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9/11 and the Politics of Fear and Self-Preservation

By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | September 10, 2021

The 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001 is a particularly somber one, not just because of the horrific nature of events of that day reaching its second-decade milestone, but because of how little we seem to have learned in that amount of time.

The fear and trauma generated by the events of 9/11 were used by the U.S. national security state and its civilian allies to great effect to divide the American population, to attack independent reporting as well as independent thought, to gut the anti-war movement, and to normalize the U.S. government’s overt and persistent degradation of the country’s Constitution. This, of course, is in addition to the illegal U.S. occupations and drone wars in the Middle East and elsewhere that were also born out of this event.

The true beneficiaries of 9/11

As a nation, the U.S. populace has failed to grapple with these realities, and many others, in the two decades since the Twin Towers and WTC Building 7 fell. Far from bringing any benefit to the alleged masterminds of the event, the results of 9/11 instead overwhelmingly favored the ambitions of a powerful faction within the U.S. national security state that had long sought to bring the dissident-elimination efforts it spent decades implementing abroad – from the Phoenix Program in Vietnam to Operation Condor in South America – home to roost.

As a result, the response of the U.S. government to the attack supposedly launched by those “who hate us for our freedom” was to work to reduce our freedoms and civil liberties. Now, 20 years on, the sophisticated “War on Terror” apparatus has been fully turned into a “War on Domestic Terror,” with many of those who once opposed the war on terrorism abroad now cheering on the ratcheting up of its domestic equivalent.

Yet, the domestic terror apparatus being swiftly created and implemented very clearly targets individuals and ideologies on both sides of the political divide. It is also extremely vague, essentially leaving it up to those holding the reins of political power – whether Democrat, Republican or something else – to decide who is “terrorist” and who is not. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was Joe Biden back in the mid-1990s who introduced legislation that would have given the president sole and unappealable authority to define what constitutes “terrorism,” a fact that was omitted from media coverage of last year’s presidential campaign and the past several months of his presidency.

A crisis of courage

It seems clear at this point that one of the key reasons the U.S. continues to hemorrhage its remaining civil liberties, either as a result of the new “War on Domestic Terrorism” or as a response to COVID-19, is that it is undergoing a crisis of conscience and courage in grappling with not just the true nature of the events of 9/11 itself, but with the orthodoxy over the “official story” of those events.

Even two decades after the fact, it is still deemed too controversial or unthinkable to question whether the official story is an accurate portrayal of the events that transpired on and led to that day. This is despite the fact that the official story itself, presumably the same story told by the 9/11 Commission report, has been labeled incomplete, and unable to answer major questions about that day, by its very authors. In addition, the official story relies heavily on testimony obtained through extreme torture, meaning it is of questionable accuracy.

Many of those who have been quick and vocal to point out the lies of the U.S. government when it comes to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and other consequences of the War on Terror have been unable to even consider that the official story of 9/11 may not be legitimate and may indeed have been dealt from the same pack. This may be for a variety of reasons, including a strong desire to not be de-legitimized by their peers as bearers of the “conspiracy theorist” smear and an unwillingness to face a political reality where U.S. government officials may have been complicit in a deadly attack on American soil. In those two examples, however, the failure of such individuals, particularly in media, to even consider that there may be more to the story boils down to a desire for self-preservation in the case of the former and preservation of a particular worldview in the case of the latter. Yet, in both cases, the casualty is the truth and the cause is cowardice.

By failing as a society to thoroughly examine the events of 9/11 and why those events occurred, the American public has shown the powers that be that their desire to preserve a “safe” worldview — and to preserve their own careers, in the case of certain professional classes — is enough to keep people from questioning world-altering events when they emerge. Those powers are well aware of this refusal and have been using it to their advantage ever since.

The poison remains in our system

Today, with the COVID-19 crisis still dragging on, we are similarly immersed in a situation where nuance and facts are being cast aside, militantly in some cases, in favor of the establishment narrative. Is everyone who chooses not to take this particular vaccine a “conspiracy theorist” and “anti-vaxxer”? Does it really make sense to so dramatically divide the public into groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated through a new ID system when the vaccine claims to reduce the severity of illness but not to stop disease transmission? Should those that question the motivation of politicians, powerful pharmaceutical corporations and mainstream media “experts” be censored from expressing those views online?

You do not need to agree with those who hold such views, but what is wrong with hearing what they have to say and debating their evidence with your own? We are losing the ability to have rational public discourse about these issues — and losing it swiftly, at a speed comparable to what took place in the aftermath of 9/11, when questioning the motives of the Bush administration, U.S. intelligence agencies and other groups, as well as their proposed responses and “solutions,” was deemed “unpatriotic” and even “treasonous” by some. Calls were made to strip an entire class of Americans of their freedom for merely sharing the same ethno-religious identities as those we were told attacked us, and many went along with it. Freedom became treated as a privilege only for certain groups, not as a right, and this insidious fallacy has reared its head yet again in recent months in relation to the COVID-19 vaccine debate and also the war on domestic terror.

Our pandemic of fear

Though the failure to consider explanations for 9/11 that deviate from the official story can be called cowardice, the most enduring lesson 20 years on from 9/11 is perhaps that fear was and remains the most powerful tool that has been consistently used to whittle down our freedom and civil liberties. While the divide-and-conquer strategies have raged on from 9/11 to the present, the largest wealth transfers in history have occurred, creating an unaccountable and ultra-wealthy super-elite that dominates an ever-growing underclass.

The march towards this de facto neo-feudalism certainly didn’t begin on or after 9/11, but our collective failure to grapple with the narrative orthodoxies of that day have prevented us from fully understanding the big picture of that event as well as many subsequent and similarly consequential events. For too long, the desire to preserve our self-image, our reputation, and the worldview we are taught in school has all too often made hard, difficult truths a casualty.

In order to truly understand the War on Terror, the domestic surveillance state and our current reality, we must accept that we were lied to about 9/11. We must ask the hard questions and accept hard truths. We must put an end to the 20-plus-year-long pandemic of fear over “invisible enemies,” fear that has pushed us to surrender the very freedoms that we are told we are protecting.

