Of all the elements of today’s “New Normal,” the most ominous is the “reform” that effectively changed the meanings of previously accepted words or terms. The following glossary illustrates how changes to our vocabulary played a central role in making the world a more dangerous and frightening place.
New Normal – “Normal” is something that has long been the norm and is accepted as the norm. The key point is that the “old” normal no longer applies. This change in thinking provided authority figures the license to enact reforms that would not have been widely accepted in the past.
In the old normal, a citizen might not have complied with authoritarian mandates, but in the New Normal, most will… that is, if one accepts the premise that we now have a New Normal, a premise most people now accept.
Vaccine — Previously a vaccine was an injection that provided “immunity” or prevented diseases, as well as the spread of diseases. Today, at least as it involves the COVID “vaccines,” vaccines simply (and allegedly) reduce the probability someone will develop a severe case of this disease or die from this disease.
Safe — An activity that is not dangerous or does not cause harm.
According to public health officials and almost all doctors, COVID vaccines are “safe and effective.” According to VAERS, approximately one million Americans believe they have suffered adverse medical reactions to COVID vaccines, with approximately 20,000 deaths possibly caused by the vaccines. Several studies have concluded that VAERS captures only a small fraction of such adverse events.
Effective — Certainly today “effective” does not mean COVID vaccines prevent infection or virus spread. In many heavily vaccinated countries, the vaccinated comprise a greater percentage of new COVID cases than the unvaccinated.
Harm — Something that injures, perhaps even kills, or causes someone pain or discomfort. The key change here is that “harm” can now be caused by speech. The nexus that would definitively trace any alleged harm to any piece of speech is nebulous and impossible to prove.
Still, a person who composes words determined to include “misinformation” or “disinformation” is held guilty of causing potential harm to people who might read these words. Such a person can be censored, maligned, lose their jobs, or even be prosecuted. In our Old Normal, this rarely happened. In our New Normal, it happens daily.
Misinformation or Disinformation — In its simplest terms, this would be information that is provably false.
In our “New Normal,” misinformation or disinformation is simply any information that challenges the veracity of pronouncements made by authorized experts or authorities. That is, Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s leading public health authority, cannot be charged with producing “disinformation,” but skeptic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. can and should be.
Also, in today’s New Normal, many people censor their own thoughts as they know “free speech” can result in personal or professional harm. By now, the censors don’t even have to censor everyone. People do it themselves.
Science and “The science” — A theory largely accepted by the scientific community and public.
“Science” used to be the process of testing a hypothesis and was almost never “settled.” In the past, a skeptic who examined or challenged the conclusions of peers was himself engaging in science. Today, “The Science” is what the authorized scientists and officials at public health bureaucracies say it is, and cannot or should not be challenged by other “scientists…” who perhaps should not even be called scientists and should now be labeled as “science deniers.” Or as…
Anti-vaxxer — Technically, this would be a person who opposes all vaccines. In Newspeak, it means anyone who is against mandatory COVID vaccines. In practice, this term is used as a slur to denigrate anyone who questions the pronouncements of authorities. If you oppose mandatory COVID vaccines for whatever reason, you are a “science denier” or “anti-science…” and, as such can and should be punished or censored because you could be causing “harm” to the public.
Free or freedom — In “the land of the free” the definition of freedom has also been radically changed.
Today, some Americans are “free” to keep their jobs or go to a restaurant or see a play if they can prove they have received at least two injections of an experimental vaccine (a vaccine where the vaccinated waive their right to sue if they later suffer harm). Americans may be allowed to engage in “free speech” on social media… if they say the right things.
It’s not just “COVID” topics that are now being regulated by speech monitors. If you publish “extremist” speech or politically incorrect speech that can be labeled as “harmful” or “dangerous,” you also can lose your job or speech privileges.
With the precedent established that speech can cause “harm” and that the primary role of government is to protect people from harm, the harm of being “offended” by speech is now a sanctionable offense.
Patriotism or patriot — In the past, a “patriot” was one who stood up to tyrannical governments and/or displayed a great love for their country. Today, for many Americans, a patriot is one who complies with the edicts of their government and helps attack or embarrasses those who challenge governmental authority.
Just this week, President Biden proclaimed that Americans who get vaccinated are doing their patriotic duty. This statement builds on the “us-against-them” theme, the good American vs. bad American narrative.
Public health — This term once meant the state of overall health in hundreds of millions of people who comprise “the public.” In the last two years, it’s come to mean the “health” of people who may or may not have COVID-19.
Today, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, mental health, obesity – all the conditions that kill and harm people — are afterthoughts when compared to “COVID health.”
All of the above was made possible by changes in accepted language. George Orwell was right. If you want to control people, first control the language.
COVID, a virus that poses no significant health risk to 98 percent of the population, has given us a “New Normal” where “vaccines” are not vaccines, where “freedom” is now a privilege granted to those who obey, and where unelected public health officials have made billions of dollars for pharmaceutical companies.
With his extraordinary new book, The Real Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, RFK, Jr. has made it very clear that he will not allow Orwell’s 1984 totalitarian boot to stamp on his face. His is a very rare moral courage, and he is asking us to join him, before it is too late and we enter into a new dark age, in recognizing and resisting the evil forces intent on stamping out democracy around the world. He is not pulling his punches with language as he accuses the political-intelligence-media-money-medical-corporate-pharmaceutical conspirators of executing “the controlled demolition of American constitutional democracy.” For a brilliant and highly accomplished lawyer and excellent writer and speaker, the choice of those words “controlled demolition” is clearly intentional.
For anyone who doubts that the Covid-19 crisis is an intelligence-run operation controlled by spooks working with medical technocrats like Anthony Fauci, billionaires such as Bill Gates, the military, media, Big Pharma, the World Economic Forum, etc., a close reading of this book – with its 2,194 references – will disabuse one of that illusion.
The CIA has long been deeply involved with vaccines, viruses, drugs, weaponizing cancer, biological weapons, and of course massive mind-control operations – deadly propaganda in plain English – for use in controlling U.S. Americans and foreigners alike. As Kennedy writes in an ironically understated way, “The pervasive CIA involvement in the global vaccine putsch should give us pause.” Yes, a long pause. He continues:
There is nothing in the CIA’s history, in its charter, in its composition, or in its institutional culture that betrays an interest in promoting either public health or democracy. The CIA’s historical preoccupations have been power and control. The CIA has been involved in at least seventy-two attempted and successful coup d’état between 1947 and 1989, involving about a third of the world’s governments. Many of these were functioningd democracies. The CIA does not do public health. It does not do democracy. The CIA does coups d’état. [my emphasis]
Just as it does Kennedy assassinations.
Character assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is what the CIA and its media mouthpieces have been doing for years. This has become more and more necessary as they have realized the great growing danger he poses to their agenda. Calling him an anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist, and names far worse, is part of a concerted smear campaign to turn the public away from his message, which is multi-faceted and supported by deep research and impeccable logic. Like his father and uncle, he has become an irrepressibly eloquent opponent of the demonic forces intent on destroying the democratic dream.
With The Real Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, he has pinned his indictment of those forces to the world’s wall for all to read.
Just as this new book will not be reviewed by the corporate mainstream media, not even negatively for fear of promoting it by doing so, so too the last book he wrote, American Values:Lessons I Learned from My Family, was completely ignored by such media.
As I wrote three years ago in the only review of that book:
When a book as fascinating, truthful, beautifully written, and politically significant as American Values:Lessons I Learned from My Family, written by a very well-known author by the name of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and published by a prominent publisher (HarperCollins), is boycotted by mainstream book reviewers, you know it is an important book and has touched a nerve that the corporate mainstream media wish to anesthetize by eschewal.
American Values is part memoir, part family history, part astute political analysis, and part-confessional, and is in turns delightful, sad, funny, fierce, and frightening in its implications.
What implications? It is the heart of that book that had the obedient reviewers avoiding it like the plague, a plague introduced by a little mockingbird, as in Operation Mockingbird. No member of the Kennedy family since JFK or RFK had dared to say what RFK, Jr. did in that book. He indicted the CIA in a carefully crafted and fully factual way for a vast array of crimes. He spelled out the long war between the Kennedys and the CIA that resulted in the deaths of his father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and his uncle President John Kennedy. He threw a gauntlet down in the midst of telling an entertaining and touching family saga, which included a critique of his own youthful transgressions.
But the nation’s spooks smelled danger in the tale and they are now more acutely aware that they must censor him because his message is finding an expanding audience of people sick of government lies and very hungry for the truth. More and more people are willing to follow this brave man into the darkness of our history and the ongoing coups d’état underway at home and abroad. They smell a demonic author behind the Covid-19 propaganda.
While Dr. Anthony Fauci understandably stands at the center of this new book, and deservedly so for his evil machinations over so many decades, it is important to recognize that he is an obedient, albeit very powerful, underling in a systemic structure of evil, who has greatly materially profited from the sale of his soul. Yet while this is true, to read Kennedy’s chapters on Fauci’s commanding role in the HIV/Aids fraud, the AZT shakedown, illegal experiments on children that killed at least 85, etc., is enough to make your blood boil and to realize that such actions must spring from a source far deeper than the thirst for lucre. Something fiendish and sinister is at work with all this with the suffering and death it has caused, and in the ways it has foreshadowed the COVID-19 propaganda and the complicity of the mass media in fronting for Fauci and his allies, then and now.
