Tag Archives: Technocracy

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.

Smart Dust: A Tiny Part of What They’ve Got Planned For You

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By Mickey Z.

Source: Dissident Voice

Thanks to corporate media, anything outside the accepted parameters of debate (e.g. CNN vs. Fox, NY Times vs. Wall Street Journal) is considered beyond the pale. Thus, when I wish to introduce you to what the transhumanists in charge have planned for you, by default, I sound like a fringe weirdo in a tinfoil hat. This highly efficient system keeps the rabble in line by encouraging each of us to do the enforcing of such censorship. We willingly limit our own access to information — in the name of “justice” or “science,” of course.

With that in mind, I offer you a 2-minute video on “smart dust” in the hope you have enough attention span and open-mindedness to focus that long:

Keep in mind that the above video is already five years old. In tech years, that might as well be a century. As far back as 2013, MIT was talking about “How Smart Dust Could Spy On Your Brain.” Smart dust (or “neural dust”) is already here, already in use, and will soon be a daily part of your life — whether you ask for it or not. Are you okay with that?

Smart Dust is comprised of “many small wireless microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). MEMS are tiny devices that have cameras, sensors, and communication mechanisms to transmit the data to be stored and processed further. They generally range from 20 micrometers up to a millimeter in size. They are usually connected to a computer network wirelessly and are distributed over a specific area to accomplish tasks, usually sensing through RFID (radio-frequency identification) technology.”

You can probably see what they’ve been given the nickname of “dust.” In fact, they can even be distributed via tiny, unmanned aircraft that would serve as crop dusters of sorts. Without being detected, they’d spray the virtually invisible motes over a large area and collect information that way. They are so small, you’d never know they were there — perhaps gathering info on you. How small? The prototype smart dust currently measures 0.8 millimeters x 3 millimeters x 1 millimeter can be only 1 cubic millimeter or less in size — possibly as small as 100 microns per side. 

Some of you, I’m certain, are already embracing this sci-fi kind of idea as yet another fine example of  “science.” Before you get too misty-eyed about such “progress,” please allow me to remind you that smart dust was developed by (surprise, surprise) the U.S. military. More specifically, it is the brainchild of the notorious DARPA — Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. These are the same folks who brought you mind-control weapons, cyborg insects, synthetic blood, mechanical elephants, programmable shape-shifting matter, and so much more.

So, go back and re-read the details above and recognize how easily smart dust could be weaponized. Even better, accept the reality that step one (as always) was weaponizing smart dust. And now, digest the fact that those well-intentioned and good-hearted souls in the military want to implant smart dust inside you… for your own good, of course.

“Neural dust represents a radical departure from the traditional approach of using radio waves for wireless communication with implanted devices,” said Doug Weber, a DARPA program manager. “The soft tissues of our body consist mostly of saltwater. Sound waves pass freely through these tissues and can be focused with pinpoint accuracy at nerve targets deep inside our body, while radio waves cannot. Indeed, this is why sonar is used to image objects in the ocean, while radar is used to detect objects in the air. By using ultrasound to communicate with the neural dust, the sensors can be made smaller and placed deeper inside the body, by needle injection or other non-surgical approaches.”

I’ve already told you about the Internet of Bodies. And I’ve also already told you about the Pentagon’s openly-discussed plan to insert microchips inside us to “protect” us. With smart dust, they could just let the technology waft down from the sky and have you unknowingly inhale it. Why is no one talking about this? I ask you to re-visit my opening paragraph for that answer. To even talk about smart dust is to be dismissed as a “conspiracy theorist.” Once again, those in power have trained the public to do the policing for them. Somewhere, Goebbels is drooling.

All of the above has become easier to employ thanks to the pandemic. To explain that, we need to meet Klaus Schwab — the founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), and author of a book called The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Here’s how the WEF explains this concept: 

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.

To repeat: “a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.” This is transhumanism. It’s an ideology that proposes that technology can and must “enhance” the human mind and body and they are already working to “prove” this theory. Men like Schwab believe we must connect the physical, digital, and biological domains via steps like “implantable technologies such as smart tattoos, smart dust, smart pills, and other implantable smart functionalities.” They want to turn your heartbeat into your digital ID. Schwab and his ilk also support work going on in areas like designing human genomes, and simulating, monitoring, or even influencing brain activity, both in medical and non-medical applications. (P.S. Elon Musk is also currently setting up a company that links brains and computers.) Click here to watch Schwab telling Charlie Rose about his plans to edit your genes. 

Most people would’ve probably cast a wary side-eye at such suggestions — until Covid-19. For 18 months, the powers-that-be have successfully scared the population into believing anything they decree. They’ve also coerced and manipulated billions into allowing novel nanotechnology to be injected into them without a second thought. Never mind thinking, the masses are lining up to serve as unpaid PR people for the experimental jab.

With such widespread and enthusiastic compliance, there seems to be little to stand in the way of Schwab, the World Economic Forum, DARPA, Big Pharma, and the transhumanist agenda. They are counting on you going along without asking too many questions. But there’s the catch. You still can demand and reclaim autonomy over your mind and body. For starters, all you need to do is a little self-loving homework to see what they have planned for you and then… just say no. Unless, of course, you’d prefer having your consciousness uploaded to the cloud. 

