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UK Now Considering Digital Face Scanning to Enter Pubs

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | March 29, 2021

The UK government is funding companies that are producing technology which will utilize digital face scans to check people’s vaccination status and allow or block them from entering pubs, stadiums and other venues.

“Britons could have their faces scanned to allow them to access pubs, gigs and sports events under one government-funded plan being drawn up for vaccine passports,” reports the London Times.

Two companies – Mvine and iProov – are working together on the system after being given a £75,000 grant by the government having already worked with the NHS on facial recognition technology in the form of the contact tracing app.

The technology is being proposed as a solution to concerns that presenting vaccination status via an app on a phone will be too slow when multiple people are entering a busy venue.

“Whoever is standing on the door of the pub is going to have to scan the certificate, read the name and date of birth, then ask the person for an ID document, check that the name and date of birth on the ID document are the same, squint at the photograph on the ID document and then make sure that the person in front of them is that person,” iProov CEO Andrew Bud said. “To which the answer is, that’s not going to happen.”

Bud said that the facial recognition system would reduce this process to a matter of seconds, streamlining the system.

“It speeds the process up and it absolves people of what would otherwise be a very heavy responsibility,” he added.

After months of promising that there would be no domestic vaccine passport, every indication is now that the government is going ahead with it.

Millions of Brits will refuse to submit to digital face scans to go about their everyday business, but the vast majority are likely to accept it without question, creating a two tier society where those who resist the biosecurity surveillance state will remain in a de facto permanent state of lockdown.

This again underscores the fact that the ‘vaccine passport’ is a digital identity card that citizens will be expected to carry at all times and use whenever they want to engage in basic commerce or other normal leisure activity.

March 29, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

The Covid-19 pandemic has taken thought policing and wokeness to a whole new level

By Rachel Marsden | RT | March 28, 2021

What’s the link between vaccine militancy, Covid jab passports, and a woke Church of Sweden theologian suggesting Christians should accept Prophet Mohammed out of “respect” for Muslims? Let me tell you.

For years now, Western society has been on a slippery slope towards total rejection of the old philosophy of ‘live and let live’. And that slope is a slip’n’slide with a brick wall at the end of it. It was only a matter of time before society slammed into it. There were many exit ramps and flashing warning signs en route, but, as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

It all seemed to start innocently enough when social justice warriors advocated in favor of tolerance of diversity. Fair enough. What reasonable person would have a problem with people being able to live their own life as they see fit, as long as it didn’t impede on anyone else’s?

The only real confusion was that by focusing on the kind that’s based on appearance or traits that individuals can’t control, these activists limited their mission to increasing only the most superficial kinds of diversity, which is in itself a form of discrimination against the very people for whom they purport to advocate. These militants effectively reduce people to one-dimensional figures by underscoring the kind of traits that are only visible on the most cringeworthy dating hook-up apps while negating the kind of diversity that is unseen and far more deep. But society ultimately conceded to their worldview, which served only to embolden them.

The next step was to advocate beyond simple tolerance in favor of the policing and rejection of any thoughts that diverged from theirs. It was the view of social justice warriors that everyone should be able to call themselves what they wish – he/him, she/her, ve/ver, xe/xem, ze/hir, (f)ae/(f)aer, etc – and have the right to dictate how others view them. Those lacking the bandwidth to wrap their minds around this new language system have been able to sidestep it by simply referring to people by their name, for example. But it was the beginning of the emergence of two parallel languages and cultures, and, ultimately, social segregation, with one for the “woke” and their sympathizers, and the other for the traditionalists.

More recently, the push for diversity has even reached realms that are by definition traditional in the strictest sense. Literally nothing is sacred anymore, not even religion. Earlier this month, a theologian of the Church of Sweden, who may or may not be a woke millennial, suggested that Christians could accept Prophet Mohammed in the interests of greater respect for Muslims, apparently seeking to treat centuries-old institutions like they’re a Marvel/DC crossover akin to having Spider-Man and Superman team up.

So, where is all this leading now? It’s pretty obvious. The Covid-19 pandemic has taken the militant policing of others’ thoughts and behaviour to a whole new level. Anyone making their own decisions about their life amid this global fiasco has been shamed for wrong-think, in a page taken straight from George Orwell’s ‘1984’, written in 1949, in which a character is executed for thoughtcrime. It’s not uncommon for workers nowadays to be fired from their jobs if the company feels the individual has violated what it considers to be proper conduct in the Covid-19 era. It’s not quite the same as Orwell’s imagined punishment by ‘vaporization’, but we seem to be getting there. Woke citizens who are completely intolerant of anyone whose views and behaviour diverges from theirs amid the pandemic are already in hysterics over people choosing not to wear face masks or electing where to wear them, or opting to go about their daily life as normally as possible.

Now we’re starting to see these same militant sanitary authoritarians wanting to dictate to others whether they should be forced to be vaccinated. And governments are playing along, with several nations evoking the notion of vaccine passports for travel or simply to enter certain indoor venues. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, for example, has raised the possibility of British pub owners having the option of reserving the right of access to their establishment to those who have been vaccinated against Covid-19.

Similarly, it appears that even higher education may soon be something reserved for the vaccinated class, with Rutgers University in New Jersey setting the tone for the next school year by requiring that students be vaccinated in order to attend.

