The unseen evil of Covid restrictions … a dehumanising denial of physical contact
By Frank Palmer | The Conservative Woman | May 26, 2021
THERE should have been more outrage at the inhuman restrictions placed on us since March 2020.
The cat is now out of the bag about the psychological tricks used by the Government’s behavioural psychologists, with the collusion of the MSM – the terror tactics, the mixed messages creating uncertainty and insecurity, the successful attempts to polarise people, the gaslighting.
However, the full significance of the physical restrictions – the ‘social’ distancing, the prevention of meetings, the covered faces, the outlawing of affectionate hugs or handshakes – has not, I believe, been deeply enough understood.
The latter goes far beyond mind games, and has taken place in a modern culture that had already become increasingly depersonalised.
Long before Covid, face-to-face contact, or even telephone contact, with banks and other institutions (including GPs) was made progressively difficult. Staff at railway stations, banks and supermarkets were being replaced by machines. Enforced online accounts have been reducing us to disembodied digits. ‘Faceless bureaucrats’ abound.
In the streets, there was less and less eye contact or courtesy, with zombie faces headphoned, or glued to smartphone screens.
Aversion to physical contact was implied in the everyday language of ‘personal space’, ‘safe spaces’, and – in the cowardly euphemism for ending a relationship – ‘I need some space’.
‘I understand/sympathise’ was being replaced with ‘I know where you are coming from’ (a locution which already presupposes spatial remoteness).
Meanwhile, with online ‘socialising’ you don’t see or meet a person, you see a screen with an image, an increasing replacement for the real McCoy, a fantasy engagement devoid of the moral and emotional risks involved in engaging with a person ‘in the flesh’.
And of course, you have absolute control, where this simulacrum of a human presence can be ‘ghosted’ at the click of a mouse.
The upshot is that people are increasingly reduced to abstractions, which can obliterate the need for integrity in the way they are treated. A power-mad government can therefore easily reduce us to what Johnson called ‘pure mathematics’, or pieces on a chessboard.
In proper human interaction, the reality of the other person consists in their physical presence. We are embodied persons, with all the moral implications that generates.
Our moral imperatives are not mere mental abstractions. They are infused with references to our embodied nature, one sign of which is that our moral perceptions are not unrelated to our aesthetic sensibilities, which involve our sensory capacities.
Our reaction to wrongdoing or evil is not simply cerebral disagreement, it involves visceral repulsion. There are overtones of our sensitivity to beauty and ugliness in being appalled at the repulsiveness of greed, the slime of dishonesty, the filth of obscenity, and the stench of corruption.
We are not mere ‘rational beings’ (even Mr Spock has some feelings ). Our moral perceptions seem connected to a series of aesthetic contrasts between pure and impure, clean and dirty, savoury and unsavoury, harmonious and discordant, sweet-smelling and foul-smelling, and natural and unnatural (which are not for us mere ‘value-free’ biological categories).
That is not to say that our morality can be reduced to aesthetics. I merely emphasise a point about our embodied condition.
Professor Anthony O’Hear has reminded me of the significance of the following remarks of Simone Weil in her essay The Iliad, or the Poem of Force …
‘The human beings around us exert just by their presence a power which belongs uniquely to themselves to stop, to diminish, or modify, each movement which our bodies design. A person who crosses our path does not turn aside our steps in the same manner as a street sign, no one stands up, or moves about, or sits down again in quite the same fashion when he is alone in a room as when he has a visitor.’
The reference to (physical) presence is what is vital here. We meet people ‘in person’, and this presents a challenge to our self-centred tendencies in accepting the ‘reality’ of other people.
There are some things which are basic and primary to any further sophisticated views we reach about human beings. In one of his philosophy lectures, Professor David Hamlyn once asked: ‘How does an infant acquire the concept of a person?’
Pat came the answers from students about the ratiocination (the process of exact thinking or reasoning) involved in conceptual development.
‘No’, said Hamlyn, ‘the infant acquires it through being treated as a person. By being cuddled and burped, by being smiled at … and so on.’
In his essay Eine Einstellung zur Seele (An attitude towards a soul), Peter Winch argues that our primary reactions to people are ‘unreflective and primitive’, that these reactions are ‘part of the primitive material out of which our concept of a human person is formed’.
It seems to me that these instinctive reactions are present when we walk with someone and automatically match our steps to theirs, we harmonise with their facial expressions, and these reactions are not derived from ratiocination, nor from intellectually inferred beliefs about what it is to be human.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, challenges the idea that we infer mental states from bodily behaviour by saying: ‘We see emotion … we do not see facial contortions and make the inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom.
‘We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features – grief, one would like to say, is personified in the face.’
He also makes the telling observation that ‘we don’t see the human eye as a receiver, it seems not to let something in, but to send out …’
Again, our embodied nature is revealed in such expressions as ‘lending someone a sympathetic ear’, ‘being touched or moved by generosity’ or ‘my heart goes out to you’.
