What had been a remarkably successful policing operation, handling the one million protestors who showed up in Canberra to protest two years of government overreach during the Covid era, turned sour in the final hours.
Until that point there had been no reports of violence, rapes, vandalism or all the other behaviours one might fairly expect with such a wildly diverse and yes, angry crowd.
Although the crowd was unmasked, and certainly weren’t lining up to QR code in, the authoritarian derangement and violent police excesses the nation has become accustomed to were nowhere to be seen.
Australians are extremely slow to protest; but with millions having lost their jobs, their businesses, even contact with their families amidst deep social divisions created by being daily threatened or ostracised if they do not take “the jab”, they are silent no more.
The hands off policing which had characterised both the protest and the handling of the 200,000 campers at Camp Epic, only one of a number of campsites, were largely peaceful because the police did not seek confrontation.
That all ended on the 14th of February, 2022, two days after a million people marched on Parliament House in jubilant unity.
The putative and publicly squabbling leadership of the movement at Camp Epic did nothing to dispel tensions. And all of them disappeared on the penultimate day, leading to yet more fear and confusion amongst the thousands who remained on the site itself, including many with children who had no jobs and no homes to return to.
All the rhetoric from various members of the movement that they were there “until the job is done”, or “until this is over”, proved as substantial as smoke.
The social chaos and personal crises wrought by the blizzard of government diktats and authoritarian overreach of the past two years is now clearly evident.
Camp Epic was already rapidly emptying on the final day when police moved in and aggressively moved every last protestor off the site.
In the inflammatory leadup, sowing yet more tension and confusion, protestors were initially told that they would have to move on by midnight. One woman with two young children said people had come to her tent early in the evening and told her she would be bashed and arrested if she did not move on.
The woman did not have a car and had no way of complying.
The next rumour in this evolving drama was that campers had until 8am to comply.
As it turned out the police arrived in force at around 11am, repeatedly broadcasting the message: “Leave Now. You are trespassing. Leave immediately. If you do not leave you will be arrested.”
Police, tolerating no resistance, worked their way through from the showgrounds from the top camping ground until every last protestor had been evicted.
The irony of police aggressively moving demonstrators from the nation’s capital, ostensibly the heart of Australian democracy, was lost on nobody.
As more than 98% percent of protestors had already left, and of the holdouts most were already packing up to leave, it was a largely pointless show of force.
In one of those all too human moments, one protestor pleaded with the police: “Don’t vax your kids.”
One sign, emblematic of the passionate sincerity of protestors, read: “Touch Our Kids & It’s War.”
While from a policing point of view the dissolving of Camp Freedom may well be deemed a success and end up as a textbook model for policing in highly volatile situations, it has also left many questions over its inhumanity and deceptive nature.
Every last protestor moved on yesterday has one message in their head: “The government is my enemy.”
Campers were told multiple conflicting stories. They could move to a large holiday camp an hour outside of town; that they could move to another Council controlled camping ground Camp Cotter at Cotter Creek half an hour away; or that they would be safe and welcome to stay on Ground Seven, at the top of the Epic showgrounds.
In the dramatic unravelling, none of these stories, or deliberate falsehoods, turned out to be true.
The hundreds of people who moved up to Ground Seven on the understanding that as it was private property they would be safe to stay were easily kettled, or corralled, given no choice but to leave after more than 50 police entered the grounds with backup forces clearly evident behind them. While many wore the standard uniforms of local police, there were other heavily armed special operatives wearing masks and holding leashed dogs, adding to the fear and panic already spreading through the crowd.
Amid these surreal and frightening scenes, it was obvious that a few of the officers were enjoying their role perhaps “a little too much”; but that many were unhappy about the duties they were being asked to perform.
In the midst of this chaos, some of the younger officers in particular, were exceptionally polite, thanking the protestors for their cooperation.
Many protestors moved to Cotter Creek Campground, a council run venue, on the assurance that they would be safe and welcome there.
That also proved false, with police aggressively moving protestors on, despite the fact that they had already made bookings and paid for their visit.
Another suggestion that protestors could move to a large conference and adventure centre Caloola Farm, an hour outside of Canberra, provided free of charge by the sympathetic owner, also proved false.
Police blockaded the roads and refused to let protestors enter.