Will others follow suit? How about mass transit, gyms, libraries, restaurants, movie theatres, shopping malls, swimming pools? Are we currently witnessing the beginning of the segregation of society based on vaccination? If so, it’ll be to the detriment of anyone skeptical about turning their body over to Big Pharma lest they find themselves barred from what most would consider normal life.

Yet there are people cheering for exactly that. The mere thought of people who think and behave differently to them is intolerable. The authoritarian policing of other people’s lives – the sort of extremism that used to be relegated to science fiction – is now nearly a fait accompli. And authoritarian wokeness disguised as benevolence is exactly how we ended up here.

Rachel Marsden, columnist, political strategist and host of an independently produced French-language program that airs on Sputnik France. Her website can be found at rachelmarsden.com

March 29, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

New York’s Covid Vaccine Passport Makes No Sense

By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute For Political Economy | March 29, 2021

NY Governor Cuomo is establishing a Covid passport that will show vaccination or a recent negative test. It will serve as permission to enter events or venues.

Will this passport be efficacious, or is its purpose to get us accustomed to a “your papers please” way of life?

Allegedly, the combination of people with vaccinations and those recovered from infection have, or are, bringing about “herd immunity.” If so, what is the point of a passport?

There are credible reports that some who have been vaccinated have nevertheless come down with Covid, which raises doubt about the efficacy of the vaccine. There are other reports that antibodies produced by the vaccines are not long lasting.

How recent must the Covid test be to make the passport valid. A person could have a negative test and catch Covid on the way home. If the passport relies on a negative test, the passport will have to expire after some designated period unless the passport is renewed with a new test.

There is also the problem that the widely used PCR test produces false negatives and false positives. In other words, is the information on which the passport is issued valid information?

We can laugh at the passport as a silly over-reaction to a virus that in most cases is hardly more dangerous than flu, or we can understand it as a control measure over our freedom of movement and association. We are the safer if we view it as the latter.

Police already have too much power to invade homes without warrants and to stop and search people on the streets without warrants. “Probable cause” has been used to curtail civil liberty.

I am convinced that no health purpose will be served by Covid passports, and that the public should protest the introduction of a Soviet-style internal passport.

Once established, the Covid passport will be a boon for Big Pharma. A yearly booster shot will be decreed, and without it your passport will expire.

Keep in mind that Florida avoided lockdowns and mask mandates and has no worse infection and death rate than lockdown states.

Notice also that many highly qualified experts have criticized the lockdowns, mask mandates, use of untested vaccines, and the prohibition on using safe effective treatments such as HCQ and Ivermectin. Why were their voices censored and the information kept from the public? The only explanation I can think of is that Covid is being used for an unstated agenda. We should not be deceived into cooperating with this unstated agenda.

A democracy that censors expert testimony and prohibits public debate is well on its way to a police state.

A public that can be stampeeded by orchestrated fear into being jabbed with vaccines that could be more dangerous than Covid is not a public that can expect to remain in freedom.

March 29, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

Congress, in a Five-Hour Hearing, Demands Tech CEOs Censor the Internet Even More Aggressively

By Glenn Greenwald | March 26, 2021

Over the course of five-plus hours on Thursday, a House Committee along with two subcommittees badgered three tech CEOs, repeatedly demanding that they censor more political content from their platforms and vowing legislative retaliation if they fail to comply. The hearing — convened by the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Chair Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of its Subcommittees, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) — was one of the most stunning displays of the growing authoritarian effort in Congress to commandeer the control which these companies wield over political discourse for their own political interests and purposes.

As I noted when I reported last month on the scheduling of this hearing, this was “the third time in less than five months that the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms.” The bulk of Thursday’s lengthy hearing consisted of one Democratic member after the next complaining that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have failed in their duties to censor political voices and ideological content that these elected officials regard as adversarial or harmful, accompanied by threats that legislative punishment (including possible revocation of Section 230 immunity) is imminent in order to force compliance (Section 230 is the provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that shields internet companies from liability for content posted by their users).

Republican members largely confined their grievances to the opposite concern: that these social media giants were excessively silencing conservative voices in order to promote a liberal political agenda (that complaint is only partially true: a good amount of online censorship, like growing law enforcement domestic monitoring generally, focuses on all anti-establishment ideologies, not just the right-wing variant). This editorial censoring, many Republicans insisted, rendered the tech companies’ Section 230 immunity obsolete, since they are now acting as publishers rather than mere neutral transmitters of information. Some Republicans did join with Democrats in demanding greater censorship, though typically in the name of protecting children from mental health disorders and predators rather than ideological conformity.

As they have done in prior hearings, both Zuckerberg and Pichai spoke like the super-scripted, programmed automatons that they are, eager to please their Congressional overseers (though they did periodically issue what should have been unnecessary warnings that excessive “content moderation” can cripple free political discourse). Dorsey, by contrast, seemed at the end of his line of patience and tolerance for vapid, moronic censorship demands, and — sitting in a kitchen in front of a pile of plates and glasses — he, refreshingly, barely bothered to hide that indifference. At one point, he flatly stated in response to demands that Twitter do more to remove “disinformation”: “I don’t think we should be the arbiters of truth and I don’t think the government should be either.”