In the 19th century, after the prison reforms of 1835, ‘silent treatment’ was used in some US prisons as an alternative to physical punishment.
It consisted of forbidding prisoners from speaking to one another, calling them by numbers rather than by their name, and making them cover their faces – all to dehumanise them and break their will.
The physical restrictions, the prevention of interaction, and the face coverings imposed upon us by this government are equally unethical, if not downright evil.
But, for the reasons given earlier, so many people cannot see this. They have been forcibly alienated from their own nature and will no doubt uncritically accept their reduction to trackable digits on the biometric identity passes being planned – the price of their future so-called freedom.
Facebook is suppressing ‘facts’ that are flagged as promoting ‘vaccine hesitancy’: whistleblowers
RT | May 25, 2021
Facebook is taking aggressive steps to sideline any content, including factual material, critical of Covid-19 vaccines, two insiders have revealed to Project Veritas. The tech giant claims the policy was publicly announced.
The conservative media watchdog organization published a purported internal Facebook memo concerning “Vaccine Hesitancy Comment Demotion.” The policy aims to “drastically reduce user exposure to vaccine hesitancy,” the document states.
Another document leaked to Project Veritas discusses how to flag and categorize “non-violating content” that raises questions about vaccination, “thereby contributing to vaccine hesitancy or refusal.”
Comments can be “demoted” if they are flagged as directly or indirectly discouraging people from getting vaccinated. It doesn’t matter if the content is factually accurate, Project Veritas reported, citing the leaked documents.
According to the reported policy, “shocking stories” about side effects linked to the vaccines can be suppressed, even if they are “potentially or actually true events or facts that raise safety concerns.” The company explains that such content should be discouraged because it could “present a barrier to vaccination in certain contexts.”
Facebook is also said to target comments that claim vaccination is not necessary due to low Covid-19 death rates, or argue for natural herd immunity against the virus, as such views are considered “indirect discouragement” that could hurt immunization efforts.
One of the Facebook whistleblowers who reached out to Project Veritas said that anyone who questions the “narrative” of “get the vaccine, the vaccine is good for you” will be “singled out.”
A second company insider, identified as a data center technician, said that Facebook is working to censor all content that can be deemed critical of vaccines.
“They’re trying to control this content before it even makes it onto your page before you even see it,” the whistleblower told Project Veritas.
In response to the leaked documents, a Facebook spokesperson told the media watchdog that the company “proactively announced this policy on our company blog and also updated our help center with this information.”
In February, the platform said it was expanding its efforts to combat “false claims” about Covid-19 vaccines. Under the initiative, Facebook said it would remove content that claims “vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against” or that argues the jabs are “dangerous.”
The content crackdown comes amid growing concern about side effects that have been linked to the vaccines. Numerous countries temporarily suspended their rollout of the AstraZeneca jab amid reports of blood clotting in people who received it. The pharmaceutical company has insisted the vaccine is safe, a position that has been echoed by the EU’s drug regulator. However, some have argued that there is insufficient data to show that the vaccines represented on the market are safe and effective long-term, as their rollout was fast-tracked amid the pandemic.
Telegraph: UK Needs “Vaccine Force” To Produce Jabs “On Tap”
By Richie Allen | May 24, 2021
Yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph editorial focused on vaccine production. The newspaper claimed that the UK should set up a “Vaccine Force” in the same way that we maintain a standing army in peacetime.
According to the editorial:
One of the big lessons from this crisis is that vaccines are essential, one of modern civilisation’s greatest inventions and must be deployed far more efficiently and ruthlessly than Britain’s public health establishment had previously fathomed.
Ruthlessly? I’ll come back to that. The Telegraph claims that the country needs to be better prepared for pandemics and flu-seasons to come and that vaccine work and human challenge trials should begin immediately. The paper says:
We need to be much better prepared next time a new virus emerges. Like this time, vaccine work must begin straight away; but the difference must be that we need immediate human challenge trials.
It was a remarkable achievement that it took just 11 months for vaccines to start being injected; but next time the target should be closer to three.
We need massive production and distribution capacity on tap, at all times, just as we maintain a standing army even in peacetime. Never again should an epidemiological challenge lead to the country being locked down for months on end.
The Telegraph’s message is pretty clear. The paper wants the country to set up a vaccine army that will run mass-production facilities and human trials forever more. It wants this new army or “force” to be ruthless in its endeavours.
This, says the paper, is the only way to avoid lockdowns in future. Lockdowns are intolerable and devastating for the economy and health. The only answer, says The Telegraph, is to have vaccines “on-tap.”
By ruthless, the paper might mean that there should be little or no red-tape to prevent these vaccines reaching our arms. Maybe the paper means that the UK should be ruthless in dealing with refuseniks, because after all, refuseniks delay the end of restrictions.