Owner Ralph Hurst-Meyers, well known for his community generosity, said: “After consultation with the authorities, Caloola Farm and the Hurst-Meyers Charity Limited will allow vulnerable people affected by recent events such as the elderly, the disabled, and the indigenous community, single mothers with children, vulnerable families with children to temporarily stay at Caloola Farm free of charge while they make preparations to return home.
The problem with that, of course, is that many of the remaining protestors have no home to return to.
As one of the many passionate people involved in the weeks events observed: “Everyone here is on the verge of losing everything.”
A million people on their doorstep has upset the smug disdain displayed towards the largely working class protestors by Canberra’s insular, well paid public servants and their political overlords.
But as the many Australians who are refusing to accede to the government’s vaccine mandates burn through their savings and resources, the social chaos inflicted on Australia’s working and middle classes by the Canberra elites can only intensify.
The authorities may have succeeded in moving the protestors on this time around, but this story is going nowhere.
A STUDENT who has spent £100,000 on his education and studied for ten years has been told he may not be allowed to finish his course unless he has a Covid vaccination.
David Shepherd, 28, is studying for his third Masters, an MSc in physiotherapy (pre-registration) at York St John University.
Unless he can complete 18 weeks of practical placements, he will be unable to graduate. He has currently finished 12 weeks.
He said: ‘I have been told that I cannot go to placements where I spend time with patients unless I have a Covid jab.
‘The Covid mRNA vaccine is an experimental vaccine which I will consider after the trials have finished in 2023. It is not like the hepatitis B vaccine mandated for health staff. That has years of safety data. There is no long-term safety data for Covid jabs but there is evidence it can cause the inflammatory heart conditions myocarditis and pericarditis in younger men.
‘Everything we do as health professionals hinges on being able to give our patients informed consent so that they know the risks of any procedure.
‘I have a scientific background and I don’t like being a guinea pig for mRNA vaccine technology.’
David is not alone in his concerns about lack of consent. A charity called Consent, set up by parents in 2018 to challenge doctors’ decisions for their teenagers and children, published a full-page advertisement in Metro insisting that the government stop coercing young people into having Covid vaccinations.
David is training to become a musculoskeletal practitioner attached to a GP’s surgery. Back problems account for 30 per cent of visits to the surgery so it is a job with a high demand and he has invested heavily preparing for it.
The money spent on his courses is secondary to his desire to contribute. He said: ‘I have got to the stage where I almost don’t care about the money. It’s the health principles I care about. And I do not want to be coerced into getting the jab.’
David completed a BSc (Hons) undergraduate degree in sports therapy at the University of Bedfordshire between 2012 and 2015. Then he took three Masters degrees receiving a scholarship from Bedfordshire for the first in 2015, which he failed.
Now he is in his second MA year at York St John. Having seen a friend hospitalised after suffering two mini strokes caused by the vaccine, he does not want to take the risk.
He said: ‘Last year was fine, there was no discussion about mandatory vaccination and students got it when they wanted to. Two students in my bubble are from the Republic of Ireland and they got the vaccine just so that they could travel. They are very critical thinking so felt a bit coerced into it.
‘Then the head of our course began sending out emails last November saying how good it is to get vaccinated. She said it shows how much you care about yourself and everybody else. I hate that rhetoric.
‘I continued with the course and did two placements over 12 weeks, both attached to Hull Royal Infirmary. The first was in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease [COPD is a group of respiratory diseases including emphysema and bronchitis], going to people’s houses and helping them clear their lungs.
‘I was shadowing two facilitators; one completely understood my position, the second gave me a hard time and was very worried that patients might infect me, despite the fact I would be wearing a mask.
‘I wasn’t allowed to car share with them because I wasn’t vaccinated. It was a bit insulting, and it was “othering”. It made no sense because at that point we did understand that vaccination wasn’t halting the spread.
‘My second placement was predominantly remote, processing post-Covid outcome measures with a team. In one of the multi-disciplinary meetings, they were discussing a patient who had been injured by the vaccine. They were not convinced that she had been injured and thought she was making it out to be worse than it was. It was an interesting conversation to hear.’
In December, all York St John students received an email saying that due to mandatory vaccines being introduced for healthcare workers, students would need to have a vaccination and if they did not, it would affect their ability to finish the course.
‘I spoke to my new tutor; he’d been working in the NHS for 40 years, and he told me he understood my position,’ David said. ‘All changed after I came back after Christmas. I received an email from him that said I must give evidence of a vaccination by January 25.
