That’s about as good a description as you’ll find for the sorry state of our nation.
SWAT teams crashing through doors. Militarized police shooting unarmed citizens. Traffic cops tasering old men and pregnant women for not complying fast enough with an order. Resource officers shackling children for acting like children. Homeowners finding their homes under siege by police out to confiscate lawfully-owned guns. Drivers having their cash seized under the pretext that they might have done something wrong.
The list of abuses being perpetrated against the American people by their government is growing rapidly.
We are approaching critical mass.
The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.
President Biden’s long list of executive orders, executive actions, proclamations and directives is just more of the same: rule by fiat.
Now the Biden Administration is setting its sights on gun control.
Mark my words: gun control legislation, especially in the form of red flag gun laws, which allow the police to remove guns from people “suspected” of being threats, will become yet another means by which to subvert the Constitution and sabotage the rights of the people.
These laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, are yet another stealth maneuver by the police state to gain greater power over an unsuspecting and largely gullible populace.
Nineteen states and Washington DC have red flag laws on their books.
While in theory it appears perfectly reasonable to want to disarm individuals who are clearly suicidal and/or pose an “immediate danger” to themselves or others, where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.
Now consider the ramifications of giving police the authority to preemptively raid homes in order to neutralize a potential threat.
It’s a powder keg waiting for a lit match.
Under these red flag laws, what happened to Duncan Lemp—who was gunned down in his bedroom during an early morning, no-knock SWAT team raid on his family’s home—could very well happen to more people.
At 4:30 a.m. on March 12, 2020, in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic that had most of the country under a partial lockdown and sheltering at home, a masked SWAT team—deployed to execute a “high risk” search warrant for unauthorized firearms—stormed the suburban house where 21-year-old Duncan, a software engineer and Second Amendment advocate, lived with his parents and 19-year-old brother.
No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, had a criminal record.
No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, was considered an “imminent threat” to law enforcement or the public, at least not according to the search warrant.
So what was so urgent that militarized police felt compelled to employ battlefield tactics in the pre-dawn hours of a day when most people are asleep in bed, not to mention stuck at home as part of a nationwide lockdown?
According to police, they were tipped off that Lemp was in possession of “firearms.”
Thus, rather than approaching the house by the front door at a reasonable hour in order to investigate this complaint—which is what the Fourth Amendment requires—police instead strapped on their guns, loaded up their flash bang grenades and acted like battle-crazed warriors.
This is the blowback from all that military weaponry flowing to domestic police departments.
This is what happens when you use SWAT teams to carry out routine search warrants.
This is what happens when you adopt red flag gun laws, which Maryland did in 2018, painting anyone who might be in possession of a gun—legal or otherwise—as a threat that must be neutralized.
Therein lies the danger of these red flag laws, specifically, and pre-crime laws such as these generally where the burden of proof is reversed and you are guilty before you are given any chance to prove you are innocent.
Red flag gun laws merely push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.
Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.
All you need to do is end up on a government watch list.
Be warned: once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, a dissident watch list, or a red flag gun watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there.
You will be tracked wherever you go.
You will be flagged as a potential threat and dealt with accordingly.
A man who spent last year believing everything the Government and media said about Covid-19 and Lockdowns, only to find out that none of the things he’d believed are true, has announced his continued belief that they must be acting out of purely altruistic motives. Brian Sprocket, a 38-year-old teaching assistant from Barnsley, spent most of last year staying home, wearing a mask on the few occasions he ventured out, and ensuring he stayed away from all human beings, whom he regarded as walking virus carriers.
But at the beginning of this year, he was forced to think for the first time about what was going on, after his television stopped working. With nothing to watch, Brian decided to look at an email sent to him by a friend last autumn, which he had previously dismissed as a conspiracy theory:
“The email claimed that Asymptomatic transmission was a myth, based almost entirely on one false case in Germany. To my amazement, when I actually did a bit of research for the first time in nearly a year, I realised that this claim, which Governments around the world had used as the pretext for Lockdowns, masks, social distancing, and, well everything, wasn’t actually true.”
From there, nothing could hold Brian back from his new found quest for the truth. Having previously believed that the quarantining of millions of healthy people for months on end was a normal health policy that had been used since time immemorial, he was shocked to find out that this wasn’t the case at all, and that normal practice was to quarantine the sick:
“I must admit, I felt a bit of a numpty when I found that out. I suppose it’s obvious when you think about it, but I suppose at least I wasn’t the only one who fell for it.”
From there, Brian entered a whole new world of truth discovery. For instance, he was amazed to find out that the authorities had been lying about PCR testing, which even its inventor said should never be used as a clinical diagnostic tool. He was also shocked to find out the truth about the lethality of Covid-19, which he had been convinced was roughly the same as Bubonic Plague, which had killed up to 60% of the populations it infected:
“All through 2020,” he said, “I’d been sending angry and sneering Tweets to those claiming Covid-19 was not much different to a bad seasonal flu, calling them names like Covidiots and Covid Deniers, that sort of thing. But back in February, I came across a paper by one of the world’s most cited epidemiologists, Stanford University’s John Ioannidis, who found that the Infection Fatality Rate of Covid-19 is around 0.23% — roughly the same as a bad flu. This was accepted by the World Health Organisation. You’d think finding out that Covid-19 isn’t the Plague would be reassuring, but I must admit I found it all a bit unnerving.”
