BY MORGAN BEGG | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | SEPTEMBER 22, 2022
The danger in the post-lockdown era is that in our rush to move on we forget the hard lessons that have been learned about this catastrophic public policy failure.
On the basis of alarmist modelling, often commissioned by governments and amplified by sensationalist media, panicked politicians discarded all basic ideas about proportionality and the rule of law to criminalise everyday life and exert unprecedented controls over the citizenry.
From the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, all Australian governments adopted the attitude that any public health mitigation measure was on the table, and little to no consideration was given to the costs of the measures that were adopted.
This is the subject of new research published by the Institute of Public Affairs, which for the first time in Australia calculates many of the costs of the nation’s Covid zealotry up to June 2022. In the report, Hard Lessons: Reckoning the Humanitarian, Economic, and Social Costs of Zero-Covid, we find that the total economic and fiscal cost of the Australian COVID-19 response was no less than A$938.4 billion (£550.6 billion) to June 2022. This report identifies:
The research also calculates how much children suffered in terms of schooling. Despite being the safest cohort in society when it comes to COVID-19, children were routinely sent home to learn remotely or not learn at all. We estimate children in the state of Victoria would have lost about 12 weeks of reading skills and 17 weeks of numeracy skills, something which for many will never be recovered.
Even on the most basic metric, lockdowns failed. In terms of the number of years of life, the costs of joblessness because of the initial nationwide lockdowns in March and April 2020 were about 31 times more costly than the maximum possible years of life saved by lockdowns throughout 2020 and 2021.
Even in the state of Victoria, whose Labor Government enthusiastically established a world-renowned Covid police state, politicians are no longer touting their pandemic response in the lead up to the state election in November.
Likewise, the former federal Liberal/Nationals Coalition Government, which was voted out of office earlier this year, rarely boasted of its Covid response.
Governments of the Covid era appear to have accepted the failure of the Covid-elimination approach, but rather than confront the reality of this failure are just pretending that it never happened.
This is not about living in the past, because the reality is we are still bearing the costs now. In terms of the resulting mental health crisis, lost learning, shuttered businesses, Government debt and inflation, we are not likely to know the full costs of the Covid response for many years to come.
Our future wellbeing as a society also demands that we remember the hard lessons of the Covid response.
We will need to deal with pandemics in the future, and it is critical to know what went wrong, and how these failures came to be.
Australians were subject to the harshest restrictions on their way of life in their history, and we should be demanding not that it should be forgotten, but that it should be remembered so that it doesn’t happen again.
Morgan Begg is the Director of the Legal Rights Program at the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne, Australia.
The damage that lockdowns would cause was far too well known, uneven, and catastrophic to assume their chief instigators must have had good intentions.
By Michael P Senger | The New Normal | September 20, 2022
In the United States, some 2,000,000 people—over 1% of adult men—currently reside in prisons and jails. In America’s poorest cities, crime and law enforcement are intertwined with life to such a degree that many children grow up more familiar with the justice system than the education system. For kids who grow up in these circumstances, getting through school while staying out of jail is a feat worth celebrating.
Some of this is, of course, necessary to maintain a peaceful society in a country as open and unequal as the United States. But the American political-prison-industrial complex is also riddled with perverse incentives. As Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch put it: “We live in a world in which everything has been criminalized. And some professors have even opined that there’s not an American alive who hasn’t committed a felony under some state law.” We’ve even developed an Orwellian lexicon for this system; the term “crime of moral turpitude” is a tacit admission that America’s statutes are riddled with crimes that do not actually involve “moral turpitude”—it’s puzzling why these should be considered crimes at all.
Worse yet, an estimated 5% of convicts are actually innocent. That means there are currently some 100,000 Americans in prisons and jails who didn’t even commit the crimes for which they were charged. The sad truth is that just living in one of America’s poorest neighborhoods comes with some risk of incarceration; the more people around who are convicted, the greater the odds of becoming an innocent convict oneself. Juries do their best, but they’re beset by the usual human biases. Judges know all too well that verdicts often come down to such irrelevant factors as the defendant’s charisma, physical attractiveness, or even what the jury had for breakfast that morning.