Zuckerberg in particular has minimal capacity to communicate the way human beings naturally do. The Facebook CEO was obviously instructed by a team of public speaking consultants that it is customary to address members of the Committee as “Congressman” or “Congresswoman.” He thus began literally every answer he gave — even in rapid back and forth questions — with that word. He just refused to move his mouth without doing that — for five hours (though, in fairness, the questioning of Zuckerberg was often absurd and unreasonable). His brain permits no discretion to deviate from his script no matter how appropriate. For every question directed to him, he paused for several seconds, had his internal algorithms search for the relevant place in the metaphorical cassette inserted in a hidden box in his back, uttered the word “Congressman” or “Congresswoman,” stopped for several more seconds to search for the next applicable spot in the spine-cassette, and then proceeded unblinkingly to recite the words slowly transmitted into his neurons. One could practically see the gears in his head painfully churning as the cassette rewound or fast-forwarded. This tortuous ritual likely consumed roughly thirty percent of the hearing time. I’ve never seen members of Congress from across the ideological spectrum so united as they were by visceral contempt for Zuckerberg’s non-human comportment:


But it is vital not to lose sight of how truly despotic hearings like this are. It is easy to overlook because we have become so accustomed to political leaders successfully demanding that social media companies censor the internet in accordance with their whims. Recall that Parler, at the time it was the most-downloaded app in the country, was removed in January from the Apple and Google Play Stores and then denied internet service by Amazon, only after two very prominent Democratic House members publicly demanded this. At the last pro-censorship hearing convened by Congress, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) explicitly declared that the Democrats’ grievance is not that these companies are censoring too much but rather not enough. One Democrat after the next at Thursday’s hearing described all the content on the internet they want gone: or else. Many of them said this explicitly.

At one point toward the end of the hearing, Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-TX), in the context of the January 6 riot, actually suggested that the government should create a list of groups they unilaterally deem to be “domestic terror organizations” and then provide it to tech companies as guidance for what discussions they should “track and remove”: in other words, treat these groups the same as ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Words cannot convey how chilling and authoritarian this all is: watching government officials, hour after hour, demand censorship of political speech and threaten punishment for failures to obey. As I detailed last month, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the state violates the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee when they coerce private actors to censor for them — exactly the tyrannical goal to which these hearings are singularly devoted.

There are genuine problems posed by Silicon Valley monopoly power. Monopolies are a threat to both political freedom and competition, which is why economists of most ideological persuasions have long urged the need to prevent them. There is some encouraging legislation pending in Congress with bipartisan support (including in the House Antitrust Subcommittee before which I testified several weeks ago) that would make meaningful and productive strides toward diluting the unaccountable and undemocratic power these monopolies wield over our political and cultural lives. If these hearings were about substantively considering those antitrust measures, they would be meritorious.

But that is hard and difficult work and that is not what these hearings are about. They want the worst of all worlds: to maintain Silicon Valley monopoly power but transfer the immense, menacing power to police our discourse from those companies into the hands of the Democratic-controlled Congress and Executive Branch.

And as I have repeatedly documented, it is not just Democratic politicians agitating for greater political censorship but also their liberal journalistic allies, who cannot tolerate that there may be any places on the internet that they cannot control. That is the petty wannabe-despot mentality that has driven them to police the “unfettered” discussions on the relatively new conversation app Clubhouse, and escalate their attempts to have writers they dislike removed from Substack. Just today, The New York Times warns, on its front page, that there are “unfiltered” discussions taking place on Google-enabled podcasts:

New York Times front page, Mar. 26, 2021

We are taught from childhood that a defining hallmark of repressive regimes is that political officials wield power to silence ideas and people they dislike, and that, conversely, what makes the U.S. a “free” society is the guarantee that American leaders are barred from doing so. It is impossible to reconcile that claim with what happened in that House hearing room over the course of five hours on Thursday.

March 28, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

Matt Hancock’s UK Health Security Agency would be the worst April Fool’s ever – except he isn’t joking

By Neil Clark | RT | March 27, 2021

The UK Health Secretary confirmed this week that a new ‘UK Health Security Agency’ was being set up on April 1, thus marking the next stage in Britain’s transformation into a repressive bio-security state.

Back in 1957, the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Panorama (well, it was then) showed a short three-minute film of a family in Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from a family ‘spaghetti tree.’ People rang up the BBC switchboard afterwards for advice on growing their own spaghetti. They should have paid closer attention to the date of the broadcast. The first of April. Yes, it was an ‘April Fool.’ One of the best in history.

The first of April is also the date that the UK’s new ‘Health Security Agency’ is being established but this time it really is no laughing matter. If only Matt Hancock was joking when he said he was setting up a “dedicated, mission-driven national institution for health security.” But, unlike his namesake, the great comedian Tony Hancock, Matt isn’t remotely funny. The establishment of the UKHSA should give us all sleepless nights. It’s actually more terrifying than the scariest Hammer horror movie. Well, Hancock’s video announcing the news was, at any rate.

The new agency –which Britain needs right now as much as a hole in the head– brings together the work of Public Health England, NHS Test and Trace and the Joint BioSecurity Centre.

Hancock says the body will be mission driven, but what will be the mission?

“I want everybody at UKHSA, at all levels, to wake up every day with a zeal to plan for the next pandemic.”