After going on to discover that the vaccines aren’t really vaccines, but experimental gene therapies that haven’t completed their clinical trials, Brian started to write a stern letter to his MP, telling her he’d never vote for her again if she didn’t start holding the Government to account, oppose Vaccine Passports, and demand our freedoms back. However, just as he was completing it, his TV was returned from the repair shop, and after turning it on to watch the latest Government briefing, he forgot everything he’d found out over the past few weeks, and instead expressed his anger at those who refuse to wear masks, who don’t wish to be “vaccinated”, and who are sounding the alarm about Vaccine Passports:
“I can’t believe those stupid tinfoil hat wearing Covidiots and Vaccine Deniers,” he said from under his triple mask. “Don’t they realise there’s a deadly virus about and the Government is just trying to do its best to keep us safe. All we need to do is keep following the rules, stay apart from each other, keep your distance, keep masking up, make sure we don’t mess it up now, get the vax, follow the science, behave responsibly etc etc.”
The cadence is increasing of jurisdictions introducing, normalizing and expanding laws allowing doctors to help people commit suicide.
Is this purely in the service of relieving unbearable physical or mental suffering? Or do other factors predominate?
I used to believe the former, but my recent re-examination of the issue suggests the latter is more likely.
On March 17, 2021, Bill C-7 came into effect across Canada. The new law significantly increases the proportion of the population eligible to undergo physician-assisted death (PAD). C-7 expands PAD eligibility to, for example, people whose death is not reasonably foreseeable.
On March 18, Spain passed federal legislation that for the first time allows PAD there; it goes into effect in June.
The same thing has happened in New Zealand: the federal ‘End of Life Choice Act’ goes into effect in November.
And on April 8 the French federal parliament debated whether to make euthanasia the law of their land. The majority of the parliamentarians favour legalizing euthanasia. However, the law was not passed because there wasn’t enough time for them to go through the thousands of amendments proposed by legislators who oppose PAD.
(Other terms for the act of doctors helping people commit suicide include physician-assisted suicide, voluntary assisted suicide and medical assistance in dying. And the difference between euthanasia and PAD is the latter requires patients to request it.)
Other countries, such as the UK, are similar to France: active euthanasia is illegal but most residents and physicians approve of it. Therefore in these countries many physicians perform euthanasia without being punished and there is a considerable push to legalize it.
Holland and Belgium were the first countries to decriminalize euthanasia and PAD, bringing their laws into effect in 2002. In Luxembourg a similar assisted-death law came into effect in 2009.
All three countries allow people to undergo PAD if they have a serious medical condition, disability or psychiatric disorder, whether their death is imminent or not.
For the last few years years Holland has been moving towards voting on legalizing PAD for people 75 years of age or older who are ‘tired of life.’ And there has been a steady and very significant increase in the overall number of people undergoing PAD in Holland and Belgium.
PAD currently can also be legally performed in five other countries, either across the whole country or in parts of it: Canada, the US, Australia, Germany and Switzerland.
In the U.S. each state can decide whether PAD is permitted there. So far, eight states plus Washington, D.C. have legalized it. Similarly, in Australia it’s a state issue; so far the state of Victoria has brought into effect a law allowing PAD and on July 1 the state of Western Australia will follow suit.
In Canada PAD was first legalized federally in 2016. Now Bill C-7 expands PAD by, among other measures:
no longer requiring a 10-day ‘reflection’ period between the time a person whose natural death is reasonably foreseeable consents to PAD and when they receive it;
allowing people who have a very serious illness or disability but whose natural death is not imminent to access PAD as long as they meet certain conditions (previously, PAD was only allowed in people whose natural death was reasonably foreseeable);
allowing PAD for people who have previously requested it, been found eligible to receive it and their natural death has become reasonably foreseeable but they’ve lost the capacity to consent; and,
starting in 2023, allowing PAD for people who have a mental illness alone, and no other underlying medical conditions or disabilities.
The government and mass media largely paint all of this asgiving more people more right to choose how and when they end their lives.
Pro-PAD groups and opinion leaders refer to it in positive terms such as ‘right to die’ and ‘death with dignity.’
Other institutions have an overt pro-PAD position; among these is the Hastings Center in the US.
And additional influential groups and organizations — Wikipedia, for example — have a more subtle but definitely detectable pro-PAD slant in the information they provide to the public about PAD.
Most of the individuals and groups that oppose PAD do so on religious grounds.
But there are at least three facts that most people don’t know about physician-assisted death.
One
Expanding PAD is a serious potential threat to people with disabilities, dementia and Alzheimer’s.
That’s because what the vast majority of these people want and need is good care and services – but those services are becoming very hard to access, particularly in this era of Covid.
Most countries’ PAD laws require health-care providers to inform people of available services for relieving their suffering as alternatives to PAD and to offer referrals to professionals who can provide these services. But those laws don’t also require that the services be made accessible to all of these people, via increased government funding.
And there already have been documentedcases of people with disabilities being pressured to undergo PAD.
That’s why many disability advocates oppose expansion of PAD.
Catherine Frazee, a professor at Ryerson University in Toronto and a leading disability advocate, gave powerful testimony to the Canadian parliamentary Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights’s Bill C-7 hearing in November 2020.
She told hearing attendees that the Quebec Superior Court’s 2019 decision allowing disabled Quebec resident Jean Truchon to undergo assisted death even though his death was not reasonably foreseeable – which the Canadian federal government used as a springboard to create Bill C-7 — does not in fact translate into the need to make it easier for disabled people to kill themselves.
Frazee said that, rather, “the deprivations of institutional life that choked out his [Truchon’s] will to live [and resultant request for PAD] were not an inevitable consequence of disability.”
Krista Carr, executive vice-president of Inclusion Canada, has voiced a similar sentiment.