Mass incarceration is one sad byproduct of inequality and community deterioration in the 21st century. But an even worse byproduct of that inequality is an entire caste of western elites who’ve begun to manipulate the system to exempt themselves and their supporters from the rule of law to a degree not seen since the rise of the fascist regimes of the 1930s. And in no instance has this been made more clear than in the promulgation of Covid lockdowns into policy in early 2020.
Lockdowns, or the shutting of businesses and community spaces with the force of law, were unprecedented in the western world prior to Xi Jinping’s lockdown of Wuhan and weren’t part of any democratic country’s pandemic plan; rather, these pandemic plans suggested only voluntary social distancing measures. While lockdowns bore some facial resemblance to the voluntary social distancing measures contemplated in pandemic plans, this similarity was no coincidence, as the concept of “social distancing” in its origin was lifted by the US CDC straight from the Chinese Communist Party policy of “lockdown” as imposed during SARS in 2003. Further, some leading federal officials have disclosed that at the time they recommended temporary social distancing measures for Covid, they did so with the intent that state governors would enforce them as indefinite forced lockdowns.
As former UN Assistant Secretary-General Ramesh Thakur has documented in scrupulous detail, the harms that lockdowns would cause were all well-known and reported at the time they were first adopted as policy in early 2020. These included accurate estimates of mass deaths due to delayed medical operations, a mental health crisis, drug overdoses, an economic recession, global poverty, hunger, and starvation.
Yet regardless, for reasons we’re still only beginning to understand, some key scientists, health officials, national security officials, media entities, international organizations, billionaires and influencers advocated the broad imposition of these unprecedented, devastating policies from the earliest possible date, ostensibly to stop or slow the coronavirus as the CCP claims to have done in Wuhan, while censoring any contrary opinions, spinning a false illusion of consensus amongst an unknowing public. A report later revealed that military leaders saw this as a unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques on the public, shaping and “exploiting” information to bolster government messages about the virus. Dissenting scientists were silenced. Psyops teams deployed fear campaigns on their own people in a scorched-earth campaign to drive consent for lockdowns.
These early advocates of lockdowns inverted the definitions of key public health principles in sophisticated, Orwellian fashion. While the lockdowns they advocated were deliberately intended to overturn existing public health practices, they instructed the public to “follow the science,” leading the public to believe that their policies were grounded in established scientific practice. They used the rhetoric of equity and vulnerability to advocate policies that disproportionately harmed the most vulnerable and increased existing economic divides. They then retroactively cited the broad public support for lockdowns that had been sown by their own propaganda as justification for their propaganda in support of those lockdowns.
Ultimately, these lockdowns failed to meaningfully slow the spread of the coronavirus and killed tens of thousands of young people in every country in which they were tried. We now know the virus had already begun spreading undetected all over the world by fall 2019 at the latest and had an infection fatality rate under 0.2%.
However, the lockdowns caused the public to believe that the virus was hundreds of times deadlier than it really was. Simultaneously, the World Health Organization issued global PCR testing guidance—using tests later confirmed by the New York Times to have a false positive rate over 85%—pursuant to which millions of cases were soon discovered in every country. Additionally, the WHO issued new guidance on the use of mechanical ventilators to member nations; over 97% of those over age 65 who received mechanical ventilation in accordance with this guidance were killed.
Terrified by this surge of deaths and the psychological terror campaigns deployed by governments on their own people, populations across the western world proceeded to impose an ever-darker swathe of illiberal mandates including forced masking and digital vaccine passes for everyday activities. Young children, who were at virtually no risk from the virus, lost years of primary education in the worst education crisis since the end of the Second World War. An indefinite state of legal emergency was imposed which continues to this day. The global fight for human rights and the end of poverty was set back decades.
Over $3 trillion in wealth was transferred from the world’s poorest to a tiny number of billionaires and their supporters, predominantly in China and in the tech and pharmaceutical industries. Several key early lockdown proponents indicated that they saw Covid as an opportunity to “entrench a new idea of the left … reconstructing a cultural hegemony on a new basis.” Authoritarian regimes grew more autocratic, and democratic governments took on authoritarian characteristics.
Worst of all, a norm was grafted onto western democracy that the fundamental rights to movement, work, association, bodily autonomy, and free expression, for which our forebears fought so tirelessly, can be suddenly and indefinitely suspended, without precedent, analysis, or logic, based on nothing but vague promises that doing so will “save lives” — rendering them all but moot.