Yes, that’s right. We’re at the tail end of Covid – but it’s time to plan for the next Covid to come along. Has a government agenda ever been so transparent? Of course, Hancock is only echoing Bill Gates when he talks about the ‘next pandemic’. Back in January the software multi-billionaire, who has been able to gain so much influence with his foundation’s funding of academics, scientists and public health organisations, outlined his strategy for dealing with the ‘next pandemic,’ which, he warns, could be “ten times more serious” than Covid. And, guess what, his strategy calls for “mega-diagnostic platforms,” mass vaccinations and governments spending lots of taxpayers’ money.

Compare Gates’ proposals with what Hancock says and the new “Securing Our Health” webpage introducing the UKHSA and you can see quite clearly where the ‘inspiration’ for all this is coming from. Hancock, as he’s done throughout 2020 and 2021, is following a global script.

As I highlighted in a recent OpEd, the ‘War on Covid’ is the new ‘War on Terror.’ Civil liberties were stripped away, post 9-11, in the ‘War on Terror’ and now we have the latest phase of the project. Like the War on Terror, the War on Covid/War on Viruses is never meant to end. In fact we don’t really need new viruses to come along. Covid variants will work quite nicely, if Gates’ ‘ten times more serious’ virus is delayed in traffic.

In a piece for Bloomberg this week entitled ‘We Must Start Planning for a Permanent Pandemic,’ Andreas Kluth spelt it out very clearly for those who still don’t get it: “For the past year, an assumption –sometimes explicit, often tacit– has informed almost all our thinking about the pandemic: At some point, it will be over, and then we’ll go “back to normal. This premise is almost certainly wrong. SARS-CoV-2, protean and elusive as it is, may become our permanent enemy, like the flu but worse.”

The establishment of the UKHSA at a time when deaths with Covid have dropped to low numbers is a clear sign that the UK government plans no ‘back to normal.’ Perhaps the scariest sentence in the UKHSA policy paper is “We need to consider how best to engage with citizens and drive behaviour change in the 21st century.”

What ‘behaviour change’ can that be, I wonder? Requiring people to wear face masks and maintain ‘social distance’ from one another permanently? Don’t forget Home Secretary Priti Patel declared last May that social distancing was ‘here to stay.’

Many thought she misspoke, but ten months later and ‘social distancing’ is still here.

Then there’s the list of the new agency’s five core functions. Number One, again with echoes of the ‘War on Terror,’  is “Prevent.” This means “Anticipating and taking action to mitigate infectious diseases and other hazards to health before they materialise, for example through vaccination and influencing behaviour.”

Yes, you read that right. “BEFORE they materialise.” We will need to be vaccinated against viruses and hazards to health that haven’t yet materialised! What a bonanza for Big Pharma that would be!

Hancock’s announcement comes in the same week as Boris Johnson – the dishevelled charlatan who promoted himself as a ‘libertarian’ to  get elected but who’s turned out to be the most dictatorial prime minister in our history – saying that pubs could require Vaccine Passports, once everyone had been offered a vaccine.

With us still in lockdown, and the Coronavirus Act extended for a further six months, the architecture for permanent digital slavery is being constructed – and it’s all being done under the guise of ‘protecting’ us. But who will protect us from our protectors? That really is the question we should all be asking.

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com.

March 28, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Canadian Gov’t’s Move to Hire Influencers to Tout its Work is a ‘Form of Propaganda’: Journalist

Sputnik – 27.03.2021

A website called Blacklock’s Reporter revealed on Thursday that Canada’s Department of Health wants to hire celebrities and digital influencers “to say nice things” about its work on social media. According to Canadian independent journalist Leigh Stewart, this spin operation shows that the Liberal government lacks honesty and transparency.

Sputnik: The news about the government’s online endorsement campaign appeared after several controversial stories involving Minister of Health Patty Hajdu, some of them pandemic-related, surfaced online. What do you think about it as a journalist, and as a taxpayer?

Leigh Stewart: It doesn’t surprise me that the government would be willing to pay people to give them praise, or promote what they are dishing out. It’s a form of propaganda. It reminds me what they did in 2019: paid influencers to promote the election (Trudeau’s election) until they scrapped it when people realised the social media influencers that were chosen had a Trudeau bias. We never did get that money back.

Sputnik: According to another news outlet – The Post Millennial, the influencers will not be required to tell their audience that the Trudeau government will be paying them – something which is illegal, according to the Canadian government’s own website. It’s also unclear how much money the bloggers will be receiving. Do you think Canadians deserve to know how their tax dollars are being spent on celebrity endorsements?

Leigh Stewart: The government has never been transparent. If this current government was honest, they wouldn’t need to pay celebrities to praise them, that would come naturally. Canadians should definitely know where their tax dollars are going, it’s a mockery to the hard working Canadians to not be informed, personally I think it equates to theft.

Sputnik: It’s likely that a lot of  that “positive content” about the government will be COVID-related. Do you think the handling of pandemic-related issues by the Department of Health during the past year has been adequate and effective?

Leigh Stewart: Health Canada needs all the help they can get, seeking praise for their decisions surrounding the coronavirus. Nothing they have put in place, whether it be lockdowns, wearing masks, has worked. We are in the same place we were a year ago and not much has changed. I think the lockdowns are doing more harm than good, with the help of big tech and corporations, especially for small business. Anyone who speaks out against the current government and their solutions backed with zero evidence is silenced, or presented with a summons to court. I think their goal is to abolish the middle class. Get a majority of people on government assistance (Canada has the highest unemployment in the G7) and inflate prices so eventually, people cannot afford to live.