‘Before Christmas, my tutor thought I would be able to continue with my placements; I need 1,000 hours practice to be able to register with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) and qualify.
‘I asked if I could finish the academic component and he said probably not, it wasn’t worth carrying on if I couldn’t do the placements.
‘I was trying to be pragmatic, but I was quite upset and very stressed about my future. If I got kicked off the course, I would still have to pay back my maintenance loan, but where would I work and what would I do?’
Since then, the Health Secretary has performed a U-turn on mandatory Covid vaccination for health care workers. Even though Sajid Javid scrapped the mandates, he has pushed back the decision to vaccinate to the regulators. He wants them to send a ‘clear message’ that health care workers should all be vaccinated.
David said: ‘Currently, our regulators, the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists and the Health and Care Professions Council, are against mandatory vaccination. So I’m safe for the time being.’
However government concessions can be short-lived, and we know that they want to bring in vaccination by the back door. So David could find that pressure is applied to his regulators behind the scenes, and he will be prevented from working unless he has a Covid jab.
In a letter to nine regulators, including the General Medical Council, Javid made his thoughts clear. He said that abandoning compulsory vaccines ‘in no way diminishes the importance that health and care workers are vaccinated. Indeed, it is the responsibility of all healthcare professionals to take steps to ensure the safety of patients. As the approach to ensuring vaccine uptake among health and care staff changes it is important that this personal professional responsibility is re-emphasised’.
Western democracies have beckoned many of us, both its citizens, and those who looked across the way at their shining, seemingly self-evident example of relatively “enlightened” governance. Successful Asian powerhouses like Japan and Singapore, and of course Hong Kong (both Asia and Britain in many ways for so long), drew inspiration on how they should be structured, governed and led.
Those in developing countries, or countries where authoritarianism held sway, pined for the rule of law, hoping their leadership might take a cue from Western role models, yearning for the tonic of good leadership and sound social structures, rather than continuing to suffer under corrupt, incompetent, misrule.
And then these countries, unlike Western counterparts, had virtually no social safety nets. Progress, education, prosperity, safety and security, these were the enchantments portrayed across the world.
How Superficial Was It All?
Post COVID, and the fact-free, hysterical over-reaction and meltdown we have still not recovered from, “democratic” countries have been in free fall. Who can not be dismayed by how these “democratically elected” leaders behaved, manipulating and being manipulated by their own systems? How shattering to see the shallowness of character, where in a charade of “public health,” constitutional rules were compromised, fundamental societal norms ignored, and seeking unbridled power, apparently the prevailing narcotic.
The US has unraveled. Fauci is found tripping over his tongue, his “testimony” and his emails, and gross misrepresentations re the “origins” of the coronavirus (the once forbidden fruit of the “Lab Leak”, now a mainstream consideration), gain of function definition and taxonomy, as well as multiple varietals of “guidance” on masks to lockdowns to “vaccine efficacy”, and still, utterly immune to consequence or accountability.
And we have been treated to the rambling, well-nigh unintelligible proclamations and machinations of the US President, reading from “scripts” while the “case-demic” rages. While debasing the Constitutionally sacred right to skepticism, we have seen an ignominious departure from Afghanistan (where on our fourth President dealing with it, we have essentially “gifted” the Taliban a remarkable military arsenal), and the Southern border seems porous to illegal, at times, literally “criminal” migrants. And the Democratic party has become apologists for defunding the police, and ransacking through rampant lawlessness, more than one large American city.
And with all of Mr. Trump’s misadventures with the law, and family cronyism, we are also face-to-face with Hunter Biden, in the fine tradition of the Clinton influence machine, brazenly peddling political influence for massive personal (financial) gain. This happens routinely, though it is common sport in these circles to sneer at African despots, while socializing at country clubs, for their “outrages” on similar fronts.
US law enforcement “enforces” or not, corruption is comprehensive, and ruling junta agendas advance Party interests, not those of the people. The once proud Republic is tottering and teetering as selective use of the law, extra-legal “emergency” powers, massive “mandating” of legally indemnified experimental therapy posing as “vaccines”, endemic abuse of positions of power — all dances side by side with hypocritic injunctions (maskless leaders being served by “masked” servers). HCQ and Ivermectin are availed of by Fauci’s family and Congressional leaders, while the public is treated to gaslighting galore.