I’m betting that The Telegraph didn’t come up with the idea of a “Vaccine Force” all by itself. But then again, what the hell do I know? I do know this. We really are here now.
OSHA Pulls Guidance Stating Employers May Be Held Liable For ‘Adverse Reactions’ If They Mandate Vaxx
By Chris Menahan | InformationLiberation | May 23, 2021
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration threw workers under the bus over the weekend by pulling their new guidance which stated that employers they may be held liable for “any adverse reactions” if they mandate employees take COVID-19 vaccines “as a condition of their employment.”
On April 20, OSHA released a new FAQ on their website stating that if employers require their employees to be vaxxed “then any adverse reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine is work-related” (and therefor must be recorded for, at the very least, worker compensation claims).
OSHA appears to have caved to political pressure and scrapped their own well-thought-out, pro-worker guidance after just one month so as not to “disincentivize employers’ vaccination efforts.”
Their FAQ now states:
DOL and OSHA, as well as other federal agencies, are working diligently to encourage COVID-19 vaccinations. OSHA does not wish to have any appearance of discouraging workers from receiving COVID-19 vaccination, and also does not wish to disincentivize employers’ vaccination efforts. As a result, OSHA will not enforce 29 CFR 1904’s recording requirements to require any employers to record worker side effects from COVID-19 vaccination through May 2022. We will reevaluate the agency’s position at that time to determine the best course of action moving forward.
OSHA was created to protect workers’ rights and instead it’s trampling all over them on behalf of Big Pharma.
“Encouraging COVID-19 vaccinations” comes before protecting workers’ rights.
Despite OSHA’s disgraceful actions, OSHA states on their own FAQ that their “guidance is not a standard or regulation, and it creates no new legal obligations.”
Employees are not under any legal obligation to take experimental mRNA shots. Employers who attempt to force these shots on their workers are going to get sued and the case may go all the way to the Supreme Court.
Russian Embassy Refutes Colombian Minister Remarks About Moscow Role in Inciting Violence
Sputnik – 22.05.2021
The Russian Embassy to Colombia has expressed bemusement over the remarks of Colombian Defense Minister Diego Molano Aponte, who accused Russia of cyberattacks and inciting violence in the Latin American nation via social networks.
“The Russian Embassy expresses deep bewilderment at the statements of the Colombian defense minister, Mr. Diego Molano, made on May 17 in an interview with one of the main Spanish media, El Mundo. In particular, the high-ranking Colombian official, answering the question of whether there was foreign interference via social networks aimed at inciting violence, said, we quote, ‘there were cyberattacks that came, in particular, from Russia,'” the embassy wrote on its Twitter page on late Friday.
According to the Russian diplomatic mission, the defense minister made similar statements in an interview with the Colombian newspaper Tiempo.
“We strongly reject these claims. Such serious accusations against our country, which we consider completely unfounded and not supported by specific evidence, in no way contribute to the development of traditionally friendly relations between Russia and Colombia,” the embassy noted.
The Russian diplomatic mission has also expressed condolences over the reported fatalities during the protests in Colombia.
The nationwide demonstrations started in Colombia on April 28 in protest of tax reform. Although the reform bill was later withdrawn, the protests continue. Labor and student organizations demand social and healthcare reforms, demilitarization of cities, and dissolution of Mobile Anti-Disturbance Squadron forces.
Since April, according to the Defense Ministry, more than 1,900 people have been injured in clashes between security forces and protesters. The authorities have confirmed the deaths of 15 people, while human rights activists say more than 50 have been killed in the protests.
YouTube censors public meeting of Shawnee Mission School District parents for “misinformation”
The public hearing was deleted
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | May 21, 2021
A video from a school board meeting in Kansas has been removed from YouTube for violation of community standards around “misinformation.”
Shawnee Mission School Board president Heather Ousley announced this on Twitter, adding that the violations had to do with statements made by third parties during a meeting that was open to public comment.
The channel has received a strike, which means that if it is again found in breach of YouTube’s policies over the next 90 days, it will not be allowed to upload new videos for a week – a scenario which Shawnee Mission School District spokesperson David Smith said would represent “a serious interference to our work.”
YouTube is the district’s chosen and only platform for posting videos of public meetings and where they are also live streamed.
Over on Twitter, Ousley went on to say that comments made by those she referred to as third parties do not indicate the position of the board itself, or the school district.
Local media reported that during the meeting, parents and state Senator Mike Thompson urged the district to remove the mask mandate. Ahead of the meeting itself, residents, including the senator, protested against this mandate.
During the meeting, Thompson expressed his belief that masks are ineffective, comparing the size of the virus and the mask fabric to a 6-foot-tall person trying to walk through a 6,000 by 2,000 feet doorway.
