and humanity is able to network and share information like never before, yet we remain firmly under the thumb of the same power structures we’ve been ruled by for generations, both politically and psychologically. Even the dominant media institutions are somehow still the same.
So what went wrong? Nobody’s buying newspapers anymore, and the audiences for television and radio are dwindling. How is it possible that those same imperialist oligarchic institutions are still controlling the way most people think about their world?
1) Ranking corporate news higher in YT's algorithim 2)Suppressing independent news/politics channels 3)Suppressing people creating content "from their basement" (THE ORIGINAL PURPOSE of YT)
Last month a very informative interview saw the CEO of YouTube, which is owned by Google, candidly discussing the way the platform uses algorithms to elevate mainstream news outlets and suppress independent content.
At the World Economic Forum’s 2021, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki told Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson that while the platform still allows arts and entertainment videos an equal shot at going viral and getting lots of views and subscribers, on important areas like news media it artificially elevates “authoritative sources”.
“What we’ve done is really fine-tune our algorithms to be able to make sure that we are still giving the new creators the ability to be found when it comes to music or humor or something funny,” Wojcicki said. “But when we’re dealing with sensitive areas, we really need to take a different approach.”
Wojcicki said in addition to banning content deemed harmful, YouTube has also created a category labeled “borderline content” which it algorithmically de-boosts so that it won’t show up as a recommended video to viewers who are interested in that topic:
“When we deal with information, we want to make sure that the sources that we’re recommending are authoritative news, medical science, et cetera. And we also have created a category of more borderline content where sometimes we’ll see people looking at content that’s lower quality and borderline. And so we want to be careful about not over-recommending that. So that’s a content that stays on the platform but is not something that we’re going to recommend. And so our algorithms have definitely evolved in terms of handling all these different content types.”
Progressive commentator Kyle Kulinski has a good video out reacting to Wojcicki’s comments, saying he believes his (entirely harmless) channel has been grouped in the “borderline” category because his views and new subscribers suddenly took a dramatic and inexplicable plunge. Kulinski reports that overnight he went from getting tens of thousands of new subscriptions per month to maybe a thousand.
“People went to YouTube to escape the mainstream nonsense that they see on cable news and on TV, and now YouTube just wants to become cable news and TV,” Kulinski says. “People are coming here to escape that and you’re gonna force-feed them the stuff they’re escaping like CNN and MSNBC and Fox News.”
It is not terribly surprising to hear Susan Wojcicki admit to elevating the media of the oligarchic empire to the CEO of a neoconservative publication at the World Economic Forum. She comes from the same elite empire management background as all the empire managers who’ve been placed in charge of mainstream media outlets by their plutocratic owners, having gone to Harvard after being literally raised on the campus of Stanford University as a child. Her sister Anne is the founder of the genetic-testing company 23andMe and was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
Google itself also uses algorithms to artificially boost empire media in its searches. In 2017 World Socialist Website (WSWS) began documenting the fact that it, along with other leftist and antiwar outlets, had suddenly experienced a dramatic drop in traffic from Google searches. In 2019 the Wall Street Journal confirmed WSWS claims, reporting that “Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results.” In 2020 the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet admitted to censoring WSWS at a Senate hearing in response to one senator’s suggestion that Google only censors right wing content.
We should be extremely alarmed that the Atlantic Council—funded by NATO and the state department and Gulf monarchies and weapons companies—is telling Facebook who to delete https://t.co/7N6fDjDSHRpic.twitter.com/W2zLmx1MKI
Then you’ve got Facebook, where a third of Americans regularly get their news. Facebook is a bit less evasive about its status quo-enforcing censorship practices, openly enlisting the government-and-plutocrat-funded imperialist narrative management firm The Atlantic Council to help it determine what content to censor and what to boost. Facebook has stated that if its “fact checkers” like The Atlantic Council deem a page or domain guilty of spreading false information, it will “dramatically reduce the distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on Facebook.”
All the algorithm stacking by the dominant news distribution giants Google and Facebook also ensures that mainstream platforms and reporters will have far more followers than indie media on platforms like Twitter, since an article that has been artificially amplified will receive far more views and therefore far more clicks on their social media information. Mass media employees tend to clique up and amplify each other on Twitter, further exacerbating the divide. Meanwhile left and antiwar voices, including myself, have been complaining for years that Twitter artificially throttles their follower count.
If not for these deliberate acts of sabotage and manipulation by Silicon Valley megacorporations, the mainstream media which have deceived us into war after war and which manufacture consent for an oppressive status quo would have been replaced by independent media years ago. These tech giants are the life support system of corporate media propaganda.
India is currently witnessing a COVID-19 surge of unprecedented proportions, with an allegedly triple-mutant strain stretching the nation’s healthcare infrastructure to the limits. The uncertainty hanging over the nation is compounded by viral despatches of dead bodies piling up in morgues; of people dropping dead in the streets; of despondent souls jumping off their balconies; and of funeral pyres all over the country. There will be no public service-minded Big Tech censorship in this instance.
This is supposedly Wuhan 2.0. Any social media addict would be forgiven for thinking that India’s population of 1.3 billion might suffer a dip before the year is out.
Amidst the toxic miasma of fear-mongering, coherent explanations over this surge are hard to come by. Therefore, one needs to resort to correlations and proxies in order to gauge causations and effects. For starters, one should compare the yearly death tolls (from all causes) before and after the advent of COVID-19 in India, particularly for the year 2021. But relevant data will only be available a year from now. Many will die as a result of continued lockdowns which generally weaken the immune system. Essential medical procedures will be deferred as hospitals are compelled to focus on COVID-19. Rising socioeconomic despair will naturally lead to a surge in suicides. In the end, not all coronavirus deaths can be directly attributed to the virus no matter how “experts” add them up.