The United States, and much of the world, is quickly becoming an unrecognizable and authoritarian dystopia. We cannot wait another two decades to grapple with the difficult questions and realities that arose after 9/11 and persist into the present. We will either be remembered as a country that took freedom and liberty for all seriously or we will be remembered as a nation of cowards who, driven by fear, were willing to deprive this group, then that group, of their freedom — before losing that freedom entirely.

Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for MintPress News. She currently writes for her own outlet Unlimited Hangout and contributes to The Last American Vagabond and MintPress News

September 11, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Islamophobia, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Twenty years of lies

By Daniel Miller | TCW Defending Freedom | September 11, 2021

TWO decades after 9/11, which was eleven years to the day after President George H W Bush delivered his famous ‘new world order’ speech, the historical significance of both events is now much clearer.

Two decades of permanent ‘most favoured nation’ trading status for China has produced the largest transfer of wealth, technology, manufacturing capacity and markets in human history, and destroyed the American industrial economy.

Two decades of the ‘War on Terror’ and the cancerous growth of a global surveillance state has destroyed Western liberty and obliterated civil rights.

Two decades of the corporate internet, social media and smartphones has lobotomised Western culture, destroyed key Western institutions, engineered a rolling mass psychosis and transferred regional political and economic power to Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

Two decades of the occupation of Afghanistan, then Iraq, drone war and collateral murder in Pakistan, attacks on Libya, Syria and Yemen has destroyed the authority of the United States and its allies to the point where the senile winner of a crooked election mumbling prepared talking points inside a fortified Capitol is the nominal leader of what was once called the free world.

Before 9/11 it was still almost possible to believe America’s idealised story of itself. Today the USA can be compared to the most corrupt regimes in history, and may even be the most corrupt, given the scale of corruption now possible.

Gangster states, which are merely criminal rather than sadistic and depraved, now look at the United States with justified disgust.

But America is also no longer really America, just as Britain is no longer really Britain. Both are no more than holding companies of a global commercial conglomerate hostile to national power as a barrier to global domination, just as developing national power in an earlier era was determined to weaken regional power.

All this was accelerated after 9/11 through the imposition of a war whose structural outcome, if not objective, was the demolition of the democratic West, and it is now being accelerated yet further via the pandemic.

Once again shock propaganda has been used to declare a state of emergency and enable the seizure of power from the people to State and transnational organs. Here, too, a highly profitable permanent war has been declared against an invisible enemy with no definable conditions of victory, or even coherently stated aims.

Again, the winners are the same global political, economic and security elites who consolidated after 9/11 by destroying the independence and competence of the institutions over which they had acquired control in the process of converting them into instruments of domination.

Here too, beyond a lingering and misplaced respect for institutional authority, the plausibility-effect produced by endless, mantra-like repetition, and the production of irrelevant distractions, the official story remains unpersuasive.

In the days which followed 9/11 questions were already being asked about the relationship between the official story, the actual pattern of the evidence and a series of imponderables, and they have continued to be asked.

What is without question is that one hour after the attack in New York, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak had identified the likely perpetrator as Osama Bin Laden (Bin Laden would later deny any involvement) and called for the declaration of a global ‘war against terror’ extending beyond the perpetrators of 9/11 itself to confront terror generally.

The paradigm was adopted wholesale by George Bush in a speech to Congress nine days later. ’Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda,’ Bush said, ‘but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.’

Islam itself was not the enemy, we were told. Al Qaeda had only ‘hijacked’ Islam for the purpose of ‘remaking the world and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere’.

In subsequent years this vague and ambiguous distinction would be used to support the extension of police state surveillance not just of rapidly growing Muslim populations across the West (to monitor evidence of dangerous radicalization) but also anyone articulating suspicion towards Muslims.  By 2019 more ‘Right-wingers’ than Islamic activists were being referred to the Prevent programme. Last month the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin implying that if Americans question and challenge the COVID shot mandates, they are now considered potential ‘Domestic Violent Extremists’.

In truth, Bush and his associates and masters had hijacked Al-Qaeda and Islam for the purpose of imposing their own radical agenda. Spun between a belligerent discourse of Islamofascism and a police discourse of Islamophobia, a schizoid and insulting fantasy of a liberal Islam became the object of a new imperialism in the stated cause of Western values, and in reality enacting their destruction.

Just as recent calls to ‘Save the NHS’ have served to camouflage the liquidation of the NHS, the rhetoric of ‘nation-building’ efforts to extend Western democracy across the world have, in reality, destroyed democracy everywhere.

Even as mass Muslim immigration into the West accelerated following their destruction of their countries, a steady drumbeat of slaughter and atrocity in London, Madrid, Paris and elsewhere, staged by actors invariably known to intelligence agencies, maintained a climate of hostility and madness to the benefit of the occupational elites. The language of permanent terror bled into a culture (what is a safe space but a refuge from a world of terror?) as a psychologically brutalized population regressed into a cloying “thoughts and prayers” martyrology, in fact promoted or exploded into murderous psychosis, combining in cases like Usman Khan, who shortly before his London Bridge rampage attended a conference on criminal rehabilitation as a rehabilitated criminal. https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-indoctrination-of-the-justice-system/ (The Millwall supporter who helped to disarm him, Roy Larner, was later added to terror watchlist.)

In February 2007, when former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski denounced before the Senate ‘a historical, strategic and moral calamity . . . driven by Manichaean impulses and imperial hubris’, the full extent of the damage was not yet clear. What now is clear is that the War on Terror was a weapon directed against the West itself which has succeeded beyond all expectations.

Whether through a conscious plan or what Hegel called the cunning of reason, the West has been destroyed. What now exists is a shadow West, which still speaks as if it was the West for camouflage, but in the service of completely different goals. It is not a coincidence that the characters promoted and rewarded for their participation in the War on Terror have either remained in place or returned to play a role in the pandemic: from their perspective there has been no error. What has materialised over the last thirty years, and especially the last eighteen months, is a new system of power, which although still defined within the context of the history of the nation-state, represents its ultimate destruction.