Meanwhile, the lockdowns and mandates led to the deaths of over 170,000 Americans and proportionate numbers in countries that imposed them across the western world. By 2021, lockdowns had killed over 228,000 children in South Asia. Studies of excess deaths indicate that lockdowns led to several million deaths in India and proportionate numbers in other developing nations.
A million here, a million there, pretty soon you’re talking real atrocities.
These numbers do not even begin to count the total damage that will ultimately ensue due to the economic devastation of lockdowns, which we will continue to witness for many years to come. Many early lockdown proponents may never be among the 2,000,000 Americans currently residing in jails and prisons, but we can be sure that thousands more would-be innocent children will one day be added to the prison rolls as a result of the economic destruction their policies unleashed.
Ladies and gentlemen, this case ultimately comes down to whether, unlike the other 2,000,000 Americans currently in state custody, we can be sure that by virtue of their socioeconomic position and the panic over a virus which panic they deliberately stoked with their own policies, this handful of key early lockdown proponents acted in good faith when they convinced the world to adopt these unprecedented, catastrophic policies based on the belief that China eliminated the virus from an entire country by shutting down one city for two months—so sure that the question demands no further inquiry. I leave that for you to decide.
Press TV – September 20, 2022
Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi says Western powers have impeded the growth and progress of other countries through their culture of domination and by exploiting international entities to their own benefit.
President Raeisi made the remarks on Monday on the closing day of the three-day Transforming Education Summit at UN Headquarters in New York.
“Unfortunately, the culture of hegemony has defined [West’s] interests in holding back other countries,” he said. “They have impeded other countries’ growth and progress by creating an unfair world order, abusing international organizations, and drawing up schemes to impose their own cultural and intellectual views.”
“Cultural domination and confinement of knowledge are the worst kinds of oppression and injustice,” he added.
Raeisi also urged international entities to respect countries’ cultural and educational sovereignty, noting that it is impossible to transform the education system without taking into account values such as family, equality, and spirituality.
“International organizations are expected to respect countries’ educational and cultural sovereignty and protect them against cultural invasion,” he said.
“The history of Iran’s civilization began with science and knowledge; the Islamic culture elevated it and established its pillars on heavenly reflections,” he said.
Raeisi added that Islam invites humanity to acquire knowledge with the aim of achieving equality, spreading spirituality, and bringing prosperity and development.
“Making progress is a matter of significance for almost all countries, and while governments have implemented international recommendations in this regard, serious challenges have been imposed on national and indigenous cultures simultaneously,” he said.
A development that lacks spirituality and morality won’t last long and will result in societal collapse, the president argued.
Moral values such as respecting the family, protecting the environment, establishing equality, denouncing violence and extremism, promoting internet safety, and encouraging healthy online habits must be among the priorities for transforming education, he said.
The president also took a swipe at the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, criticizing its approaches as “one-dimensional” and “secular,” and saying that the Islamic Republic has drawn up its own educational agenda based on Iranian-Islamic principles.
Iran’s newly set-up educational system is now shifting from rote learning to a system relying on research, creativity, skill-training, and commitments to cultural and religious values, he concluded.
Raeisi left Tehran for New York on Monday morning to take part in the UN General Assembly.
The Transforming Education Summit was convened in response to a global crisis in education. The crisis, which is often slow and unseen, is said to have a devastating impact on the future of children and youth worldwide.
“Joint Base Cape Cod” contaminated groundwater plumes
By Richard Hugus | September 18, 2022
As reported by national news in the US, on September 16, 2022, 50 illegal immigrants from Venezuela were flown from Florida to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Officials on the island said they did not have the resources to take care of the immigrants, so they were transported by the Massachusetts National Guard to a military base on Cape Cod. The immigrants were tolerated on Martha’s Vineyard for exactly two days.