Amazon, “Economic Terrorism” and the Destruction of Competition and Livelihoods

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By Colin Todhunter

Source: Off-Guardian

Global corporations are colonising India’s retail space through e-commerce and destroying small-scale physical retail and millions of livelihoods.

Walmart entered into India in 2016 with a US$3.3 billion take-over of the online retail start-up Jet.com. This was followed in 2018 with a US$16 billion take-over of India’s largest online retail platform, Flipkart. Today, Walmart and Amazon control almost two thirds of India’s digital retail sector.

Amazon and Walmart have a record of using predatory pricing, deep discounts and other unfair business practices to attract customers to their online platforms. A couple of years ago, those two companies generated sales of over US$3 billion in just six days during Diwali. India’s small retailers reacted by calling for a boycott of online shopping.

If you want to know the eventual fate of India’s local markets and small retailers, look no further than what US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in 2019. He stated that Amazon had “destroyed the retail industry across the United States.”

AMAZON’S CORPORATE PRACTICES

In the US, an investigation by the House Judiciary Committee concluded that Amazon exerts monopoly power over many small- and medium-size businesses. It called for breaking up the company and regulating its online marketplace to ensure that sellers are treated fairly.

Amazon has spied on sellers and appropriated data about their sales, costs and suppliers. It has then used this information to create its own competing versions of their products, often giving its versions superior placement in the search results on its platform.

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) published a revealing document on Amazon in June 2021 that discussed these issues. It also notes that Amazon has been caught using its venture capital fund to invest in start-ups only to steal their ideas and create rival products and services.

Moreover, Amazon’s dominance allows it to function as a gatekeeper: retailers and brands must sell on its site to reach much of the online market and changes to Amazon’s search algorithms or selling terms can cause their sales to evaporate overnight.

Amazon also makes it hard for sellers to reduce their dependence on its platform by making their brand identity almost invisible to shoppers and preventing them from building relationships with their customers. The company strictly limits contact between sellers and customers.

According to the ILSR, Amazon compels sellers to buy its warehousing and shipping services, even though many would get a better deal from other providers, and it blocks independent businesses from offering lower prices on other sites. The company also routinely suspends sellers’ accounts and seizes inventories and cash balances.

The Joint Action Committee against Foreign Retail and E-commerce (JACAFRE) was formed to resist the entry of foreign corporations like Walmart and Amazon into India’s e-commerce market. Its members represent more than 100 national groups, including major trade, workers’ and farmers’ organisations.

JACAFRE issued a statement in 2018 on Walmart’s acquisition of Flipkart, arguing that it undermines India’s economic and digital sovereignty and the livelihoods of millions in India. The committee said the deal would lead to Walmart and Amazon dominating India’s e-retail sector. It would also allow them to own India’s key consumer and other economic data, making them the country’s digital overlords, joining the ranks of Google and Facebook.

In January 2021, JACAFRE published an open letter saying that the three new farm laws, passed by parliament in September 2020, centre on enabling and facilitating the unregulated corporatisation of agriculture value chains. This will effectively make farmers and small traders of agricultural produce become subservient to the interests of a few agrifood and e-commerce giants or will eradicate them completely.

Although there was strong resistance to Walmart entering India with its physical stores, online and offline worlds are now merged: e-commerce companies not only control data about consumption but also control data on production and logistics. Through this control, e-commerce platforms can shape much of the physical economy.

What we are witnessing is the deliberate eradication of markets in favour of monopolistic platforms.

BEZOS NOT WELCOME

Amazon’s move into India encapsulates the unfair fight for space between local and global markets. There is a relative handful of multi-billionaires who own the corporations and platforms. And there are the interests of hundreds of millions of vendors and various small-scale enterprises who are regarded by these rich individuals as mere collateral damage to be displaced in their quest for ever-greater profit.

Thanks to the helping hand of various COVID-related lockdowns, which devastated small businesses, the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.9tn (trillion) between 18 March and 31 December 2020.

In September 2020, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s executive chairman, could have paid all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105,000 bonus and still be as wealthy as he was before COVID. Jeff Bezos – his fortune constructed on unprincipled methods that have been well documented in recent years – increased his net wealth by $78.2bn during this period.

Bezos’s plan is clear: the plunder of India and the eradication of millions of small traders and retailers and neighbourhood mom and pop shops.

This is a man with few scruples. After returning from a brief flight to space in July, in a rocket built by his private space company, Bezos said during a news conference:

I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.”

In response, US congresswoman Nydia Velazquez wrote on Twitter:

While Jeff Bezos is all over the news for paying to go to space, let’s not forget the reality he has created here on Earth.”

She added the hashtag #WealthTaxNow in reference to Amazon’s tax dodging, revealed in numerous reports, not least the May 2021 study ‘The Amazon Method: How to take advantage of the international state system to avoid paying tax’ by Richard Phillips, Senior Research Fellow, Jenaline Pyle, PhD Candidate, and Ronen Palan, Professor of International Political Economy, all based at the University of London.

Little wonder that when Bezos visited India in January 2020, he was hardly welcomed with open arms.

Bezos praised India on Twitter by posting:

Dynamism. Energy. Democracy. #IndianCentury.”