September 11, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Sydney doctor who criticized medical censorship online is suspended from practicing medicine

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | September 11, 2021

On social media, a Sydney doctor questioned whether vaccines and lockdowns would be effective in ending the pandemic while also scrutinizing how medical authorities were handling treatment. As a result of his postings, New South Wales medical authorities have taken action against Dr. Paul Oosterhuis by suspending him.

Oosterhuis’ social media activities have garnered at least two anonymous complaints to the medical council, the group confirmed on September 2nd.

“Over the last 18 months, I have been increasingly concerned about the misinformation and censorship creeping into science and medicine,” the doctor had stated.

Oosterhuis recommended that medical authorities advise COVID-19 patients to take vitamin D and zinc and to treat them with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

He called the lockdowns “totalitarian” and causing “massive damage to society-wide.”

In a post, he wrote. “The risk of antibody-dependent enhancement of disease… driven by immune escape from the selective evolutionary pressure of vaccinating with a non-sterilizing agent is a real and present danger and needs to be discussed. The danger to millions is distressing me, and discussing that danger is, I believe, unarguably in the public interest.”

According to the Medical Council of New South Wales, Oosterhuis’s social media activity was flagged. He was asked to attend an “immediate action panel” on September 3rd and the anesthetist was questioned by the MCNSW.

“​​The Council deals with individual doctors whose conduct, performance or health may represent a risk to the public and works with them, where possible, to reduce that risk by for example, placing conditions on their medical registration. Section 150 or immediate action panels are held by the Council when a complaint or notification prompts serious concerns about risk to public safety or the need to otherwise act in the public interest. Panel members include community representatives as well as medical practitioners,” the MCNSW statement read.

The MCNSW provided Reclaim The Net with this full statement here

Ultimately, the MCNSW chose to suspend Dr Oosterhuis’ later that day.

Medical practitioners can be suspended by the medical council under New South Wales’ Health Practitioner Regulation National Law (NSW). The New South Wales Medical Council collaborates with the state Ministry of Health to investigate and resolve complaints about specific doctors and other medical specialists.

According to the council, this law does not give it the power to de-register Oosterhuis or revoke his license and they have no authority to punish him. However, despite his almost 30 years of experience in medicine, his suspension has already barred him from practicing in the medical profession.

Oosterhuis has responded by stating that he will not adjust his behavior to be more compliant. He stated that he intends to challenge the suspension, saying:

“I am very disappointed by the Medical Council’s decision to suspend my registration.

“The material I submitted in support of my evidence-based concerns was not considered. I intend to appeal the decision.

“The council drew upon s150 powers to demand an urgent hearing into some posts I have shared on Facebook on the importance of early treatment, particularly the low hanging fruit of vit D, Zinc, Quercetin, vit C and the repurposed drugs Ivermectin.

“I’m pro choice, pro informed consent… it’s always been a key ethical principle… you need to be able to discuss all the risks, benefits, and alternatives of any medical intervention.”

He later added, “Censorship kills. My responsibility to the Hippocratic oath, and basic ethics compels me to share data that I believe is definitely in the public interest.”

Despite an initial public statement, the MCNSW failed to make any further statements on this issue.

September 11, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Children are Next in Line for Mandated Coronavirus Vaccine Shots

By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | September 11, 2021

Much attention is focused on President Joe Biden in a Thursday speech announcing that the coronavirus testing alternative United States government employees had been able to use to avoid the mandate to take experimental coronavirus vaccines is being eliminated and that regulations are in the works to require all employees at companies with 100 or more employees to take the “vaccines” or be tested weekly. Less noticed is news that experimental coronavirus vaccines may soon be rolled out for young children. Pfizer-BioNTech is seeking in the next few weeks approval for giving its experimental coronavirus vaccine shots to children ages five through 11, while Moderna is close behind, proceeding with testing of its shots on children 11 and younger. Then come shots for toddlers and babies.

Shots mandates for workers first, shots mandates for children next: That seems to be the situation in America, though it should be noted that some children —especially older children — are workers too.

Of course, as happened Thursday with the testing alternative to shots disappearing for government workers, expect that alternative to go away for people working at private businesses as well. By the time a shots mandate for children comes along, a testing alternative might not be available from the start.

Biden provided in his speech a preview of an argument in favor of mandatory shots for children. First, he asserted that the August 23 expedited Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of a Pfizer-BioNTech experimental coronavirus vaccine for people 16 and over means “the time for waiting is over” for people 16 and older who have not taken the shots. Second, Biden suggested that as soon as vaccines are approved for use in an age group of children his conclusion is that the children in that age group should then be given shots:

It comes down to two separate categories: children ages 12 and older who are eligible for a vaccine now, and children ages 11 and under who are not are yet eligible.

The safest thing for your child 12 and older is to get them vaccinated. They get vaccinated for a lot of things. That’s it.  Get them vaccinated.

A move to require children to be given the experimental coronavirus vaccine shots should come as no surprise. Children across America have long been mandated to receive many vaccines on a prescribed timeline in accord with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine schedule or similar state vaccine schedules in order to attend school. And many of the mandates are difficult to avoid. In California, for example, the vaccine mandate applies even to children in private schools and only has a very limited exemption.

The obvious way to introduce the requirement that young children take the experimental coronavirus vaccine shots is to make the shots a prerequisite for attending school. There is plenty of precedent for that from all the other vaccine shots required in the CDC and state vaccine schedules.

Next up, the shots can be required for even homeschooled children, just like the shots requirement for people employed in businesses with a 100 or more employees can be extended to people employed in businesses with under 100 employees, the self-employed, the retired, and the unemployed. Indeed, on Thursday Biden announced he will mandate US government contractors and 17 million healthcare workers take the shots, no matter how many employees their employers have.