The military base they were taken to, with the purposely non-descriptive name, “Joint Base Cape Cod,” is about 30 miles north of the church in Edgartown where the immigrants stayed. The base was formerly known as the Massachusetts Military Reservation, or Otis/Camp Edwards. The base is notorious for being a dump site for the federal government, so it probably seemed to the authorities a logical place to get rid of the immigrants. The 22,000 acre base was designated a Superfund site in 1989 due to massive amounts of fuels and solvents dumped at Otis Air Base into the sandy soil above Upper Cape Cod’s sole-source aquifer. As more and more contaminated groundwater was being discovered on the Air Force side, yet more was discovered from the past dumping of propellants and explosives by the Army at Camp Edwards. At one site on the base in the 1960s, the Air Force dumped up to 6 million gallons of aviation fuel on the ground just to test aircraft emergency release valves. Enough fuel from here and elsewhere got into water supplies in nearby Forestdale to the point that tap water at a kitchen sink could be lit on fire. Meanwhile, the Army was accustomed for years to firing Howitzer and mortar rounds into the base “impact area” whose explosions would shake windows in residential areas all over the Upper Cape. Nearby residents also lived with the frequent sound of machine gun fire from one of many gun ranges. Indeed, the Army National Guard has lately insisted it needs 200 acres of forest clearcut for a new machine gun range, with 5,000 acres reserved for strays and overshoots. For those feigning such concern, this was some place to send a group of helpless refugees. The public has no access to and very little knowledge of this huge area of sunny Cape Cod.
Martha’s Vineyard has had its own episode of Pentagon abuse. A small island called Nomans, just south of the Vineyard, was used as an aerial bombing range for many years, leaving the land littered with unexploded ordnance and contaminated soil. Rather than remediate, the US Navy conveniently handed the land over the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife who simply called it a conservation area, posted No Trespassing signs, and called it a day. The small island, a beautiful gem once inhabited by Wampanoag Indians and early settlers, it is now just a sacrifice zone, like a closed landfill. No one is allowed to set foot on it.
Both Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard have a service and tourist economy. Most people who live and work there are not wealthy, but have jobs serving the wealthy in one way or another. They build and repair the homes of the rich, they entertain them, run the restaurants, cook the food, clean the houses, and maintain their boats and cars. Low wage workers and immigrant labor are brought in every year for the summer season as there is evidently not enough money to pay local workers asking for a decent wage. Nor can working people afford houses on local wages. It’s a rentier economy. Poverty is real on both Martha’s Vineyard and the Cape because so many among the rich know very well how to spend as little of their money as possible for the services they receive. While working people there might not be happy about immigrant labor lowering wages and taking jobs, they would not have called the National Guard to come in and remove the strangers from Venezuela. And of course they would not have had the power to do so even if they wanted to. That call had to have come from new world order hopeful Governor Charlie Baker, on orders from Vineyard residents like Barack Obama who don’t want to see the results of the unrestricted immigration that they initiated actually becoming visible in their own neighborhoods. This is why the 50 Venezuelans were brought to eastern Massachusetts’ go-to military dump site, incidentally also home to the Barnstable County Jail — another thing no one wanted to see or hear anywhere else on the Cape.
We might ask why people in Venezuela got to the point of leaving family, home, culture, and country to emigrate in the first place. Obviously, two decades of coup attempts from the Chavez era on, relentless sanctions, and the theft of assets by the US has made life in Venezuela hard for many people. The US government created this problem. The further abuse of Venezuelans in a program of engineered destruction of sovereign countries and cultures, which is what the immigration crisis amounts to worldwide, is the same attack multiplied. Democrats are accusing Republicans of using the 50 immigrants as pawns. Higher powers still are using the Democrats and Republicans as pawns. This is a play inside a play and involves a level of manipulation that is not just cynical, but diabolical.
We’ve all seen the “In This House, We Believe” signs. The signs are displayed by some of the people on Martha’s Vineyard who this past week didn’t mind seeing 50 of the world’s poor carted off to a restricted military base. Between the lines on these cute little emblems of virtue we now read the ugly truth:
In this house, we believe . . .
In complete, shameless hypocrisy
In full totalitarianism, as long as it’s nicely wrapped in self-righteous liberal jargon
Virtue-signaling is better by far (and much easier) than actual virtue
Immigrants are welcome (to mow our lawns and wash our dishes)
Climate change is real (how else do we explain it being sunny one day and cloudy the next?)