Kennedy exhaustively details Fauci’s work as a drug dealer for Big Pharma, even while his job at NIAID is to protect and improve the people’s health, which has deteriorated dramatically over his tenure. (It is important to mention parenthetically but not at all incidentally that the CIA “manages” the so-called war on drugs in a similar manner.) Thus we have a war of drugs and a “war on drugs” working in tandem in a perfect scheme to drug as many people as possible. Here are a few details:
Fauci has an annual $6 billion budget, most of which goes toward the research and development of new drugs.
He is the highest paid federal employee, more than the President, with an annual salary of $417, 608.
He controls 57 percent of global biomedical medical funding directly and indirectly via the NIH, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust, and therefore controls the scientists looking for research money.
He has for decades overseen the regulatory capture of government health agencies by Big Pharma.
The CDC, a paramilitary organization, spends $4.9 billion of its $12 billion budget buying and distributing vaccines, the vaccines that Fauci has been pushing. It also owns 57 vaccine patents.
Fauci and other officials receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help to develop and push through the approval process.
He has for many years promoted false pandemics to promote novel vaccines, drugs, and pharmaceutical company profits.
Forty-five percent of the FDA’s budget comes from the pharmaceutical industry through what are euphemistically called “user fees.”
Fauci has a “strange fascination with,” and has invested in “gain of function” experiments to engineer superbugs, which is part of a long CIA history of weaponizing viruses, etc.
RFK, Jr.’s detailed exposure of Fauci’s role reminds me of reading Moby Dick and meditating on Melville’s description of Ahab – one has to enter a different mental space to begin to comprehend such evil, and even then one is struck dumb by its extent and the media’s complicity in covering it up for so long.
When I use the word evil, I am not using that word loosely, but very precisely, for the actions of Fauci and his ilk are evil, although the human being Anthony Fauci is still capable of contrition and redemption. Anything is possible if not probable, but I am not holding my breath. Just as the actual people who shot JFK, RFK, MLK,Jr., et al. were obedient servants of the system that produced them – listen to Bob Dylan’s Only A Pawn in Their Game – Fauci is a product of a structural system of evil. This is not to excuse him but to place his actions in an historical and structural context.
Obviously he is not a poor southern unschooled white man used by the KKK as in Dylan’s song, but a sophisticated and Jesuit-educated New Yorker brought to political consciousness within a system that amply rewards obedience to the authorities. He is a graduate of the same Jesuit high school I attended, the elite Regis High School in NYC (and then the Jesuit College of the Holy Cross), and is considered by many of my classmates to be a national hero bordering on a saint. Such schooling made me well aware of how the system gobbles up its youth with promises of wealth and prestige if they yoke their intellectual acumen to allegiance to the rules of the game and become what Hannah Arendt termed “schreibtischtäter” – desk killers, or what the great American poet Kenneth Rexroth called hyenas with polished faces in the offices of billion dollar corporations devoted to “service.”
That such socialization is presented as being “a man for others” within the Jesuit tradition of mind-control, doubles its effectiveness as a confidence game. That is why so many decent young people succumb to this siren call. It then, however, demands the quelling of an uneasy conscience.
Jean Paul Sartre called this bad faith (mauvaise foi), a form of mental trickery in which one tries to “lie” to oneself – an impossibility since the liar and the one lied to are the same person – which means the deceiver must really know the truth that he is trying to conceal from the deceived. This form of split consciousness allows those who serve a rapacious system to attempt to deceive themselves and others that they are serving a just cause. Such attempts demand an actor’s skill and the quelling of one’s inner voice. But there are very many actors among us, as Nietzsche said, not genuine ones, but bad actors. Fauci, Gates, et al. are bad actors in a propaganda film, at least for those who know how propaganda is produced and bad acting exposed. Robert Kennedy is such an astute critic.
My purpose here is not to go into detail about Fauci and Gates’s connections to the U.S. intelligence and defense industries, for this is a meditation, not a review. But those connections are massive. Read the concluding chapter 12 in The Real Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. Check his sources, 298 for this chapter alone. This is not speculation or theory, but fact. Do your homework. Study. Kennedy says:
After twenty years [since the insider anthrax attacks following September 11, 2001: see Graeme MacQueen’s, The 2001 Anthrax Deception (isbn.nu)] of modeling exercises, the CIA – working with medical technologists like Anthony Fauci and billionaire internet tycoons – had pulled off the ultimate coup d’état: some 250 years after America’s historic revolt against entrenched oligarchy and authoritarians rule, the American experiment with self-government was over. The oligarchy was restored, and these gentlemen and their spymasters had equipped the rising technocracy with new tools of control unimaginable to King George or any other tyrant.
Yet the fight is far from over, and those with the tools and the mechanistic, material mindsets must contend with a rising tide of opposition to their plans for a “Great Reset” and a transhuman world. We may be in the final battle of this war, but the human spirit is stronger than those who wish to stamp out human freedom. Robert Kennedy, Jr. is leading the fight for the soul of the world, and it is both a political and spiritual one.
It does not take great intelligence to realize that when countries throughout the world act in a synchronized way in locking down their populations and repeat the same message on cue that such events are centrally coordinated. The entire COVID-19 propaganda campaign, culminating with its push to enforce multiple vaccines that are not vaccines and are based on fraudulent PCR tests, has been long in preparation and the intelligence agencies’ fingerprints are all over its planning. War game scenarios, weaponized vaccines, the CIA, the NIH, Gates, Fauci, the NIAID, DARPA, Wired magazine, the financial elites and their power centers such as the World Economic Forum, etc. – they are all involved in a conspiracy to impose a rigid global tyranny over regular people for the benefit of the world’s super-rich. Since Fauci’s coordinated lockdowns early in 2020, there has been a 3.8 trillion dollar shift in wealth upwards to the super-rich, creating 500 new billionaires, while pulverizing the middle class, destroying small businesses, enriching Fauci and his Pharmaceutical and robber baron corporate partners, and causing vast suffering and death all around the world. None of this is accidental. Kennedy documents it all. He writes:
Dark Winter, Atlantic Storm, and Global Mercury were only three of over a dozen Germ Games staged by military, medical, and intelligence planners leading up to COVID-19. Each of these Kafkaesque exercises became uncanny predictors of a dystopian age that pandemic planners dubbed the “New Normal.” The consistent feature is an affinity among their simulator designers for militarizing medicine and introducing centralized autocratic governance.
Each rehearsal ends with the same grim punchline: the global pandemic is an excuse to justify the imposition of tyranny and coerced vaccination. The repetition of these exercises suggests that they serve as a kind of rehearsal or training drill for an underlying agenda to coordinate the global dismantlement of democratic governance….Virtually all of the scenario planning for pandemics employ technical assumptions and strategies familiar to anyone who has read the CIA’s notorious psychological warfare manuals for shattering indigenous societies, obliterating traditional economics and social bonds, for using imposed isolation and the demolition of traditional economies to crush resistance, to foster chaos, demoralization, dependence and fear, and for imposing centralized and autocratic governance.
U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies have dominated the COVID-19 military project from the start. The CIA and Fauci are central to the official “conspiracy theory” – accurately called fact – including “Operation Warp Speed” under Trump. Trump simply carried on the work of his predecessors, including Obama, but acted as if he was opposed to it. It has always been a bi-partisan program because the CIA runs both parties.
When he was in prison in Germany after returning in 1939 from Union Theological Seminary in NYC to oppose Hitler, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote the following from his prison cell before he was executed:
Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
By stupid he did not mean that such people lacked intellectual ability, for they were often very smart, but that they had fallen under the spell of public power and lost all independence of mind. Thus he adds, “He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.”
Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. is still trying to reach these people. His is an heroic task. No wonder Kennedy is named for St. Francis to whom he is devoted; St. Francis taught him and us that courage and sacrifice are what God asks of us all.
One of his father’s favorite quotes defines the son as well; it is from Edith Hamilton, the author of The Greek Way, who wrote:
Men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life…. To the heroic, desperate odds fling a challenge.
Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. has stepped up to the challenge. He is brave and brilliant. We are blessed to have his witness.
Social psychologist Roy Baumeister begins his bookEvil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, with a proposition that will be counterintuitive to many: “Evil usually enters the world unrecognized by the people who open the door and let it in. Most people who perpetrate evil do not see what they are doing as evil.”
Dismissing evildoers as “insane” is an attempt to absolve both them and you of responsibility. Baumeister observes, “People do become extremely upset and abandon self-control, with violent results, but this is not insanity.” If only “insane” people commit “evil” acts, you might reason there is no need to strengthen spiritual and moral muscles. You might skip the reflection, study, and practice that builds spiritual and moral strength.
Would you, Baumeister asks, “obey orders to kill innocent civilians? Would you help torture someone? Would you stand by passively while the secret police hauled your neighbors off to concentration camps?” Baumeister writes, “Most people say no. But when such events actually happen, the reality is quite different.” Today, to the point, will you obey orders to fire upon people who refuse to comply with mandates?
The men of Police Battalion 101 were not specially selected psychopathic killers. Initially, the Battalion was set up to enforce Nazi rule in occupied Poland. Eventually, their mission changed, bringing them to be the genocidal murderers of Jews they were charged with rounding up. Browning explains, “The bulk of the killers were not specially selected but drawn at random from a cross-section of German society, and they did not kill because they were coerced by the threat of dire punishment for refusing.” Mostly they were “middle-aged reserve policemen.” Battle had not driven these men to depravity, “they had not been fired on nor had they lost comrades.”