The ruling party’s top man in the BJP foreign affairs department hit back with:

Please tell this to your employees in Washington DC. Otherwise, your charm offensive is likely to be waste of time and money.”

A fitting response, albeit perplexing given the current administration’s proposed sanctioning of the foreign takeover of the economy, not least by the unscrupulous interests that will benefit from the recent farm legislation.

Bezos landed in India on the back of the country’s antitrust regulator initiating a formal investigation of Amazon and with small store owners demonstrating in the streets. The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) announced that members of its affiliate bodies across the country would stage sit-ins and public rallies in 300 cities in protest.

In a letter to PM Modi, prior to the visit of Bezos, the secretary of the CAIT, General Praveen Khandelwal, claimed that Amazon, like Walmart-owned Flipkart, was an “economic terrorist” due to its predatory pricing that “compelled the closure of thousands of small traders.”

In 2020, Delhi Vyapar Mahasangh (DVM) filed a complaint against Amazon and Flipkart alleging that they favoured certain sellers over others on their platforms by offering them discounted fees and preferential listing. The DVM lobbies to promote the interests of small traders. It also raised concerns about Amazon and Flipkart entering into tie-ups with mobile phone manufacturers to sell phones exclusively on their platforms.

It was argued by DVM that this was anti-competitive behaviour as smaller traders could not purchase and sell these devices. Concerns were also raised over the flash sales and deep discounts offered by e-commerce companies, which could not be matched by small traders.

The CAIT estimates that in 2019 upwards of 50,000 mobile phone retailers were forced out of business by large e-commerce firms.

Amazon’s internal documents, as revealed by Reuters, indicated that Amazon had an indirect ownership stake in a handful of sellers who made up most of the sales on its Indian platform. This is an issue because in India Amazon and Flipkart are legally allowed to function only as neutral platforms that facilitate transactions between third-party sellers and buyers for a fee.

UNDER INVESTIGATION

The upshot is that India’s Supreme Court recently ruled that Amazon must face investigation by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) for alleged anti-competitive business practices. The CCI said it would probe the deep discounts, preferential listings and exclusionary tactics that Amazon and Flipkart are alleged to have used to destroy competition.

However, there are powerful forces that have been sitting on their hands as these companies have been running amok.

In August 2021, the CAIT attacked the NITI Aayog (the influential policy commission think tank of the Government of India) for interfering in e-commerce rules proposed by the Consumer Affairs Ministry.

The CAIT said that the think tank clearly seems to be under the pressure and influence of the foreign e-commerce giants.

The president of CAIT, BC Bhartia, stated that it is deeply shocking to see such a callous and indifferent attitude of the NITI Aayog whch have remained a silent spectator for so many years when:

…the foreign e-commerce giants have circumvented every rule of the FDI policy and blatantly violated and destroyed the retail and e-commerce landscape of the country but have suddenly decided to open their mouth at a time when the proposed e-commerce rules will potentially end the malpractices of the e-commerce companies.”

Of course, money talks and buys influence. In addition to tens of billions of US dollars invested in India by Walmart and Amazon, Facebook invested US$5.5 billion last year in Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Platforms (e-commerce retail). Google has also invested US$4.5 billion.

Since the early 1990s, when India opened up to neoliberal economics, the country has become increasingly dependent on inflows of foreign capital. Policies are being governed by the drive to attract and retain foreign investment and maintain ‘market confidence’ by ceding to the demands of international capital which ride roughshod over democratic principles and the needs of hundreds of millions of ordinary people. ‘Foreign direct investment’ has thus become the holy grail of the Modi-led administration and the NITI Aayog.

The CAIT has urged the Consumer Affairs Ministry to implement the draft consumer protection e-commerce rules at the earliest as they are in the best interest of the consumers as well as the traders of the country.

Meanwhile, the CCI probably will complete its investigation within two months.

Australia Continues Its Plunge Into Authoritarianism And Military Brinkmanship

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Australia has joined the US and UK in an “enhanced trilateral security partnership” called AUKUS with the unspoken-yet-obvious goal of coordinating escalations against China. Antiwar reports:

President Biden and the leaders of Australia and the UK announced a new military agreement on Wednesday aimed at countering China. The pact, known as AUKUS, will focus on the sharing of sensitive military technologies, and the first initiative will focus on getting Australia nuclear-powered submarines.

US officials speaking to CNN described the effort to share nuclear propulsion with another country as an “exceedingly rare step” due to the sensitivity of the technology. “This technology is extremely sensitive. This is, frankly, an exception to our policy in many respects,” one unnamed official said.

This deal will replace a planned $90 billion program to obtain twelve submarines designed by France, an obnoxious expenditure either way when a quarter of Australians are struggling to make ends meet during a pandemic that is four times more likely to kill Australians who are struggling financially. This is just the latest in Canberra’s continually expanding policy of feeding vast fortunes into Washington’s standoff with Beijing at the expense of its own people.

If readers are curious why Australia would simultaneously subvert its own economic interests by turning against its primary trading partner and its own security interests by feeding into dangerous and unnecessary provocations, I will refer them once again to the jarringly honest explanation by American political analyst John Mearsheimer at a debate hosted by the Australian think tank Center for Independent Studies in 2019. Mearsheimer told his audience that the US is going to do everything it can to halt China’s rise and prevent it from becoming the regional hegemon in the East, and that Australia should align with the US in that battle or else it would face the wrath of Washington.