There is no constitutional basis for the experimental coronavirus vaccine mandates Biden announced on Thursday. If he can get away with those mandates, what’s to stop him from expanding on those mandates so he can eliminate all the “loopholes,” including the one protecting children from forced shots.

Copyright © 2021 by RonPaul Institute

September 11, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

In setback for Biden’s mandate policy, Florida appeals court allows governor to ban obligatory masks in schools

RT | September 10, 2021

A Florida appeals court has overruled a district judge who sought to block Governor Ron DeSantis from banning mask mandates in public schools, even as President Joe Biden vowed federal support for administrators who do so.

On Friday, the First District Court of Appeals in Tallahassee overruled Leon County Judge John Cooper’s decision to block the enforcement of the mandate ban, meaning schools that try to force children to wear masks can be punished by the governor.

“Upon our review of the trial’s court’s final judgment and the operative pleadings, we have serious doubts about standing, jurisdiction, and other threshold matters,” said the appeals court order, casting doubt on the case the mandate advocates made through a group of parents.

DeSantis is a Republican governor opposed to lockdowns and mask mandates, who has opted for encouraging vaccinations and antibody treatments for Covid-19 instead. He has argued that masking up ought to be voluntary, and that school mask mandates violate the rights of parents and children. Under the rules enacted by DeSantis last month, school administrators who impose mask mandates can be docked pay. Judge Cooper tried to block their enforcement.

Of the 67 school districts in Florida, 13 have adopted strict mask mandates in violation of the state order. So far, DeSantis has withheld the monthly salary of school board members in two counties, Broward and Alachua, while investigating others for non-compliance.

On Thursday, Biden said the federal government would reimburse anyone who defies the mask mandate ban, as part of his push to force some 80 million Americans to get vaccinated or submit to weekly tests under the threat of losing their jobs or paying massive fines. Biden blamed the “unvaccinated” for the surge in Covid-19 cases and said the vaccinated must be protected from them.

“This is not about freedom, or personal choice,” Biden said in a televised speech, later adding, “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us.”

Biden also said state governors should require vaccinations of all school teachers and staff, imposed a vaccination requirement on 300,000 teachers in the federal Head Start program, and vowed to go after any governors “undermining” his measures.

“If these governors won’t help, I will use my powers as president and get them out of the way,” he said.

Last month, DeSantis vowed to “stand in the way” of Covid-19 mandates, lockdowns, and other restrictions, saying the US can “either have a free society or we can have a biomedical security state.”

September 10, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Adam Schiff demands more data on Amazon’s policing of “misinformation” in books

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | September 10, 2021

Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat, has written to Amazon and Facebook, requesting more information on their efforts to combat the spread of “misinformation” on their platforms. The Democratic party has intensified its criticism of online platforms for their failure to address what they say is misinformation, which they blame for the stalling of the vaccination program.

“Despite some concrete and positive steps previously taken, these companies owe both the public and the Congress additional answers about the exponential and dangerous proliferation of misinformation,” said Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in a statement.

In recent weeks more Democrats, including White House officials, have spoken out against online platforms for their failure to address health misinformation, blamed for the increased vaccine hesitancy in the country. Biden singled out Facebook, saying the company was killing people for allowing the spread of vaccine-skeptic content.

In a statement to Reuters, Facebook said that, since the beginning of the pandemic, it had “removed over 20 million pieces of COVID misinformation, labeled more than 190 million pieces of COVID content rated by our fact-checking partners, and connected over 2 billion people with reliable information through tools like our COVID information center.”

It added it had “removed over 3,000 accounts, pages, and groups for repeatedly violating our COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation policies and will continue to enforce our policies and offer tools and reminders for people who use our platform to get vaccinated.”

A spokesperson for Amazon said that it has been “constantly evaluating the books we list to ensure they comply with our content guidelines, and as an additional service to customers, at the top of relevant search results pages we link to the CDC advice on COVID and protection measures.”

September 10, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Texas governor branded hypocrite after signing free speech bill, having cracked down on Israel critics

RT | September 10, 2021

Republican Governor Greg Abbott has been slammed as a hypocrite after he signed an anti-Big Tech censorship bill on Thursday, with critics pointing out that he’s cracked down on Texans who’ve protested against Israel’s actions.

In a video on Thursday, Abbott claimed “freedom of speech is under attack in Texas,” before revealing he would be signing a law that “prevents social media companies from banning users based upon the user’s political viewpoints.” He said it would allow Texans to file lawsuits against “dangerous” Big Tech platforms that wrongfully suspend their right to post.

“In Texas, we will always fight for your freedom of speech,” Abbott concluded, as he signed the bill.

Though many US conservatives praised Abbott online for signing the bill, journalist Glenn Greenwald pointed out that the same governor had previously used his power to crack down on pro-Palestine activists who protested against Israel.

“I’m happy seeing anyone take a stand against Big Tech censorship, but I also feel compelled to note that [Abbott] himself is one of the country’s most repressive censors,” Greenwald tweeted on Friday, noting that the governor had championed a law that “punishes American citizens who refuse to take an oath about Israel.”

“I can’t overstate how repressive is the censorship supported by Abbott and other mostly but not all red-state governors that punish citizens who advocate a boycott of Israel. Thankfully, the courts are declaring them unconstitutional, but Abbott is a fraud.”

In 2017, Abbott’s office announced that the governor had “proudly” signed a new law that “prohibits all state agencies from contracting with, and certain public funds from investing in, companies that boycott Israel.”

At the signing of the bill, Abbott declared that “any anti-Israel policy is an anti-Texas policy” and “any boycott of Israel is considered to be un-Texan,” ultimately disregarding citizens whose views on the matter didn’t align with his own.

“We will not tolerate such actions against an important ally,” he warned.

A Muslim speech pathologist at an elementary school in Austin, Texas was subsequently ousted from her job after she refused to take an oath swearing she would not engage in a boycott of Israeli products or other such anti-Israel actions.

In 2019, a federal court in Texas ruled Abbott’s bill to be an unconstitutional violation of citizens’ First Amendment rights.