“This bill has got to be stopped, or it will end the life of people. It will end the life of way too many people with disabilities who feel they have no other options,” she’s quoted as saying in a February 8, 2021,Canadian Press article.
In Holland, ever since its PAD law went into effect in 2002, the country has allowed assisted killing of children — in cases where they’re considered to be incurably ill — of as young as 12. And the Dutch government is now considering following Belgium’s lead and lowering that minimum age to as young as one.
This expansion wouldn’t involve a change in federal law in Holland. Instead, it would be done via changes to the ‘Groningen protocol.’ This set of guidelines was created in 2004 for the killing of newborns and infants with very serious illnesses or deformities such as spina bifida.
Three
There is significantcontroversy about allowing assisted suicide for people who have a psychiatric disorder alone and no other conditions.
Currently only Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg permit this, as part of their original assisted-death laws.
Under Bill C-7, Canada will allow it in 2023.
The Canadian Psychiatric Association (CPA) released a position statement last year saying it “did and does not take a position on the legality or morality of MAiD [medical assistance in dying] as this is a decision reflecting current Canadian ethical, cultural and moral views.”
This prompted two former CPA presidents to post an open letter to Canadian psychiatrists highlighting that the CPA did not engage its membership in a consultation process before releasing its position statement.
The two past presidents asked the CPA to “revisit the Statement by temporarily withdrawing it, to allow for a proper engagement process and development of evidence-based recommendations to inform any future Position Statement on MAiD.”
The CPA did not do this.
The American Psychiatric Association released its PAD position statement in 2016. It states, in whole: “The American Psychiatric Association, in concert with the American Medical Association’s position on medical euthanasia, holds that a psychiatrist should not prescribe or administer any intervention to a non-terminally ill person for the purpose of causing death.”
The American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics states, in part, that “Physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks. Instead of engaging in assisted suicide, physicians must aggressively respond to the needs of patients at the end of life.”
It certainly makes one wonder why the public isn’t given all of this information.
Instead, the rush to expand access to PAD around the world in the name of humaneness is holding sway.
After obtaining an MSc in molecular biology from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary, Rosemary Frei became a freelance writer. For the next 22 years she was a medical writer and journalist. She pivoted again in early 2016 to full-time, independent activism and investigative journalism. Her website is RosemaryFrei.ca
I posted Episode 398 of The Corbett Report podcast, “Science Says,” around 10 PM Japanese Standard Time on Friday, April 9th, 2021, and then went to bed. Sometime shortly after midnight, the main Corbett Report channel was removed from YouTube.
And, just like that, 14 years of work—some 1700+ videos, 569,000+ subscribers and 90 million+ video views—was erased from the digital ether. . . . Well, the GooTube portion of that digital ether, anyway.
Given that I’ve been promoting YouTube alternatives since at least 2009, and given that I have made video after video after video after video after video warning my audience that I would be banned from GooTube, and given that I even delivered a presentation last year noting that The Library of Alexandria is on Fire, it’s safe to say that this news did not catch me off guard. Learning about the banning after waking up on Saturday morning, my only thought was, “Well, that took longer than I expected.”
Indeed, it was not surprising in any sense that this was the report that led to GooTube purging my main channel. When you release a video on an account that already has two strikes for information that “contradicts the World Health Organization (WHO) or local health authorities’ medical information about COVID-19” and that video itself contains information calling those very authorities’ pronouncements into question, you better believe the thought that this might be your last YouTube upload crosses your mind when you push that publish button. Heck, the “offending” podcast even centers around an op-ed comparing COVID skeptics to terrorists and calling for the UN to mount a “counteroffensive” against them. Of course this video was going to be censored.
What’s more, this had been a particularly difficult report to post in the first place. After rendering and uploading to GooTube, the GooTube censorship copyright check flagged the 30-second clip of “Bill Nye Saves the World” embedded in my commentary on The Weaponization of Science and refused to post the video. So I had to cut the offending 30 seconds (specifically, the extremely scientific video for Rachel Bloom’s highly educational song, “My Sex Junk,” which can still be enjoyed in the audio version of the podcast), re-render the episode and re-upload it. Then, after that video processed, I performed one quick check before hitting “publish” and noted that the fancy transitions that Corbett Report video editor Broc West had used for this episode (which had worked perfectly fine in the previous two renders) were now suddenly glitching. Banging my head on the keyboard in dismay, I went back into the project, manually changed all of the transitions and rendered and uploaded the entire episode for the third time.
And in the span of those three renders, my initial excitement at the prospect that I would actually get a podcast episode rendered, uploaded and published before 5 PM on a Friday night evaporated. Venting my spleen at Broc over my bad luck, I made the obvious “joke”:
So, as you can see, this turn of events was not unexpected.
In a sense, it’s even more fitting that it was specifically a video about the philosophy of science that ended the channel. Not a documentary about the central banking system. Not an expose of false flag terrorism. Not a hard-hitting report on geopolitics or hidden history. No, a podcast about science that quotes Thomas Kuhn and highlights the growing politicization of science.
I say it’s “fitting” that such a report would be the one to do in the channel not only because I have been exploring this theme over and over in different ways since the very earliest days of The Corbett Report (since at least Episode 006 of the podcast, to be precise), but because in a sense the removal of The Corbett Report’s YouTube channel provides the ironically hilarious answer to a question that I had as a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and naive undergrad over two decades ago.
You see, as I explained at the beginning of The Weaponization of Science video, I began my university career as an aspiring physics major. But after a semester spent in chemistry labs, applied mathematics courses and physics tutorials, I decided one day that I wanted to take my life in a completely different direction. So I dropped all my science courses for the upcoming semester and replaced them with English courses.