Other correlations must also be explored in the Indian context. India was rather late in joining the mass vaccination bandwagon. Throughout 2020, its COVID-19 mortality figures were moderate by global standards due to the efficacy of low-cost treatment protocols. Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was sanctioned for early stage treatment from March 2020 onwards; while a few months later, India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh (population 231 million) replaced HCQ with ivermectin (an anti-parasitic drug).
The results were highly encouraging. As the TrialSiteNews (TSN) reported on Jan 9 2021:
By the end of 2020, Uttar Pradesh — which distributed free ivermectin for home care — had the second-lowest fatality rate in India at 0.26 per 100,000 residents in December. Only the state of Bihar, with 128 million residents, was lower, and it, too, recommends ivermectin.
Despite having the coronavirus situation under control, New Delhi was under immense pressure from various international lobbies and their local proxies to roll out a mass vaccination campaign. It can be argued that India’s ongoing oxygen shortages are the direct result of prioritizing foreign-curated experimental vaccines over local necessities.
While the initial mass vaccination launch was pencilled for Jan 16, the campaign effectively took off only in late February. With uncanny timing, the New York Times hailed India as an “unmatched vaccine manufacturing power” that could counter China in the area of vaccine diplomacy.
As the goal of vaccinating 300 million people by August 2021 neared the midway mark, however, the number of COVID-19 cases surged accordingly. The graph below broadly charts this anomaly.
Not only has India’s COVID-19 cases surged in tandem with increased vaccination, the trajectory of infections and inoculations can be neatly superimposed as the following graph suggests.
Can one infer that there may be a correlation between increased vaccinations and infections? This is not the first time that gene-based therapies ended up creating new viral chimeras. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recently admitted that a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF)-backed vaccine program was responsible for a new polio outbreak in Africa. The usual suspects were also behind a vaccination-linked polio surge in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Vaccines causing deadly outbreaks of the very diseases they are supposed to eradicate happen to be a 21st century phenomenon – brought to you by an unholy alliance of Big Tech and Big Pharma. In the process, new mutant strains or “vaccine-derived viruses” emerge, necessitating even more potent vaccines which deliver greater profits and levers of global control to Big Tech. This is how the Davos cabal tries to stay relevant in a century that should otherwise be dominated by Asia. India may end up being the first Asian victim of Big Tech’s Great Reset against the East.
A recent study by Tel Aviv University may shed further light on India’s bizarre surge. It seems those who have been vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine are 8 times more likely to contract the new South African variant of COVID-19 than the unvaccinated.
The Covishield (Oxford University-AstraZeneca) and Covaxin (Bharat Biotech) vaccines used in India may have produced a similar effect. Dr. Harvey Risch, a professor of epidemiology at Yale University, has estimated that over 60 percent of all new COVID-19 cases seem to occur among the “vaccinated.” Dr Michael Yeadon, former vice president and chief science officer for Pfizer, fears a more alarming outcome which includes the possibility of “massive-scale depopulation”. These are not your average basement-dwelling conspiratorial kooks!
“The vaccine,” to paraphrase Francis Bacon, “is now appearing to be the worse than the disease itself.” Gene-based vaccines open up a Pandora’s Box of what systems theorists call “emergence”. The human body is a complex system that may react unpredictably to interferences at its most substrate (or genetic) levels. As a result, mutant virus strains may emerge alongside unforeseen side effects. This is what we are witnessing worldwide.
But as the virus mutates, so does the official narrative. The Indian Medical Association (IMA) now claims that mass vaccinations in densely-packed stadiums and halls are “superspreader” events. Is the IMA suggesting that new vaccine delivery systems, as lobbied by Big Tech, will solve this problem? Let us wait and see. Furthermore, is close proximity the prime culprit behind the super-surge in India? India is a nation where trains, buses and all forms of public spaces teem with human bodies. Yet, it did not lead to mass casualties in 2020 as many had feared.
In the absence of a watertight scientific explanation from mainstream gatekeepers, a more plausible narrative may be sought from peripheral sources. The Daily Expose offers one such graphic-laden narrative to explain the correlation between mass vaccinations and the rising death toll in India.
While the Daily Expose concedes that correlation does not always equal causation, a similar pattern was noticed in other nations. The vaccination-mortality graph for Mongolia, for example, is particularly eye-popping.
Did Mongolia witness a near-zero to mutant COVID-19 surge just when mass vaccinations rolled out? How coincidental can that be?
The Case of America: Red vs Blue States
One may scientifically argue that India’s surge had nothing to do with ramped-up vaccinations. A new mutant virus may also somehow explain the vaccination-mortality correlations in Mongolia.
Therefore one should resort to another layman-friendly proxy to see whether similar correlations exist elsewhere. How about a comparison within the most coronavirus-affected nation on earth – the United States of America?
Reports thus far suggest that US states which have been resisting mass vaccinations and/or mandatory masking, at least in relative terms, are generally faring better than those adhering to draconian COVID-19 guidelines. Just weeks after Texas lifted its public mask mandate – featuring full crowds at bars, restaurants and concerts no less – COVID-19 cases as well as hospitalizations dropped to its lowest levels since October 2020. The current White House occupant, who continues to make a buzz over his mental acuity, nonetheless panned the move as a symptom of “Neanderthal thinking”. In the meantime, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a prominent opponent of mandatory masking, is using COVID-19 restrictions elsewhere to lure businesses to her state. Other red states such as Florida and Arizona have moved to ban the so-called vaccine passports.
Rather coincidentally, the annual flu has virtually disappeared in the United States since the onset of the pandemic. It must be a modern medical miracle!
How will India fare?