“The question that’s on the table is what should Australia’s foreign policy be in light of the rise of China,” Mearsheimer said. “I’ll tell you what I would suggest if I were an Australian.”

Mearsheimer claimed that China is going to continue to grow economically and will convert this economic power into military power to dominate Asia “the way the US dominates the Western Hemisphere”, and explained why he thinks the US and its allies have every ability to prevent that from happening.

“Now the question is what does this all mean for Australia?” Mearsheimer said. “Well, you’re in a quandary for sure. Everybody knows what the quandary is. And by the way you’re not the only country in East Asia that’s in this quandary. You trade a lot with China, and that trade is very important for your prosperity, no question about that. Security-wise you really want to go with us. It makes just a lot more sense, right? And you understand that security is more important than prosperity, because if you don’t survive, you’re not gonna prosper.”

“Now some people say there’s an alternative: you can go with China,” said Mearsheimer. “Right you have a choice here: you can go with China rather the United States. There’s two things I’ll say about that. Number one, if you go with China you want to understand you are our enemy. You are then deciding to become an enemy of the United States. Because again, we’re talking about an intense security competition.”

“You’re either with us or against us,” he continued. “And if you’re trading extensively with China, and you’re friendly with China, you’re undermining the United States in this security competition. You’re feeding the beast, from our perspective. And that is not going to make us happy. And when we are not happy you do not want to underestimate how nasty we can be. Just ask Fidel Castro.”

Nervous laughter from the Australian think tank audience punctuated Mearsheimer’s more incendiary observations. The CIA is known to have made numerous attempts to assassinate Castro.

So there you have it. Australia is not aligned with the US to protect itself from China. Australia is aligned with the US to protect itself from the US.

This new move happens as Northern Territory Chief Minister Michael Gunner announces his government’s policy for Covid-19 restrictions once the territory’s population is 80 percent vaccinated which will include “lockouts” during outbreaks wherein people will only be allowed to work and move freely in society if they verify that they are vaccinated using check-in measures which Gunner literally calls a “freedom pass”.

“I’ll say it again and again. If you want your life to continue close to normal, get your jab,” Gunner said. “For vaccinated people, the check-in app will basically be your freedom pass. For people who make the choice to not get vaccinated, no vax means no freedom pass. We’re working with other governments now to get this technology ready.”

This is in alignment with what we’ve been told to expect as the rest of Australia prepares to roll out the use of vaccine passports.

And we continue to see other authoritarian escalations in Australia which have nothing to do with Covid as well. Authorities have been proposing new legal provisions which will allow Australian visas to be cancelled and citizenship revoked in entirely secret proceedings based on information provided by secretive government agencies. The horrifying Identify and Disrupt bill which allows Australian police to hack people’s devices, collect, delete and alter their information and log onto their social media was passed through Parliament at jaw-dropping speed last month. Neither of these escalations are Covid-related.

People who just started paying attention to Australian authoritarianism during Covid often get the impression that it’s entirely about the virus, but as we discussed previously the actual fundamental problem is that Australia is the only so-called democracy without any kind of statute or bill of rights to protect the citizenry from these kinds of abuses. This is why Australia is looked upon as so freakish by the rest of the western world right now: because, in this sense, it is. People call it a “free country”, but there has never been any reason to do so.

Covid has certainly played a major role in the exacerbation of Australian authoritarianism, but it’s a problem that was well underway long before the outbreak. Back in 2019 the CIVICUS Monitor had already downgraded Australia from an “open” country to one where civil space has “narrowed”, citing new laws to expand government surveillance, prosecution of whistleblowers, and raids on media organizations.

This slide into military brinkmanship and authoritarian dystopia shows no signs of stopping. The abuses of the powerful will continue to grow more egregious until the people open their eyes to what’s going on and begin taking action to steer us away from the existential dangers we are hurtling toward on multiple fronts. If there is any good news to be had here, it’s that if such a miracle ever occurs it will then be possible to immediately course correct and start building a healthy society together.

THEY ARE CREATING THE BIGGEST WITCH HUNT IN AMERICAN HISTORY

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By Michael Snyder

Source: Waking Times

Prior to this pandemic, if you wanted to weed out all of the “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” from our society, how would you have done it?

I suppose that sending everyone a questionnaire asking them what they believe would be one way to do it, but of course a lot of people would give false answers and many others would simply ignore the questionnaire.  Social media profiles contain a wealth of information, but many “non-conformists” are not even on social media and digging through all of that data would take an extraordinary amount of time, money and energy.  Up until just recently, there just hasn’t been an easy and efficient way to identify those that are not eager servants of the system.

But now the COVID vaccines have changed everything.  These injections are the perfect litmus test, because “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” are pretty much the only ones that are refusing the shots at this point.  This makes it exceptionally easy to divide American citizens into two categories, and it also gives authorities a perfect excuse to push all of those “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” to the fringes of society.

As I discussed yesterday, I was literally sick to my stomach as I pondered the implications of Biden’s tyrannical new decrees.  Originally, Biden and other Democratic leaders were against any sort of vaccine mandates, but now I think that they have realized that mandates are a tool that they can use to fundamentally reshape our society.