Browning explores one of their initial murderous actions, “shooting some 1,500 Jews in the Polish village of Józefów in the summer of 1942.” Major Wilhelm Trapp addressed his men before the shooting began: “Pale and nervous, with choking voice and tears in his eyes, Trapp visibly fought to control himself as he spoke. The Battalion, he said plaintively, had to perform a frightfully unpleasant task. This assignment was not to his liking; indeed, it was highly regrettable, but the orders came from the highest authorities.”
Trapp provided a “justification” for the coming slaughter—Jews were damaging Germany and threatening German troops—but then Trapp “made an extraordinary offer: if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step out.” The task, Trapp outlined, was the immediate killing of all women, children, and the elderly.
Only twelve of the approximately 500 in the Battalion initially took Trapp’s offer to “step out.” Browning estimated “10 to 20 percent of those actually assigned to the firing squads” extricated themselves “by less conspicuous methods or asked to be released from the firing squads once the shooting had begun.” Yet for most of the police, killing became second nature: “Many reserve policemen who were horrified in the woods outside Józefów… subsequently became casual volunteers for numerous firing squads and ‘Jew hunts.’”
Browning’s research provides insights into the mindsets that fueled obedience: “Who would have ‘dared,’ one policeman declared emphatically, to ‘lose face’ before the assembled troops.” Another said, “No one wants to be thought a coward.”
Not all who followed orders lacked moral consciousness: “Another policeman—more aware of what truly required courage—said quite simply, ‘I was cowardly.’”
Some rationalized their atrocities: “It was possible for me to shoot only children. My neighbor then shot the mother and I shot the child that belonged to her, because I reasoned with myself that after all without its mother the child could not live any longer.”
To escape moral culpability, others offered the excuse of what difference could they make: “Without me [shooting] the Jews were not going to escape their fate anyway.” How many managers are saying today, what difference can I make? If I don’t fire the unvaccinated, someone else will.
Browning explains, “The men’s concern for their standing in the eyes of their comrades was not matched by any sense of human ties with their victims. The Jews stood outside their circle of human obligation and responsibility.” Today, hospital administrators are firing workers with robust natural immunity who faithfully served during the pandemic and refuse the vaccine. Like the men in the Battalion, these administrators are just following orders.
What would have happened that terrible day in 1942 if more policemen recognized the humanity of the “other” and had the courage to not conform? Today, what would happen if more businesses, like In-N-Out Burger, refuse to obey government edicts? In October, Stephen Davis, a Florida fire battalion chief, “was fired for refusing to discipline department employees listed as unvaccinated.” What would happen if more managers had the courage of Chief Davis? Without obedience, tyranny fails.
During this time of Covid, we can learn lessons from Browning’s book about how we treat people who make choices different from our own. We can notice when we fail to see the humanity in others. We can become aware when we justify an us vs. them mindset. We can question our perceptions. To wait for Biden or Fauci to change first is to ignore our power of choice.
Lessons Learned
Browning reflects on the actions of the Battalion and asks, “If obedience to orders out of fear of dire punishment is not a valid explanation, what about ‘obedience to authority’ in the more general sense used by Stanley Milgram?”
Browning wonders if there is “a ’deeply ingrained behavior tendency’ to comply with the directives of those positioned hierarchically above, even to the point of performing repugnant actions in violation of ‘universally accepted’ moral norms.” Browning explains,
The notions of ‘loyalty, duty, discipline,’ requiring competent performance in the eyes of authority, become moral imperatives overriding any identification with the victim. Normal individuals enter an ‘agentic state’ in which they are the instrument of another’s will. In such a state, they no longer feel personally responsible for the content of their actions but only for how well they perform.
Browning recounts, “Milgram made direct reference to the similarities between human behavior in his experiments and under the Nazi regime. He concluded, ‘Men are led to kill with little difficulty.’”
Importantly, “Milgram himself notes that people far more frequently invoke authority than conformity to explain their behavior, for only the former seems to absolve them of personal responsibility.” Yet, in the Battalion case, “Many policemen admitted responding to the pressures of conformity—how would they be seen in the eyes of their comrades?—not authority.” Based on his research, Browning concludes, “Conformity assumes a more central role than authority at Józefów.”
The Covidocracy demands we all conform and shames those who make different choices. Browning explains the dangers of a culture of shame: “The shame culture, making conformity a prime virtue, impelled ordinary Germans in uniform to commit terrible crimes rather than suffer the stigma of cowardice and weakness and the ‘social death’ of isolation and alienation vis-à-vis their comrades.”
The segregation of Jews was an enabler of evil actions. Browning points to pervasive banishment of Jews from German society “and the resulting exclusion of the Jewish victims from any common ground with the perpetrators made it all the easier for the majority of the policemen to conform to the norms of their immediate community (the battalion) and their society at large (Nazi Germany).”
For some policemen who did not shoot, their commercial ties shaped their view of human beings. One said, “Through my business experience, especially because it extended abroad, I had gained a better overview of things. Moreover, through my earlier business activities I already knew many Jews.”
Harvard social psychologist Gordon Allport developed his famed contact hypothesis in the 1940s: “Increasing exposure to out-group members will improve attitudes toward that group and decrease prejudice and stereotyping.” Commercial ties bring people together.
Recently Tim, a reader and business owner from New Zealand, sent me his powerful testimony in an email:
Fifty odd years ago, as a young child I went to Ranui Primary School in suburban Auckland. There were two Māori boys in my class of 9-year-olds. Sometimes through the day they would make short comments to each other in Māori.
If the teacher heard them do it, he would keep our entire class in detention after school for 15 to 30 minutes. I always hated it because one of the boys was my friend, and a regular playmate of mine after school. The other one, used to walk home from school with me too, they were my friends.
But most of the class blamed these two Māori boys for us all being locked in after school. The majority of the kids disliked and bullied them in my class.
I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t dislike them because they were my friends. Perhaps even then as a boy I could see what our teacher was doing.
Our teacher was using the rest of the class as a weapon against those two young boys by encouraging the spiteful and discriminating attitudes towards them.
Tim’s choice to not conform to social pressure made all the difference to his Māori friends. Did Tim’s ability to see the humanity in others help him become a successful entrepreneur? After all, entrepreneurs succeed when they help serve the needs of others.
Tim continued his testimony:
Today, 50 years later, I am again feeling the same way as I did back in my Ranui Primary School class. The teacher is telling us all that we will continue to be locked in until 90% (or whatever) of the country is vaccinated. And further, we are told that it is the fault of the 20% (or so) that have so far chosen not to accept the two shots in the arm.
As a country, we are all encouraged to heap blame and hate towards anyone who has decided to not vaccinate.
Regardless of my own vaccination status, I have friends and family who I refuse to hate or blame.
I lay the blame exactly where it belongs. At the feet of my Primary School teacher for our detentions, not my two boyhood friends.
And at the feet of our Prime Minister for her lockdown rules, not my friends and family who have chosen to decline an injection that they don’t trust, rightly or wrongly.
Be like Tim. Be like the 10-20% of Battalion 101 who didn’t conform. Our scorn should be towards those who demand our obedience and split America into an in-group and an out-group. Become more aware when you allow your thinking to be hijacked by propaganda.
Many in the Battalion didn’t understand their crimes until decades after the war ended. Don’t wait to reflect until a future historian writes a book about how you supported tyranny by placing conformity above human rights.
Today Charles Eisenstein points out, “Many people trust the authorities and willingly comply with their rules. They face no dilemma, no initiatory moment, no self-defining world-creating choice point, not yet.”
Conforming, lacking courage, will not spare you from choices that life will demand of you. Eisenstein challenges us: “As the authorities’ narratives devolve into absurdity and their rules devolve into oppression, more and more of us face this choice: … To do what you know is right, or to cave in to the pressure, consoling yourself with words you don’t believe. ‘I had no choice.’”
We all have a personal responsibility for preserving freedom. The price of abdicating our responsibility is high. As Browning puts it, Germans paid a high price for “placing uncritical trust in the ‘firm leadership’ of seemingly well-intentioned political authority between 1933 and 1945.”
The risks of severe illness and death from COVID for children has not been put in context of other risks. Right now, many parents are stricken with fear and worry about their child contracting COVID. Putting COVID in the context of other risks may help change the perspective of parents and also question whether or not making COVID vaccines mandatory for children is the right decision.
When it comes to morality risk to children, COVID-19 has a lower annual mortality risk than car accidents, influenza, and for 5-14 year olds, suicide (Leonhardt, 2021). In fact, the survival rate of COVID for people under the age of 19 according to recent pre-print study by two Stanford scientists is nearly 100 percent.
Seroprevalence data from eight locations around the world: England, France; Ireland; Netherlands; Spain; Atlands, USA; New York, USA; Geneva, Switzerland show the infection fatality rate for 0-9 year olds to be less than 1 in 200,000 (less than 5 in 1 million) and 1/55,000 for 10–19-year-olds.
Even the risk of hospitalization as a result of a COVID infection is quite low. If infected with COVID-19, children ages 0-9 have on average a chance of 0.1% or 1/1000 of being hospitalized and, for ages 11-19 a 0.2% or 1/500 chance of being admitted to the hospital (Herrera-Esposito, 2021).
In Canada, as of May 28, 2021, there were 259,308 confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections in Canadians 19 years and under. Of these, 0.48% were hospitalized, 0.06% were admitted to ICU, and 0.004% died. According to this data, seasonal influenza is associated with more severe illness than COVID-19.