With the surge affecting the nation badly, the CEOs of Google, Microsoft and Apple, among others, have pledged heartfelt aid to India. With friends like these, one wonders why Indians cannot question the global COVID-19 narrative on Twitter, Facebook or YouTube without being summarily banned or censored. If India can concede the digital rights of its own citizens and the digital sovereignty of the nation to Big Tech, then how is it going to crowdsource solutions for COVID-19? Or deal with any other future crisis for that matter? An Indian scientific paper which tentatively explored a laboratory origin for COVID-19 can be summarily removed after concerted condemnation from Western academics but a similar claim made by the former head of the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) appears relatively palatable. Isn’t this a textbook example of neoliberal racism?
Indians should also question why Africa has not been badly affected thus far, despite a South African variant hovering in the region. This is a continent mired in conflicts, poverty, serious healthcare deficits and other Third World-related woes. It lacks world-class scientists and institutions which India admittedly has. Is it because Africa does not pose an economic threat to the Western oligarchy the way Asia does? Or maybe, mass vaccinations haven’t yet taken off in Africa?
For the time being, India cannot reverse course on its vaccination drive and adopt measures similar to the one employed by the Eisenhower administration during the 1957-58 Asian Flu pandemic. The fear genie is already out of the bottle. Big Tech controls the digital narrative in India as it does elsewhere. Even if New Delhi manages to tame the COVID-19 crisis within the next few weeks or months, Big Tech will still be around to stifle India’s destiny.
Ultimately, this game is much bigger than COVID-19; it is about global domination through perennial mass-manufactured crises until a Great Reset is achieved.
During 2016 CIA director John Brennan and FBI director James Comey, together with the corrupt Democrat party, began orchestrating Russiagate in order to prevent Trump from reducing the risk of nuclear war by normalizing relations with Russia. President Trump tried to nip a New Cold War in the bud, but that was not in the interest of the power and profit of the military/security complex which desperately needs the “Russian threat” as its raison d’etre.
Stephen Cohen, myself and a few others expressed concern that the tensions between the two nuclear powers were being driven to more dangerous highs than ever existed during the 20th century Cold War. Many websites joined in debunking the orchestrated Russiagate fabrication.
To discredit these voices, a new website, PropOrNot, suddenly appeared with a list of 200 “Russian agents/dupes.” Those of us who had raised red flags about Russiagate and the worsening of tensions were on the list. The Washington Post gave the accusation credibility by reporting the PropOrNot accusation that those who dissented from a hostile policy toward Russia were “Putin agents.”
A number of the falsely accused websites were intimidated and abandoned the truth. CounterPunch went even further. It dropped its best and most incisive writers—people such as Mike Whitney and Diana Johnstone. CounterPunch, which had once collected, published, and marketed a collection of my essays as a book, suddenly discovered that it preferred fiction over fact. Other websites that had religiously reproduced all of my columns now became selective about which parts of the official narrative they would permit to be examined on their sites. This was, perhaps, the beginning of the movement to de-platform all who challenge the narrative.
The threat to truth-tellers has now been elevated by election thief Joe Biden’s latest Executive Order declaring a “national emergency” to “deal with the Russian threat.” Pepe Escobar reports that Biden’s order opens every American to being accused of being a Russian agent engaged in undermining US security. “A sub-paragraph (C), detailing ‘actions or policies that undermine democratic processes or institutions in the United States or abroad,’ is vague enough to be used to eliminate any journalism that supports Russia’s positions in international affairs.”
“Supports Russia’s position” includes an objective description and non-partisan analysis of Russian policy. The crucial point is that, in effect, Biden’s executive order places everyone reporting objectively on Russia’s political positions as a potential threat to the United States. https://www.unz.com/pescobar/putin-rewrites-the-law-of-the-geopolitical-jungle/
If we are honest, we will acknowledge that we have undergone the complete collapse of the United States. Truth is prohibited in the media, school systems, and universities if it conflicts with the elite agendas served by the official narratives. The First Amendment is dead and buried. Free speech is reserved for the official narratives, such as “systemic racism” and “Russian threat.” Those who exercise their Constitutional right find themselves de-platformed or fired.
To understand how the victory of propaganda over truth elevates the likelihood of nuclear Armageddon, consider the difference between the 20th century and 21st century cold wars.
In the original Cold War both Soviet and American leaders worked to defuse tensions. Agreements were made on arms control and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. There were regular meetings or summits between American and Soviet leaders. Diplomatic decorum was maintained. There were agreements that permitted each side to inspect the other’s compliance.
This process began with President John F. Kennedy and Soviet First Secretary Khrushchev. It continued through President Reagan and, more or less, President George H. W. Bush. It ended with the Clinton regime and has been downhill ever since. President Trump intended to reduce the dangerous tensions, but was not permitted. Indeed, his intent was sufficient cause for the Establishment to drive him from office. 2020 was a coup, not an election.
In the 20th century Cold War Russian experts differed in their assessments of the threat, and their differences were publicly aired. Differing assessments were debated. Dissenters were not demonized as Russian agents. Today American Russian experts find that being Russophobic is a career boost. In the 20th century the New York Times and Washington Post were aligned with peace efforts. Today they are part of the neoconservative warmongers’ propaganda ministry.
The alarming conclusion is that since the Clinton regime, the US government has worked consistently to worsen relations with Russia even to the extent of publicly demonizing the Russian president and strangling objective debate in the US. This is the perfect foundation for war.
All the while insouciant Americans elected governments that successively raised the likelihood of nuclear annihiliation while shutting down dissident concerns. As I reported on March 17, “In the United States Russian Studies has degenerated into propaganda. Recently, two members of the Atlantic Council think tank, Emma Ashford and Matthew Burrows, suggested that American foreign policy could benefit from a less hostile approach to Russia. Instantly, 22 members of the think tank denounced the article by Ashford and Burrows.”