If you don’t understand where I am going with this, just keep reading, because it will become extremely clear by the end of this article.

Biden’s new decrees cover almost every major institution in our society.  Just think about it.  Any “major institution” is almost certainly going to be employing more than 100 people, and all such organizations are covered by Biden’s mandates.

In addition to businesses of various sizes, we are also talking about colleges, schools, churches, non-profits, political entities, sports teams and charitable organizations.

Millions of Americans that are employed by such institutions could be forced to leave their positions if they refuse to comply with what Biden is demanding.

And the rules that the Biden administration is coming up with will require the institutions to be the enforcers of these draconian new measures.

Your bosses will be forced to make sure that you are submitting to the new rules, because if not they could be hit with massive fines.

In my last article I used the word “sickening” to describe what Biden is trying to do to all of us, but the truth is that word is not nearly strong enough.

What we are facing is a complete and total national nightmare, and it isn’t going to end any time soon.

Biden’s new mandates are even stricter for employees of the federal government.  Previously, employees of the federal government were at least given the option to undergo regular testing if they didn’t want to be vaccinated, but now that option is being taken away.

So now millions of federal employees will have to choose between their principles and their careers.

And considering the fact that so many of these people are barely providing for their families right now, a lot of really heartbreaking choices are going to have to be made.

Earlier today, I posted a video from a woman that works for the U.S. Treasury Department.  After all these years, she publicly announced on social media that she is going to leave her job because of Biden’s new mandates.

And countless others will follow her out the door.

Biden’s new decrees will also force nearly everyone in the entire healthcare industry to either get vaccinated or give up their careers.

What a horribly cruel thing to do.

Biden is essentially putting a gun to the heads of these people.  So many of them spent an enormous amount of time, energy and money to get their educations, and now Biden is telling them that they have to sacrifice everything that they have worked for if they will not comply with his demands.

As I pointed out yesterday, healthcare workers won’t just be forced out of their current jobs.  Because virtually every health care provider in the entire country accepts Medicaid and Medicare, those that refuse to comply will essentially be banned from the entire industry.

At a time when a shortage of qualified workers is causing chaos throughout our economy, Biden’s tyrannical orders could force millions of Americans to suddenly lose their jobs.  This is an incredibly foolish thing to do, and it could have very serious ramifications in the years ahead.

Sadly, it won’t just be a few people quitting their jobs.  A poll that was just conducted discovered that 72 percent of unvaccinated Americans said that they would quit their current jobs rather than be vaccinated…

Many making this argument have cited a Washington Post-ABC News poll released over the weekend. It showed that just 18 percent unvaccinated people whose employers don’t currently have mandates said they would likely get vaccinated if their employer required it. About 7 in 10 (72 percent) said that, if they couldn’t get a medical or religious exemption, they would probably quit rather than submit to the requirement.

I don’t know what is going on behind the scenes, but it is my opinion that Kamala Harris has had a lot of influence in the recent decisions that Biden has been making.

She has always had authoritarian tendencies, and if she ever becomes president that will truly be a catastrophic scenario.

Needless to say, Biden’s new mandates are going to cause great anxiety for millions upon millions of people, and a recent CNN poll found that the mood of the country was already heading in a very negative direction…

The new poll finds 69% of Americans say things in the country today are going badly, below the pandemic-era high of 77% reached in January just before President Joe Biden took office but well above the 60% who felt that way in a March CNN poll.

And 62% say that economic conditions in the US are poor, up from 45% in April and nearly as high as the pandemic-era peak of 65% reached in May 2020.

My hope is that Republican governors will fight Biden’s new decrees with everything that they have got.

Because the truth is that this is one of the most critical moments in U.S. history.

Our most basic liberties and freedoms are under full assault, and we really are descending into full-blown tyranny.

If Biden’s new mandates are not overturned by the courts, millions of Americans that love liberty and freedom could be forced from their jobs.

It would truly be a witch hunt of unprecedented size and scope, and it would represent the greatest purge of “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” that any of us have ever witnessed.

Which Is Worse, the Tech Giant Censors or the Stuff You Want Censored?

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By David Swanson

Source: War is a Crime

The communications system we live in is highly complex, mostly driven by greed and profit, in part semi-public, full of filth I know we’d be better off without, and increasingly openly censored and monitored by defenders of accepted good thinking.

Fascist nutcases are spreading dangerous nonsense, while billionaire monopolists are virtually disappearing critics and protesters. It’s easy to get confused about what ought to be done. It’s difficult to find any recommendation that isn’t confused. Different people want different outrages censored and censored by different entities; what they all have in common is a failure to think through the threats they are creating to the things they don’t want censored.

A 1975 Canadian government commission recommended censoring “libel, obscenity, breach of the Official Secrets Act, matters affecting the defense of Canada, treason, sedition, or promulgating information that leads to incitement of crime or violence.” This is a typical muddle. Half of those things were almost certainly already banned, as suggested by their identification through legal terminology. A few of those things probably should be banned, such as incitement of violence (though not promulgating information that “leads” to incitement of any crime or violence). Of course I would include as incitement of violence a speech by the Prime Minister advocating the shipping of Canadian “Peace Keepers” to Africa, but the Prime Minister (who would have more say than I) would no doubt have just identified me as commenting on a matter affecting the defense of Canada — plus, if he or she were in the mood, I’ve probably just promulgated something that will lead to inciting some crime or other, even if it’s just the crime of more people speaking on matters affecting the “defense” of Canada. (And it shouldn’t matter that I’m not Canadian, since Julian Assange is not from the United States.)