Across the pond, a once sane Boris Johnson, rightly proclaiming natural immunity, got spooked by SAGE, and capitulated to widespread nonsense. His large parliamentary majority should have immunized him, instead he retreated into ineffectual flailing as mobs tore down historical statues. Rather than lead a national conversation, “white guilt” was the easy default setting. Scientific charlatans, disproven again and again, brandishing a new population-decimating “plague” were enough to send PM and advisers scurrying towards hysteria and “lockdowns”.
The resulting economic disaster and undermining of the quality of life of millions of people, were apparently a small price to pay. However, their own lifestyles and outings and those of affluent sponsors bypassed the draconian legislation. And so, they knew it was all essentially tommyrot as Wimbledon and office parties were unrestrained in either physical proximity or passionate engagement.
And while the UK is, for now, “liberated” of COVID restrictions, France is “easing up” but without relinquishing the threat of possibly reinstating the “Stalinist” decrees about “vaccination” (though the shots provide no immunity), at the first flutter of Macron’s angst infused paranoia. When you begin to threaten the withdrawal of citizenship and promise brutal force, you know how adrift and panicked a proposition must be.
Other countries “shelving” COVID restrictions include Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy and Lithuania. Israel is retaining its infamous “Green Pass” for parties and weddings, and it is being abolished for restaurants, hotels, gyms and theaters.
Overall Madness
The stats shriek their testimony. Late January each of the last two years saw the COVID “peak” overall. With or without “lockdowns,” with or without the silly masks, or whatever absurd companion restrictions came with it, the same results. Two years of “expert remedies” provided primarily a cesspool of sunk costs, as new waves and variants came implacably forward. We were scammed by “approved” experts and Big Pharma, and officiously stripped of rights that were once considered “unalienable” (more on this below).
The “two weeks” to flatten the spread metastasized into endless restrictions on human movement and autonomy with nary an end point in sight. A new cloth mask wearing religion was enforced, and automatons even today walk in fresh air where we have zero evidence of spread, inhaling their own waste. Oh, we also received the “blessings” of fresh segregation (long after we hoped that had been consigned to the dustbin of history) via a biosecurity state, and billions paid out for sheer snake oil (a.k.a. “safety”) – for example the utterly unreliable “testing” regime which couldn’t even be globally harmonized, so the same standards applied. There was not even a pretense of “quality control.”
Anti-humane and economic wars have been waged on people around the world, hitting hardest the most impoverished of course. Constitutions have gone up in flames, and anyone who wished to speak out to preserve that which made life worth living, or interfered with the Big Pharma subsidized autocracy, was demonized as an ”enemy of the state” (more on this below as well).
People around the world saw livelihoods and businesses vanish and had to undergo the sheer humanitarian outrage of multiple rounds of experimental injections, for them, and then their children, just to be able to feed their families or operate in society at all. What does it take to get outraged?
In “advanced societies” (with notable exceptions like Sweden and then states like Florida), local academia made “schools” (when they were actually open, even though children were at virtually zero risk and did not pass on the infection either before the “vaccination” bedlam) virtual penal camps (children eating in the cold, forced spacing, muzzling) to advance political gains and aims while teeming concerts and sporting events made a mockery of these injunctions.
And then, we do not yet even know the magnitude of the adverse impact of these “vaccines.”
The Great Embalming Fiasco
Hats off to the indefatigable Steve Kirsch, entrepreneur and crusader for COVID data that showcases the realities we are dealing with. Steve has offered cash to anyone who can show him the key early treatments don’t work, he has offered to debate public health officials or doctors, and to field doctors and specialists if they don’t wish to debate a so called “layman.”
But he recently brought attention to an alarming finding that deserves to be highlighted. In the United States, fifteen embalmers are seeing odd “fatal clotting” that was first discovered in 2021. As the night follows the day, the mainstream media are scrupulously disinterested, not to mention CDC, and their acolytes.
Specifically, Steve interviews Richard Hirschman, Alabama embalmer, 20 years of experience, and a funeral director. Stew Peters interviewed Mr. Hirschman, generating 800,000 views on Rumble alone.
The facts are damning and well-nigh irrefutable. In the subsequent interview with Mr. Kirsch, Mr. Hirschman clarifies that he started noticing the clots around May or June 2021. They may have been evident earlier, but that’s when he became aware of them.