​Canadians don’t need a babysitter to tell them what to do, last time I checked we had a freedom of choice. If you don’t want to wear a mask, go ahead. If you want to keep your small business open, go ahead. There should be absolutely nothing wrong with people making the choices that they feel are best for them.

Sputnik: Ontario premier Doug Ford said that the authorities will be watching the daily case numbers, as the COVID infection rate has increased in your province.  All of that may sound as if the authorities are preparing for another lockdown, while the previous one has not been fully lifted. Do you think people would readily accept the new restrictions?

Leigh Stewart: I think a lot of people are getting fed up. In the beginning it was only 15 days to flatten the curve and here we are, a year later, only now the narrative has changed. It’s now about waiting for a vaccine. Which health officials say you will still have to wear a mask, even if you receive one. The Premier of Ontario Doug Ford is relying on medical health professionals to tell him what to do, when I’m not convinced they actually do know what they are doing. Locking down again hurts small business and even Ford has admitted that himself.

March 28, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | | Leave a comment

COVID VACCINE: THE NEW SACRED COW

Computing Forever | March 27, 2021

Source articles:

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/anti-vax-email-deluge-hits-european-parliament-1.4519954

https://summit.news/2021/03/22/covid-restrictions-to-remain-in-place-for-years-says-public-health-official/

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-24/when-will-covid-end-we-must-start-planning-for-a-permanent-pandemic

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March 28, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Why Is Everyone in Texas Not Dying?

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | AIER | March 26, 2021

I’m sitting at a bar in Texas, surrounded by maskless people, looking at folks on the streets walking around like life is normal, talking with nice and friendly faces, feeling like things in the world are more-or-less normal. Cases and deaths attributed to Covid are, like everywhere else, falling dramatically.

If you pay attention only to the media fear campaigns, you would find this confusing. More than two weeks ago, the governor of Texas completely reversed his devastating lockdown policies and repealed all his emergency powers, along with the egregious attacks on rights and liberties.

There was something very un-Texan about those lockdowns. My hotel room is festooned with pictures of cowboys on horses waving guns in the air, along with other depictions of rugged individualism facing down the elements. It’s a caricature but Texans embrace it. Then a new virus came along – as if that had never happened before in Texas – and the new Zoom class took the opposite path, not freedom but imposition and control.

After nearly a year of nonsense, on March 2, 2021, the governor finally said enough is enough and repealed it all. Towns and cities can still engage in Covid-related mischief but at least they are no longer getting cover from the governor’s office.

At that moment, a friend remarked to me that this would be the test we have been waiting for. A complete repeal of restrictions would lead to mass death, they said. Would it? Did the lockdowns really control the virus? We would soon find out, he theorized.

I knew better. The “test” of whether and to what extent lockdowns control the virus or “suppress outbreaks” (in Anthony Fauci’s words) has been tried all over the world. Every serious empirical examination has shown that the answer is no.

The US has many examples of open states that have generally had better performance in managing the disease than those states that are closed. Georgia already opened on April 24, 2020. South Dakota never shut down. South Carolina opened in May. Florida ended all restrictions in September. In every case, the press howled about the coming slaughter that did not happen. Yes, each open state experienced a seasonality wave in winter but so did the lockdown states.

So it was in Texas. Thanks to this Twitter thread, and some of my own googling, we have a nice archive of predictions about what would happen if Texas opened.

  • California Governor Gavin Newsom said that opening Texas was “absolutely reckless.”
  • Gregg Popovich, head coach of the NBA San Antonio Spurs, said opening was “ridiculous” and “ignorant.”
  • CNN quoted an ICU nurse saying “I’m scared of what this is going to look like.”
  • Vanity Fair went over the top with this headline: “Republican Governors Celebrate COVID Anniversary With Bold Plan to Kill Another 500,000 Americans.”
  • There was the inevitable Dr. Fauci: “It just is inexplicable why you would want to pull back now.”
  • Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke of Texas revealed himself to be a full-blown lockdowner: It’s a “big mistake,” he said. “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that it’s also a cult of death.” He accused the governor of “sacrificing the lives of our fellow Texans … for political gain.”
  • James Hamblin, a doctor and writer for the Atlantic, said in a Tweet liked by 20K people: “Ending precautions now is like entering the last miles of a marathon and taking off your shoes and eating several hot dogs.”
  • Bestselling author Kurt Eichenwald flipped out: “Goddamn. Texas already has FIVE variants that have turned up: Britain, South Africa, Brazil, New York & CA. The NY and CA variants could weaken vaccine effectiveness. And now idiot @GregAbbott_TX throws open the state.” He further called the government “murderous.”
  • Epidemiologist Whitney Robinson wrote: “I feel genuinely sad. There are people who are going to get sick and die bc of avoidable infections they get in the next few weeks. It’s demoralizing.”
  • Pundit Bill Kristol (I had no idea that he was a lockdowner) wrote: “Gov. Abbott is going to be responsible for more avoidable COVID hospitalizations and deaths than all the undocumented immigrants coming across the Texas border put together.”
  • Health pundit Bob Wachter said the decision to open was “unforgivable.”
  • Virus guru Michael Osterholm told CNN: “We’re walking into the mouth of the monster. We simply are.”
  • Joe Biden famously said that the Texas decision to open reflected “Neanderthal thinking.”
  • Nutritionist Eric Feigl-Ding said that the decision makes him want to “vomit so bad.”
  • The chairman of the state’s Democratic Party said: “What Abbott is doing is extraordinarily dangerous. This will kill Texans. Our country’s infectious-disease specialists have warned that we should not put our guard down, even as we make progress towards vaccinations. Abbott doesn’t care.”
  • Other state Democrats said in a letter that the decision was “premature and harmful.”
  • The CDC’s Rochelle Walensky didn’t mince words: “Please hear me clearly: At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained. I am really worried about reports that more states are rolling back the exact public health measures we have recommended to protect people from COVID-19.”