Thompson later told the press that there was no medical misinformation presented during the meeting, and said his presence was in support of parents opposed to continued wearing of masks.
According to him, the meeting also heard from students who complained that it was hard to breathe with a mask on, while a parent spoke about their child being separated from the rest of the class and sent to another room for not wearing a mask.
The reason to allow “third party” comments during the meeting is to let taxpayers who fund the school express themselves, he said.
Hateful hypocrisy: In hate crime-obsessed Britain, vilifying Covid vaccine ‘refuseniks’ comes with establishment approval
By Neil Clark | RT | May 21, 2021
We hear so much in woke Britain about ‘hate crime’ and how terrible it is. But right now, we’re in the midst of an extremely nasty campaign against those who don’t wish to take a Covid vaccine and somehow that’s deemed acceptable.
“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.” From George Orwell’s ‘1984.’
“Selfish idiots.” “Refuseniks.” “Anti-vaxxer loonies.” “Holding the country to ransom.” “A menace to their own health and ours.” “They’re like drink drivers.” Just a few of the insults that have been hurled at Brits who, despite the biggest drug promotion campaign in our history, have decided they don’t wish to take one of the new-on-the-market Covid vaccines.
Freedom of choice? Bodily autonomy? They seem to have gone out of the window, along with all the other basic rights we have lost in Britain these past 15 months. The date is 2021, but we’re actually living in Orwell’s ‘1984,’ with its daily ‘Two Minutes Hate.’
A whole succession of obnoxious newspaper columnists, radio ‘shock jocks’ and some ‘celebrities’ have gone out of their way to be as rude as possible to those who don’t want to have a jab – and call for extreme measures to be used against them that would be more associated with a totalitarian state in mid-1930s Europe than a country which still styles itself a ‘democracy’. Or, indeed, with Pretoria, circa 1965.
Apartheid – which we all denounced when in place in South Africa – has had a 2021 public health makeover and is back in vogue, with ‘Covid vaccine passports’ replacing ‘pass laws.’
“Love the idea of covid vaccine passports for everywhere: flights, restaurants, clubs, football, gyms, shops etc. It’s time covid-denying, anti-vaxxer loonies had their bullsh*t bluff called & bar themselves from going anywhere that responsible citizens go,” tweeted media motormouth Piers Morgan.
Nick Cohen penned an article for the Observer entitled “It’s only a matter of time before we turn on the unvaccinated.” “Rational people will ask why they should continue to accept restrictions on their freedoms because of ignorant delusions,” he wrote.
Columnist Richard Littlejohn went even further by calling for the unvaccinated to publicly declare themselves ‘Unclean.’ “If some people don’t like the idea of getting the jab, tough. I wouldn’t force them. But maybe refusniks should have to wear a bell round their necks and sport a sandwich board declaring themselves ‘Unclean’”, he wrote in the Daily Mail, in an article entitled “No jab, no job – it’s a no brainer.”
In similar vein there was Sean O’Grady, an associate editor of the supposedly ‘liberal’ Independent. His article, published earlier this week, was entitled “This is what we do about anti-vaxxers: No job. No entry. No NHS access.”
“The time has come when the hard choices are looming closer,” O’Grady opined. “If we don’t want this Covid crisis to last forever, we need some new simple, guidelines: No jab, no access to NHS healthcare; no jab, no state education for your kids. No jab, no access to pubs, restaurants, theatres, cinemas, stadiums. No jab; no entry to the UK, and much else.” I think we’ve got your point Sean. You wouldn’t make vaccination mandatory, but the unvaccinated wouldn’t be able to go anywhere, or do anything. And if they got ill? Well they’d just have to die because they shouldn’t have access to NHS healthcare. All in the name of ‘the common good’.
On the same day that O’Grady’s piece was published, we had one Sarah Vine weighing in with her penny’worth, too. “We can’t let idiots who don’t want Covid vaccines hold us hostage” was the title of her screed published in the Daily Mail. “You are stupid. Weapons grade stupid,” is how she addressed those who don’t want to take the Coronavirus vaccine. Who cares what this poisonous Vine thinks, I can hear you ask? But actually, it does matter, because her husband is none other than Michael Gove, the UK government minister currently heading a review into vaccine passports. If Gove’s wife thinks the unvaccinated are “weapons grade stupid” then it hardly gives us confidence that her husband won’t decide to discriminate against them.
It’s not just in print that the attacks on ‘refuseniks’ are coming. It’s on the airwaves, too. Iain Dale berated the unvaccinated on his LBC radio call-in show earlier this week. “The fact that people still refuse to get the vaccine for whatever reason, I don’t really care what the reason is, they are not only putting themselves at risk – they are putting other people at risk,” he said. “If you are 50, 60, 70, 80 years old and you still haven’t availed yourself of the opportunity of having the vaccine, I’m afraid you need your head read. You need your head examined. You are a selfish individual.”