He knows of no instance of such clots in “unvaccinated” cases (except one instance, someone who had received a transfusion).
Currently, over 50% of the bodies he embalms have these strange clots which he believes are directly caused by “vaccines” and boosters. In January 2022, 65% of all cases he came across (37 out of 57) had these suspicious clots. He roughly handles 600 bodies a year, so this is not “small number” distortion. Also, being COVID recovered and being sane enough to realize he was not at risk, other funeral homes have been contracting his services. So, he truly, in saying “over 50%” is referring to a largely unfiltered group of people.
He says he’s spoken to 15 of his peers who all are seeing the same thing but refuse to speak out publicly. As Steve mentions, this phenomenon is fairly common given the reprisals against anyone speaking up and out, for example school officials being unwilling to reveal the high rates of myocarditis that are suddenly percolating in their schools.
While shunned by mainstream media, Hirschman was contacted by PolitiFact (oxymoronically named) seeking to discredit him, but they ditched the article as presumably nothing compromising was located even by their scavenging.
The line of causation, following Occam’s Razor, of taking the simplest explanation until and if its refuted, is clear. An experimental injectable “therapy” is first used in 2021, which we know results in blood clots, and over 50% of the population are so “injected.” And this coincides almost exactly with the “embalmer’s expose.”
If this is in the vicinity of the truth, then of the 65,000 that die every week in the US, and you discount Hirschman’s “60%” to “40%” to err on the side of caution, that would still be 26,000 dying from the adverse effects per week or 676,000 annual “vaccine” related deaths.
But let’s go further suggests Steve. Assume this analysis is off by 1000X. Then it would be a “mere” 676 annual deaths, which would be 3 times more deadly than the smallpox vaccine which is currently deemed to be too unsafe to use. With even the “possibility” on the other hand, of a 65% death rate, every health agency, every media outlet should be there vetting the data. Not one has.
How could they possibly know there’s nothing there? Not even a request for a tissue sample for analysis by a medical journal. It distils down to a simple conclusion: they don’t care, they don’t want to know. The mania is to “embalm” the truth and in a frenzy, jab away…no matter what.
The Frenzy
The truckers rolled up Parliament Hill in Ottawa, now having sparked parallel outbursts of “civil” and at times not so civil disobedience. They are described with frenzied disdain, as if they were a plague of locusts from scripture.
And their “blasphemies” were there for all to read: “United Against Tyranny,” “No Vaccine Mandates,” “Freedom to Choose.” What gall!
As CJ Hopkins put it,
“Yes, that’s right, New Normal Canada has been invaded and is now under siege by hordes of transphobic Putin-Nazi truckers, racist homophobes, anti-Semitic Islamophobes, and other members of the working classes!”
The media is painting portraits of swastika waving goons, stealing food from the mouths of homeless people, while taking time out to desecrate war memorials. CJ adds
“Rumor has it, a kill-squad of truckers has been prowling the postnatal wards of hospitals, looking for Kuwaiti babies to yank out of their incubators”
as was asserted for the vengeful hordes of “Satanic” Saddam.
And if with a few restoratives, you come to, and remind yourself this is Canada, and this seems rather fanciful, remember this characterization of the protestor’s motives has passed muster by the “fact checkers” who are been elevated to the tribunal of truth, and have showered us with such unimpeachable insight about masks, early treatments, “vaccine” safety and effectiveness, and so much more.
Truculent Trudeau in his own Twitter blessed words:
“Today in the House, Members of Parliament unanimously condemned the antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia that we’ve seen on display in Ottawa over the past number of days.”
Who’s the satirist, CJ or the prime minister of Canada? The latter has been hidden in a bunker, after his boosted self, tested positive for COVID, hurling epithets at these rascally, depraved truckers, who decided to draw a civilizational line in the sand – long overdue.
All over the world, all creeds, colors, ages, families with kids, working class and simply sane and humane citizens are flocking to the streets against this surreal Covidian cult charade. And their stance and presence is a powerful rebuke to the face muzzling, socially distancing against an airborne pathogen, double boosting with obsolete “therapeutics,” brigade.
Therefore, governments have to somehow “try” to declare victory and roll the nonsense back, before the edifice is shamed into confessing its absurdity. We have to pray their desperation does not boil over into even more acute manifestations of authoritarian distemper.