Well, what’s the solution? A simplistic and surprisingly popular one is to blame philosophers. Those idiot postmodernists said there was no such thing as truth, which allowed that great student of philosophy Donald Trump to declare news about him “fake” — which he never could have thought of doing without a bunch of leftist academics inspiring him; and the endless blatant lies about wars and economies and environmental collapse and straight-faced reporting of campaign promises can’t have anything at all to do with the ease people have in distrusting news reporting. So, now we need to swing the pendulum back in the direction of tattooing the Ten Commandments on our foreheads before morality perishes at the hands of the monster relativism. We can’t do that without censoring the numbskulls, regrettably of course.

This line of thinking is dependent on failing to appreciate the point of postmodern criticism. That the greater level of consensus that exists on chemistry or physics as opposed to on what should be banned as “obscenity” is a matter of degree, not of essential or metaphysical substance, is an interesting point for philosophy students, and a correct one, but not a guide to life for politicians or school teachers. That there is no possible basis for declaring some law of physics permanent and incapable of being replaced by a better one is not a reason for treating a law of physics as a matter of opinion or susceptible to alteration via fairy dust. If Isaac Newton not being God, and God also not being God, disturbs you and you’re mad at philosophers for saying it, you should notice what follows from it: the need for everyone to support your right to try to persuade them of their error. And what does not follow from it: the elimination of chemistry or physics because some nitwit claims he can fly or kill a hurricane with his gun. If that idiot has 100,000 followers on social media, your concern is not with philosophy but with stupidity.

The tech-giant censors’ concern is — in part — also with stupidity, but it’s not clear they have the tools to address it. For one thing, they just cannot help themselves. They have other concerns too. They are concerned with their profits. They are concerned with any challenges to power — their power and the power of those who empower them. They are concerned, therefore, with the demands and national bigotry of national governments. They are concerned — whether they know it or not — with creative thinking. Every time they censor an idea they believe crazy, they risk censoring one of those ideas that proves superior to existing ones. Their combination of interests appears to be self-defeating. Rather than persuade people of the benefits of their censorship, they persuade more and more people of the rightness of what was censored and of the arbitrary power-interests of those doing the censoring.

Our problem is not too many voices on the internet. It is too much concentration of wealth and power in too few media outlets that are too narrowly restricted to too few voices, relegating other voices to marginal and ghettoized corners of the internet. Nobody gets to find out they’re mistaken through respectful discourse. Nobody gets to show someone else they’re right. We need to prioritize that sort of exchange, before a flood of misguided good intentions drowns us all.

The “promulgating information that leads to incitement of crime or violence” bit of that proposed law seems to have had a surprisingly good intention, namely benevolent parental concern with all the “action-filled” (violence-filled) children’s entertainment on television, the violence-normalizing enter/info-tainment programming for all ages that studies and commonsense suggest increase violence. But can we ban all that garbage, or do we have to empower people who actually give a damn to produce and select programming, and empower families to turn it all off, and schools to be more engaging than cartoons?

The difficulty of censoring such content should be clear from the fact that discussions of it tend to stray into numerous unrelated topics, including the supposed need to censor wars for the protection of, not children, but weapons dealers. Once you allow a corporation to censor damaging news — poof! — there go all negative reports on its products. Once you tell it to put warning labels over recommendations to drink bleach as medicine, it starts putting warning labels on anything related to climate collapse or originating outside the United States of Goddamn Righteousness. You can imagine whether that ends up helping or hurting the supposed target, stupidity.

Censoring news, and labeling news as “factual,” seems to me a cheap fix that doesn’t fix. It’s a bit like legalizing bribery and gerrymandering and limited ballot access and corporate airwaves domination and then declaring that you’ll institute term limits so that every rotten candidate has to be quickly replaced by an even more rotten one. It’s a lovely sounding solution until you try it. Look at the “fact-checker” sections of corporate media outlets. They’re as wrong and inconsistent as any other sections; they’re just labeled differently.

The solutions that will work are not easy, and I’m no expert on them, but they’re not new or mysterious either. We should democratize and legitimize government. We should use government to break up media monopolies. We should publicly and privately facilitate and support numerous independent media outlets. We should invest in publicly funded but independent media dedicated to allowing a wide range of people to discuss issues without the overarching control of the profit interest or the immediate interests of the government.

We should not be simplistic about banning or allowing censorship, but highly wary of opening up any new types of censorship and imagining they won’t be abused. We should stick to what is already illegal outside of communications (such as violence) and censor communications only when it is actually directly a part of those crimes (such as instigating particular violence). We should be open to some limits on the forces empowered by our choice through our public dollars to shape our communications; I’d be happy to ban militaries from having any role in producing movies and video games (if they’re going to bomb children in the name of “democracy,” well, then, that’s my vote for the use of my dollars).