Today even in Republican and conservative circles to question Putin’s demonization raises disapproving eyebrows (the same for China and Iran). The US Establishment has succeeded in labeling objective analysis as “pro-Russian” (or pro-Chinese or pro-Iranian). This means that an objective view of US/Russian relations is off-limits to US policymakers.
The “Russian threat” is another hoax, one that will destroy the world.
The death of Democracy, embodied by Lady Liberty herself; her torch spluttered to ash and her tabula ansata resting resignedly beside her in the shadows. Illustrated by Ben Hying
By Robert J. Burrowes
Politically savvy individuals know that democracy has rarely existed and probably never outside small groups of humans who deliberately organize themselves to share power or grant it temporarily to one or a small number of people for a particular purpose. In most contexts, ‘democracy’ is simply a label used to deceive the unwary into believing that ordinary people have a say in how we are governed. But this has never been the case in any political framework on a larger scale.
Whatever victories have apparently been achieved in the long struggle to achieve political representation, human rights, dignity, economic justice, cultural and gender identity, ecological sustainability and other causes dear to the hearts of those who have struggled, the elite (local, national or global) has always retained control and merely surrendered the minimum necessary to keep the bulk of the human population submissive.
Consequently, as outlined in ‘Why Activists Fail’, while elite control over human societies started to gather pace with the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago, it has simply been progressively consolidated since that time. Real power over anything that matters, including fundamental decision-making and the vast bulk of the world’s wealth, remains firmly in the hands of the elite.
More importantly, as one result of the elite’s long reign and the grotesquely distorted priorities it has advanced within the delusional versions of democracy we have experienced, human society is now characterized by staggering levels of psychological, social, economic, military and geopolitical dysfunctionality and Earth is on the brink of ecological collapse with Homo sapiens threatened by four distinct paths to extinction. See ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls: A Report on the State of Planet Earth at Year’s End 2020’.
But what is interesting about the elite coup that is being implemented now, under cover of the non-existent virus SARS-CoV-2 – see, for example, ‘COVID-19: The virus does not exist – it is confirmed!’ and ‘Statement On Virus Isolation (SOVI)’ – and the supposed Covid-19 pandemic, is that the final facade of our ‘democracy’ is being dismantled in plain sight with most of the human population begging for it to be done provided that they are kept ‘safe’. It is pitiful to observe and brings to mind one of Benjamin Franklin’s most famous lines: ‘They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.’
How is this final destruction of even the delusion of democracy being executed? Well, the simple answer is this: ‘It is being done in a variety of ways, depending on the context.’ Here are some examples in each of three categories.
Destruction of Democratic Processes, Human Rights and the Rule of Law
While so-called democratic processes have long been a sham and the rule of law (as it is meant to mean in a conventional sense) does not exist – see ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’ – even the sham elements of democracies – rule by Parliament (rather than executive fiat or unelected bureaucrats), respect for human rights (including freedom of speech), obedience of laws and adherence to legal process – have been ignored by virtually all governments (national, provincial and local) around the world as measures decided by the elite and promulgated through its international organizations such as the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organization have simply been implemented by governments without so much as a public (or even a parliamentary) debate. In fact, any attempt to present an alternative view in any mainstream forum leads to one of a range of outcomes such as dismissal from office, censorship – with corporate and major social media leading the way – or howls of accusation such as ‘conspiracy theorist’ to discredit the dissenting voice.
This has happened, of course, because politicians are not beholden to voters, which is why lobbying politicians is a waste of time, unless the issue is of little significance politically, militarily, economically and environmentally. As implied above, the elite controls the political fate of politicians who well know that their political survival has nothing to do with pleasing ordinary voters. Politicians are beholden to the elite that manipulates levers of power such as the corporate media and education systems, employs an army of lobbyists to ensure that elite preference is clearly understood (while using bribes where necessary), and has ready access to removal options such as, at its most benign, withdrawal of pre-selection endorsement.
Moreover, those supposedly basic human rights – such as freedom of speech, assembly and movement – have been eviscerated under the various lockdown, curfew and martial law measures with many people attempting to exercise these rights quickly discovering that they no longer exist except, perhaps, in the very narrowest of circles or in particular contexts (even if those with the courage to do so often find that these ‘rights’ do exist but only if one is courageous enough to exercise them).
As early as March 2020, governments around the world were introducing draconian laws supposedly in response to the ‘pandemic’. For example, Denmark’s parliament ‘unanimously passed an emergency coronavirus law which [gave] health authorities powers to force testing, treatment and quarantine with the backing of the police.’ As noted by Copenhagen University law professor Jens Elo Rytter, the measures were unlike anything passed in the last 75 years: ‘It is certainly the most extreme since the Second World War. There have been some powerful encroachments in various terror packages. But this goes further.’ See ‘Denmark rushes through emergency coronavirus law’.
But with the passing of a full year since the coup began, the progressive destruction of any semblance of democracy is now rapidly in train.
Of course, Switzerland is far from alone in considering such measures and there is plenty of evidence that virtually all countries will deny airline travel to those not vaccinated. See, for example, ‘Guidance for global travel’.
And Dr. Rudolf Hänsel in Germany reports that on 13 April 2021, the government of Germany tightened the ‘Infection Protection Act’, with the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) confirming that this so-called ‘Emergency Brakes Act’ abrogates the fundamental rights of inviolability of home and body. As noted by the renowned legal scholar Volker Boehme-Neßler: The planned coercive measures such as the curfews are ‘unconstitutional, dictatorial and against human nature’. See ‘Germany: The “Dictatorship of Democracy” Secretly Transformed into an “Open Dictatorship”’.