As one of the very, very few scientifically inclined students in the entire English department, I found that I was particularly on guard against all the eye-rollingly ignorant ways that those in the humanities attempted to add gravitas to their arguments by shoehorning inaccurate analogies about poorly understood scientific concepts (like “relativity” and “quantum mechanics”) into their lectures and papers. And so it was that I found myself approaching one professor during his office hours after he made a remark about how science was “politically determined.”
“How can science be politically determined?” I demanded of him indignantly. “If I drop this tape dispenser off your desk it’s going to fall at 9.81 m/s2 regardless of who is in political office.”
My professor, for his part, had only to prompt me to consider the inquisition’s investigation of Galileo for me to realize his point. Yes, scientists can be intimidated into proclaiming whatever the authorities—political, religious or otherwise—tell them to proclaim, even if it goes against their experimental results. The Galileo example may have been a particularly blunt one (and may or may not be apocryphal), but it hit the mark.
Fast forward 20+ years and here I am daring to point out how the neo-inquisitionists are purging all criticism of their pseudoscientific pronouncements and . . . poof. Channel gone. Which kind of proves my point, doesn’t it?
Now, as I do not need to tell my regular audience, none of the videos are actually gone. Every single video has been backed up to LBRY. Years worth of videos are also backed up to BitChute, and, to a lesser extent, Minds and Archive.org. Every video since 2011 is downloadable directly from my servers. But if you don’t know that by this point, perhaps you’re not really ready to follow The Corbett Report into the Brave New (post-YouTube) Internet. Newsflash: this is 2021. If you’re still using YouTube to get your news, history and political information then you’ve got bigger problems than just the loss of The Corbett Report.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the “infowar” is not an analogy but a stone cold sober reality, and the fact that The Corbett Report was able to use a major enemy information platform to propagate the truth to the slumbering masses for 14 years is a major victory in and of itself.
So long, GooTube. Thanks for helping me to unlock so many minds. You will not be missed.
They are the stewards
Of the whole universe
Masters by force
Commanders without laws.
[…]
They eat everything
They eat everything
They eat everything
And leave nothing.
José “Zeca” Afonso, “Os Vampiros” (1963)
Fifteen years ago, a good Uruguayan friend said to me, “Tom, we are at the end of an era, not just any historical period, but an era. I don’t know what will come next, but I’m sure that almost all the structures that regulate our world today are no longer valid.”
Although I was well into the process of radically questioning the fantasies pumped out daily in my country about the culminating timelessness of the “liberal” order erected by the United States at the end of World War II, the flat, confident tone of my friend from down under still managed to disturb me.
And it set in motion a very long series of reflections about the enormous blindness that people, even so-called “thinking” people, who live and work at the heart of the world system of economic power and cultural production, often suffer.
It has been stated on more than one occasion that the modern novel, defined among other things by its extraordinary diversity of voices, and the constant dialogue between them, was born with the publication of Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
And within this same critical framework, many have seen its protagonist’s famous shout of “I know who I am” as a statement of principles for the emergence of modern man, a being who, in contrast to his medieval predecessor, placed much greater value on his own perceptions of reality and demonstrated an increased confidence in his own ability to successfully navigate the multiple contingencies of life.
It was not so much that the role played by God in the previous age was excluded from the mental framework of man. It was rather that man appropriated a much larger parcel of the responsibilities and privileges that social pedagogies had said belonged exclusively to God or his “chosen” representatives on earth.
We can say that, in a sense, the modern man or, rather, the small educated class that adhered to the new principles of modernity, began the process that continues to this day of progressively deifying themselves while systematically ignoring and denigrating the accumulated “natural” wisdom of those who could not, or did not want to share the new vision of reality.
The first sustained dissent against this radical change of criteria from within the bourgeois class came from the romantics of central Europe, followed by thinkers such as Nietzsche, Bergson and Ortega who warned, each in his own way, about the very harmful secondary effects of the process, at first sight so laudable, of separating man from his most primary instincts and customs.
But, surprisingly for many, the vigorous resurrection of Western culture (1945-1975) after its two clear attempts at self-immolation (1914-1918 and 1939-1945) invalidated the pessimistic views of these thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Or perhaps not.
As Pasolini tried to convince us in the 1960s, and even more fervently in the early 1970s before his death, in all likelihood, at the hands of the Italian deep state, we should not and cannot place our faith in cultural recovery based on the propagation of consumerism.
This, for a very simple reason: consumerism, with its absolute contempt for the past, is nothing more and nothing less than anti-culture, a force, as noted by his contemporary Debord, that devours everything, including the idea, so essential for the growth and maintenance of modernity, of the willful person disposed to challenge the orthodoxies propagated by the great centers of political and social power.
If there is a master trope in the discourse of consumerism, it is this: “You are defective and we, only we, can repair you.” Listening to this repeatedly in advertising on a day-to-day basis, works, in time, and in the effective absence of any other attractive model of the good life, like the waves that wear down the sharp edges the stones located near the tide line at the beach.
Looking at our covidophobic, or perhaps more accurately, covidophilic world of 2021, it seems clearer and clearer that the long agony of modernity is finally over. Westerners are very tired, so tired that they are not even interested in minimally investigating the very questionable logics and findings of the oracles of the new church of biosafety.
The signs of what Unamuno called “the reason of unreason” are everywhere.
Like the peasants of yesteryear with their garlic necklaces, people now devotedly wear masks that, no matter what the public health authorities and their media lackeys say and repeat, have no clear cut, scientifically proven efficacy against the transmission of the virus.