Repeat after me: “I am a selfish individual. I am a selfish individual.” Gaslighting really doesn’t get any more obvious.
At least Dale didn’t suggest putting poison into ‘refuseniks’ coffee as his LBC colleague Shelagh Fogarty did. “I’d literally be in fights with these people (vaccine decliners),” she told a caller. “How do you keep seeing them at work without wanting to poison their coffee.”
Let’s not mince words: We are dealing here with the very open, plain-view demonisation of a group of people, with no consequences for those who are doing the demonisation. And all this is happening, lest we forget, in ‘woke’ times when anything you say might be seen as ‘offence’, ‘racism’, ‘sexism’, ‘genderism’ or a form of ‘ism’ or ‘phobia.’
To see the egregious double standards, just replace the ‘unvaccinated’ with a minority racial or religious group. But the unvaccinated are fair game. Hate crime, according to the Crown Prosecution Service website, “can be used to describe a range of criminal behaviour where the perpetrator is motivated by hostility or demonstrates hostility towards the victim’s disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity.” Vaccine status is not a “protected characteristic” so it seems people can be as hateful to the unvaccinated as they like.
But that doesn’t make what’s going on right. Far from it.
If someone is vaccinated, why should they care if someone else isn’t? We never had these arguments before about the flu jab. Either the vaccine works to protect the vaccinated, or it doesn’t. Nor were those who decided not to have a flu vaccine labelled ‘anti-vaxxers.’ You can be generally pro-vaccination, but have rational ‘wait and see’ reservations about the new-on-the-market Coronavirus ones, especially if your chances of becoming ill or indeed dying from Covid are extremely low. But that nuanced position is simply not recognised in the current, coercive ‘Just take the bloody jab’ hysteria.
As for the line that it is the unvaccinated who are holding the country hostage by putting in jeopardy an end to Covid restrictions? Sarah Vine really needs to look closer to home. Literally. It was the government of which her husband is a prominent member which assured us that life would be back to normal as soon as the most vulnerable were vaccinated. In an interview with The Spectator in January, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said he would “Cry freedom” as soon as the most vulnerable were vaccinated.
But we still don’t have freedom. The goalposts have moved from vaccinating the ‘most vulnerable’ to now vaccinating everyone. Is it any surprise there are those who wonder if this is motivated by the introduction of vaccine passports, which in turn could lead to other digitised social credit systems?
But, conveniently, it’s the vaccine ‘refuseniks’, the current subject of the daily Orwellian Two Minutes Hate, who are being blamed for continued restrictions and not the authorities. In these toxic times, ‘divide and rule’ has never been more blatant.
Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com.
“No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, No Unvaxxed”
By Dustin Broadbery | OffGuardian | May 21, 2021
The government is pressing ahead with its Vaccine Passport and plans for a two-tier society are afoot. The effrontery of those leading the charge beggar’s belief.
When they said ‘there were no plans for ‘discriminatory’ Covid vaccine passports’, they were quietly funding at least eight different vaccine passport schemes since last year.
And that’s just the half of it. We are midway through a Europe-wide feasibility study for the development of a common vaccine passport, launched by the European Commission in 2018.
They would have you believe – they were caught with their trousers down, their policies are proportionate to the emergency as it unfolds, and at all times they operate according to a system of informed consent.
But hang on a minute. Since the onset of SARS-CoV-2, they have played the most astonishing game of deception and manipulation. Cooking the books and fiddling the tills.
They have deliberately plunged society into two camps – skeptics and adherents, compliant and non-conformists.
Last year established the mood for pettifogging anyone questioning the narrative, while those refusing to comply were branded narcissists and psychopaths or denounced as ‘Covid deniers’ – the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier.
This government has polarised the nation on a scale never before attempted, legitimising a particular brand of prejudice and enmity not seen in Europe since the days of the Third Reich. And once the NHS App becomes your ticket to freedom on Monday, they will finally have means to weed out and punish dissidence while rewarding blind faith in authority. No matter how injurious their compliance is to society at large, the silent majority have lost their moral compass.
But it must be understood – this principle of divide and rule is as old as the hills. It was not so long ago that signs hung in the windows of establishments in Britain that read: ‘No dogs, No Irish, No blacks’. The difference today is that it won’t be the colour of your skin, your class, gender or sexual orientation that will condemn you, it will be something far more virulent – your ideology.
That this crucial point has been entirely missed by the chattering classes is astonishing. And despite the most flagrant attempts to marginalise large segments of society, identitarians, the woke brigade and other erstwhile defenders of the most marginalised remain largely unphased. Unless it is to flap their arms in the air over higher rates of vaccine hesitancy amongst ethnic minorities. But the rest of us can go to hell.
Who cares about anyone not from a protected social group, right?