In March, Abbott also took aim at the social network Gab, calling it an “anti-Semitic platform” and declaring, in a video in which he sat in front of an Israeli flag, that it had “no place in Texas.”

Abbott received heavy criticism from Republicans for his anti-Gab stance, including from several Jewish conservatives who served in President Donald Trump’s administration.

The governor’s statement was branded “despicable and false” by Gab CEO Andrew Torba, who pointed out that nearly 800,000 Texans had visited the network in the previous 24 hours and that even the Texas Republican Party had a verified account on the site.

September 10, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

The Paradox of Turnkey Totalitarianism

By Max Borders | AIER | September 10, 2021

Somewhere a brilliant but troubled biotech engineer is doing CRISPR in his garage. He has all he needs: a computer, a fridge, a centrifuge, some animal cages, and an assortment of microorganisms in tubes, which he has labeled and stored until he’s ready. Today he will use a gene-editing technique to make a deadly, fast-spreading bacterium. Oh, and he plans to unleash it upon the world tomorrow. He just needs to make a few finishing touches.

Why is he doing this?

Maybe he’s gone mad. Maybe he’s lonely and wants to get revenge on the world. Maybe he read Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto and thinks humans are a plague. In some sense, it doesn’t matter. Out of a thousand other brilliant gene researchers, he has broken bad. And nobody really knows what he’s working on in that garage. He is as invisible to his neighbors as he is to the girls he likes.

  • What on earth are we going to do about this young man?
  • How do we stop people like him from unleashing mass death?
  • And if we are going to stop him, who is the “we?”

Today, more and more people have access to technological means to wreak havoc on the world. As more people have access to exponential technologies, some subset of them could be out there in the dark working on the next existential threat.

So what are we going to do?

Reasonable Regulations

For most people, the answer is linear, even logical: regulation. It’s plausible enough. Certain kinds of activities are riskier than others, so ordinary people are going to have to trust and empower authorities to provide regulatory oversight. Sounds simple. Advocates of this kind of regulation are not arguing that risky research should be banned. As we stipulated in our own scenario, 999 out of 1,000 are not monsters at all but up to good things. Some of their work will be welcome medical breakthroughs.

So maybe some people should be allowed to engage in activities that create existential risks. Otherwise, such activities should be tightly controlled by regulators in licensed, transparent environments. And, of course, government ought to supply that regulatory oversight; or so goes that rationale.

Turnkey Totalitarianism

A handful of people have begun to study existential threats like the ones described above. One such individual is philosopher Nick Bostrom who in the policy summary of his “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis”, writes:

“In order for civilization to have a general capacity to deal with “black ball” inventions of this type, it would need a system of ubiquitous real-time worldwide surveillance. In some scenarios, such a system would need to be in place before the technology is invented.”

After a unipolar surveillance regime is put in place, Bostrom thinks that dangerous materials that could go to the development of existential threats would have to be supplied by a “small number of closely monitored providers.”

So, we get ubiquitous surveillance plus tight regulation, which some such as privacy policy analyst Julian Sanchez have referred to as “turnkey totalitarianism.” The question before us then, is, would it work?

Regulating the Regulators

In a separate article titled “Fawning Over Fauci,” I suggested the media better investigate a situation that is not very different from the one I imagined in the opening vignette. However, the major difference is that there wasn’t some kid in a garage in this real-world scenario. There were government-sanctioned scientists in a research center — The Wuhan Institute of Virology — who used largesse dispensed by our own government.

Indeed, one of the best ways to provide oversight in various research endeavors is to control the funding sources for such research. I have suggested that it is plausible that the infectious diseases branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH/NIAID), run by none other than Anthony Fauci, was responsible for funding research into zoonotic viruses of the sort that includes Covid-19.

In other words, without Fauci and his agency’s regulatory failure, there might have been no pandemic.

Let’s assume that Anthony Fauci and the functionaries at the NIAID presided over the funding of dangerous research, which was to be tightly controlled and regulated (if not outright banned). Let’s stipulate that such research did lead to a pandemic that has already killed millions of people. And as the virus mutates, it evades not only vaccines, but all manner of bureaucratic mandates. It could soon be endemic.

In this scenario, though, all of the criteria for reasonable regulation ought to have been satisfied. Yet we still got mass death. In other words, there was neither a mad scientist nor a monstrous incel, at least not as far as we know. It could have been as simple as bureaucratic incompetence combined with negligence at one of the labs serving at the NIH’s behest.

For now, I’ll leave aside questions about whether or to what extent the Chinese government knew about the research and could have co-opted it for nefarious purposes. Despite the Communist Party’s sorry track record, the most likely explanation is that this was a terrible accident. We simply can’t say. Nor are we ever likely to find anything but lies coming out of Beijing (or Washington for that matter).

But one thing is clear: there is currently no way to regulate the regulators. Instead, we have no choice but to live with them. Otherwise, they are entirely unaccountable. They alone hold power to take such enormous risks, presumably in the name of science.

The Problem of Power

When it comes to the idea of government, most people suffer from both a great blind spot and a failure of imagination.

The blind spot is a refusal to believe the state is itself the greatest of all existential threats to humanity. Whether in Hollywood’s depiction of corporate baddies or general concerns about gigantism, most people can’t or won’t appreciate the fact that nation-states hold all the records for mass killing. Compare individuals and corporations to that record. It ain’t even close. Yet most people want desperately to believe the state’s job is to protect us. Unicorn governance. Again, the state is the greatest source of violence in human history.

The failure of imagination lies in a widespread inability to see how it might be possible for humanity to mitigate existential threats without the linear model of state control. Whether we’re talking about “reasonable regulation” or “turnkey totalitarianism,” the linear model originates in Hobbes’s Leviathan rationale, which holds most people in its thrall. Simply put, the Leviathan rationale prompts us to entrust a powerful monopoly to protect us and work in our interests.