At the same time, we need — through schools and outside of them — radically better education that includes education in the skills of media consumption, BS-spotting, propaganda deciphering, fact-verification, respect, civility, decency, and honesty. I hardly think it’s entirely the fault of youtube that kids get less of their education from their classrooms — part of the fault lies with the classrooms. But I hardly think the eternal project of learning, and of learning how to learn, can be restricted to classrooms.

A Tool of Control: How Health Officials Weaponize Language to Manage Public Perception of COVID Vaccines

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The deployment of clever linguistic tricks has created a hostile upside-down universe, where even the vaccine-injured are tarnished as “anti-vaxxers” or liars rather than acknowledged as ex-vaxxers who took risks that turned out to be life-changing.

By Children’s Health Defense Team

Source: The Defender

Psychological and linguistic manipulation are, for those in power, proven tools for building, consolidating and maintaining dominance — a reality keenly depicted in George Orwell’s never-more-relevant novel, “1984.”

As phrased by master propagandist Edward Bernays, an approximate contemporary of Orwell’s, the mind of the people “is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion.”

Recent events surrounding COVID vaccines have shown that medicine and public health — with the help of a complicit media — are particularly skilled at “pull[ing] the wires which control the public mind.”

The clever bag of linguistic tricks deployed by the medical cartel includes seeding evocative terms such as “vaccine hesitancy” and “lockdowns” (which is prison terminology) into popular and scientific discourse, forging slippery new definitions of words with formerly fixed meanings (such as “pandemic,” “herd immunity” and “vaccine”), and circling failed products back around by giving them the positive spin of “boosters.”

Ominously, medicine’s and public health’s verbal assaults encourage shaming of, or violence against, those who ask questions, while upholding the disingenuous pretense that vaccine mandates are compatible with freedom.

In this hostile upside-down universe, even the vaccine-injured are tarnished as “anti-vaxxers” or liars rather than acknowledged as ex-vaxxers who took risks that turned out to be life-changing.

‘Much like other stressors’

One of the more insulting recent examples of linguistic weaponization involves a dubious psychiatric cover term, “functional neurological disorder” (FND), that is suddenly being trumpeted as an explanation for the tsunami of adverse events — especially severe neurological reactions — being reported all over the world in the aftermath of COVID vaccination.

Psychiatrists conveniently define FND — which they also refer to as a “psychogenic” (originating in the mind) or “conversion” disorder — as “real” nervous system symptoms that “cause significant distress or problems functioning” but are “incompatible with” or “can’t be explained by” recognized neurological diseases or other medical conditions.

Lest members of the public derive a “simplistic impression of potential links between the [COVID] vaccine and major neurological symptoms,” neurologists pushing the FND story have hastened to reassure people that the “close development of functional motor symptoms after the vaccine does not implicate the vaccine as the cause of those symptoms.”

One of these individuals is National Institutes of Health-funded neurologist Alberto Espay, who implausibly adds that COVID vaccination (which entails injection with high-risk substances and technologies) is just “a stressor or precipitant, much like any other stressor … such as a motor vehicle accident or sleep deprivation.”

Officials and the media are audaciously trotting out the FND narrative on both sides of the pond, as evidenced by a recent Daily Mail headline that read, “Videos of people ‘struggling to walk’ after getting their COVID vaccine are NOT result of jab itself but a condition triggered by stress or trauma.”

Helping with the spin, a member of the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization straight-facedly attributed this “stress” to coercion, stating: “If people begin to feel they are being kind of forced against their will to do something, then in a sense that’s quite a damaging thing to do because it gives people the impression vaccination is something being imposed on them.”

Hammering home the point that “there is nothing to see here,” Kings College London physician Matthew Butler solemnly (and without evidence) agrees that FND — though “serious and debilitating” — “does not implicate any vaccine constituents and should not hamper ongoing vaccination efforts.”

Butler is the lead author of a May 2020 paper proposing FND patients’ “abnormal body-focussed attention” be treated with psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin — never mind that psychedelics themselves, admit Butler and co-authors, “sometimes produce abnormal physical and motor effects,” including seizures.

An all-too-familiar game

To past victims of vaccine injury, the “it’s all in your mind” sleight-of-hand being summoned to dismiss COVID vaccine injuries is all too familiar.

Consider autism, which psychiatrists blamed, in its earliest days, on emotionally distant “refrigerator moms.”

In more recent decades, families affected by autism have experienced the double whammy of regulatory indifference to likely culprits (including not just neurotoxic vaccines but other probable environmental triggers) alongside brazen denial of autism’s escalating prevalence.

Young people injured by human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines tell similar stories of “denial and dismissal of reported harms and deaths.” Researchers who in 2017 reviewed the serious adverse events reported during two of the largest HPV vaccine clinical trials noted that “Practically, none of the serious adverse events occurring in any arm of both studies were judged [by the manufacturers] to have been vaccine-related.”

In the face of severe symptoms such as heart-attack-like chest pain, numbness and swelling of extremities, hair loss, whole-body aches and extreme fatigue, boys and girls injured by HPV vaccines have been repeatedly subjected to medical gaslighting — told they are “crazy” and just need to “slow down.”