In this bizarre parochial moral imperative, discrimination is only frowned upon if you’re discriminating against someone’s authorised and rubber-stamped marks of distinction, whereas discrimination, of and by itself, is entirely permissible.
These crowd-pleasers would defend their moral high ground by telling you “the unvaccinated are selfishly putting others’ lives at risk”, or that “mask refuseniks are superspreaders”. But hold on a minute. All of this is pure conjecture which, like everything else under the post-COVID sun, has been founded on speculative science and policies pulled straight from the magician’s hat.
Other than taking the government on its word, where is the actual evidence of asymptomatic transmission? Where is the evidence of mask efficacy?
In fact, can someone point me to a single risk assessment for any of these high-risk interventions? But to deny someone entry into an establishment, to prevent them from travelling, shopping, or worse, stepping foot outside of their own bolthole is no moot point. These are very real and tangible forms of discrimination, for no other reason than you personally disagree with their choices.
These people have clearly made peace with the fact that membership to society is now the exception rather than the rule. They labour under some neotribal sense of entitlement – if you’re not with us, you’re against us. Like their neolithic ancestors they take refuge in the herd from an unseen predator threatening their hand to mouth existences. Positioning themselves in the upper echelons of this looming two-tier system, with others equally desperate to get their lives back and ready to submit to whatever ephemeral demands are made of them in return for one coveted free pass to re-enter polite society.
While the rest of us – who will not be spoken for, bribed or coerced – will risk excommunication from the social-balm in defence of our principles.
This loose association of the poorest and most marginalised, conscientious objectors, lockdown skeptics, and anyone with a shred of faith in their god-given sovereignty of being or bodily autonomy will wage a personal crusade of civil disobedience against the tyranny de jour, as Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King did before them. For them, braver men have endured far worse for much less.
But what the first group fails to realise is that they are doing the unofficial bidding of another group – the well-healed members of our political establishment to whom the rules do not apply. Who are protected by more exemptions than the rest of us are governed by regulations. And who, at the onset of the pandemic, were not caught with their pants down, as the general population was.
As this group spoke of herd immunity, they quietly struck a £119 million COVID advertising and propaganda deal with one of the world’s biggest marketing companies. Going on to become the UK’s biggest advertiser in 2020.
Just a day before the first lockdown, their Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) began work on the most criminal propaganda campaign in British history:
Extract from UK gov’t report “Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures”, read the whole thing here.
What most card-carrying conservative voters fail to realise is that this group is the country’s biggest employer, with 17% of the British workforce employed in the public sector, whose every agency has been pointed like a cruise missile launch pad at the general population, to essentially knock our stuffing out and railroad us along a critical path, towards what is arguably a controlled destination – the complete nullification of our rights, indefinitely.
But that’s only half of it. Once you conflate unlawful policies with science that falls apart under the lightest of scrutiny to bring about the most controversial changes to Britain’s laws since the Norman Conquests, it is written in the cards that two types of citizens will be left in the wreckage: those wandering aimlessly into the trap having abandoned all reason and judgement to the trappers; and those whose contempt runs so deep they will lay their life on the line in opposition.
Now here’s the thing – there’s nothing particularly avant-garde about a two-tiered society or the discrimination of certain minority groups by the prevailing social order. And no matter what polite excuse is used to justify vaccine passports, it cannot be denied – this is the same system of caste, class, eugenics, apartheid, persecution and slavery that would inflict those toppling statues with an extreme case of dashed hopes.
But what is even more terrifying than the depths which the political class is prepared to sink, is the collusion of a silent majority – without a vested interest – whose own complicity will result in the persecution of everyone else not toeing the line.
And now, with 353,341 variants at their disposal, the government has 350,000 reasons to keep this fiasco going until hell freezes over.
Riding roughshod over the British public who, make no mistake, will continue to weather such violations, in spectacular ignorance of the fact that only 388 healthy people under the age of 60 died from COVID in 2020, the average age of death was 82, and strangely enough, the vast majority had pre-existing conditions. Equally unremarkable is the fact that between 23%-85% of all deaths attributed to COVID, died from other underlying causes.
And the fact that 2020 had a lower standardised mortality rate than every single year prior to 2009 can be found in the dictionary under ‘Ignorance is Bliss’.
You would also be forgiven for assuming that once the most vulnerable had been vaccinated (which is now), not much remains between the people and their freedom. That any further attempts to “protect us” with more turns of the screw entirely defy common reason.
Yet here we are, fighting a battle for humanity.
The trouble, therefore, with lockdown skeptics such as Peter Hitchens publicly throwing in the towel, or Lord Sumption accepting the inevitability of vaccine passports – they have raised the white flag long before the real battle has begun.
While lockdowns and social distancing represent the abstract of this ideological war, its frontlines are being waged on the physical surrender of our will and bodily autonomies. The former is arbitrary, the latter is systematised. One is going to happen with or without your consent, the latter is wholly dependent on it.