Given Canada’s numbers, the discussion around “keeping children safe at school” is not a policy concern if it was not one for the seasonal flu. Yes, children may be a source of transmission, but they are not at risk of COVID by being at school.
In comparison to the vaccine, a study out of the University of California shows that the risk of myocarditis is greater after two doses of the Pfizer vaccine than being hospitalized for COVID for boys ages 12-15. The research was led by led by epidemiologist Dr. Tracy Høeg, an epidemiologist studying COVID in kids.
There have been multiple reports of death from myocarditis following COVID vaccination, including a 13-year-old Michigan boy who died June 16, three days after he received his second dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine. Preliminary autopsy results indicated that following his vaccination his heart become enlarged and was surrounded by fluid. As of August 7th, there were 106 reported incidents of myocarditis/pericarditis in Ontario, Canada in people under the age of 25.
Pfizer BioNTech study included 2,260 children and adolescents, 12-15 years of age, 1,131 of whom received the vaccine. This is a very small number of adolescents and does not permit an evaluation of rare but serious side-effects, such as effects that may happen in only 1:5,000 adolescents. Furthermore, with most of the adolescents followed for only 1 or 2 months after their 2nd dose, there is no data to support long-term safety.
On the 22nd of September, Høeg gave her testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives providing an excellent summary regarding the latest data on COVID and kids. In it she cites data illustrating that drowning, vehicle accidents, homicide, cancer, cardiovascular disease, flu, and suffocation are all greater threats when it comes to mortality for children.
She also touches upon concerns like long COVID, and the Delta variant, and other affects the pandemic and health policy is having on the mental and physical health of children.
She outlines how the delta variant has resulted in increased case numbers in children, but the severity of the disease per case does not appear to have increased. When it comes to long COVID, a recent report from the Office of National Statistics (ONS, 2021) in the UK that she sites, the prevalence of persistent symptoms 12-16 weeks after COVID were no different between those with a COVID infection and controls.
I feel that our country’s failure to do a risk-benefit analysis as well as good scientific studies of the interventions we imposed upon children to mitigate one disease has created numerous additional and avoidable public health crises in our youth. For a disease that relatively spares them, this generation has suffered an incredible amount during the pandemic and, unfortunately, the effects of this will likely travel with them for the rest of their lives.
Sunetra Gupta, an infectious disease epidemiologist from the University of Oxford, Carl Heneghan, an NHS urgent care doctors and Professor of Evidence Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, as well as Alberto Giubilini, senior research fellow in infectious diseases at Oxford, make their position on vaccinating children quite clear below. They published an opinion article in the European Journal of Medical Ethics in July 2021, explaining why children should not be required or encouraged to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
The risks of COVID-19 for children and young people are minimal. For example, ‘[i]n the USA, UK, Italy, Germany, Spain, France and South Korea, deaths from COVID-19 in children remained rare up to February 2021 (ie, up to the time the study had available data about), at 0.17 per 100 000 population’.7 The long-term risks of the novel COVID-19 vaccines on a population of millions of children are at the moment unknown, given that the clinical trials involved a few thousands of subjects over a few months period.
Vaccinating children would be a way of treating them as mere means to serve other people’s interests or some form of collective good. We already did this through indiscriminate lockdowns and other restrictions, such as school closure. Using children as means or even mere means in this way is not necessarily wrong, but it can only be justified if the cost imposed is sufficiently small and the benefit sufficiently large.7 Unfortunately, currently available COVID-19 vaccines do not meet either condition, given our current state of knowledge. Not only would vaccinating children pose risks on them without any substantial direct benefit.
Also, vaccinating children can only offer collective good if this reduces infection levels in the community. However, while COVID-19 vaccines almost certainly will provide long-term protection against severe disease and death, their infection blocking effects are incomplete and very likely to be transient. This means there is actually no collective benefit to trade off against individual harm to children, unless we perform mass vaccination on a regular basis, for example, annually. But this would compound the potential harms.
Everyone pretty much agrees that we have a major problem with crime in this nation. But when we talk about “crime”, are we all talking about the same thing? Normally, when most of us think about “crime” what comes to mind is the rampant violence in our city streets. As I discussed a couple of weeks ago, the FBI just released the final numbers for 2020, and they showed that the murder rate was up about 29 percent. That was the largest one year increase in U.S. history by a very wide margin, and law enforcement authorities are warning that the numbers for this year will show another huge jump. With so much violence in our streets, it is only natural that when we think of “crime” that we tend to think of young men recklessly firing guns in the core urban areas of our major cites. Here is one example that I just came across…
An intense wild west gunfight that played out on the streets of the Bronx was caught on camera in incredible new footage released by New York police.
The video begins by showing what appears to be seven gang members brandishing pistols, firing at an unidentified target across the street.
This is the latest in a string of high-profile incidents of violent crime that have become more common throughout the five boroughs in the last 18 months, during which New York City has seen a rise in the number of shootings, felony assaults, and hate crimes.
But do they represent the worst that our society has to offer?
Of course not.
Even worse are the people that choose to take guns into our schools and start shooting. Sadly, we had another such incident on Wednesday…
An 18-year-old suspect was taken into custody Wednesday after four people were injured in a shooting at a Texas high school, authorities said. Three of the victims were hospitalized, with at least one requiring surgery.
Around 9:15 a.m., police responded to a call about a shooting on the second floor of Timberview High School in Arlington, according to Kevin Kolbye, the city’s assistant police chief. Two of the victims were shot but were expected to survive, Kolbye said.
There is no place for such violence in our society, and I don’t want to minimize the evil of such a crime one bit.
But there are even worse criminals.
You see, the truth is that the biggest criminals in our society can be found in corporate boardrooms and in our halls of power. The wicked decisions that very powerful men and women make behind closed doors can result in the deaths of thousands or even millions of people.
Let me give you a few examples. Merck just announced a new COVID “wonder drug”, and those running the company have decided to charge $712 for a treatment that only costs $17.74 to produce…
Merck’s new ‘not Ivermectin’ Covid-19 treatment, molnupiravir, costs $17.74 to produce – yet the company is charging the US government $712 for the treatment– a 40x markup, according to The Intercept, citing a report issued last week by the Harvard School of Public Health and King’s College Hospital in London.
The pill, originally developed using US government funds as a possible treatment for Venezuelan equine encephalitis, cut the risk of hospitalization and death in half in a randomized trial of 775 adults with mild/moderate Covid who were considered at high risk for disease due to comorbidities such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease. The trial was stopped early so the company could apply for and emergency use authorization (EUA). The drug did not benefit patients who were already hospitalized with severe disease.
Theoretically, this “wonder drug” could help millions upon millions of COVID victims all over the globe in the coming years if it was priced fairly.
But the vast majority of those potential patients will never see it because they simply will not be able to afford it.
Meanwhile, how many other inexpensive alternative treatments are being suppressed so that big pharma can rake in billions of dollars in profits?
A Colorado woman suffering from stage five renal failure was denied a new kidney because both she and her prospective donor were unvaccinated.
The University of Colorado Health hospital sent a letter to Leilani Lutali, 56, who was set to receive a kidney from Jaimee Fougner, 45, informing her that the procedure could not be done until both women were vaccinated against COVID-19.
‘I feel coerced. I feel like my life is being held in their hands in exchange for a shot, and the attitude is just take the shot,’ Lutali told Denver7.
They are fully prepared to let her die if she won’t get the shot.
You have to be a special kind of evil to be so absolutely heartless.
In our society, the level of wickedness tends to rise the higher up the food chain that you go. And so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Washington D.C. is absolutely seething with evil. When I worked there over a decade ago, you could literally feel it in the air.
Of course things have only gotten worse since that time, and right now the current resident of the White House is seeing his approval rating absolutely plummet because of all the nightmarish decisions that he has been making…
As his agenda flounders on Capitol Hill, President Joe Biden’s popularity among everyday Americans is taking a beating.
Biden’s approval rating has dropped to 38%, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday. That’s down from 42% three weeks ago and from a high of 50% in mid-February.
Sadly, the truth is that the politicians in Washington D.C. are simply a reflection of who we have become as a nation.
And if the full extent of our national misdeeds is ever brought to light, we will become the most hated country on the entire planet and the rest of the world will turn on us with tremendous fury.
There is so much going on behind the scenes that most people don’t know about. For example, a whistleblower just came forward and revealed some staggering information to Project Veritas. If you have not seen that video yet, you can view it right here.
Of course the mainstream media will never report on this because they are evil too and this story would hurt the agendas that they are trying to push.
The biggest criminals get up in the morning and put on very expensive suits. They are paid lots of money and they love fame and recognition.
Unlike many of the violent criminals in our streets, most of the criminals in our boardrooms and in our halls of power will never go to prison for what they have done.
Instead, they will just keep laughing all the way to the bank as millions suffer and die.
In 1943, the writer and literature professor C.S. Lewis delivered a series of three evening lectures at King’s College, Newcastle. In the third and final part of his lecture series titled “The Abolition of Man,” he spoke of how science can be misused. A literary giant who is known for his pro-Christian texts linked the progress of science to man’s aspiration to dominate nature. Lewis stated, “Man’s conquest of nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men.”
Over half a century later, we are seeing “science”, in the hands of the few, being used to reshape the world.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the disintegration of the global economy which began unraveling in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. In mid 2020, as the economy had yet to recover, the World Economic Forum (WEF) announced its plan for a “Great Reset” to re-engineer the global economy as the world emerged from the pandemic.