And they accept as unquestionably legitimate methods for the containment of the virus freedom-robbing lockdowns that, when studied rigorously in comparative framework, show no clear sign of having positively affected infection curves or death rates in the places where they have been employed
In effect, consumerism has done what none of the reactionary movements of the past or the many self-inflicted wounds of the Enlightenment were able to do: empty the modern being of his desire to manage life along rational lines and in the expectation of ever greater freedoms. After sixty years of being bombarded by images designed to make us constantly doubt the often miraculous self-sufficiency of our bodies and our individual powers of discernment, we have surrendered to the law of “experts” paid by, and loyal to, big business.
Returning to Cervantes, it could be said that we no longer “know who we are” and it seems that, for most people, this loss of will and prerogative is not the slight bit problematic.
Why worry? Why look at the previously essential question of how to manage both risk and our own libidinal forces, they say, when we have well-credentialed sages, working hand-in-glove with power who, like the princes of the church in days past, clearly know how so much more about our defective lives than do we ourselves.
Thomas S. Harrington is an essayist, photographer and Professor of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford (USA). In addition to his academic work, he is a frequent commentator on politics and culture in the US press and a number of international media outlets, especially the Catalan-language press. You can find much of his public writing, photography and press interviews on his website. A selection of his academic writings can be found at Academia.edu
What is a zero-carbon future? What does it look like? To imagine, turn off your heater. No airports. No shipping. No animals. Perfect surveillance state. In this Ice Age Farmer special report, Christian breaks The “Absolute Zero” plan and how governments are actively taking drastic steps every day to meet these dystopian goals for Travel, Transport, Energy, Manufacturing, Recycling, and Food. We must understand the reality underneath their flowery philanthropic language: Absolute Slavery.
This seems crazy, but as this rolls out, you will begin to see more and more influencers that you may want to unfollow and have nothing to do with anymore. Over the past year (and much longer for many people), people all around the world have realized that the celebrities they idolize… the doctors, nurses and “medical professionals” that they thought were honest and cared about their health… the politicians who they thought had the public’s best interest at heart… ARE LYING TO THEM!
The Canadian Government has announced they will pay ‘influencers’ to promote Covid vaccines.
We really are separating the wheat from the chaff.
(Entrepreneurs might want to consider creating a better alternative to ANY of the companies mentioned in that above article. MILLIONS of Patriots would likely support it, if they knew about it. Don’t make excuses. Make things better)
We now know more than ever how many politicians, news anchors, media outlets and on and on and on are actually corrupt.
So use this as an opportunity to become more aware of how “their” system of control works. Knowing how it works is a big part of winning!
We can’t change something if we’re not aware of it.
The mouthpieces of the scientific establishment have identified the latest global security threat: antiscience. So what does that mean, exactly? Whatever they want it to mean, of course! This week on The Corbett Report podcast, James explores the game of Science Says that the self-appointed experts are playing with the public and outlines how that game is about to get a whole lot darker.
“Like a magnetic field that pulls iron filings into alignment, a powerful cultural belief is aligning multiple sources of scientific bias in the same direction.” – policy scientist Daniel Sarewitz
Statistician Regina Nuzzo summarizes the problem:
“This is the big problem in science that no one is talking about: even an honest person is a master of self-deception. In today’s environment, our talent for jumping to conclusions makes it all too easy to find false patterns in randomness, to ignore alternative explanations for a result or to accept ‘reasonable’ outcomes without question — that is, to ceaselessly lead ourselves astray without realizing it.”
Psychologists Richard Simmons et al. find that researcher bias can have a profound influence on the outcome of a study. Such ‘researcher degrees of freedom’ include choices about which variables to include, which data to include, which comparisons to make, and which analysis methods to use. Each of these choices may be reasonable, but when added together they allow for researchers to extract statistical significance or other meaningful information out of almost any data set. Researchers making necessary choices about data collection and analysis believe that they are making the correct, or at least reasonable, choices. But their bias will influence those choices in ways that researchers may not be aware of. Further, researchers may simply be using the techniques that work – meaning they give the results the researcher wants.
The objective of scientific research is to find out what is really true, not just verify our biases. If a community of scientists has a diversity of perspectives and different biases, then the checks and balances in the scientific process including peer review will eventually counter the biases of individuals. Sometimes this is true—but often this does not happen quickly or smoothly. Not only can poor data and wrong ideas survive, but good ideas can be suppressed.
However, when biases caused by motivated reasoning and career pressures become entrenched in the institutions that support science – the professional societies, scientific journals, universities and funding agencies – then that subfield of science may be led astray for decades.
Biases caused by a consensus building process
Consensus is viewed as a proxy for truth in many discussions of science. A consensus formed by the independent and free deliberations of many is a strong indicator of truth. However, a consensus can only be trusted to the extent that individuals are free to disagree with it.
A scientific argument can evolve prematurely into a ruling theory if cultural forces are sufficiently strong and aligned in the same direction. Premature theories enforced by an explicit consensus building process harm scientific progress because of the questions that don’t get asked and the investigations that aren’t undertaken. Nuzzio (2015) refers to this as ‘hypothesis myopia.’
If the objective of scientific research is to obtain truth and avoid error, how might a consensus seeking process introduce bias into the science and increase the chances for error?
‘Confirmation bias’ is a well-known psychological principle that connotes the seeking or interpretation of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or an existing hypothesis. Confirmation bias usually refers to unwitting selectivity in the acquisition and interpretation of evidence.
Philosopher Thomas Kelly (2005) provides the following insight into confirmation bias. As more and more peers weigh in on a given issue, the proportion of the total evidence which consists of higher order psychological evidence of what other people believe increases, and the proportion of the total evidence which consists of first order evidence decreases. Kelly concludes that over time, this invisible hand process tends to bestow a certain competitive advantage to our prior beliefs with respect to confirmation and disconfirmation.