All orientations are preferable to heterosexuality — the human race has gone on long enough
We hate humanity
A woman’s rights are human rights (but there is no such thing as a woman, so there is no such thing as “women’s rights”)
Black lives matter (especially when they can be used to create disruption and chaos while we do nothing to actually improve the lives of black people)
No human is illegal (unless he’s too close to my $12 million oceanfront property)
There is no place for hate (unless you’re a white hetero male, a Palestinian, a Muslim, a Christian, a Russian, a ‘right wing extremist’, an anti-vaxxer, a climate ‘denier’, or anyone else on our list)
Science is real (so long as it serves pharmaceutical company profits and ‘great reset’ eugenics)
Love is love, and all other nice-sounding, mystifying, empty tautologies
Kindness is everything (after money, power, and control)
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | September 15, 2022
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is publishing ideas about yet another reason, or excuse, to deploy more surveillance technology: this time it’s climate change, and specifically, monitoring carbon emissions – at the individual level.
This is generally referred to as “My Carbon initiatives” and according to a post on the group’s website, penned by the director of India’s Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs Smart Cities Mission, it’s all about “inclusivity of citizens” in reducing carbon emissions in urban areas.
However, “My Carbon” and what’s dubbed as “personal allowance programs” have apparently not been a success, although the push has been there for years; but now, with tracking and surveillance technology continuing to, technically speaking, improve and become more and more ubiquitous, the idea is to start bringing those into the climate change story.
And since the share of emissions attributed to individuals in cities is 40%, the proposal is to tackle those things that are now identified by WEF and its cohorts as standing in the way of personal allowance programs taking root: social and political resistance, a lack of awareness, and, of “fair mechanisms” to track individual emissions.
The post, which says the views are “those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum,” sees “an improved” world not only when it comes to technology, but also society, and mentions the catastrophic pandemic restrictions in a positive tone, as proof that billions of people can effectively be trained to show “individual social responsibility.”
Good old Covid was a test for that. “A huge number of unimaginable restrictions for public health were adopted by billions of citizens across the world,” the WEF blog piece says approvingly.
The implication is that billions are also now more likely to accept restrictions regarding their lifestyle in other contexts. Then there’s the technology, “AI,” blockchain, digitization, “smart home” devices – all useful in advancing this specific dystopian agenda.
And the plan is to use surveillance tech to track in detail personal carbon emissions, along with giving “individual advisories on lower carbon and ethical choices for consumption of product and services.”
Further, costs for “carbon-intensive” activities and goods should be increased, while offering economic incentives to reduce demand – another way of saying, “low carbon emissions social credit system.”
And then, creating new social norms is also recommended. These would impose a new definition of what “a fair share” of personal emissions is, and set “acceptable levels” of personal emissions.
Samizdat – September 16, 2022
Facebook has been reporting users to the FBI’s domestic terrorism unit for nothing more than anti-authority sentiment, the New York Post reported on Wednesday, citing Justice Department (DOJ) sources.
“Facebook provides the FBI with private conversations which are protected by the First Amendment without any subpoena,” the sources claimed, explaining this is done “outside the legal process and without probable cause.”
Merely expressing concern about the legitimacy of the 2020 US election results was enough to get users flagged, they said.
Excerpts from those messages, often highlighting the “most egregious-sounding comments out of context,” were offered to nearby FBI field offices as “leads.”
Upon receiving them, the local offices could request subpoenas from their partner US attorney’s office in order to legally obtain the private messages they had already been shown by Facebook outside the legal process, the Post’s sources claimed.
None of the subsequent FBI investigations turned up any criminal or violent activity, the sources said.
“It was a waste of our time,” one source complained, describing a “frenzy” of subpoena requests and other activity over the last 19 months aimed at backing up the claims made by the administration of President Joe Biden about the threat posed by domestic terrorism in the aftermath of the January 6 Capitol riot.
The users targeted by Facebook for this kind of surveillance were all “gun-toting, red-blooded Americans who were angry after the election and shooting off their mouths and talking about staging protests,” the source said, adding there was “nothing criminal, nothing about violence or massacring or assassinating anyone.”
Facebook initially called the DOJ sources’ claims “false” before releasing a second statement to the Post an hour later characterizing them as “wrong,” insisting the company’s relationship with the FBI was “designed to protect people from harm” rather than to “proactively supply” law enforcement with the names of users expressing anti-government sentiment.