Woe Betide Any Accountability
Of course, the convoy was not even covered in the mainstream media, despite it representing the most important protest in modern times in Canada. Despite no coverage, public opinion in Canada swung 15% to create a solid majority against both restrictions and mandates.
Suddenly a new slogan is born, “living with COVID.” As epidemiology would have mandated from the outset.
But the sloganeering is pernicious, as it has been since Nixon’s Press Secretary Ron Ziegler intoned, “mistakes were made.” The chalice of responsibility thus escaped his lips, rather than a genuine acceptance and reckoning. Was the mistake the lies and illegality or “getting caught?” Kudos to Thomas Harrington of the Brownstone Institute for helping us to forage for this moral understanding.
The deliberately obfuscating language, now a cornerstone of political life, is a form of vandalism of the public trust. Mr. Ziegler was for some time the widespread prototype of the oily dissembler who should not be holding public office in a serious Republic.
However, today, he seems the grandfather of public communication, disgustingly so. When moral responsibility is diluted in this way, we have little clarity. How did the disgraceful Iraq war get mandated and how are war criminals who led it being recognized with honors today? Who caused the financial meltdown? Who is actually accountable?
The COVID saga has been made possible, in all its pervasive implausibility by this new reflex of “changing the subject” if moral accountability is asserted or challenging the “source” of ideas rather than actually engaging the ideas themselves.
So those who have been undermining our human dignity and freedom are being threatened with potential meltdown. Some key Democratic governors reading the tea leaves re possible electoral annihilation, are lifting the idiotic mask mandates in their states. The excuse? The mild Omicron variant. That’s easier than admitting two decades of science has been utterly consistent on the uselessness of face muzzles to alter the spread of respiratory viruses within the general population in any statistically significant way.
All the countries like Britain, Norway and others, who are dismantling COVID restrictions, claim that the “leaky” “vaccines” that don’t ward off reinfection nor prevent spread but suppress symptoms for a brief window of efficacy, were responsible for opening society back up after we faced the “terror” of a coronavirus with a 99%+ recovery rate for those not in the most vulnerable demographic (above 70 with multiple comorbidities, with an average age of death of 82, beyond life expectancy virtually everywhere). A sick, deluded stance, with shattered lives everywhere and the widespread debris of our constitutional protections and civil liberties, but hey, “let’s do a little sidestep” as the old song says.
When physical autonomy is up for grabs due to “non-science” then all other liberties are ornamental. So we must tell this tale straight on, lest “mistakes were made” becomes our pathetic hymnal as we lurch from one contrived crisis to another.
COVID as Trojan Horse
The real battle will not be about mandates, but our refusal to “normalize” the underlying legal and ethical outrages of this period. Already, in the US, Homeland “Insecurity” is claiming that spreading “misinformation” would be tantamount to a “terrorist act.” You have to gag when you read their assertion of “current heightened threat environment” being triggered by “The proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in US government institutions.”
Ah! The fount of “WMD” never runs dry. The founders of the American Republic, once a fragile revolutionary, embryonic experiment in self-government in the 18th century, enshrined free speech in the “first” Amendment.
By contrast, imagine elected cronies, on numerous payrolls, endowing themselves the right to determine what is “false” or “misleading.” And government that has lied about so much, distorted so much to perpetuate the jabbing mania, including subjecting children to it on no grounds whatsoever, believes it is just “entitled” to public trust?
Just as Macron has scant moral standing going against the tide of liberation washing over Europe to lecture Putin on “democracy” (hence 60% of those polled in France assessed the visit a “failure”), but even more so, seemingly benign Britain has announced plans to put an increased emphasis on “personal responsibility” and “duties to the wider society” as well as not “abusing” rights. And who will determine any of this? Music swells… the grand majesty of today’s crony riddled political parties, or at the very least, the one in current electoral ascendance.
This is to be an articulated “bill of rights” and veering away from those “unalienable rights” that no government could impugn or interfere with, we will have a parasitic “quid pro quo” with the state, now acting as ethical puppeteer. “Rights”, precisely as they sound, are “innate” and not a gift from callow, feckless politicians, or indeed anyone else.
This is what must really be stopped. The legalizing of the insulation from responsibility of those whose only legitimacy derives from serving the people and safeguarding (not editing) their rights.