Allen et al. (2020) demonstrate how dependence, pressure, and polarization can force a consensus, making reliance on consensus as an indicator of truth unreliable. As a result, a consensus can only be trusted to the extent that individuals are free to disagree with it, without repression or reprisal. Similarly, when strong incentives favor affirmation of a position, a consensus affirming it becomes almost inevitable, and therefore all but meaningless.
Communication theorist Jean Goodwin argues that once the consensus claim was made, scientists involved in the ongoing IPCC process had reasons not just to consider the scientific evidence, but also to consider the possible effect of their statements on their ability to defend the consensus claim.
The IPCC’s consensus-building process arguably promotes groupthink. ‘Groupthink’ is a pattern of thought characterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values. Janis (1972) describes eight symptoms of groupthink:
illusion of invulnerability
collective rationalization
belief in inherent morality
stereotyped views of out-groups
direct pressure on dissenters
self-censorship
illusion of unanimity
self-appointed mind guards
Many defenders of the IPCC consensus − both scientists and consensus entrepreneurs − show many if not all of these symptoms.
Thomas Gold (1989) discussed the dangers that ‘herd behavior’ poses for scientists, potentially leading to an inertia-driven persistence of false consensus opinion within the sciences. While herd instinct has value in sociological behavior, it has been a disaster in science − in science what we generally want is diversity. When people pursue the same avenue all together, they tend to shut out other avenues, and they are not always on the right ones.
It is not just the herd instinct in the individuals that is of concern. If support from peers and moral and financial consequences are at stake, then staying with the herd is the successful policy for the individual; however, it is not the successful policy for the pursuit of science. Mental herd behavior, even if it does not actually put a clamp upon free thinking, insidiously applies pressure to follow the fashion. The institutions that support science − financial support, the journals, the judgment of referees, the invitations to conferences, professional recognition − are all influenced by herd behavior.
Economist William Butos (2015) characterizes the IPCC as a ‘Big Player’ in science in that it possesses all of the attributes characteristic of Big Players in markets: bigness in terms of influence, insensitivity to the usual constraints, and discretion in its ability to promote a favored direction of research. This characterization of the IPCC as ‘Big Player’ is similar to economist Richard Tol’s characterization of the IPCC as a knowledge monopoly. The IPCC’s influence in climate science is pervasive, allowing it to largely ignore the usual scientific constraints on the acceptance of hypotheses. Professional success in climate science has become more tied to the acceptance of the IPCC’s pronouncements than with the exploration of contrary possibilities.
The existence of the IPCC as a ‘big player’ and a ‘knowledge monopoly’ on climate change can lead to premature canonization of IPCC conclusions. Premature canonization refers to widespread scientific belief in a false or incomplete conclusion, which leads to suppression masquerading as rejection. Suppression occurs when the fear of social sanctions prevents ideas from being explored or empirical findings from being presented in scientific or public forums. In science, rejection occurs when an idea has been explored and the evidence has been found wanting. A classic, relatively recent case of premature canonization involves the scientific identification of causes of ulcers.
So what are the implications of these concerns for the IPCC’s consensus on human-caused climate change? Cognitive biases in the context of an institutionalized consensus building process have arguably resulted in the consensus becoming increasingly confirmed, and even canonized, in a self-reinforcing way. An extended group of scientists derive their confidence in the consensus in a second-hand manner from the institutional authority of the IPCC and the emphatic nature in which the consensus is portrayed. This ‘invisible hand’ marginalizes skeptical perspectives. Overconfident assertions by the ‘Big Player’ take away the motivation for scientists to challenge the consensus, particularly when they can expect to be called a ‘denier’ for their efforts and see their chances diminish for professional recognition and research funding.
The consensus building process acts to amplify personal biases, and marginalizes disagreement from either a majority opinion or the opinion of the loudest or most motivated person in the room. One can only speculate on the magnitude and importance of the biases introduced into climate science by the IPCC’s consensus seeking process.
Going to the grocery store in Massachusetts in 2020 guaranteed you would breathe heaps of sanitizer. A full-time employee scrubbed down shopping carts between customers. Conveyor belts at the checkout counter were blasted and wiped between every sale. Glass surfaces were sprayed as often as possible. The plastic keypads on credit machines were not only covered in plastic – why putting plastic on plastic stopped Covid was never clear – but also sprayed between uses.
Employees would carefully watch your hands to see what you touched, and as you exited the space would cover the area with cleaning spray.
It was the same at offices and schools. If a single person turned in a positive PCR test, the entire place had to be evacuated for a 48-hour fumigation. Everything had to be wiped, sprayed, and scrubbed, to get rid of the Covid that surely must be present in the bad place. The ritualistic cleaning took on a religious element, as if the temple must be purified of the devil before God could or would come back.
All of this stemmed from the belief that the germ lived on surfaces and in spaces, which in turn stemmed from a primitive intuition. You can’t see the virus so it really could be anywhere. The human imagination took over the rest.
I was in Hudson, New York, at a fancy breakfast house that had imposed random Covid protocols. It was cold outside but they wouldn’t let me sit inside, even though there were no government restrictions on doing so. I asked that masked-up twenty-something why. She said “Covid.”
“Do you really believe that there’s Covid inside that room?”
“Yes.”
Subway cars were cleaned daily. Facebook routinely shut its offices for a full scrub. Mail was left to disinfect for days before being opened. Things went crazy: playgrounds removed nets from basketball hoops for fear that they carried Covid.