For a wider look at the bigger picture, Dr. Joseph Mercola interviewed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The interview touched on elements of Mercola’s new book The Truth About Covid-19 explaining how ‘The technocrats’ plan, as laid out in various papers and reports, is to use bioterrorism to take control of the world’s resources, wealth and people’. See ‘The Truth About Covid-19’.
But perhaps constitutional lawyer John W. Whitehead, in collaboration with Nisha Whitehead, captures the true depth of what has transpired in these two paragraphs about the United States but equally applicable to other countries:
Not only have the federal and state governments unraveled the constitutional fabric of the nation with lockdown mandates that sent the economy into a tailspin and wrought havoc with our liberties, but they have almost persuaded the citizenry to depend on the government for financial handouts, medical intervention, protection and sustenance.
Of course, a common response of many people is to fearfully deny that this is actually happening or to deny that it is really as bad as it seems. But reality has a nasty habit of biting, sooner or later, although it won’t be either in this case. It is already happening.
The Great Reset: Rule by Elite Agents including International Organizations
But I wonder if you remember voting for the WHO or the World Economic Forum to tell your government to tell you what you to do. In fact, I wonder if you remember having a say in the composition, and hence decision-making, of these international organizations. Do you even know their elite masters?
And yet ‘suddenly’, or so it seems, ‘our’ national, provincial and local governments are doing what these elite agents are telling them to do, which is to tell us what to do in response to this ‘virus’. How did that happen? Do you remember it happening, at least this obviously, previously?
So do you think that voting for some other party at the next election in your country is going to precipitate change?
Of course, it will suit the elite nicely to have you preoccupied over which party will govern your country in future. Because it won’t matter. Just as it never has.
So while you might pin your hopes on some political party (and perhaps, even, a new one) most of what has been familiar about your life in the past will vanish. The changes being wrought by the elite’s corporations as you read this article are profound. For example, vastly more satellites are being shot into Space – see ‘SpaceX launches 60 new Starlink internet satellites, nails latest rocket landing at sea’ – and a staggering array of new infrastructure is being installed on the ground so that 5G (and 6G) can be used to make elite control of our lives total.
This will enable comprehensive surveillance of our daily activities, digital ID (possibly implanted in your brain) linked to your bank account and health records, a social credit ID that will end up dictating every facet of your life, the digitization of money, the robotization of the workforce and military, and the biological and electronic connectivity (through embedded sensors, software and other technologies) of humans and machines through the Internet of Things. And that is just part of what the fourth industrial revolution and the transhumanist agenda will mean for you and me. For a little more, see ‘Beware the Transhumanists: How “Being Human” is being Re-engineered by the Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’.
More fundamentally, this interview by Dr Reiner Füllmich of WHO insider Dr. Astrid Stuckelberger carefully explains why WHO is a corrupt dictatorship with signatory nations legally required to obey the Director General’s directives and Bill Gates given equivalent status to a member nation-state. See ‘WHO Insider Blows Whistle on Gates and GAVI’.
But the most comprehensive demonstration that any semblance of democracy is being destroyed is perhaps the removal from political office of those presidents who dared to challenge the elite-driven narrative that our world is seriously threatened by a virus.
As recorded in progressive media, at least two presidents openly resisting the elite-driven narrative have been removed in coups, with both presidents killed outright.
Similarly, President John Magufuli of Tanzania not only rejected the Covid-19 narrative but openly ridiculed it in a televised address, in which he exposed the fraudulent nature of the testing ‘when he covertly had non-human samples – from fruits, goats, sheep, and car oil – tested for Covid on the PCR test, returning positive results from a paw-paw, a quail, and a goat’ thus openly irritating the global elite. See ‘John Magufuli: Death of an African Freedom Fighter’ (which includes the video of President Magufuli exposing the Covid-19 lie).
What is touched on above is, in many respects, just the tip of the iceberg. The profound transformations under way do not bode well for any semblance of a human future worth living.
And you will watch as your children lose whatever remaining capacity they had for independent thought further broken down by the propaganda directed at them. See ‘Brainwashing our children’.
But this list could go on.
Resisting the Death of Democracy
If you want to strategically resist the elite coup currently in train – that is, to undermine the power of the global elite to take complete control of our lives – there is a comprehensive nonviolent strategy for doing so outlined in ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ with detailed supportive information available in Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.
And it will be invaluable if you make yourself increasingly self-reliant as the mechanisms that you have been seduced into becoming dependent upon are progressively and rapidly being taken away. See ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.
If you wish to campaign to avert one or more of the four most immediate paths to human extinction – deployment of 5G, nuclear war, the collapse of biodiversity and the climate catastrophe – you can see a list of strategic goals for doing so here: Campaign Strategic Aims.
More simply, if you like, you might consider committing to:
The Earth Pledge
Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:
I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
I will not own or use a mobile (cell) phone
I will not buy rainforest timber
I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.
Conclusion
Human life as you experienced it until the beginning of 2020 has now ended. It will not return. The long-standing elite plan to take complete control of our lives is now being progressively implemented. Act 1 – the ‘Covid-19 pandemic’ – successfully distracted most people so comprehensively that the measures implemented by the global elite to depopulate humanity and take full control of those still living proceeded rapidly. Act 2 is but a short time away.
If you want any chance of restoring a semblance of the lives we have lost, you are invited to join those strategically resisting the elite coup. If your resistance is not strategic, it will have zero impact.
Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.
With every new study, with every new paper, the “deadly” pandemic gets less and less, well, deadly. The most recent data review, published in late March, puts the infection fatality ratio (IFR) at 0.15%.
That is, once again, pretty much the same as a normal flu season.
The new paper is the work of Dr John Ioannidis, whom you likely remember. He is an eminent epidemiologist and statistician who publicly urged the need for “good data” last spring.