“We carefully scrutinize all government requests for user information to make sure they’re legally valid and narrowly tailored and we often push back,” Erica Sackin, a spokesperson for parent company Meta, said in the statement.
The FBI admitted it receives information “with investigative value” from social media providers and that it “maintains an ongoing dialogue to enable a quick exchange of threat information,” but would neither confirm nor deny the specific allegations made by the DOJ whistleblowers.
By John Roberts | TCW Defending Freedom | September 13, 2022
There have been calls for those who championed lockdown to apologise or at least admit they were wrong – to accept the overwhelming evidence that the imprisonment of pretty much the entire population did far more harm than good. With few exceptions that hasn’t happened.
Well, I have a confession to make. I was a committed Europhile. My name is John and I loved the EU. I voted Remain in the referendum and was upset and dismayed when the result came through. Actually I was beside myself. I really could not understand how so many people could be antagonistic to something that I thought was such a force for good.
Surely, I reasoned, a closer union of European peoples would help change our centuries-long habit of killing each other. I have always enjoyed travelling around Europe, experiencing the various cultures and at the same time been proud of our common European heritage. To be able to explore in this way with relatively little bureaucracy, and perhaps eventually without currency exchanges, was to my mind wonderful. I also thought that Britain’s membership would be a bulwark to French and German domination, which some of the smaller EU countries hoped would be the case. Then there was the frequent banner-waving for freedom, democracy and human rights. What’s that you say? How could I have been so naive? Perhaps you might say something less polite. Anyway, I’m not going to argue; maybe I was too idealistic. I knew there was corruption and stupidity but there is in most governments and although I didn’t think the EU was benign I didn’t think it was evil either. Now I delight when I hear of the EU in difficulty, not because I wish ill on the people but because of the discomfort it would cause the globalist bureaucrats. I would be happy for the Union to break up.
What changed me? The last two and half years. Through the so-called pandemic nearly all countries have become increasingly authoritarian, ours included. Most countries in the EU took the biscuit with longer and stricter lockdowns and draconian vaccine mandates. Piers Morgan may have called for the unvaccinated to be made to suffer but it never really happened here except perhaps through the actions of our ‘friends’ and family members and, of course, care workers in England who were sacked for not taking the jab, too low on the social scale to worry about.
In countries such as Italy, France, Germany and others the vaccine mandates were forced through with fascistic brutality, applauded and encouraged by the EU. Travel and restaurant bans were commonplace; an apartheid reminiscent of Germany in the late 1930s. Many states in Europe suffered greatly from one kind of dictatorship or another in the last century so you would have thought that their leaders might have found imposing vaccine mandates on their populations difficult – but not so. Despite some ministers and officials here, drunk on dictatorial power, wanting to go full-on China, they never quite managed it. What happened here was bad enough but never as bad as much of Europe.
I would like to say that the marches, the resistance that rose through the internet and the thousands of nurses and other health professionals who refused to be intimidated, albeit too late to stop the care workers from being sacked, were the reasons for this, but I think there is more to it. There were plenty of examples of resistance and indeed solidarity between the vaxxed and unvaxxed in EU countries but the jackboots marched onward. There has now been a move away from the health apartheid but that’s because in the real world the vaccines have been shown to be useless at preventing spread; the majority of the vaccinated know this because they and their friends and families have caught the virus, sometimes more than once. In such circumstances even avid watchers of mainstream propaganda will spot the insanity of compulsory vaccination.
The last couple of years have shown that the EU is a piece of the globalist jigsaw puzzle and a large one at that, and it hasn’t just been hijacked as some countries have – its founders were going in that direction right from the start. It is obvious to me that the orchestrated pandemic with its lockdowns and vaccine mandates was part of that age-old weapon of tyrants: fear. Fear so that we will ask the globalist elites to protect us from disease and climate change. In return we have only to give up our culture, our national sovereignty and eventually our families. This is how I see the EU now; I was late coming to the party.