During the whole pathetic episode of last year, people turned wildly against physical things. No sharing of pencils at the schools that would open. No salt and pepper shakers at tables because surely that’s where Covid lives. No more physical menus. They were replaced by QR codes. Your phone probably has Covid too but at least only you touched it.
“Touchless”’ became the new goal. All physical things became the untouchables, again reminiscent of ancient religions that considered the physical world to be a force of darkness while the spiritual/digital world points to the light. The followers of the Prophet Mani would be pleased.
The demonization of surfaces and rooms stemmed not just from active imaginations; it was also recommended and even mandated by the CDC. It offered a huge page of instructions on the need constantly to fear, scrub, and fumigate.
On April 5, however, the CDC page was replaced by a much-simplified set of instructions, which includes now this discreet note: “In most situations, the risk of infection from touching a surface is low.” Oh is that so?
The link goes to the following:
Quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) studies have been conducted to understand and characterize the relative risk of SARS-CoV-2 fomite transmission and evaluate the need for and effectiveness of prevention measures to reduce risk. Findings of these studies suggest that the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection via the fomite transmission route is low, and generally less than 1 in 10,000, which means that each contact with a contaminated surface has less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of causing an infection.
Whoops.
So much for the many billions spent on cleaning products, the employees and the time, and hysteria and frenzy, the rise of touchlessness, and gloves, the dousing of the whole world. The science apparently changed. Still it will be years before people get the news and act on it. Once the myths of surface transmission of a respiratory virus are unleashed, it will be hard to go back to normal.
Fortunately the New York Times did some accurate reporting on the CDC update, quoting all kinds of experts who claim to have known this all along.
“Finally,” said Linsey Marr, an expert on airborne viruses at Virginia Tech. “We’ve known this for a long time and yet people are still focusing so much on surface cleaning.” She added, “There’s really no evidence that anyone has ever gotten Covid-19 by touching a contaminated surface.”
Still, I’m willing to bet that if right now I headed to a WalMart or some other large chain store, there will be several employees dedicated to disinfecting everything they can, and there will be customers there who demand it to be so.
How many years will it take before people can come to terms with the embarrassing and scandalous reality that much of what posed as Science last year was made up on the fly and turns out to be wholly false?
As the China-Russian-Iran alliance continues to gain new momentum spreading win-win cooperation and development across Asia, Africa and the World, the dying unipolar system run by detached militarists, financiers and technocrats is doubling down on its weird mix of 1) a “scorched earth” offensive threat to “dissuade” China and Russia from continuing on their current trajectory and 2) a “positive” green game on which nations are invited to tie their destinies as an alternative to China’s BRI.
Everyone reading this should already be aware of the “scorched earth” Full Spectrum dominance policy targeting Russia and China.
However, what is less appreciated even among the most geopolitically savvy anti-imperialists today is what sort of “positive” green game is being deployed to subvert the $3 trillion Belt and Road Initiative which has already won over 136 participating nations and which geopolicians understand to be a mortal threat to their desired world order.
A U.S.-Led Alternative to the BRI
According to Biden’s own remarks during his March 26 call to Boris Johnson, the USA must create “an infrastructure plan to rival the Belt and Road Initiative.”
This agenda was amplified by John Kerry’s foray to India, Bangladesh and the UAE from April 1-11 where the Presidential Climate Envoy has been deployed to set the stage for the April 22-23 International Leaders Summit on Climate to be hosted by Joe Biden.
Now, in principle, a U.S.-version of the BRI is not intrinsically a bad idea.
However, this idea could only function in the real world IF the USA were to give up its unipolar imperial ambitions and return to the anti-imperial constitutional traditions which once animated its greatest leaders like Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, FDR and JFK. Under influence of the technocrats managing the current Biden presidency in post-color revolution USA, that option is about as far from reality as one can imagine.
On the other hand, were the USA to stick with the Great Reset Agenda which is attempting to undo the industrial revolution under the cover of “reducing global emissions” to zero by 2050 as the Paris Accords proclaim, then any idea of a viable U.S.-led BRI doppelganger is pre-doomed to fail by its own internal self-contradictions.
What is the main self-contradiction of this “development agenda”?
The nations of the earth need to develop. They have objectively verifiable and measurable constraints to their ability to support their populations based on limits to agriculture, industry, energy, education and transportation. Decades of unchallenged Anglo-American dominance has only exacerbated these problems to the acute degrees we find today.
That’s why they are embracing China’s Belt and Road so enthusiastically.
Unlike the World Bank and IMF practices over the past 70 years, China is extending financing to all participating nations based on conditionality-free, low interest practices that create long term, genuine development, and full spectrum economies in every nation it touches. This is how China has met its goals of wiping out extreme poverty at home in a relative blink of an eye.
Despite the countless billions of dollars of loans extended to the poorest nations of the world since the earliest days of the Cold War, poverty, war, insecurity, terrorism and debt slavery have become more rampant today than ever before. The recent March 23 Hunger Hotspots Report issued by the World Food Program and FAO outlined hundreds of millions of people suffering acute food insecurity around the world with Syria, the Congo, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Venezuela, Haiti and South Sudan toping the list. U.S.-led imperial intrigue, financial loans, speculative warfare and humanitarian “aid” to all of these countries should not be seen as coincidental to their currently dismal situation.
China, on the other hand, is ensuring that these nations acquire genuine development, great megaprojects, interconnectivity via roads, ports and rail as well as local industrial production and engineering expertise via trade schools and on-the-ground training under Chinese experts. Investments into all forms of energy required to build megaprojects is on the table without any green conditionalities as we find being imposed by western technocrats.