Imagine if our worst fears about the longer-term immunosuppressive impact of these “vaccines” come to pass? I pray they don’t. Let’s hope they are just incompetent. But whatever is the case we must take stock, we must use the disinfectant of “facts” to deal with distortions, no matter of what type. But challenging these may get you thrown in with terrorists, allowing government wide latitude in addressing being jolted by such revelations.
March 2020 cannot happen again, when in panic, and ignoring mounting data, governments asserted themselves over individual rights by declaring an “emergency” (which it seems will not stop “emerging”). We ignored the impact on the vulnerable, the poor, on children, on those running personal businesses, those needing other medical care, and we never debated “cost-benefit” before blowing up society and shutting down the planet.
The world became an authoritarian police state. And it is reluctantly having to have that wrested from its grip. The unconditional nature of free speech and core rights are critical to keep governments from embarking on dubious “crusades” allegedly for the public good. It keeps scientific/medical bodies from claiming to be a “Ministry of Truth” and doubling down on grotesque mistakes to avoid accountability.
Self-anointed potentates and virtue signaling mobs have to be held in check by this scaffolding of rights we are fighting for, the right to interrogate narratives and do a deep dive into facts. How we live is our business to decide, not a privilege granted by government if you conform to their often-self-serving vision. Let us never again cede that.
It may be the world will have to take tuition from new exemplars, as our Western role models have sadly become so tarnished. Japan, for example, never fully locked down, has refused mandates and has actually been scientifically open to early treatments like Ivermectin. In a statistical repudiation of the science-free narrative that had been coming out of Western governments, Africa, with 6% “vaccination” has only 3% of the world’s COVID ascribed fatalities.
But wherever and however, all together, we must renew human traditions, and rediscover discourse, and commit to educating ourselves so our “voice” is meaningful.
Essential human needs beckon… to live, to contemplate, to take decisions, to love, to kick off enterprise, to adventure, to explore, and yes to both be “safe” and to trust our ability to navigate challenges and manageable dangers. If we don’t, we will find ourselves in a hell not suitable for human habitation. If we do, this debased chapter can give way to the glory of being radiantly, autonomously alive.
On Monday, the Toronto Star called the Trudeau regime’s “decision to invoke the Emergencies Act (for the first time in Canadian history) an admission of failure…at all levels of government.”
Canada’s National Post reported that opposition parties slammed what they called his “proof of failure” to deal with activism by truckers.
“Premiers of Quebec, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Alberta and Manitoba expressed opposition” to his draconian action.
Trudeau’s minority regime needs support from at least one opposition party to gain parliamentary approval of what no one should support.
Interim Conservative Party leader Candice Bergen called his usurpation of power “ham-fisted,” adding:
“Provinces are not in agreement with” his action.
He “wedge divide(d) and stigmatize(d) Canadians who he doesn’t agree with.”
“And by doing so, he creates so many barriers in terms of trying to solve this problem.”
Conservative Party leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre tried having things both ways by saying:
“I’ve always been against blockades and I still am now because I don’t believe you can gain your freedom by blocking someone else’s.”
“So yes to peaceful protests. No to blockades.”
Ontario premier Doug Ford expressed support for Trudeau’s tyrannical action.
Passage calls itself a publication that “offers left-wing perspectives on politics, economics, and culture from Canadian writers and thinkers.”
In response to the Trudeau regime’s usurpation of draconian powers, it called his action “a dangerous mistake,” adding:
It’s “undisputed proof that the state is using its heaviest hand to break their movement” to reverse justice denied.
“Canadians need to keep in mind that this crisis has been entirely invented by people in power.”
“The only (solution) is another collective attack on the civil liberties of Canadians? Are we actually supposed to believe this?”
The Toronto Sun denounced Trudeau for “go(ing) too far,” adding:
His “unjustified invoking of the Emergencies Act is deeply problematic and will have long-lasting consequences for the country.”
“The only real violence so far has been a vehicular ramming conducted against protesters, which sent four people to hospital.”
“You don’t hear much about that though. Trudeau never condemned it.”
“Instead, (he) called protesters every name in the book even though they are a diverse crowd in every sense of the word.”
His draconian actions show that he “wants more division and more hostility.”
Alberta’s Premier Jason Kenney slammed his Monday action, saying:
“We have all of the legal tools and operational resources required to maintain order.”
What Trudeau invoked on Monday will likely heighten tensions more than already.
Executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, Joanna Baron, slammed his incompetence to deal with legitimate grievances.