In one incident in Australia, after “26 girls presented to the school’s sick bay with symptoms including dizziness, syncope [fainting] and neurological complaints” within two hours of receiving HPV vaccines at school, pharma-funded researchers had the chutzpah to dismiss the safety signal and characterize the episode as a “mass psychogenic event” — which they defined as “the collective occurrence of a constellation of symptoms suggestive of organic illness but without an identified cause in a group of people with shared beliefs about the cause.”

Recognize, question and reclaim

The medical-public health-pharma cartel, the “small cabal of wealthy countries, corporations and individuals” that support it, and their media mouthpieces are supremely confident in their ability to manage public perceptions through words and narratives, whether for the purpose of “mystifying” the public about key events, securing buy-in for oppressive policies or sowing discord to divide and conquer. (As journalists Caitlin Johnstone and Glenn Greenwald also remind us, many media personalities are intelligence agency veterans or assets, and the “sole owner of the Washington Post is a CIA contractor.”)

Thus, it pays to be attentive to how health authorities use language, for “the more you know about language, the more immune you become to its effects.”

Beyond noticing the manipulation, we must also stop ceding the linguistic terrain to our would-be manipulators — for example, by eschewing weaponized vocabulary such as the pejorative term “vaccine hesitancy.”

Catholic journalist Jane Stannus points out that the term “vaccine hesitant” portrays those who decline COVID (or other) vaccines as “‘trapped by irrational fears’ in a state of inaction or ignorantly opposed to science,” with the strong suggestion “that such backward and weak-minded persons are worthy of contempt, especially compared with the enlightened, confident people who signed up for the vaccine immediately.”

The unfortunate corollary of such language is the “witch hunt on the unvaccinated” that we are already witnessing, “an act of violence against the fabric of society,” says Stannus, that is “a greater evil … than the shared suffering of disease.”

We can and urgently need to see through these shenanigans and reclaim our humanity.

Fast-moving current events are proving those who have declined COVID injections are the wise ones, with science proving them correct in just about every way.

Whether we consider the many suspected dangers of products unleashed on the public less than a year ago, or the injuries and deaths occurring on a never-before-seen scale (including in teens who had their lives ahead of them), or the clear superiority of natural immunity, or the fact that the injections don’t even do the one thing the clinical trials alleged they could do (i.e., keep more severe illness at bay), it is clear that citizens who would rather think for themselves than swallow prefabricated lies are the ones who are going to come out ahead.

Why Is Biden Mandating a Vaccine that Does Not Protect Against Covid?

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

The dumbshit American population sat on their butts and allowed a few Democrat gangsters to steal a presidential election and stick in the Oval Office a complete moron.

Doing his masters’ bidding, the moron is directing the Labor Department to rule that companies with 100 or more employees must require employees to be vaccinated or have weekly testing.  (The current PCR test in use is being abandoned as it produces false positives that have greatly exaggerated the number of Covid cases.)  

The moron is a puppet on a stick that gets moved around by the monied interests that rule us.  The moron has been directed to get all Americans “vaccinated” with a “vaccine” that the public health authorities themselves admit does not protect against Covid or the Delta variant or any of the other variants.  They have stated as much.  Their solution for a “vaccine’ that does not work is more of the “vaccine.”  Fauci says the population will need booster shots every 8 months forever.  The Israeli “health minister” is already pushing Israelis to have a fourth booster shot with more to come.

In other words, neither Fauci, the Israeli government, the elite controlling the narrative, nor the puppet on the stick are sufficiently intelligent to realize that what they are saying is:  If you are doubly vaccinated (until the other day “fully vaccinated” and assured of protection), today you no longer qualify as vaccinated, and you might be more vulnerable to Covid and its variants than the unvaccinated.  Moreover, as the Israeli “health minister” has said, you are not vaccinated even if you have the first booster shot, the third shot.  You must have a fourth booster.  Fauci has already said that you will have to have boosters forever.

In other words, the vaccine, whatever it is, is most certainly not a vaccine against Covid or its variants.

In view of these acknowledged facts, what is the point of the mad-hat vaccination campaign?  

Is it to maximize adverse vaccine reaction deaths and illnesses?  As of July, the combined adverse vaccine reaction databases of the US, EU, and UK reported more than 5 million adverse reactions and  40,000 deaths.  This information until recently was available on Google, but Google now hides it, and a search only pulls up Big Pharma propaganda that adverse reactions are “rare.”  In other words, the accomplices to murder at Google disavow the official adverse reaction reporting systems and suppress them for “spreading misinformation.”  

The numbers of adverse reactions and deaths associated with the Covid Vaccine are far greater than the officially reported numbers.  Many experts agree that few adverse reactions are reported.  Hospitals have financial incentives to call adverse reactions Covid cases. Vaccine advocates refuse to admit that there are adverse reactions.  Among some age groups the vaccine has done more harm than Covid.  These known facts are kept out of the media.

Then there is the other problem that is being kept secret.  The vaccine itself is the cause of the variants.  As I have previously reported, the vaccine enables the virus to escape immune response.  Thus, Covid cannot be controlled by mRNA vaccination.

The bottom line is:  The entirety of the Covid policy is, and has been, counterproductive and greatly harmful to public health, the economy, and civil liberty, and the response of the American Elite is to continue the harm.

The Covid policy of the United States is a complete and total betrayal of the American people.  It is a policy of total Evil.