There are probably hundreds more such warnings, predictions, and demands, all stated with absolute certainty that basic social and market functioning is a terrible idea. The lockdown lobby was out in full force. And yet what do we see now more than two weeks out (and arguably the lockdowns died on March 2, when the government announced the decision)?

Here are the data.

The CDC has a very helpful tool that allows anyone to compare open vs closed states. The results are devastating for those who believe that lockdowns are the way to control a virus. In this chart we compare closed states Massachusetts and California with open states Georgia, Florida, Texas, and South Carolina.

What can we conclude from such a visualization? It suggests that the lockdowns have had no statistically observable effect on the virus trajectory and resulting severe outcomes. The open states have generally performed better, perhaps not because they are open but simply for reasons of demographics and seasonality. The closed states seem not to have achieved anything in terms of mitigation.

On the other hand, the lockdowns destroyed industries, schools, churches, liberties and lives, demoralizing the population and robbing people of essential rights. All in the name of safety from a virus that did its work in any case.

As for Texas, the results so far are in.

I’m making no predictions about the future path of the virus in Texas. Indeed for a full year, AIER has been careful about not trying to outguess this virus, which has its own ways, some predictable and some mysterious. The experience has, or should have, humbled everyone. Political arrangements seem to have no power to control it, much less finally suppress it. The belief that it was possible to control people in order to control a virus produced a calamity unprecedented in modern times.

What’s striking about all the above predictions of infections and deaths is not just that they were all wrong. It’s the arrogance and confidence behind each of them. After a full year and directly observing the inability of “nonpharmaceutical interventions” to manage the pathogen, the experts are still wedded to their beloved lockdowns, unable or unwilling to look at the data and learn anything from them.

The concept of lockdowns stemmed from a faulty premise: that you can separate humans, like rats in cages, and therefore control and even eradicate the virus. After a year, we unequivocally know this not to be true, something that the best and wisest epidemiologists knew all along. Essential workers still must work; they must go home to their families, many in crowded living conditions. Lockdowns do not eliminate the virus, they merely shift the burden onto the working class.

Now we can see the failure in black, white, and full color, daily appearing on our screens courtesy of the CDC. Has that shaken the pro-lockdown pundit class? Not that much. What an amazing testament to the stubbornness of elite opinion and its bias against basic freedoms. They might all echo the words of Groucho Marx: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”

March 27, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Inside the Department of Homeland Security’s Plan to Crush Right-Wing Americans

 By Eric Striker | National Justice | March 26, 2021

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is preparing to use mass data collection, interagency prioritization directives, psychological operations and online censorship to crush what its recently confirmed Secretary Alejandro Mayourkas, a Jew from Cuba, has deemed “domestic violent extremism,” National Justice can report.

Who does the DHS consider to be a domestic violent extremist? The March 1st Director of National Intelligence threat assessment ordered by the Biden administration lists anti-abortion activists, environmentalists, members of militias, and advocates for white people as America’s top national security threats.

Besides intensifying police repression and government surveillance, DHS outlined on Wednesday its plan to use grants to fund private, unaccountable organizations that specialize in experimenting on “extremists,” psychological operations and brainwashing, and training teachers to spot and report children engaging in “hate speech.”

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a 77-year-old woman with purple hair, led the House Appropriations Committee discussion on combating “domestic violent extremism” with DHS’ two counter-terrorism department leaders, John Cohen and John Picarelli. Rep. DeLauro is the wife of former Ehud Barak advisor, Stan Greenberg.

Much of the discourse revolved around the frustration officials are having shutting down supposed “extremists” due to the fact that these individuals they claim are posing a national security risk are often not committing any criminal offenses. Rep. DeLauro frantically ranted about the need for legislation that would make membership in a patriotic militia of any kind illegal.

During the hearing, Cohen described how the DHS has been active behind the scenes in pushing social media companies to censor what he vaguely characterized as “toxic narratives,” legally dubious behavior that none of the Republicans — whose party is currently fundraising off opposing tech censorship — showed any interest in pressing him on.

Picarelli later added that his department has also been instructing online gaming and e-sports platforms to examine ways to quickly suppress and prevent what he claimed are “radicalizing” discussions.

The view that young men are “radicalized” by shouting obscenities at one another while playing video games with one another is a narrative made up by the Anti-Defamation League, not something based on sound data. Even more preposterous was Cohen’s assertion that “incels” — men who do not have regular sex — were in and of themselves a category of terrorist.

The most disturbing part of Picarelli’s testimony was when he revealed that DHS has been using NGOs to outsource projects intended to manipulate people and manufacture changes in political beliefs. They admitted that this is being used as a loophole. It would be illegal for the government to directly engage in this CIA-style activity in the homeland.