Participants in the initiative include international governmental organizations such as the United Nations and its specialized agency the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as well as leading global corporations.
Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of WEF, called the initiative of the Great Reset “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” that opens up a new chapter for human development. Using science and advanced technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and genetic engineering, its stated goal is said to create a “fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity.”
Merging humans with the machine
Steps toward the merging of digital technologies and biological systems are already taking place with the idea of the immunity passport – a form of documentation that could prove a person has received the required number of shots of an approved Covid-19 vaccine. On August 27, 2021, the WHO released a guiding document for a digital certificate for COVID-19 vaccination status. Funded by organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, it is intended that this digital information system be used to implement a vaccine passport in every country.
A COVID vaccination certificate system has been already rolled out in Israel, some European countries, and in US cities such as New York and San Francisco. Current uses for the vaccine passport include denying those who are unvaccinated access to restaurants, bars, gyms and trains. This program separates people based on health status and creates a system of medical and socio-economic apartheid.
Government issued QR-code health passes could be used to launch a China style authoritarian government program. With the use of big data, face recognition technology and machine learning, China’s social credit system monitors and regulates people’s behavior. It ranks them based on their ‘social credit’, rewarding ‘good’ citizens, while punishing ‘bad’ citizens.
Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of WEF, called the initiative of the Great Reset “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” that opens up a new chapter for human development. Using science and advanced technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and genetic engineering, its stated goal is said to create a “fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity.”
Merging humans with the machine
Steps toward the merging of digital technologies and biological systems are already taking place with the idea of the immunity passport – a form of documentation that could prove a person has received the required number of shots of an approved Covid-19 vaccine. On August 27, 2021, the WHO released a guiding document for a digital certificate for COVID-19 vaccination status. Funded by organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, it is intended that this digital information system be used to implement a vaccine passport in every country.
A COVID vaccination certificate system has been already rolled out in Israel, some European countries, and in US cities such as New York and San Francisco. Current uses for the vaccine passport include denying those who are unvaccinated access to restaurants, bars, gyms and trains. This program separates people based on health status and creates a system of medical and socio-economic apartheid.
Government issued QR-code health passes could be used to launch a China style authoritarian government program. With the use of big data, face recognition technology and machine learning, China’s social credit system monitors and regulates people’s behavior. It ranks them based on their ‘social credit’, rewarding ‘good’ citizens, while punishing ‘bad’ citizens.
Now, it looks like China’s social scoring technocracy is coming to the West. Under algorithmic governance that enforces obedience and conformity, human beings will become automatons, not being able to make independent decisions about their own actions.
Internet of bodies
The enslavement of humanity in cyberspace is not the end goal. The convergence of biological and digital identity will bring about a radical transformation of human beings. Lewis recognized man’s aspiration to control nature would lead to the abolition of our humanity, and that the timing of this change was not far off:
“The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by prenatal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won.”
In the digital age, the advancement of technology is opening up many possibilities for human beings to transform themselves. By experimenting with a range of high-tech innovations, teams behind the Great Reset are now seeking to exploit this uncharted territory.
In July 2020, WEF published the white paper titled, “Shaping the Future of the Internet of Bodies: New Challenges of Technology Governance.” A 28-page document introduced the concept of the internet of bodies (IoB) as “the network of human bodies and data through connected sensors”. It explained how these sensors can be attached to human bodies through consumer wearable devices or “implanted within or ingested into human bodies to monitor, analyse and even modify human bodies and behavior.”
Those who are working to bring related products to market claim that the application of IoB could change human beings as a natural concept. Seizing the power of this technology, this can be viewed as an attempt to claim ownership of human bodies, to gain access to the thoughts, emotions and biorhythmic data of individuals. Their vision seeks to create a post-human society by transforming “the human body into a new technology platform.”
Politicization of public health
Capitalising on the ongoing pandemic, while people are kept in fear and uncertainty, the end game is being played out for man’s final conquest of nature. Those who aspire to eradicate the human race in its natural state steer the societal narrative in order to ensnare the population in their web of control.
Since it declared a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, the WHO has quickly positioned itself as the preeminent global health authority. With its own process of gathering data, research and evaluation, the organization has spearheaded global public health efforts, advising countries on how to respond to the COVID-19 crisis. They have published guidance as to how to minimize the risk of spreading, or catching the virus, together with its own website ‘myth-buster’, which purports to debunk what they deem to be unsubstantiated information or “medical misinformation” online.
In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), working in partnership with the WHO, began to set guidelines and give recommendations. As new rules and restrictions have been put into place, the concept of ‘public health’ has become politicized.
From face mask policies to “lockdown” measures, corporate media framed the issues in a false dichotomy of liberal and conservative talking points. First, major media networks have dismissed anyone questioning the official pandemic narrative as “conspiracy theorists” and accused them of spreading harmful misinformation to the public. Then they indiscriminately labeled them as “Covid deniers,” and branded them as “far right,” or “Trumpers,” and “anti-science.”
Insane disinformation propagated by Dr. Leana Wen on national TV. Her and other agencies actions are leading to increasing deaths – she and they are literally citing a FRAUDULENT paper to support their lies as proven in this review https://t.co/PUCPGqTIk2pic.twitter.com/oKMA37X7e9
Concerted efforts of the legacy media have been used to suppress information on early treatment that could be beneficial to the public, paving the way for the perception that a vaccine is the only way to end the pandemic. With a message of “we are all in this together,” we were told we need to accept the government’s mandate “for the public good.”
Discourse that is not founded on medical facts and is wrapped up with the concept of public duty seems to have affected prominent liberal intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, and institutions such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) which recently issued a puzzling statement saying that the vaccine mandates further civil liberty.
Their virtue-signalling has influenced public opinion on the political left. Organized networks of self-righteous social justice activists have been quickly formed online to engage in the shaming and guilt-tripping of fellow citizens who dare to question or comment negatively on official policies, or who refuse to take the vaccine.
For instance, comedian and political commentator Jimmy Dore faced backlash on social media when he shared his own experience of adverse side effects after receiving his second dose of the Moderna Covid vaccine. In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, he said that people started to call him an ‘anti-vaxxer,’ and that he was pressured not to share any more information about his reactions.
Demonization of unvaccinated
The moral battle that has been engineered maintains its structure through marginalizing a certain population and assigning them negative attributes. From black, indigenous, and people of color, and other immigrants, governments have often used minority groups as a means of social control and source of blame for a country’s domestic problems. In the wake of 9/11, American Muslims were scapegoated for the terrifying reality of terrorism on U.S. soil. Now, in this Covid crisis, the unvaccinated have become a target for demonization. By using the phrase “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” President Joe Biden has portrayed unvaccinated people as those who pose a threat to public health, stopping society from moving forward.
Placing blame on the unvaccinated has helped spread a new type of discrimination. In some hospitals, doctors have begun to refuse to treat the unvaccinated, making those who are vaccinated a priority when resources are scarce. Vilification of those who have not gotten a shot has increased, such as when The Atlanticpublished an article from former Obama Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem calling for unvaccinated people to be put on the No Fly List.
This type of discrimination can escalate quickly. Arne Duncan, who served as former President Obama’s Education Secretary for seven years, compared unvaccinated Americans to suicide bombers at the Kabul airport. In his tweet, he noted that anti-mask and anti-vax people “blow themselves up, inflict harm on those around them, and are convinced they are fighting for freedom.”
These wild imaginations have been acted out in other Western countries. In France, a woman who tried to enter a shopping mall without proof of vaccine passport was violently beaten by the security forces.
On the streets of Paris, police are using teargas during their confrontation with the protesters opposing the vaccine passport. Similar scenes can be seen in other countries.
New domestic terrorism
Now, with the rise of the allegedly highly contagious Delta variant, governments are intensifying their fight against the coronavirus. Accompanied by media fear mongering, the drumbeat for ‘the war on Covid-19’ is getting louder.
Earlier this month, on September 9, President Biden announced his intention to expand the executive branch’s power to require all federal workers to get vaccinated, while this mandate does not extend to members of Congress. He also stated his intention to force all private businesses with over 100 employees to get COVID vaccinations or be tested for coronavirus at least once a week.
During his announcement the President heaped even more disdain on the unvaccinated, saying they are “keeping us from turning the corner” and “making people sick, causing unvaccinated people to die.” He then said that the fight against the virus requires defeating those who are reluctant to get a shot, and that he intended to make them roll up their sleeves.
Biden’s forceful Covid-19 vaccine speech came at a time when his administration introduced the government’s new strategy to confront domestic terrorism. Journalist Whitney Webb reported that despite its stated aim of tackling “right-wing white supremacists”, the policy targets anyone who criticizes the government’s authority.
But who are the unvaccinated, now being treated like a dangerous virus that needs to be dispatched? In reality, they are not confined to some fringe element of society. They represent a broad range of professionals including police officers, military members, firefighters, teachers and students. They are physicians, nurses and other ‘essential’ workers who put their lives on the frontline during the pandemic – and are now told to take a jab or lose a job.
Silenced majority
The politicians and media pundits call those who are refusing to take doses “anti-vaxxers.” But many of them are not strictly anti-vaccine. Rather, they are anti government (or corporate) mandating of the vaccine. Most have had other vaccines previously, and vaccinated their children. Many have even taken the Covid vaccine. They are also those who came to a decision that a Covid-19 vaccine is not right for them, whether it is for medical, personal health or religious reasons. They believe in medical freedom and choose natural remedies; to eat wholesome food and work with the body’s innate capacity for healing. They are individuals who are standing up for bodily autonomy with the conviction that the government has no right to inject things that they don’t want into their body.