Do you remember last spring? The blissful days of never having even heard of “infection fatality ratio”? (I do. Fondly.)
The phrase really rose to prominence last year, after the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the IFR of the scary new virus was 3.4%.
This is not, in and of itself, especially high. But it is significantly higher than most cold/flu viruses.
Around the same time, somebody (or multiple somebodies) actually edited the Wikipedia page of the Spanish Flu, to change its IFR and make it seem like Covid was just as dangerous. Who did this remains a mystery, although why has become fairly obvious.
At the time, many experts (such as those listed in our 12 Experts article) predicted the actual IFR of “Covid” would be much, much lower than the WHO’s estimate, and that this would become clear as new data were gathered.
Dr John Ioannidis was one of the most vocal on this point, he was featured on our list and was also the first interview in the Perspectives on the Pandemic series. All the way along he has urged the need for cool heads and good data. His first a study, last April, found the REAL IFR of Covid19 was 0.27%. Then he did another in October that found it may be even lower at 0.2%.
That’s a reduction of 95% of the WHO’s estimate, in less than a year. It’s also right along the same lines as the WHO’s (accidental) admission, made last October, that around 10% of the world had likely been exposed to the virus, rendering an IFR of roughly 0.14%.
Now, let’s couch this with all the usual disclaimers: Yes, the virus may not ever have been isolated, and thus has not as yet been proven to exist. And yes, even supposing it does exist, it has not been proven to cause the disease known as “Covid19”.
But, increasingly, the distinction between “no virus” and “a virus that isn’t dangerous” seems entirely moot, doesn’t it?
As the real IFR of Covid is revealed to be lower (and lower, and lower) than the original estimates, it moves further and further into line with the basic background risk of just being alive.
Still, don’t forget to take that experimental gene-therapy “vaccine”. We don’t know if they’re completely safe yet, because long-term trials won’t finish for two years, and the technology has never been used on humans before, but still…you’ve only got a 99.85% chance of survival without it.
A March 9 Twitter post by Secretary of State Tony Blinken reads as follows: “We will never hesitate to use force when American lives and vital interests are at stake, but we will do so only when the objectives are clear and achievable, consistent with our values and laws, and with the American people’s informed consent – together with diplomacy.”
Like pretty much everything ever said by Blinken, and indeed by every US secretary of state, this is an absolute lie.
Firstly, US military force is never used to protect “American lives” in modern times, unless you count the lives of US troops and mercenaries in foreign lands they have no business occupying in the first place. The US military is never used to defend American lives against an invading enemy force; that simply does not happen in our current world order. It is only ever used to protect the agenda of unipolar planetary domination, which would be the “vital interests” which Blinken obliquely refers to above.
Secondly, Blinken’s claim that the Biden administration will never use military force without “the American people’s informed consent” has already been blatantly invalidated by Biden’s airstrikes on Syria last month. The American people never gave their consent to those airstrikes, informed or uninformed. A nation the US invaded (Syria) was bombed because troops are being attacked in a second nation the US invaded (Iraq) on the completely unproven claim that a third country against whom the US is currently waging economic warfare (Iran) supported those attacks. At no time were the people asked for their consent to this, and at no time was any attempt made to ensure that they were informed of the situation before it happened.
Thirdly, US military force is never, ever conducted with the American people’s informed consent. Literally never. Consent is alwaysmanufactured for US wars by lies and mass media propaganda, one hundred percent of the time, without exception. The bigger the military operation, the more egregious the deceit used to manufacture consent for it. Even in relatively “peaceful” times when the US is merely raining dozens of bombs and missiles per day on foreign soil, Americans are subject to a nonstop deluge of distorted and outright false narratives about their military and the nations it targets for destruction.
Consent that has been artificially manufactured by propaganda is not informed consent, any more than sex with someone who’s been dosed with rohypnol is consensual sex. US imperialism does not rely on informed consent, it relies on disinformed consent; consent for it is manufactured by disinformation. Informed consent plays no role whatsoever in the use of US military force, nor indeed in any other major aspect of the behavior of the US or its allies.
Every aspect of the US-centralized power alliance is propped up by a relentless deluge of mass-scale psyops. Imperialism, capitalism, electoral politics; consent for all its key pillars is constantly being manufactured by the plutocratic news media, by television, by movies. All of the most influential generators of modern mainstream thought and culture are heavily influenced by a plutocratic class which has a vested interest in keeping power out of the hands of the people.
This is the only thing keeping us from moving into a healthy new paradigm where we collaborate with each other toward a healthy world based on truth and beauty instead of competing with each other over who can create the most profitable pieces of future landfill. No hard obstacles are in place stopping us; our cages only exist between our ears. It is only because powerful people are manipulating our minds to their advantage that we have not already used the power of our numbers to create a healthy, harmonious and enjoyable earth.
It’s important to be aware of the fact that our consent has been manufactured for this mess, because it means we never gave them our informed consent, which means no existing power structures have any legitimacy at all. They have power because they stole our power from us, and it is our prerogative to take it back. We do not need to go through the political systems they have rigged to their advantage or the ideological spectrum of acceptable debate that they have confined mainstream discourse to. We can just take it.
This will only happen after we have freed ourselves in sufficient numbers from their mass-scale psychological manipulations, which will only happen after we have prioritized weakening public trust in their propaganda operations and waking the mainstream public up to the truth. Once a sufficient number of people have been awakened from their propaganda-induced slumber, we can reclaim our world from the sociopathic manipulators without firing a shot, just by standing up to our true size and flexing our giant muscles.
I sincerely believe this will happen, and that it will happen fairly soon. Then we will extract their rapey fingers from our minds and create something truly amazing together.