Historically, the federal government has primarily reserved NGO funding as a tool of war, regime change and influence in foreign lands, but under both the Obama and Trump administrations, and now accelerated under Biden, they have been increasingly utilized against Americans who disagree with the left-liberal Washington/New York/San Francisco consensus.

When asked about the results produced by grant making in recent years, Picarelli cited his favorite development on this front: research and experimentation being done at American University by a far-left activist that seeks to “inoculate” individuals exposed to political, religious or philosophical arguments and ideas the US government believes are undermining its power and credibility.

US Intelligence Cutouts

Some of the NGOs involved in these operations had representatives at the meeting, where they explained to the House their specialties, methods and goals.

They are as follows,

1) Richard Aborn — Citizens Crime Commission of New York City

Richard Aborn was invited to showcase his group’s “counter-terrorism” innovation, DEEP, which stands for Disruption and Early Engagement Program.

According to his description, individuals with radical beliefs are recommended to the program by the NYPD, FBI or other police organizations either before they’re arrested, while they’re in custody, or after they finish their prison sentences.

Once enrolled in the program, the “subject” (how a DHS fact sheet refers to candidates for the program) is subjected to a year or more of undisclosed psychological techniques designed specifically to depoliticize them. The way Aborn represented it sounded like a dystopian brainwashing scheme copied straight from the film A Clockwork Orange.

The ethically dubious program was created and is directed by a self-described counter-terrorism expert named Claire Abrahams.

Abrahams’ LinkedIn shows that she is a Zionist operative who has served on the committee of the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces, a group of American Jews who provide funding to the Israeli military. While the group is allowed to keep non-profit status, it is for all intents and purposes an instrument of a foreign government.

2) Tyler Cote — Division 250

Another Jewish individual, Tyler Cote, peddled his Massachusetts based program, Division 250, which specializes in warning middle and high school students against accessing “hate speech” on the internet while also training teachers to spot politically problematic students.

Cote, a former math teacher at Fall River Jewish Home, has never attempted to hide his intense personal prejudices or loathing of Trump voters.

His main academic achievement is a 2017 academic paper titled “The Rhetorical Psychology of Trumpism: Threat, Absolutism, and the Absolutist Threat.”

3) Sammy Rangel — Life After Hate/Exit USA

Sammy Rangel’s group, Life After Hate/Exit , is also being utilized by the government.

Rangel, showing off his con, was the least vitriolic of all the people at the hearing.

According to Rangel, the group employs white nationalists who claim to have been “cured” and now see themselves as liberals, leftists, or in Christian Picciolini’s case, Antifa supporters.

In response to an inquiry about what he’s trying to do, Rangel admitted to the Committee that white nationalists often have real, fact based grievances.

His methodology revolves around pretending to befriend nationalists and talking them into channeling their anger at injustice and lack of political representations in an anti-racist direction.

The group is heavily inspired by a German program which shares the same name (EXIT).

The German equivalent is funded by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, which is led by a Jewish woman who used to work for the infamous East German secret police unit, the Stasi.

Jewish Power Is Bipartisan

The Republicans at the inquiry expressed nothing but support for the malevolent schemes being plotted against their voters.

Only one serious concern about civil liberties was expressed to Cohen and Picarelli. Lauren Underwood, who represents Illinois’s 14th, demanded that DHS take extra care in protecting people’s civil rights and privacy, but only in cases involving minorities. Cohen reassured her that his relatives were “Civil Rights attorneys” and would stop him if they thought he was violating the rights of blacks and non-whites.

Ashley Hinson, Republican from Iowa, asked Cohen about four illegal aliens apprehended at the US border who were listed on the FBI’s terrorist watch list. Cohen responded by saying that being on the list doesn’t mean actually mean you’re a terrorist. Hinson failed to follow up with a logical question: then why does it exist?

Many of the names involved in this COINTELPRO revival are Jewish individuals who seem to lack respect for American civil traditions, and in some cases, basic human rights.

While Cohen — the “good” cop to Picarelli’s bad — paid some lip service to the First Amendment and constitutionally protected speech, the question was largely treated as an afterthought throughout the meeting.

There is no meaningful distinction between what Washington is doing and how political dissidents are treated in so-called authoritarian countries. Between 2018 and 2019, Ken Cuccarelli and Chad Wolf both began aggressively targeting primarily white nationalists. Now the Biden administration is expanding their precedent to politically persecute white Christians, libertarians, veterans and regular conservatives as well.

While this could be construed as him misspeaking, Joe Biden’s comment that the GOP may not exist in 2024 should be read as ominous in light of all that is happening.

At least half of America have been declared enemies of the state. The ruling class’s thirst for vengeance appears insatiable.

March 27, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

Rutgers Says Students Must Have Injections Before They Can Come to the Campus in Fall

By Robert Wenzel | Target Liberty | March 26, 2021

COVID authoritarianism has hit the university level.

Rutgers University, in New Jersey, announced Thursday that all students would need to be fully vaccinated against the coronavirus before they would be allowed to return to campus in the fall.

“Adding COVID-19 vaccination to our student immunization requirements will help provide a safer and more robust college experience for our students,” said Jonathan Holloway, the president of Rutgers University, in a statement.

Beginning in the fall, students will have to show “proof of vaccination” before moving into their dorm or attending in-person classes.

According to the university, students may file for an exemption for medical or religious reasons.