‼️This is — without a doubt — the best articulation as to the ethical problem posed by mandatory vaccines or vaccine passports.
Dr. Julie Ponesse explains the dilemma in a persuasive manner.
Mass media depict them as right-wing extremists, but they do not belong to either the left or the right. They are a silenced majority, being betrayed and abandoned by elected leaders and now being pushed into political exile.
Despite health officials calling them anti-science, many of them believe in science and hold a view that science requires rigorous studies and open debate. They are those who have acquired natural immunity because they already had the virus. They are people who were injured after the first dose and the doctor advised not to take a second dose. They are people whose immune systems are compromised and who cannot take a shot, even if they want to. They are parents who are concerned that their little children are categorized as disease reservoirs and do not want to accept medical treatment from manufacturers and healthcare providers that are shielded from legal liability.
While the vaccinated represent a largely privileged class in a society, among the majority of unvaccinated are poor and people of color from marginalized communities. Black people have been showing hesitancy because they distrust the government based on historic injustices like the Tuskegee experiment and other past experience of abuse at the hands of the government.
Awakening human heart
The war on Covid is a war on humanity. In this pandemic crisis, we have been made to be afraid of an invisible virus. The fear has frozen our hearts, making us afraid of our own neighbors. With the practice of social distancing, we have been conditioned to see each other as a threat from which we need to protect ourselves. Now, career politicians who have never once cared about public health are telling us that we have to sacrifice our freedom to bring society back to normal. They are now further dividing us into a new class of ‘vaxxed’ or ‘non-vaxxed’ to make us fight against one another.
With the vaccine mandate and digital ID, the movers of the Great Reset aim to open a new chapter for a society without humanity. Under the slogan “Build Back Better,” political leaders and activists around the world engage in a campaign, promising to create a fairer and greener future. Yet, the system that is built on exclusion of some brothers and sisters, separation and hatred can’t create a truly sustainable world that acknowledges the sacredness of all living beings.
In his book, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis talked about the concept of progress, saying, “If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road.”
Hence, we can best evolve as a species through each of us returning to a path of nature and choosing to abide by the laws of human nature.
The future of civil society requires human beings who freely lay claim to their responsibility as stewards of this planet. Our willingness to confront our fears with courage can awaken our sense of shared humanity. This is the heart of our democracy that accepts diverse opinions and remains open to our radical differences. Through ordinary people, heart to heart in solidarity, a new network is being created that can bring a triumph of the human spirit.
Do you know what “leaky vaccines” are? There’s a good chance you don’t because discussion about them has been mostly shunted to the fringes of the web, with videos on the subject even excised from Youtube. The subject is treated as though it is something only tinfoil hat-wearing loons would take seriously.
But leaky vaccines have been an established concern in the medical community for years. A paper discussing the potential problems with them was published in a reputable medical journal by experts well before anyone had heard of Covid.
In brief, leaky vaccines don’t offer full protection against the virus they are designed to deal with. Such vaccines don’t stop you from catching the virus. They work in the sense that they are likely to reduce your symptoms and lessen the chance of transmission to others.
That’s a good thing, but researchers have worried that leaky vaccines can have potential drawbacks, possibly very serious ones. If a vaccine erects an imperfect barrier against a virus, one the virus can sometimes breach even if weakly, the virus persists and has every incentive and opportunity to adapt. That is, it is encouraged to grow stronger.
Over time, variants of the virus are likely to find a way past the immune system’s defences mounted by the vaccine. Because the new variant has an evolutionary advantage over the original strain of virus, it comes to dominate – until a new variant supplants it in turn.
Endless arms race
In short, a leaky vaccine is at risk of becoming less effective over time. New vaccines may be needed in an endless arms race against the virus that encourages it to keep adapting and evolving to become ever more potent.
Most of us should be able to understand this problem because we have heard about it in a closely related medical context: so-called “superbugs“.
Antibiotics were invented nearly a century ago to put an end to deadly bacterial infections. They proved highly effective and saved many lives. They were so effective that doctors were encouraged by profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies – as well as the public’s desire for a pain-free life – to prescribe antibiotics for every tickly throat.
Making things worse, farmers looking to maximise profits had every incentive to routinely use antibiotics on livestock – to prevent illness and deaths among animals they packed into warehouses in unnatural and unsanitary conditions.
This abuse of antibiotics led to the current situation where some strains of bacteria have adapted so effectively they can resist every antibiotic on the market. These superbugs put hundreds of thousands of Americans in hospital every year and are reported to kill 35,000 of them annually.
‘Waning immunity’
So what does this have to do with Covid?
As you may have already guessed, the Covid vaccines are all leaky vaccines. In fact, it appears they were known to be leaky before the first person was vaccinated with them. It’s just no one thought to highlight it to us – not our politicians, the vaccine-makers or the corporate media.
We can see quite how leaky they are in the current obsession with “booster” shots to deal with what are being called “breakthrough” cases – only months after most people received what they assumed would be their one and only round of vaccination.
The justification for these boosters is framed as dealing with “waning immunity” and the fact that the delta variant is more “transmissable”. But this medical jargon, though reassuring, may in fact be concealing something significant about the direction the virus is heading in – something that was evident in earlier vaccine research.
‘Nastier’ viral strains
Until Covid, the only way to research how leaky vaccines worked in the midst of a major epidemic was by studying their use in animals. These studies were carried out in part because of concerns about what the effects of leaky vaccines might be if used during a human pandemic.
We now have that pandemic.
In 2015, four years before anyone had ever heard of Covid, the scientific journal PLOS Biology published a paper titled “Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens”. It examined what happened in the treatment of chickens for a virus called Marek’s disease, caused by a strain of herpes more virulent – if you’re a chicken – than Ebola.
As one of the researchers concluded: “Our research demonstrates that the use of leaky vaccines can promote the evolution of nastier ‘hot’ viral strains that put unvaccinated individuals at greater risk.”
Uncharted territory
In other words, once you start routinely using a leaky vaccine, the very leakiness of the virus in the vaccinated population risks putting the unvaccinated in greater danger by exposing them to turbo-charged variants of the virus their immune systems struggle to overcome.
Because the vaccinated are less aware of being ill – they don’t take to their beds – they can become the equivalent of super-spreaders.
So the solution is simple, no? Just ensure everyone gets vaccinated. (We’ll draw a veil over the issue of what to do with those who can’t get vaccinated for medical reasons.)
But there is a potential problem here too. Because if the leaky vaccines simply allow the virus to adapt and evolve, never putting out the fire, the virus keeps spreading and could get more deadly over time. As with those superbugs, we could reach a point where much nastier strains of the virus become resistant to all the vaccines we have. Delta may be an early indication of how this might happen.
That’s the theory anyway. No one can be sure whether that is what will happen with the Covid pandemic for two reasons.
First, because – from what I can tell – a leaky vaccine has never before been used in the midst of a global pandemic. This is uncharted territory.
And second, because in the case of those chickens, the spread of the disease could be halted, in addition to vaccination, through the culling of infected animals. That – I should hope – is not a solution anyone is contemplating for dealing with Covid.
No debate
Now for the disclaimer. I am not a doctor. I don’t know what the most likely outcome of using leaky vaccines against Covid is, and I don’t claim to. In any case, I doubt most readers care what I think on the subject.
What I am concerned about – and I would hope most other people are too – is that experts in this field be allowed to have a medical debate about these issues in public.
Which is exactly what isn’t happening at the moment. Corporate media companies, from the New York Times and BBC to Facebook and Youtube – many of them invested in pharmaceuticals themselves – are deciding that you shouldn’t even know that the Covid vaccines are leaky, let alone the potential pitfalls.
Maybe that wouldn’t be so serious if we could trust the medical establishment and regulatory authorities to be doing that job for us. But it seems clear we can’t.
The truth is that most doctors, even eminent ones, are little better placed than you or me to judge the dangers of leaky vaccines. This is a very specialist field of research. Those qualified to have an expert opinion on the matter are mostly those doing advanced and very costly research for vaccine companies, especially those working on mRNA technology which has been so central to the Covid vaccination programme.
Difficult to whistleblow
But if there were really a problem with the leaky Covid vaccines, why isn’t this small group of experts not speaking up to warn us? Isn’t their silence proof that this is pure hyperbole?
Here we get to the rub.
Let’s take a comparable case. The first scientists to predict the current trajectory of climate change – to an extremely high degree of accuracy – did so back in the 1970s and 1980s and they worked for the oil companies. They kept their findings secret, as we now know many decades later.
This @exxonmobile chart from 1982 predicted that in 2019 our atmospheric CO2 level would reach about 415 parts per million, raising the global temperature roughly 0.9 degrees C.
Update: The world crossed the 415 ppm threshold this week and broke 0.9 degrees C in 2017 1/ pic.twitter.com/sLpOVkwzTF
Exxon, BP, Shell and the others invested huge sums in modelling climate change so they would be the first to understand the risks to their industry. They needed to know how long they could get away with destroying the planet before the damage became so apparent they would be required to reinvent themselves as pioneers of green technologies.
The crunch moment those scientists predicted was reached a few years back – about the time the oil companies indeed did start reinventing themselves as pioneers of green technologies.
Similarly, the scientists who best understand the risks of leaky vaccines are those employed by the vaccine companies.