But then, somehow, we have to oblige that powerful monopoly to stay in its place. The problem is, it rarely does. As Edmund Burke wrote:

In vain you tell me that [government] is good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing! The Thing itself is the abuse! Observe, my Lord, I pray you, that grand Error upon which all artificial legislative Power is founded. It was observed, that Men had ungovernable Passions, which made it necessary to guard against the Violence they might offer to each other. They appointed Governors over them for this Reason; but a worse and more perplexing Difficulty arises, how to be defended against the Governors?

Checks and balances last for a while. But as soon as they fail, the proxies of that powerful monopoly seize yet more power. Any remaining checks and balances are crushed under Leviathan’s weight, well, unless Leviathan can no longer swim in an ocean of red ink. By then, it might be too late.

The Nihilism of the Vulnerable World

Thinkers such as Nick Bostrom aren’t wrong about the world’s vulnerability to exponential technologies in the hands of bad actors. What they too often forget is that politics selects for arrogance and sociopathy. Politicians and technocrats are no angels, despite how badly we might wish them to be. Even if we find the occasional wise leader to hold the ring, the ring invariably gets passed along. There is always a sociopath waiting. And that’s why the upshot of Turnkey Totalitarianism is deeply problematic, even though there are evil geniuses among the citizenry. Acknowledging all this threatens to leave us in nihilism. After all, wasn’t it very likely a small group of government technocrats and regulators who unleashed the Covid-19 pandemic?

My friend and mentor, entrepreneur Chris Rufer reminds us that the best defense against violence isn’t a panopticon or a global superstate.

“The best defense against violence is to minimize the number of people in the world who are willing to use it,” Rufer said. And I think he’s right.

I suspect it can’t hurt to have more people of basic morality checking up on each other, too. I admit, though, that preemptive morality can only reduce the number of black balls in the existential threat bucket. But that’s something. So we must start to think of morality not as a set of abstract rules but rather as an active, continuous practice to be set alight in everyone.

And we must practice morality even as we admit to ourselves that the risks of our extinction will never be zero.

Max Borders is author of After Collapse: The End of America and the Rebirth of Her Ideals and The Social Singularity: A Decentralist Manifesto.

Max is also co-founder of the event experience Future Frontiers and founder of Social Evolution, an organization dedicated to liberating humanity and solving social problems through innovation.

September 10, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Covid-19 – Fun With Figures, Food For Thought

By William Walter Kay BA JD | Principia Scientific | September 9, 2021

Contrast Covid’s impact on four East Asian countries (Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and South Korea) with its impact on four US Northeastern states (New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Connecticut).

All eight jurisdictions host high-tech societies with market-orientated economies and democratic constitutions.

All boast ultra-modern hospitals, medical colleges and public health programs.

Two differences: a) compared to the US Northeast, the East Asian countries engage in more trade and travel with Covid’s epicentre, China; and, b) Covid toured East Asia before debuting in the US Northeast.

New York state’s population (19.5 million) is slightly smaller than Taiwan’s (23.8 million). Covid has killed 837 Taiwanese, and 54,895 New Yorkers.

Massachusetts’ population (6.9 million) is comparable to Singapore’s (5.9 million). Covid fatalities in Massachusetts – 18,272. Covid fatalities in Singapore – 55.

The combined population of our four Northeastern states (38.7 million) is well below South Korea’s (51.3 million). Covid’s death toll in our Northeastern states is 108,480. Only 2,303 South Koreans have died from Covid.

Our four East Asian countries (207 million) register a total of 19,308 Covid deaths. New Jersey  (8.9 million) claims 26,919 Covid deaths.

Per capita, Covid has proven 341 times deadlier to New Jersians than Singaporeans!

Regarding Covid testing rates, Singapore is East Asia’s outlier. By conducting 17.8 million tests Singaporeans have achieved 3 tests per citizen. This still falls short of New York’s 3.3 tests per citizen and Massachusetts’ 3.8 tests per citizen. (You’ve read correctly. Certain people get tested again and again.)

Most East Asian countries, following Japan’s lead, test only patients exhibiting pneumonia-like symptoms. Japan tests 174,000 per 1 million inhabitants. Our four East Asian countries cumulatively have conducted 58 million tests. New York has conducted 66 million.

Massachusettsans test for Covid at 22 times Japan’s rate!

Medical tyranny boosters attribute East Asia’s “success” to harsh public health regimes; but Northeastern states imposed notorious lockdowns, often more Draconian than those deployed in East Asia.

Testing strategies are key. Testing only symptomatic patients is sounder than mass testing.

Asymptomatic Sars-CoV-2 carriers are extremely unlikely to be contagious.

Most people who contract Sars-CoV-2 become neither sick nor contagious.

PCR tests detect: a) miniscule infections that will not take hold; b) dead viruses from infections defeated by natural immune responses; and c) random genetic flotsam resembling Sars-CoV-2.

Mass testing yields positive results from persons who are neither sick nor contagious, and who are unlikely to become so.

By inflating case counts, mass testing makes Covid appear worse than it is.

Likewise, declaring all those who die after testing positive to be “Covid fatalities” – co-morbidities be damned – inflates death tallies; again, making Covid appear worse than it is.

Testing-based legerdemain doesn’t fully explain the whopping discrepancy between Covid’s impact in East Asia and the US Northeast.

This discrepancy also arises from the fact that the US Northeast was one of several areas following Milan’s lead i.e., during the pandemic’s early months health authorities allowed the contagion to rage unchecked through long-term care facilities.

Senior’s homes became Sars-CoV-2 incubators.

Milan, Montreal, the US Northeast et al became continental super-spreaders evidenced by supersized body counts.

Covid-19 is one matter; government response to Covid-19 is quite another.

Sources

Covid fatality and testing stats were extracted from Worldmeter’s Covid database on September 2, 2021.

September 10, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

LAPD officers are collecting social media information from citizens they stop

By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | September 10, 2021

LAPD officers have been told to collect the social media information of all civilians they stop, whether or not they have been arrested or even accused of a crime. Critics have noted the social media information collected could be used for illegal surveillance.