According to the New York Times, even with the new requirement, students on the Rutgers campuses will be required to practice social distancing and use face coverings, the university said. How absurd is that. And for a virus that is of no serious consequence to anyone that is likely to be on campus.

Follow the science? It is more like following the madness of crowds.

The university has more than 70,000 students.

March 26, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

New York Times horrified that Alex Jones can still be found via Google Podcasts

RT | March 26, 2021

Always eager to see more “guardrails” and “content curation” applied to competitors, the Gray Lady is coming after Google Podcasts, which supposedly didn’t do its homework on purging undesirable voices.

Google Podcasts is a service that helps search for, subscribe to and playback podcasts, a self-publishing media that became so popular now that leaders in the field easily rival the popularity of top TV shows and newspapers. According to the New York Times, the app “stands alone among major platforms in its tolerance of hate speech and other extremist content.”

For instance, one could find there Alex Jones, whose concerted deplatforming by Big Tech in 2018 set the stage for the increasingly restrictive policing of content today, culminating in an ouster of a sitting US president. The tech giant treats its podcast app similar to its search engine – an instrument for finding stuff people are interested in. It doesn’t host the audio records and would only occasionally remove links to them from aggregation when required by law.

The Times finds objectionable the very fact that someone like Jones can find a way into people’s ears through Google’s app, whereas companies like Twitter and Facebook “have become more vigilant in recent years in their attempts to rein in the spread of harmful content.” Some experts interviewed for the story accuse the company of putting profits before people’s safety.

“Google is perfectly well aware of how to moderate content if it cares to,” Jessica Fjeld, the assistant director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, told the newspaper. She compared Google’s platform to Parler, a pro-free speech alternative to Twitter widely vilified in the mainstream media as a supposed hotbed of right-wing extremism. Parler was infamously kicked out by Silicon Valley in the wake of the January 6 Capitol Hill riot.

“It seems like [Google has] made a decision to embrace an audience that wants more offensive content rather than constrain that content for the sake of safety and respect,” Fjeld argued.

The desire to protect the public from reading or hearing something bad online has recently become a major theme for the left legacy media. Another popular target for this kind of attack is Substack, an independent publishing site. It was accused of platforming “harassment” (alternatively: factual criticism) of Times reporter Taylor Lorenz, and even of being a threat to journalism in general (by allowing independent journalists to sell content without newsroom oversight).

One of the people criticizing Substack was Google’s Vice President of Privacy Product Management Rob Leathern, who said content moderation policies “can’t be afterthoughts anymore for serious businesses.” So, presumably some people in the company’s management would be receptive to more censorship at Google Podcasts, just as the Times advocates.

March 26, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Here There be Monsters

By Alan Sabrosky | Unz Review | March 25, 2021

We in America are neck-deep in a domestic political war to the finish. During the notable “kitchen debate” in Moscow in 1959, Nikita Khrushchev asserted that Richard Nixon’s grandchildren would live under communism, while Nixon argued that Khrushchev’s grandchildren would live in freedom. Both were correct, if not as either intended.

Americans generally applauded the implosion of the USSR and the collapse of communist regimes across Europe. Russia and some others today may not be ideal democracies, but they are a far sight better than 60-odd years ago – and in Russia’s case, more vibrant and more challenging as well.

Ironically, while external pressure and internal failings were bringing Lenin’s dream to ruins there, America and most of the West were rotting from within – victims of their own success in the Cold War and their misguided faith in the robustness of their own systems of government. The past year has brought that into stark relief.

The Democrats and their allies understand this clearly. They hold the upper hand in the Federal government, the media, academe and the streets. They did their best to make the country ungovernable during the Trump years. They needlessly locked down cities and states during the pandemic scare, all but ruining a robust economy. They sat back and watched their Antifa and BLM thugs riot, loot, burn, commit mayhem and even murder in hundreds of cities for months in 2020 in the walk-up to the election.

Then Democrats openly engaged in widespread election fraud to capture that election, aided and abetted by a compliant media and a refusal of the courts to hold them accountable. Now Democrats hold the White House and the Congress, and have begun their purge of Republican “threats” plus the implementation of a legislative agenda to codify their practices and position. They will make a shambles of governing here as their ilk have done everywhere else, but they have no intention of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory on their march to power.

Most Republicans and almost all independents do not really understand this situation. They fail to understand that the Democrats today are not the Democrats of the days of Harry Truman and John Kennedy. If they did understand, they might have armed themselves and risen when Trump foolishly allowed Antifa-BLM rioters to rip the country apart for months on end, virtually unimpeded and often applauded by mostly Democrat mayors and governors, and most of the media.

But they did not. They are deluded by a toxic combination of disbelief and denial – disbelief that it can really be so bad, and denial that the Democrats and their even more radical allies really mean what they say. They foolishly appear to believe that this is simply an unusually brutal phase in our political life – worse than the 1960s but better than the eve of the Civil War – and that they can make some real gains in the 2022 mid-term elections, and regain power in 2024.

They are wrong. “Politics as usual” in America is dead. If the Democrats get their way, there may be some competitive elections in 2022 but not enough to matter, and before 2024 it will be a done deal – the U.S. for all intents and purposes will be a one-party state with, perhaps, some tame Republicans allowed to hold a few seats in Congress for the sake of appearances. It has happened before elsewhere. It can – and most likely will – happen in America now. Here there be monsters, indeed – and we bred them ourselves.

March 25, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

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