Slow-witted Joe Biden appears to think that we’re still in the age of the sole superpower, when in fact that era has come and gone.
As this columnist has pointed out, Joe Biden’s foreign policy differs little from that of his predecessor Donald Trump. The imperatives of the United States hegemon require treating the rest of the world as either willing vassals or as sworn enemies. Any nation that threatens economic supremacy or the ability to thwart foreign policy directives is labeled an adversary and faces an onslaught of governmental and corporate media attacks. This dynamic remains unchanged and the Biden administration has only worsened an already bad situation.
The troubles start at the top with the president himself. When asked by George Stephanopoulos in an ABC news interview if Vladimir Putin is “a killer” Biden answered in the affirmative. The president was never known for his intellect and thought that repeating Russiagate tropes would play well. It didn’t play well with the Russians who immediately recalled their U.S. ambassador back home to Moscow.
While Biden was dealing with foot in mouth disease regarding Russia, his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, was making a mess of relations with China. He invited his Chinese counterparts to a meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, and proceeded to offend them by scolding them in front of the press and repeating unfounded charges about human rights abuses against the Uyghurs.
“Well, I think we thought too well of the United States. We thought that the U.S. side will follow the necessary diplomatic protocols,” said Yang Jiechie , director of the Central Commission of Foreign Affairs. It all went downhill quickly with very public bad behavior on the part of the amateurish and arrogant Americans.
It isn’t clear what Blinken hoped to achieve, but almost immediately after that debacle the Chinese began their own initiative with their partner nations. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was given a warm welcome on his trip to China. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi then departed for Iran where the two countries announced a 25-year, $400 billion partnership. Among other things China committed itself to buying Iranian oil, an agreement which diminishes the impact of U.S. sanctions.
Having squandered opportunity and lost leverage, the hapless Americans have been pressured by the Europeans to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), popularly known as the Iran nuclear deal. Talks will resume in Vienna but the Iranians are neither impressed nor intimidated. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif stated in a Twitter post that the U.S. must remove all sanctions in order for the talks to move forward. He added for emphasis, “No Iran-US meeting. Unnecessary.”
The ongoing impacts of U.S. meddling are coming to fruition all over the world. Even U.S. ally Germany is moving ahead with the Nord Stream II gas pipeline with Russia, making a lie out of claims that Russia is a threat to Europe. Despite all of its schemes to dominate, nothing is working in this country’s favor on the diplomatic front.
The United States is still the most powerful country militarily, and can do great damage should it choose. It can sanction weaker nations, but that of course drives them closer to others. China and Russia supply Venezuela with medical equipment that would otherwise be impossible to obtain under U.S. sanctions. China also purchases Venezuelan oil and along with Russia, supplies that country with Covid vaccines.
Biden is dealing with the results of decades of the United States behaving as if its brief unipolar moment would last forever. China will soon surpass the United States economically and it is using that power to its advantage. Its Belt and Road Initiative involves countries on every continent and provides opportunity where the western nations offer only debt and subjugation.
The United States believes its own hype and thinks that its relatively brief period of domination would last forever. Instead the new president is rightly viewed as a paper tiger after just a few months in office.
Only propagandized and uninformed Americans believe that Russian meddled in not one, but two elections. They have no idea that their leaders are losing influence and making enemies. They don’t know that every act of aggression brings the targeted nations closer together.
Russia’s foreign minister recently said that relations with the United States had “hit bottom” and that there were no plans to send their ambassador back to Washington. The idea that Joe Biden is the most powerful man in the world is a fantasy accepted only because of endless indoctrination.
No one else lives in this dream land. Even dim-witted Joe Biden has to learn that he can’t call other presidents killers and have any expectation of good relations. Of course his definition of good relations means other countries obeying U.S. dictates. But that isn’t how the world works any more. He and his handlers must quickly disabuse themselves of any notion that the U.S. can continue to get away with these debacles of their own making. These “grownups” in the room had better grow up fast.
After fanning COVID panic for a year, Democratic newsletter Salon admits it was all for partisan purposes: “Americans have been sucked into an all-or-nothing approach, with your choice of all or nothing depending largely on your partisan identity.”
Salon continues “Trump’s rejection of sensible precautions caused many of his political opponents to run hard in the opposite direction, embracing the lockdowns as if they were a point of personal virtue and inherent good, instead of a temporary and deeply unpleasant measure necessary to contain the virus. Worse, liberals were so protective of lockdowns that even sensible criticisms were ignored, and liberals often acted like, well, cops. They often appeared more interested in lecturing people rather than empowering them through education. There was a lot of social media shaming for any social activity, no matter how safe it was. And in behaving this way, a lot of well-intentioned people made the pandemic much worse.”
The Hill came to the same conclusion, confessing recently “Lockdowns don’t work: Remember 15 days to slow the spread? Well, since those fateful words were uttered, we have had a year of various efforts to slow down a virus that has an infection fatality rate of less than one percent. And what we have learned is that viruses are gonna virus. California, the United Kingdom, Florida and Sweden show the futility of lockdowns.” The Hill adds “The media is complicit in furthering the Panic… how you could die tomorrow, from a virus that kills virtually nobody healthy under the age of 70.”
A study found no correlation between NYC subway ridership and COVID spikes. In other words, few people got sick riding in a poorly-ventilated metal tube with strangers, masked and unmasked, an admission that many of the so-called lifesaving precautions were mostly health theatre, rituals based on fear. It was easier to order people to stay home than to see if the woods really had bears in them.
NY Magazine, after a year of scare stories about scary COVID variants taking over the world, now is running articles headlined “Maybe the Variants Aren’t So Scary After All.”