A report on The Guardian revealed that the “field interview cards” LAPD officers use when interviewing civilians include a line for the collection of information on social media accounts, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

A leaked internal memo revealed that Police Chief Michael Moore told officers that collecting the social media information was important for “investigations, arrests, and prosecutions.”

The police boss also warned that the cards would be reviewed to ensure that the social media information was collected. The collection of social media information started in 2015.

The Brennan Center for Justice, the civil rights non-profit that obtained the documents, warned that the collection of social media information by law enforcement agencies could be used for unjustified mass surveillance of civilians in the future.

“There are real dangers about police having all of this social media identifying information at their fingertips,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, a deputy director at the Brennan Center.

The organization reviewed another 40 police departments in the country but did not find evidence of the gathering of social media information.

The LAPD’s field interview cards have been the center of controversy in the past. Three officers were criminally charged for falsely accusing civilians of being gang members by checking a “gang member” box on the interview cards.

“The fact that a department under scrutiny for racial profiling was also engaged in broad scale social media account collection is troubling,” said Levinson-Waldman, speaking to The Guardian.

Hamid Khan, of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, noted that the data collected by the LAPD is shared with federal agencies, which have previously been accused of using “predictive policing” based on data provided by police.

Khan described the social media information collection as “stop and frisk,” warning that the department was doing it “with the clear goal of surveillance.”

September 10, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Sweden 1. Faith 0

As the UK prepares to convert 12 year old children into human shields for teachers and geriatrics, Swedes enjoy a coffee together in the sun.
By Richard Lyon | September 4, 2021

HERE’S AN ASTONISHING THING about Sweden: you can hardly tell, from looking at its government’s population statistics,1 that it has COVID-19.

It’s astonishing because the entire foundation of the claim underlying the world’s descent into COVID-19 madness and authoritarianism is predicated on two controversial claims: that COVID-19 is unusually deadly, and that coercion and authoritarianism are necessary and effective in controlling it.

And yet here is a country that hasn’t succumbed to madness and authoritarianism. And here is a country in which you can hardly tell that COVID-19 is present.

Discovering Sweden is like discovering intelligent life in the universe after being told there can’t be any. It falsifies COVID’s catastrophic claims, and reveals a great deal about the institutions driving them.

The number of people who die in Sweden, after making some adjustments for “good” and “bad” flu years, increases by about 1,200 every couple of years. That’s partly because the population is increasing, partly because the population is ageing, and partly because the population is changing through immigration. It would have been astonishing if the number of people who died in Sweden in 2020 hadn’t increased.

I say “after making some adjustment for good and bad flu years”, because it’s by obscuring this that COVID catastrophists have weaponised Sweden and, ironically, coerced it into being an element of their narrative.

Flu, like coronaviruses, is a winter seasonal infection. In every country, there are “bad” seasons when relatively many vulnerable people die, and “good” seasons when relatively few do. 2018/19 was a “good” flu season in Sweden.2 3

Figure 1. Recorded COVID-19 deaths in 2020 were exaggerated by the carryover of vulnerable people from the mild 2018/19 flu season (A), and by either the replacement in 2020 of flu by COVID or miscoding of flu as COVID (B)

Consequently, the cohort of people who were vulnerable to respiratory infection when COVID-19 arrived in 2020 was enlarged by those would have died in an average or bad 2018/19 flu season, but hadn’t (‘A’ in Figure 1 above). Then, after COVID-19 arrived, it replaced flu as the cause of death in the 2019/20 flu-vulnerable cohort (‘B’, above). So the people in groups ‘A’ and ‘B’ who in 2020 would most likely have died of flu, died instead of COVID-19, or were mis-coded as having died of COVID-19.

This is important to understand. The core claim that COVID-19 is especially deadly depends in turn on the implicit claim that its deaths are in addition to normal deaths. No: the majority of its victims die from it instead of flu, cancer, stroke, dementia, heart disease, falling downstairs, or any one of an extended list of things that kill us when we’ve lived longer than the average human lifespan.

This explains why, simultaneously, many people appear to have died from COVID, yet overall death rates are not catastrophic. Here in the UK, the Government advisors estimate that up to two thirds of the fatalities in its vastly inflated prediction of 2020 COVID-19 deaths would have died that year anyway.4 COVID-19 arrived in the UK after an extended period of unusually low mortality: it contributed to a mortality rate in 2020 that was lower than it used to be every single year prior to 2008. In Sweden, you can hardly see it, if at all.

It also partly explains why coercion and authoritarianism have no observable impact on fatal infection rates.5 It’s not the openness of society that kills vulnerable people. It’s their vulnerability to all the other things that still kill them while they are locked down, and that coercion and authoritarianism has no effect on.

Using the same models used to justify imposing mandatory school and business closures, domestic confinement orders, and compulsory masks on UK citizens, UK Government advisors estimated Sweden would suffer 30,000 to 60,000 deaths in 2020 if they didn’t impose the same restrictions. Sweden politely ignored the advice. It didn’t impose “masks”, it didn’t significantly close schools and businesses, and it didn’t impose domestic confinement. At the end of 2020, had recorded 8,800 COVID-19 deaths.

Here’s the impact of those deaths on overall deaths in Sweden, in numbers:

Table 1. When corrected for annual variation in flu deaths, the rise in deaths in 2019/20 was almost identical to the rise in deaths in 2015/6 and 2016/7.

The displacement of flu deaths from 2019 into 2020 is clearly visible. We’ve computed the two year average to accommodate the inter-year variation in flu deaths, and calculated the change in that.6 The overall increase in deaths COVID-19 contributed to, relative to the rising trend, is barely distinguishable from noise.

“Once your faith, sir, persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life…Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
— Voltaire, ‘Questions sur les Miracles’

Germans who keep refusing to quarantine could be put in detention centres under new Covid rules
— The Telegraph, 17 January 2021

Let’s remind ourselves of how one leading COVID catastrophists’ newspaper-of-record reports to its readers a death rate rise in Sweden that is barely distinguishable from noise, while inciting a McCarthyist witch-hunt against those who favoured Sweden’s approach:7

Their readers believe absurdities.