Kerry’s Green Delusion Exposed in India
Compare this with John Kerry’s demands that India and Bangladesh embrace de-carbonization strategies in the build up to the April 22-23 climate conference and the latter COP26 summit in December. The delusional foundations of Kerry’s thinking were eloquently exposed by Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, a leading member of Modi’s Council on Climate Change who told the Hindustan Ties on March 30:
“First, it would require us to immediately scrap all existing coal-based power plants and factories, or alternatively, retrofit them with carbon-capture and storage technology. This would entail astronomical costs at a time when the economy is already reeling from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Dasgupta called out the hypocrisy and imperial agenda’s underlying this apparently altruistic green agenda saying:
“It would necessitate an immediate switch-over to imported, existing clean energy technologies at a huge cost, denying our own industry the time required for indigenization or development of affordable indigenous technologies. Let us not forget that the U.S. lodged a complaint against us at the WTO when we took some modest measures to promote domestic manufacture of solar cells and modules… we need to examine the trade-related implications of surrendering our principled position on ‘common and differentiated responsibilities.’ The European Union is set to impose levies on carbon-intensive imports, even from developing countries. It would be naive to think that the countries calling on India to adopt a 2050 net-zero target are motivated purely by altruistic concerns unrelated to commercial interests.”
OSOWOG Revived
Despite the fact that a “Green BRI doppelganger” has been on the books since 2018 when the OSOWOG Plan was unveiled as a World Bank-financed/British Commonwealth-run initiative, the plan was generally acknowledged to be an unworkable green boondoggle and fell out of interest for quite some time. However, a flurry of renewed media propaganda over the past few months has attempted to drive this green zombie back into the zeitgeist as witnessed by Forbes’ recent promotional coverage of the plan. The authors of the Forbes fluff piece stated:
“The idea behind OSOWOG is that the sun never sets. An inter-continental grid can be instrumental in harnessing the sun’s energy (and all other forms of renewable energy) by optimally leveraging the differences in time zones, seasons, resources, and prices between countries and regions. This is particularly helpful for decarbonising countries which have limited avenues of harnessing renewable energy and heavily reliant on fossil fuels.”
The plan’s outline is broken up into three phases which is somewhat reminiscent of the famous “underpants gnome plot” from South Park.
The World Bank-connected authors describe how in phase one, solar panels will be spread across South Asia, Southwest Asia and the Middle East with India serving as the driving force. Completely skipping over how phase one could realistically happen, the technicians describe phase two which sees North Africa swiftly covered in solar panels (see: Desertec part deux) and as if by magic, both regions would be connected via green grids. In the final third phase, this new green energy hub cutting across the Eurasian Heartland from Africa through Asia, would then be extended to the entire globe.
When all of this is somehow finished by 2050, the world as a whole would be forever relieved of its dependence on dirty energy sources like oil, natural gas and nuclear as we collectively are steered into a new age of clean zero-growth, sustainable mediocrity under a technocratic elite managing the levers of consumption and production under a post-nation state world order.
Three basic questions might arise at this point:
1) How would such large-scale green megaprojects be funded by western nations who are sitting on top of a multi-quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble of speculative capital ready to blow out into a hyperinflationary collapse that will make Weimar 1923 look like a cake walk?
Answer: It can’t.
2) Even if green solar grids could be constructed across the heartland cutting across (and disrupting) the East-West New Silk Road, how could such forms of green energy- long known for its unreliability, high costs and low-quality energy output be capable of meeting the needs of the people of the world wracked by generations of poverty and underdevelopment?
Answer: It can’t.
3) So why would any nation go along with this sort of plan when viable alternatives like the Belt and Road Initiative and broader Multipolar Alliance already exist with olive branches open to all?
Answer: If they are not suicidal, then they won’t.
This last answer obviously creates a bit of an uncomfortable ambiguity since the thesis that “nations are not suicidal” is rather indefensible at this moment in time.
Suicidal Ideation as a Bad Foreign Policy Paradigm
Based upon their words and actions, any onlooker endowed with a basic IQ level would have to come to the conclusion that many nations have demonstrated a high degree of suicidal behavior in recent years. From pumping trillions of dollars into zombie, to shutting down entire economies in response to viruses with relatively low fatality rates, to encircling Russia and China with belligerent military postures, to pouring flames onto the fires of radical jihadi terrorist and neo-Nazi groups, to shutting down the foundations of industrial energy needs requisite to support existing population levels, to burning food for bioethanol- there is very little western governments have done in recent years which gives any strong indication that the desire to survive is strong.
The fact that many of those suicidal nations are concentrated in the Trans-Atlantic City of London-dominated zone of influence and have seen their nationalist leaders fall under assassins bullets many decades ago in order for supranational “deep state” operations to infuse themselves into positions of control should be kept firmly in mind. This fact helps remind us that we are not dealing with conventional “sovereign nation states” as some commentators make the foolish habit of doing, but rather we are dealing with a supranational financier oligarchy utilizing its influence across bureaucratic, media, military industrial, academic, and corporate lines of control.
Whether or not India, or any other nation among NATO (and newly emerging Pacific NATO Quad) has the moral fitness to survive will depend on how fast they realize that their genuine interests are not located in green grids or military confrontation with Russia and China but rather in dropping zero sum thinking in order to work with the Multipolar Alliance as collaborators.
Almost three years ago science entered a new dark age.
Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, seems to agree. He has been compiling a list of the examples of anti-science we have unfortunately become used to.
I have listed his thoughts so far but the list is continually expanding... continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Aletho News
Aletho News 