The Atlantic wrote a year into the pandemic “Traditional and social media have been caught up in a cycle of shaming—made worse by being so unscientific and misguided.” They point out the nonsense of the response: “Cities closed parks even as they kept open indoor dining and gyms. Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts banned students from taking even solitary walks… pictures of people outdoors without masks draw reprimands, insults, and confident predictions of super-spreading—and yet few note when super-spreading fails to follow.”
All but the most serf-like now know the response was partisan, on purpose. We know lockdowns have little effect on transmission even as they devaste people economically and psychologically. The response by government, unscientific and misguided, was encouraged by a media that correlated suffering with virtue, and pain with progress. The draconian measures taken were somewhere between merely ineffective and worse than the disease. If only somehow we could have known this a year ago and used it as a guide toward more prudent, focused, and balanced responses.
If only we’d been able to see the disease wasn’t the hoax, the response was.
As America reprogrammed into one big Crisis News Network, with every story reported with a flashlight held under the announcer’s chin, I first wrote on March 5, 2020 how COVID fear was being used to manipulate people. I said the reaction to the virus will result in long term damage to the nation well beyond the health effects of the virus. I wrote on March 10, 2020 how many of the same COVID-era tricks to create fear to drive policy were used when AIDS broke into the mainstream. On March 26, 2020 I explained how the same playbook (terrify the American people for partisan goals) was run on us after 9/11. I wrote a second article on how the “cure” of lockdown was going to be worse than the disease on March 31.
I’m not bragging. The information was as obvious as you wanted it to be. For example, in October 2020 a group of infectious disease epidemiologists wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, laying out”grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of prevailing COVID policies” such as sweeping lockdowns. They were largely ignored, though US News found time to call them arrogant and recklessness in calling for “focused protection.” The nation was as intolerant of COVID dissent as it was of anti-war dissent in 2001.
The playbook run against Americans with COVID (and 9/11, and AIDS, and…) goes back as far as 1984, the book, not the year. Orwell envisioned the need for a massive Ministry of Truth to create a state of fear among Americans, and then manipulate that fear into specific support and policy. In fact in 2020 all it took was an initial handful of deaths, some of what Orwell labeled prolefeed — worthless entertainment for the masses about whether calling COVID “Chinese flu” was racism — and a dash of sky-is-falling articles that piled on to existing anti-Trump night terrors.
The goal is always to make fear of something the problem and then empowering government becomes the solution. You have to give things up for a safe society. It just is no longer practical to try to have freedom and security, you will have to choose. If you don’t wear a mask, you’re selfish; you’ve committed a crime against society. You purposely have endangered your masked, compliant neighbors. Substitute in “terrorism” if you like at this point.Fear is a powerful a tool for manipulation. It rubs raw on the fight or flight part of our lizard brain, especially when you involve family members as potential spreaders who want to kill grandma or as victims (grandma again.)
Fear is also self-reinforcing. We feel embarrassed when we’ve been fooled into over-reacting, like when our friend made us jump, springing from his hiding place at a party. So after you sold off your stocks at a huge loss in March 2020 fearing a global depression that never came, you were ready with self-reinforcing gab instead of admitting fear drove you into a dumb financial decision. “Well, at least I had peace of mind” said many trying to justify a needless 30 percent capital loss.
Fear of the virus can be shaped into fear Trump would find a way via incompetence to kill us all somehow. That made it easier to believe he would seriously suggest you inject bleach. The MSM told us the vaccines, the scientific answer to the virus, were being rushed through, that Trump would manipulate the approval process for political gain and release dangerous untested drugs. The MSM throttled the black community with racist claims about the vaccine, invoking the 1943 syphilis experiments during last year’s Summer of Racism. Of course none of the media admit blame for today’s resistance to the vaccine.
The COVID fear playbook is nearly identical to the post-9/11 playbook, though kudos to those Bush officials who pulled it off in 2001 without the help of social media and only 3,000 dead. They turned Americans into such fearful creatures they stopped traveling, signed off on multiple wars, a torture regime, and the effective end of privacy in American life. We were conditioned to new precedents of control over personal decisions, civil life, freedom of movement and assembly, whole city lockdowns, education, and an increasing role for government and the military in health care. We became trained that when we saw something, we said something. Not unlike our modern mask patrols, rent-a-cops, and Karens demanding everyone stay back six feet, driven by things such as the Washington Post, which wrote “Every viewer who trusts the words of Earhardt or Hannity could well become a walking, breathing, droplet-spewing threat to the public.”
It will be hard for people to let go of their fear; folks will be wearing masks for a long time because there is no end game. We learned that when lockdowns went from until the curve flattens to until the vaccine until, well, forever. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said “Unless and until everyone in the world is vaccinated, then no one is really fully safe, because if the virus is out there and continuing to proliferate, it’s also going to be mutating.” COVID fear mongering will be around as long as it is a political asset and gone before it becomes a political liability.Too many good people died of COVID. Many of us have a personal tale of a friend or loved one. The news is still so full of COVID porn you’d think they were trying to convince us of something. But as we grieve equally all deaths, we must understand death was not invented in 2020. Hospitals are sadly full of people dying painfully every day. COVID deaths will soon enough be down to a mere fraction of the current count. Deaths from heart attacks, cancer, and car wrecks will not. We just won’t talk about them and we certainly won’t blame one political party over another for them.
But if drama is indeed a currency in the pandemic, let me spend some. I have physically visited with my relatives and hugged them for the past year. Not only are we all still COVID-free, we have the honor of saying the government did not tell us how to live and love each other. It was Orwell himself who wrote “They’re afraid of love, ’cause love makes a world they can’t control.”Remember that for the next time. No government should be allowed to create a world of fear and isolation for its citizens, and no citizen should willingly demand that from a government.
After the Crash 