On the basis of absurdities like these, the UK Government is finalising plans to inject 12 year old children—without their parents’ consent—with unlicensed medical substances, designed to attack their immature immune systems in ways that are not yet fully understood, with observed but currently unquantified serious side effect risks, so that they can act as human shields for teachers and geriatrics.

It’s an atrocity.

There are no circumstances in a civilised society under which exposing children to harm to protect adults could be justified. But to the extent that it is, it is on the claim that this disease is unusually deadly, and therefore that such atrocities are warranted.

Sweden shows us it is not unusually deadly, and that they are not warranted. They represent for us the ending of “Lord Of The Flies”.8 As exhausted schoolboy Ralph lies on the beach, waiting to have his brains bashed out by the former Head Chorister (who comes to power by promising to slay an imaginary beast), he looks up to see a Naval Officer standing in the surf. Instantly, the children’s descent into madness and chaos is made shatteringly visible, even as the order of the adult world is restored. The spell is broken.

Sweden breaks the COVID-19 spell for us.

We should oppose COVID madness, coercion, and authoritarianism wherever we find it, and fight to rid ourselves of it until it has gone. It has no place in our world.

1

Statistics Sweden. “Population Statistics 2018-2021 (month) and 1998-2020 (year)” [link]

2

In the northern hemisphere, the winter seasonal respiratory infection season runs from July to June the following year, hence “2018/19”. Conflating the end of the 2019/20 season with the beginning of the 2020/21 season was one of many tricks that COVID catastrophism employs the UK to magnify the impression of COVID death in 2020.

3

The Public Health Agency of Sweden. “Influenza in Sweden – Season 2019–2020”, 2 October 2020 [link]

4

For references, see my essay “Look her in the eyes” [link]

5

For a discussion, see my essay “Christopher Snowdon’s smoking ruin” [link]

6

Is it a perfect measure? Of course not. But it doesn’t need to be. COVID catastrophism makes an extraordinary claim—that we should live permanently under emergency authoritarian rule because this is an especially deadly disease. That claim demands extraordinary evidence—evidence that should “hit you between the eyes”. It doesn’t.

7

Geoghegan, P. “Now the Swedish model has failed, it’s time to ask who was pushing it”. Guardian, 3 January 2021 [link]

8

September 9, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

People’s Party of Canada is the only federal election candidate that opposes vaccine passports

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | September 9, 2021

With the Canadian federal election less than two weeks away, only one of the top six parties has definitively opposed COVID vaccine passports and vowed to repeal them if elected; Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada.

The other parties – Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party of Canada, Erin O’Toole’s Conservative Party, Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrat Party, Yves-François Blanchet’s Bloc Québécois, Annamie Paul’s Green Party of Canada – have either expressed support for vaccine passports or not made a definitive statement on the issue.

The People’s Party’s COVID policy takes a strong stance against vaccine passports and includes a plan that details how the party intends to repeal and oppose vaccine passports and mandates if elected.

“Governments don’t want to admit that they were wrong and are imposing increasingly authoritarian measures on the population, including vaccine passports,” the People’s Party states in its COVID policy. “Both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated will suffer under a regime of segregation, constant control, and surveillance. It is illusory to believe that the virus can be eradicated. We have to learn to live with it, without destroying our way of life in the process.”

The People’s Party also notes that “both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated can get infected and transmit the virus, which negates the rationale for segregation and vaccine passports.”

If elected, the People’s Party has promised to:

  • Repeal vaccine passports for travelers
  • Repeal vaccine mandates and regular testing for federal civil servants and workers in federally regulated industries
  • Oppose vaccine mandates and passports imposed by provincial governments and support individuals and groups that challenge such measures in court

In addition to this strong stance against vaccine passports and mandates, the People’s Party has also vowed to promote an approach to the pandemic that “guarantees the freedom of Canadians to make decisions based on informed consent, and rejects coercion and discrimination.”

The People’s Party also promises to not follow the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO) – a group whose recommendations have been used by Big Tech to justify the mass censorship of debate and dissent on a wide range of COVID-related topics.

To achieve this, the party vows to fire the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada Theresa Tam if elected and replace her with “someone who will work with provincial agencies to implement a rational approach to the pandemic, instead of following the recommendations of the World Health Organization.”

Bernier has consistently reiterated the People’s Party’s strong stance against vaccine passports by displaying banners with a “No Vax Passports” slogan during campaign stops, speaking out against vaccine passports, and attending vaccine passport protests.

“Vaccine passports are inefficient, unconstitutional and immoral,” Bernier told True North in August. “They will not prevent the spread of the virus because we now know that vaccinated people can also spread it. They would create two types of citizens with different rights. I don’t want to live in a ’show-me-your-papers’ society. If that happens, whether you are vaccinated or not will be irrelevant. Everyone will lose their freedoms and suffer in a surveillance and police state.”

By contrast, Trudeau’s Liberals have promised a $1 billion COVID-19 proof-of-vaccination fund to assist provinces in developing and implementing their own systems. Trudeau has described provincial vaccine passports as an “interim measure, that will perhaps last a year or so” before federal vaccine passports are promised to support businesses that are sued for forcing vaccine passports.

O’Toole’s Conservatives and Singh’s New Democrats have also expressed support for a federal vaccine passport while Blanchet’s Bloc Québécois supports vaccine passports for international travel.

Paul’s Green Party has yet to make a definitive statement on vaccine passports. In August, Paul questioned the Liberals’ motives in announcing a plan for mandatory vaccination two days before calling an election and called for information on “how the plan will accommodate people with legitimate reasons for not getting vaccinated.”

Local Green Party candidates have given conflicting answers on vaccine passports. Simcoe North Green Party candidate Krystal Brooks stated “I believe vaccine passports should be mandatory for essential workers to decrease the spread” while Kootenay-Columbia Green Party candidate Rana Nelson said “We, as in the Green Party, are not going to force vaccines.”

September 9, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

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