There is no more reason to believe that they will whistleblow on the pharmaceuticals industry than the scientists who worked for the fossil fuel industry, or the tobacco industry, or the car industry.
Any scientist who does have concerns about leaky Covid vaccines knows that by speaking out they will make themselves unemployable, they will be labelled a crazy conspiracy theorist by the media, and in any case they will be unable to reach large audiences because social media companies will censor them either directly or through changes to the search engine algorithms.
Captured by the elite
So what is needed if we are to learn about scientific concerns relating to leaky vaccines in general and leaky Covid vaccines specifically, and not simply the talking points of Big Pharma, is for the odd expert to step forward as an industry whistleblower. Any who do are almost certain to be mavericks – those who have little to lose, those who have retired, those who already hold grievances with the way public health policy is made.
And these are precisely the people who have been raising their voices.
A few disgruntled, former insiders are speaking up – while most of their colleagues keep their heads down. Is that because their colleagues think that they are wrong? Or is it because their colleagues have more to lose – like all those scientists who worked for Exxon and BP and never got round to telling us about the evidence for climate change they had unearthed.
The problem is we just don’t know. And we don’t know because our system of information dissemination is entirely captured by corporate interests. The wealth-elite that profits from rapacious, conscience-less, profit-driven, consumption-led capitalism is also the elite that buys our political class, owns our media, funds our regulatory authorities.
Playing with fire
One expert whistleblower is Dr Robert Malone, who was given a platform this week by Jimmy Dore to express his fears that what happened to the chicken virus may also happen to Covid.
His view is that we are playing with fire by trying to enforce a mass vaccination programme through a mix of mandates, incentives and social pressure . He believes only the most vulnerable to Covid should be vaccinated. Meanwhile, doctors should be working on developing an armoury of repurposed drugs for the small numbers of younger and healthier people who suffer serious ill-effects from Covid.
This, in his view, would have been the wisest and safest strategy.
I don’t know whether he’s right, but I sure would like to hear his and other experts’ concerns being addressed in public – and ideally refuted – instead of what is happening: their concerns are being brushed under the carpet.
I don’t know whether these concerns have been ignored because they are fanciful nonsense, or because the medical establishment has no good arguments to counter them and doesn’t want to frighten us, the children.
Gutter journalism
My worries have only been heightened – and yours should be too – by the fact that no one appears willing to engage in any kind of debate about the potential problems with leaky Covid vaccines.
There should be no doubt that Dr Malone qualifies as an expert. He describes himself as the inventor of the very mRNA technology that is the basis of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
But in practice, that authority to speak on the subject is being used against him. Which should set off alarm bells.
Here is one execrable attempt to discredit Dr Malone rather than address his concerns – this one from the supposedly prestigious Atlantic magazine. The article’s headline, “The Vaccine Scientist Spreading Vaccine Misinformation”, is designed to make us assume – as the author and editors doubtless hope we will assume without reading on – that the piece proves Dr Malone is peddling conspiracy theories.
That headline suggests that the doubts Dr Malone has raised about the safety of leaky Covid vaccines will be discredited in the article with countervailing scientific evidence, presumably from other experts.
The article, however, does nothing of the sort.
It is dedicated instead to painting Dr Malone as an embittered fantasist. It does so not with evidence but by quibbling over whether he can in fact be credited with inventing mRNA technology, as he says, or whether he was simply one of its leading pioneers.
Is Dr Malone the most knowledgeable person on mRNA technology or just one of a handful of them? Unless the first is true, the Atlantic implies, everything he has to say about the potential dangers of leaky Covid vaccines based on mRNA technology is worthless and can be safely discounted.
The Atlantic’s article is what we journalists call a hatchet job. It’s what journalists do when they have no evidence to make a stronger case. You play the man, not the ball. It is the very worst kind of gutter journalism.
Treated like child
I don’t know about you but that simply isn’t good enough for me. I want to hear what Dr Malone is saying and I want to hear experts who are as eminently qualified as him address his concerns. I’m not interested in having corporate journalists and editors no more qualified than me declare me a gullible fool for listening to him or for wanting to hear a scientific rejoinder to his arguments.
I also don’t want politicians and social media corporations deciding whether Dr Malone gets to speak, or the medical establishment pretending that he and the research literature he draws on don’t exist.
And I don’t want Pfizer and Moderna deciding for themselves – and without a proper discussion – whether I and my children should be made to take vaccines for the rest of our lives and whether that is a safe or wise strategy.
I can’t understand why anyone would not feel the same, unless they would prefer to be treated like a child, cocooned from taking any responsibility for their own and their family’s health, safe in the illusion that the establishment has never made a mistake or ever told a self-interested lie.
I want to be treated like a grown-up. I want Dr Malone treated like the expert he undoubtedly is. I want a conversation – before it’s too late to have a conversation.
UPDATE:
The Twitter warriors have been out in force again, insisting to me that there has been no silencing of a debate by experts on the potential dangers of leaky Covid vaccines, while paradoxically also telling me to pipe down as I ask for the chance to be exposed to that debate. Disappointingly, none of these enforcers of discourse conformity seems to be an expert on vaccines.
Strangely, we have gone from being subjected to the Atlantic magazine’s discourse policing on the issue of leaky vaccines to the Twitter mob’s discourse policing. That wasn’t quite the progress I was hoping for.
I wrote this post for two reasons.
First, when concerns about matters relating to Covid start to go viral (sic) – whether prompted by experts, as in this case, or not – it is incumbent upon our political and media class to engage with those concerns, not pretend they don’t exist or imperiously berate those who repeat the concerns.
Rightly, levels of trust in politicians and media have been falling ever lower. Treating sections of the public who entertain doubts as gullible fools who can be safely ignored will prove entirely counter-productive and simply fuel more cynicism towards our already largely unaccountable, corrupt systems of power.
And second, when potentially unjustified certainty on medical matters – especially by non-experts – translates into an attitude of rigid moral rectitude, as we are increasingly witnessing in Covid vaccine debates, we are in very dangerous, divisive territory.
When the majority is focused on finger-pointing, demanding that vaccine mandates and passports be required before fellow citizens are allowed to work or enter the public square, we ought to be pretty damn sure we know that the vaccines are absolutely essential for everyone and that they are the only safe medical option before us.
This is precisely not the time for lazy assumptions, group-think, censorship or standing back as the corporate media decides which experts should be allowed to be part of the public conversation.
One prominent web journalist led the charge against this piece, accusing me of being “disingenuous” in wanting an open debate among experts so we can all be clearer whether there are any potential dangers with leaky Covid vaccines.
But I think there are very good reasons to demand that debate.
If there is, in fact, genuine scientific uncertainty about where the enforcement of mass vaccination at the height of a pandemic might lead, then we ought to be a little more cautious and tolerant before directing our fire at those hesitant to vaccinate themselves or their children.
It might also be wise to demand a little more vociferously that other methods of treating Covid be developed, in addition to vaccines, and that public health care be properly funded rather than put all our eggs in the vaccine basket.
Whereas if there is certainty, then we can all rally enthusiastically behind these vaccines, our doubts assuaged.
My experience is, I suspect, common. I have been exposed on the web for many months to what may indeed be a “conspiracy theory” by dissident experts about leaky vaccines, and yet I haven’t been exposed to the pushback against this theory from similar experts in the “mainstream” corporate media. That shouldn’t be treated as my fault. It is a problem with the current, dominant, corporate media conversation.
If lots of experts know Dr Malone and others are talking nonsense, why did the Atlantic, for example, engage in a hatchet job on Dr Malone rather than quote some of those experts pointing out the glaring fallacies in his thinking?
I am a journalist, and so is my colleague-critic. We know that you play your strongest cards when you write a polemical piece. So why was the only card the Atlantic played the character assassination of Dr Malone? Any journalist happy with that approach is forgetting what journalism is there to do: inform public debate, not fuel hate mobs and prop up group-think.
When asked for links to the vigorous public debate on leaky vaccines that is supposedly taking place, my colleague declined to provide any. Instead he switched tactics and suggested that this be left to peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals.
But the concerns raised by experts that he seems so sure – as a complete non-expert – can be dismissed as quackery are out there on the web right now. They relate to public policy decisions that are being formulated right now. If they are indeed simply conspiracy theories, we don’t need to wait months or years for researchers to share their findings. We need these conspiracy theories engaged with and exposed right now.
You don’t put out a fire by turning your back on it. Those who prefer to silence debate, supposedly in the interests of science, only increase the division, they fuel the blame campaigns, they rationalise the demands for more censorship. And they drive those who refuse to accept the silence deeper into the opposing camp.
Interestingly, in response to my article someone did finally post a piece by an expert relevant to this debate – written, in fact, by one of the researchers behind the chicken study I cited above. It was published in a relatively obscure online publication, fittingly named The Conversation.
I will leave you to assess it as a response to Dr Malone’s concerns. Contrary to the certainty of the Twitter warriors, Prof Andrew Read appears to accept that the virus could adapt under pressure from the leaky Covid vaccines into nastier variants, though he also seems to think that this is not very likely and that there are ways to nullify that threat – mostly by intensifying the use of boosters and further refining the vaccines.
He concludes:
There are probably ways the available COVID-19 vaccines could be improved in the future to better reduce transmission. Booster shots, larger doses or different intervals between doses might help; so too, combinations of existing vaccines. Researchers are working hard on these questions. Next-generation vaccines might be even better at blocking transmission.