My estrangement from the EU led to a growing warmth towards my country. For all its faults and frustrations I believe the ideals of liberty are more deeply ingrained here than in many places. I wonder if those of our politicians who are closet tyrants realised they couldn’t impose an EU-style authoritarianism on us. I find it ironic that the French national motto is: ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. We don’t have a national motto; we have the monarch’s ‘Dieu et Mon Droit’: My God and my Right. Nothing about liberty there or equality either, decidedly autocratic, yet I would suggest that the British have been much less inclined to accept dictatorial government than the French. We are known to be a polite and placid people and we have not had the violent revolutions that our continental neighbours have suffered. We like order but not perhaps in the way the Germans do, not forced on to us from above but that which grew over the centuries from the ordinary people.
By Rachel Emmanuel | The Counter Signal | September 14, 2022
Denmark has ended the COVID-19 vaccine for most people under 50, the Danish Health Authority said yesterday.
Denmark had already discontinued COVID-19 shots for nearly everyone under 18.
According to health officials, the purpose of vaccines is to prevent severe illness, hospitalization and death.
“Therefore, people at the highest risk of of becoming severely ill will be offered booster vaccination,” the Danish Health Authority says.
“The purpose of vaccination is not to prevent infection with covid-19, and people under 50 are therefore currently not being offered booster vaccination.”
The statement goes on to say that people under 50 are generally not at high risk of becoming severely ill from COVID.
“In addition, younger people aged under 50 are well protected against becoming severely ill from covid-19, as a very large number of them have already been vaccinated and have previously been infected with covid-19, and there is consequently good immunity among this
Under the new regulations, Danes under 50 will only be inoculated if they at high risk of becoming severely ill from COVID-19. This includes those with an impaired immune system, people working in healthcare and those working with seniors.
The ban comes even while Denmark expects “a large wave of [Covid] infection” in the next few months, according to independent journalist Alex Berenson.
Berenson reports that Denmark did not explicitly say the risks of mRNA jabs now outweigh their benefits for healthy people under 50, but that view “is implicit in the announcement.”
“In other words, the health authority is not stopping shots because Covid has ended. It now believes most people are better off getting the coronavirus than taking more mRNA,” he wrote.
The announcement comes as other countries make similar steps to limit COVID-19 vaccine access.
The UK has banned doctors from giving the COVID-19 vaccine to children under 12, saying kids don’t need it and they likely already have natural immunity.
The UK government also released a report stating that pregnant and breastfeeding women should under no circumstance get the Pfizer COVID vaccine due to a lack of trial data on the vaccine’s effect on reproductive health.
In Canada, health authorities continue to encourage parents to vaccinate their babies and kids, even while the former Chair of National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) admitted last month that COVID is less deadly to kids than the flu.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently said he might impose more COVID restrictions this winter unless 80-90% of the population gets “up-to-date” vaccinations.
To be fully vaccinated in Canada previously meant having two doses of a Health Canada-approved vaccine. The Canadian federal government is now applying pressure for citizens to get regular COVID-19 boosters.
In September, NACI announced that Canadians might consider getting a vaccine every 90 days.
By Lucy Wyatt | TCW Defending Freedom | September 14, 2022
We are at war in Europe. But not with Russia. The enemy does not have boots on the ground, tanks, machine guns or bombs; we cannot see it.
It is a devious, insidious many-headed hydra shaping our lives, aided by those who are meant to represent us. A critical battle line has opened up against this amorphous enemy in the heart of Europe. In the Netherlands.
Brave Dutch farmers have mobilised their tractors, their slurry tankers and their bales of straw; they have taken to the streets to protest, as we first reported here and they have not let up.
After a tumultuous summer of protests by farmers over so called ‘pollution’ regulations – the Dutch government’s edict that will require farmers to curb their nitrogen emissions by up to 70 per cent in the next eight years – the Dutch agriculture minister, Henk Staghouwer, has resigned after only nine months in office telling reporters that he wasn’t the right person for the job. Indeed.
We would do well to pay attention. They are protesting on our behalf. They are taking on what’s been aptly described as ‘a corporatised “sustainability” agenda crafted by a billionaire-backed “green” elite with no popular constituency’.
Invisible institutions such as the World Economic Forum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as a bevy of transnational corporations, are key ‘stakeholders’ in this closely-knit network. These are the unelected figures who are influencing government policy in supposedly sovereign states across the globe.
The Dutch government plans to spend 25billion euros expropriating 11,200 farms – allegedly to cut nitrogen emissions in half by 2030. This will mean the loss of 20 per cent of farms, while another 33 per cent will be forced to scale back and reduce livestock.