It follows that for each skeptic who surrenders their compliance, they sell the rest of us downriver. The balance swings more in favour of the New Normal. And let’s be honest, vaccine passports only work if a majority of us comply.
So while we still have the illusive veneer of democracy to hold onto, politicians remain duty-bound to at least pretend to be upholding some sort of system of informed consent. Just as we are compelled to at least give the appearance of upholding the necessary checks and balances.
Even if you accept the logic of vaccine passports, where exactly on your map does this end? Three weeks to flatten the curve, three lockdowns later and there is already talk of further lockdowns in the summer, or worse, restrictions lasting two more years.
Meanwhile, in the US, Sloppy Joe has made it clear: ‘get vaccinated or wear a mask indefinitely’.
If none of this strikes the fear of God into you, then perhaps this will:
The Pentagon have developed a microchip that will detect asymptomatic COVID. The chip would be inserted below the skin and trigger a sensor if COVID infects the body. This is despite the internet being flooded with factchekers and MSM pundits debunking what the so-called “tin foil hat brigade” has been warning of all along.
In plain sight, they hide their motives and by small degrees, we continue to surrender ancient rights and protections to an unthinkable dystopia that is now within sniffing distance.
Dustin Broadbery is based in London and is interested in social theory and particularly how a mutual society could bring about great advancements in the social fabric. You can read more of his work at TheCogent.org.
Canada’s “private” COVID Alert app wasn’t so private after all
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | May 19, 2021
After by and large failing in its primary (and it was thought, the only) purpose, Canadian authorities are considering ways of repurposing their COVID Alert app to continue to collect a wider array of personal data.
The contact tracing app, which cost close to half a million dollars to develop and a further 16 million to promote, was hailed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on many occasions as a way to protect both people’s health and privacy.
But the app saw only six million downloads – about a fifth of mobile subscribers – with as few as 25,552 Canadians actually using it to enter data regarding their Covid status.
Now reports say that the government’s App Advisory Council is exploring ways to continue using it other than as a public healthcare tool – as something that would “also support Canadians and businesses in our economic, social and mental health recovery and restoration.”
Many privacy advocates have been warning ever since new apps and policies to track people and collect their data started appearing as a necessary way to protect health, that they would not just go away once the epidemic is over, or once they are proven ineffective in performing that task, as has been the case in a number of countries.
In Canada, the Council said they are consulting with Statistics Canada about what valuable data could be collected. According to reports, it has not been disclosed what type of data is collected from Canadians who have downloaded the app.
The Council stresses the critical need to create trust among individuals and businesses, i.e., persuade them that the use of the app will facilitate reopening of businesses and schools.
“The Council wants to continue to be engaged in discussions on collection of data, particularly the viability of data collection given privacy considerations,” it said, explaining that public perception of how additionally harvested data is handled is considered a risk, rather than the data collection itself.
To that end, the Council recommends “clear articulation” associated with additional data collection in order for that pitch to “outweigh the risk.”
In pushing for the app’s adoption last year, Trudeau said it was collecting data anonymously, but would also not rule out the possibility of implementing location tracking technology in an emergency. Last year, Toronto Mayor John Tory revealed this city was already doing that to track gatherings of people, thanks to phone operators providing “all the data on the pinging off their network on the weekend.
Total Tyranny: We’ll All Be Targeted Under the Government’s New Precrime Program
By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | May 19, 2021
“There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America.”― James Bamford
It never fails.
Just as we get a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, there might be a chance of crawling out of this totalitarian cesspool in which we’ve been mired, we get kicked down again.
In the same week that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that police cannot carry out warrantless home invasions in order to seize guns under the pretext of their “community caretaking” duties, the Biden Administration announced its plans for a “precrime” crime prevention agency.
Talk about taking one step forward and two steps back.
Precrime, straight out of the realm of dystopian science fiction movies such as Minority Report, aims to prevent crimes before they happen by combining widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs to enable police to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage.
This particular precrime division will fall under the Department of Homeland Security, the agency notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.
The intent, of course, is for the government to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful in its preemptive efforts to combat domestic extremism.
Where we run into trouble is when the government gets overzealous and over-ambitious and overreaches.
This is how you turn a nation of citizens into snitches and suspects.
In the blink of an eye, ordinary Americans will find themselves labeled domestic extremists for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the government’s precrime sensors.
Of course, it’s an elaborate setup: we’ll all be targets.
In such a suspect society, the burden of proof is reversed so that guilt is assumed and innocence must be proven.
It’s the American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.
What’s more, the technocrats who run the surveillance state don’t even have to break a sweat while monitoring what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, how much you spend, whom you support, and with whom you communicate.
Computers now do the tedious work of trolling social media, the internet, text messages and phone calls for potentially anti-government remarks, all of which is carefully recorded, documented, and stored to be used against you someday at a time and place of the government’s choosing.