The fact that hardly anyone engaged in the social media “row” provoked by my post appeared to know of Prof Read’s rejoinder to the viral videos of Dr Malone underscores exactly the point I was making. It is the responsibility of corporate media like the BBC and New York Times to air these scientific debates through experts, not draw a veil over them.
We need less polarisation and more engagement with prevalent concerns or confusion about Covid and its treatment. And that surely won’t happen as long as the corporate media and Twitter warriors insist on policing the discourse.
What we see is an attempt to impose an idealised technical managerialism onto a complex, rather than pursue real solutions to problems.
Change happens quickly and often unpredictably. Yet the unpredictable part seemingly is all about physics. Imagine, dropping one grain of sand after another onto a table. A pile soon develops. Eventually, just one grain starts an avalanche. Most of the time, it’s a small one. But sometimes the pile just slides and disintegrates entirely.
Well, in 1987, three physicists began to play the sand pile game in their lab, seeking an answer to what it is that triggers the typical avalanche? After a huge number of tests, they found there is no typical number of grains that does it.
To find out why such unpredictability should show up in their sand pile game, the physicists next coloured it according to its steepness. Where it was relatively flat and stable, they coloured it green; where steep and, in avalanche terms, ‘ready to go’, they coloured it red.
They found that at the outset, the pile looked mostly green, but that, as the pile grew, the green became infiltrated with ever more red. With more grains, the scattering of red danger fingers grew until a dense skeleton of red instability ran through the pile. Here then was a clue to its peculiar behaviour: a grain falling on a red spot can, by domino-like action, cause sliding at other nearby red spots.
Afghanistan was intended to be a showcase for western technical managerialism – an empirical petri-dish in which to prove the historical inevitability of technocracy. Its doctrine held that free markets somehow obviated the need for politics; that big data and ‘expert’ managerialism in markets (in markets extended to ‘everything’, that is), were the crux to re-setting the world in a better way (i.e. the Build Back Better meme). It was, in a word, postulated on data predictability.
Existential political and social questions in this doctrine however, were to be nuanced through ‘Third Wayism’ (i.e. left unsolved – or fudged with easy answers, and easy money).
Or … ‘regulated’ into compliance. The answer to social problematics was Cloud Computing of mass data. With enough input on past human choices, it is believed that experts can precisely predict human behaviour, which then can be ‘nudged’ in the direction that our élites wish it to go. Nudge behavioural psychology, of course, is about control – not active thinking.
Yet unpredictably, this ‘world class’ managerial team in Kabul, so consumed by the notion of technocracy and mass data management, produced a project so rotten and corrupt (gaming the system) that it collapsed in eleven days. Many Americans and Europeans have barely recovered from the shock, and remain in denial.
So, back to the sand pile: When the red spots come to riddle the sand pile, the consequences of the next grain become fiendishly unpredictable, the physicists discovered. It might trigger only a few tumblings, or it might instead set off a cataclysmic chain reaction involving millions. The sand pile seemed to have configured itself into a hypersensitive and peculiarly unstable condition, in which the next falling grain could trigger a response of any size whatsoever.
Physics is saying we have systemic instability at a certain point of accumulation. Our technocrats deny it, and therefore will be unable to foresee even such a possibility. Their creed is the model.
There are many subtleties and twists in the story, but the basic message is simple: The peculiar and exceptionally unstable organization of the critical state does indeed seem to explain why our highly complex world, at large, seems so susceptible to unpredictable upheavals. So much for AI and big data’s predictions – In the end, it was the landing of the Taliban ‘red grain’ that triggered an unpredicted, lightning cascade.
The question must be: Will this trigger any chain reaction? Maybe not, yet there are several other ‘fingers of instability’ in the western sand pile which should be coloured ‘grain red’, and – judged in avalanche terms – may be poised to cascade.
One such is the ‘vaccination’ (or gene therapy): The mRNA ‘vaccine’ doesn’t stop infection, nor does it stop the spread of the virus. A fully vaccinated person can catch the virus and spread it to others. There’s new evidence that double-vaxxed individuals build up huge viral loads in their noses and sinuses, causing them to become super-spreaders, and infect others. The unvaccinated therefore, have as much to fear in terms of catching the disease from the vaccinated as the other way around.
Israel is providing a useful case study in the effectiveness – or lack thereof – of vaccines. Israel is one of the most heavily vaxxed countries in the world, with nearly 80% of the population fully vaccinated and almost 100% of the elderly. But now Israel is experiencing a massive increase in infections (and of serious cases), mainly among the fully vaxxed.
There are ample reasons not to receive countless millions of mRNA spike-proteins into one’s circulatory system – including being recovered from Covid, and having stronger antibody protection than the vaccinated. Yet, the latter are being treated as lepers. And governments, like that of PM Draghi in Italy, continue trying to impose ever stringent vaccine mandates and other forms of authoritarian control. ‘Pandemic authoritarianism’ will do nothing to slow the spread of the disease. It may even adversely repercuss – as it has in Israel – to create a graver problem. What it will do however, is to tear an already tense society apart – particularly when set against the background of deteriorating economies.
It is all reminiscent of the managerialist control efforts of an earlier ‘war’ (the equally failed) Great War On Terror, launched in the wake of 9/11, when a different, yet supposedly, ‘morally justified’ form of mass public control and surveillance was instituted – with the wider, awkward facts of counter-terrorism policy simply edited out from an already anxiety-ridden and de-sensitised audience.
Today, there is an ongoing debate about whether we are going to ‘beat’ Covid in the way the general public conceives of these things. Scientists – not the ones you hear most from – always made clear that vaccines would not stop Covid in its tracks if, like other similar such viruses, the latter mutated into something more dangerous, and transmissible.
The latter would constitute a variant which vaccination might actually accelerate, in a process known as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) (on which the jury is still out). There is a popular misconception that – at some critical threshold of vaccination – Covid just ‘goes away’. The science however, (Draghi aside) suggests that a happy outcome arguably will only happen were new variants to become milder, like a ‘flu.
In Afghanistan, where a ‘managerialist’ Pentagon had for 20 years, until the very eleventh hour, one General after another, repeating the mantra lie that all was fine: Plenty of ‘progress’ evident in Afghanistan. ‘Progress’ always was there – until it wasn’t. Until the state’s collapse. It was in essence a defeat driven by data addiction, at the expense of the ‘real’.
So, in this other ‘field’ of Covid, we find the similar approach: Vaccine ‘progress’ will be achieved, if not with two, then three, and now four shots (in Israel) – until it isn’t. And with that, another ‘grain’ will settle on a red finger of instability.
This issue is doubly pertinent, because just as Covid is not ‘sorted’, neither is the economy. Anyone with a smattering of economics, might have also seen in advance that QE would never achieve its key goals. It is the quintessence of high tech (financial) managerialism. Central banks may keep saying they have achieved their goals (like the Generals calling ‘progress’ in Afghanistan), but the slump in productivity and the rise in inflation, and the shift to a reductive gig economy, all make it abundantly clear this is wishful thinking. It seems, we are now told that only trillion-dollar fiscal spends can halt the rot … Or, like vaccines, potentially with more and more shots, though possible ADE makes infections increase. Again, real solutions are edited out.
The Telegraph’s International Business Editor, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, sees another red-grain finger of instability running through the sand pile:
“Germany’s long-simmering anger with the European Central Bank (ECB) is again coming to the boil. It is hard to justify perennial [QE] and negative rates when German inflation is near 4pc – and rising. Political realities are forcing the ECB … to prepare for bond tapering sooner than it wants … in order to head off a bust-up with Europe’s anchor power [Germany].
“[This means] it will have to start pulling away the shield that has protected the high-debt Club Med states from market forces for almost seven years, and that has conveniently covered their entire borrowing requirements under the cloak of “monetary policy”. It is this monetary tightening in conjunction with parallel moves by the U.S. Federal Reserve that poses the chief risk to overheated global asset markets, not the virus’ Delta variant.
What is different this time [from past German grumblings], is that inflation can be felt everywhere – gefühlte Inflation – and parts of the German economy are patently overheating … German irritation should not be underestimated: The German Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) this week published an extraordinary paper, more or less alleging that ECB governors from the high-debt states are exploiting QE in order to bail out their own insolvent governments – and doing so in violation of EU treaty law”.
Events are nearing the point where Germany must either challenge this process, or accept that it has lost control of the Euro, and together with other northern ‘frugal’ Euro-states, pull out.
The ramifications deriving from the paradigmatic blow given by the Taliban to the Western technocratic vision; to Europe at its sudden discovery that America does not have Europe’s back; to inflation felt everywhere; to the QE impasse (that interest rates above 2% would kill the western economy); to geopolitical rejection of the western liberal model – arguably all these run through what happens next with Covid, and the mass resort to the imposition of ‘virtuous’ authoritarianism.
There is, in the end, nothing more than one common single thread running through all these fingers of instability: It is the attempt to impose an idealised technical managerialism onto a complex, critical-state reality, rather than pursue real solutions to problems – and the resort to behavioural control psychology to conceal the rot beneath, and compel compliance.
So, we are now poised at a critical state of what Paul McCulley calls ‘stable disequilibrium’ – where all actors work to maximize their personal outcome, and reduce their exposure to fingers of instability. But the longer the game runs, says McCulley, the more likely it is to end in a violent avalanche, as the fingers of instability have more time to build, and, eventually, the state of stable disequilibrium goes critical.
Which finger goes first? Unpredictability again – any grain falling on a red spot can, by domino-like action, cause sliding at other nearby red spots.
After the Crash 