The madness of these cuts comes at a time of global food and fertiliser shortages, when Holland is the second-largest food exporter after the US. It now risks following Sri Lanka in becoming a major importer as opposed to an exporter of food.
As well as the timing, what makes Dutch farmers so suspicious is that the curb on nitrogen emissions falls disproportionately on farming, when industry and transport are also major polluters. There is however a logic to this if the specific motive for this appropriation of their land and livelihood is the Tristatecity.
The Tristatecity is a ‘smart city’ project which began to emerge as a concept in 2015. It is the vision of Peter Savelberg, a Dutch consultant, to create a giant megalopolis from Holland through Belgium to the Ruhr in Germany, incorporating 30million to 45million people.
How in this carbon-conscious age could such a project have survived the eco piety of the environment zealots? It is hardly obvious how building skyscrapers and covering large areas in concrete can be more sustainable than farmland, but the project boasts that it supports all of the United Nations sustainability goals.
Of course it does – on paper. It is also keen to promote agritech, centred on the region of Brabant, which includes vertical farming (eg hydroponics). It is possibly no coincidence that, according to the Financial Times, the Belgian government has also begun buying up farmland, allegedly to avoid the Dutch ‘crisis’. In other words, the Tristatecity is a classic World Economic Forum ‘fourth Industrial Revolution’ concept.
Peter Savelberg is backed by the Dutch employers’ organisation VNO-NCW, pension funds and property developers. They believe that Tristatecity, with its 45million inhabitants, would be able to better compete for investment and talent with other global megacities, particularly those in China. And so, inevitably, the Tristatecity needs Dutch farmland for housing.
Meanwhile, the inhabitants of the Tristatecity will presumably live on bugs – because there would be less farmland to produce food for them. Hence the need for vertical farming. There would be little other industry for them to work in, because the fossil fuels needed for industry to function are drying up.
Germany is already experiencing signs of de-industrialisation as Russian gas disappears and the dried-up Rhine ironically prevents the movement of coal. Zero carbon is becoming a reality.
Despite a growing pushback against the UN’s ‘sustainable development’ programme Agenda 2030, against WEF and the Great Reset, the Dutch government, among others spurred on perhaps by the recent UN High-Level Forum in which the Netherlands participated this summer, has resorted to using so-called ‘climate change’ and ‘nature protection’ virtue-signalling as the devious and specious excuse for acquiring the land needed to implement its goals.
It is noticeable that the marketing hype around Tristatecity itself has gone quiet (only a few hundred follow its Facebook page), and the project has felt the need to issue a public statement claiming that it has no connection with nitrogen reduction programmes.
Here in the UK, we may have avoided the fate of the Dutch farmers for the time being, although our government’s financial incentive for farmers to leave their farms was on offer up till August 11. There is still a need for vigilance.
While Welsh schools are encouraging children to eat bugs, France has become the innovation nation for insect production and hosts the world’s largest insect farms.
A start-up called Ynsect has raised 224million dollars from investors – including Hollywood star Robert Downey Junior’s FootPrint Coalition – to build its second insect farm in Amiens in northern France.
The company breeds mealworms that produce proteins for livestock, pet food and fertilisers. The ‘40-metre tall plant spread over 40,000 square metres’ was promised by CEO and co-founder Antoine Hubert to be ‘the highest vertical farm in the world and the first carbon-negative vertical farm in the world’.
We are still under attack from the many-headed hydra in other ways. Gaslighting takes many forms. One recent example was the granting of the top prize at the Chelsea Flower Show to a garden whose central feature was beaver-chewed wood and not flowers – as though untouched nature trumped cultivation and creation.
In June, we only narrowly missed the loss of 700,000 acres of farmland when the budget for ‘landscape recovery’ (aka ‘rewilding’) was slashed from £800million to £50million.
This war is not over and we should support our European allies as we did in the Second World War.
Recommended viewing is Jordan Peterson’s apocalyptic warning on what ‘sustainability’ really means and Michael Yon’s programme from July, when he was embedded with the Dutch farmers.
Their fight is our fight. ‘Useless eaters’ unite. Pitchforks at the ready.
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
The infinite list
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | October 12, 2022
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
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
Aletho News 