In this way, with the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.
It works the same in any regime.
As Professor Robert Gellately notes in his book Backing Hitler about the police state tactics used in Nazi Germany: “There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors.”
Here’s the thing as the Germans themselves quickly discovered: you won’t have to do anything illegal or challenge the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.
In fact, all you will need to do is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious to a neighbor, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.
The following activities are guaranteed to get you censored, surveilled, eventually placed on a government watch list, possibly detained and potentially killed.
Use harmless trigger words like cloud, pork and pirates. Use a cell phone. Drive a car. Attend a political rally. Express yourself on social media. Serve in the military. Disagree with a law enforcement official. Call in sick to work. Limp or stutter. Appear confused or nervous, fidget, whistle or smell bad. Allow yourself to be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun, such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane, for instance. Stare at a police officer. Appear to be pro-gun, pro-freedom or anti-government. Attend a public school. Speak truth to power.
Long before Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden were being castigated for blowing the whistle on the government’s war crimes and the National Security Agency’s abuse of its surveillance powers, it was activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon who were being singled out for daring to speak truth to power. These men and others like them had their phone calls monitored and data files collected on their activities and associations. For a little while, at least, they became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.
Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, you don’t even have to be a dissident to get flagged by the government for surveillance, censorship and detention.
All you really need to be is a citizen of the American police state.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
Featured Video
Trump Announces Operation To Escort Ships – Fmr. CIA Analyst Larry Johnson
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Who Runs Our World?
Netanyahu addresses US Congress
By Richard Hugus | January 4, 2019
Our world is run by oligarchs, the holders of vast wealth from monopolies in banking, resource extraction, manufacturing, and technology. Oligarchs have such power that most of the world doesn’t even know of their influence over our lives. Their overall agenda is global power — a world government, run by them — to be achieved through planned steps of social engineering. The oligarchs remain in the background and have heads of state and entire governments acting in their service. Presidents and prime ministers are their puppets. Bureaucrats and politicians are their factotums.
Who are politicians? Politicians are people who work for the powerful while pretending to represent the people who voted for them. This double-dealing involves a lot of lying, so successful politicians must be good at it. It’s not an easy job to make the insane agenda of the powerful seem reasonable. Politicians can’t reveal this agenda because it almost always goes against the interests of their constituents, so they become adept at sophistry, mystification, and the appearance of authority. For example, wars for Israel have been part of the agenda of the powerful for years. Since 2001, wars for Israel have been sold as “the war on terror” and lots of lies had to be made up as to why the war on terror was a real thing. The visible faces promoting the war on terror were neoconservatives in the US, almost all of whom were advocates for Israel, or Zionists. Zionists are not the only members of the oligarchy, but they seem to be its lead actors. ... continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- US claim of sinking Iranian boats ‘a lie’, senior military official tells IRIB
- New KC-46 Supertankers Promise Israel Conventional Samson Option Strike Сapability
- No, New York Times, We Don’t Need to Dam the Bering Strait
- Gates-Funded ‘Big Catch-Up’ Delivers 100 Million Vaccine Doses — Including High-Risk DTP Vaccine Not Used in U.S.
- No commercial ship or oil tanker transited Strait of Hormuz in past hours: IRGC
- Russia warns of escalating NATO military activity in Baltic region
- Government Kills the Spirit
- How ‘Israel’s’ Iran regime change plot failed – again
- 1977 Influenza Pandemic Sequence Shows Signs of Laboratory Creation: Journal ‘Cell’
- China issues first prohibition order to safeguard international trade order under rule of law
- If Americans Knew
- As in Gaza, Israel is targeting rescue workers in South Lebanon, killing more than 100 since March
- Israel’s Obliteration Ecocide from Gaza to Lebanon and Beyond
- Israel Said It’s Applying the Gaza Model in Lebanon. This Is What the Devastation Looks Like.
- New Member of Trump’s Iran Negotiating Team Comes From Notoriously Pro-Israel Think Tank
- Israeli army demolishes Christian monastery, nuns’ school in southern Lebanon
- Tokenizing Christians In Israel
- One Gaza is not enough: Israel is turning southern Lebanon into another Gaza – Daily Update
- As Palestinians die, Ben-Gvir celebrates birthday with golden noose cake – Daily Update
- Israel’s New Ambassador to the ‘Christian World’ Served as Envoy to Azerbaijan During the Ethnic Cleansing of Christians from Nagorno-Karabakh
- US set to sell $1B “Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System” to Israel – Daily Update
- No Tricks Zone
- Another Study Links Warming To Cloud Forcing, Shortwave Radiation, Natural Atmospheric Circulation
- Wind Energy Is Toxic, Hazardous To Human Health, Scientific Review Shows
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
Aletho News 