NYT columnist Paul Krugman supports wealth, power and privileged interests exclusively at the expense of the general welfare he abhors.
His opposition to activism by Canadian truckers for restoration of lost freedoms didn’t surprise.
Instead of explaining what it’s all about, he called freedom-fighting “economic vandalism and intimidation (sic).”
He lied claiming that mass-protesters by Canadian truckers nationwide “isn’t a grassroots uprising (sic).”
Along with legions of supporters, people involved represent most all segments of society.
Not according to Krugman’s perversion of reality, falsely calling Canadian freedom fighters “right-wing extremists (sic).”
Downplaying their numbers to a few thousand, he ignored tens of thousands involved in Canada nationwide with widespread public support.
Saying the mission of freedom-fighting truckers is “all about… causing economic damage” is typical of how his columns consistently turn truth on its head.
The same goes for saying:
“The right is perfectly fine, indeed enthusiastic, about illegal actions and disorder as long as they serve right-wing ends.”
There’s nothing illegal about fighting for justice, for going all-out for restoration of lost freedoms, for opposing tyrannical rule.
The problem with Krugman and likeminded ideologues is that he and they support the latter at the expense of the former.
A website has claimed to have obtained a trove of personal data from Freedom Convoy donors, as the main fundraising platform for the backers of the Canadian anti-vaccine mandate truckers suffered an alleged hack and went offline on Monday.
The Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) whistleblower site announced it had been given 30 megabytes of information on the donors of the Christian fundraising site GiveSendGo, including names, email addresses, zip codes and IP addresses.
This data won’t be made available to the public, but will only be provided to “journalists and researchers” due to its sensitive personal nature, according to DDoS.
Meanwhile, GiveSendGo – which became the main crowdfunding hub for the protesters after the mainstream platform GoFundMe blocked donations to them on February 5 – remained unresponsive on Monday.
Those visiting the site were met with a message saying: “Application is under maintenance, we will be back very soon.”
Media reports said GiveSendGo had been breached overnight, with its front page replaced by a clip from Disney’s animated movie ‘Frozen’, suggesting that its operations and money have been frozen too.
The video also contained a manifesto, in which the hackers labeled the site’s donors “grifters and hatriots,” while accusing them of funding “the insurrection in Ottawa” and the Capitol riots in the US on January 6 last year.
The Freedom Convoy demonstrations began in late January over Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s demand for unvaccinated truckers to quarantine after coming back to Canada from the US.
The protest escalated quickly and saw roads and border crossings blocked across Canada, including the capital, Ottawa, with those taking part also decrying Covid-19 lockdowns and mask mandates, along with calling for Trudeau’s resignation.
Supporters of the cause allegedly gathered $8 million online to continue rallying, but a Canadian judge issued an injunction blocking the money for the Freedom Convoy over the weekend.
Late on Sunday, the Canada Border Services Agency said it had ejected the last remaining demonstrator from the border with the US in Windsor, Ontario, reopening North America’s busiest trade link after a six-day blockade.
The Canadian government has moved to extend its financial regulations to crowdfunding platforms and cryptocurrencies, under the Emergencies Act invoked Monday to crack down on “Freedom Convoy” trucker protests against Covid-19 mandates.
Under the emergency, which is due to last 30 days unless extended, all crowdfunding and crypto platforms must register with Canada’s financial intelligence agency FinTrac and report “large or suspicious” transactions, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said on Monday. This is an expansion of Canada’s existing money-laundering and terrorist financing rules, and the government will propose a law that would make these powers permanent, she added.
“We know that these platforms are being used to support illegal blockades and illegal activity which is damaging the Canadian economy,” said Freeland.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has declared trucker protests – from the “Freedom Convoy” parking in front of the parliament in Ottawa to the blockades at three border crossings with the US – to be illegal and authorized federal police to help provinces and local authorities dismantle them.
Canadian banks have also been instructed to freeze assets or “review their relationship” with anyone they suspect of being involved in such protests, without a court order. Companies whose trucks are being used in the “illegal” protests will have their accounts frozen and their insurance suspended, said Freeland.
The financial crackdown comes after Ottawa successfully pressured GoFundMe to freeze some CAN $10 million the trucker protest had raised, only to see the fundraiser move to GiveSendGo, a rival US platform. After GiveSendGo refused Canadian orders to freeze the funds, it was hacked and the trucker donor list was published online.
This is the first time Canada has invoked the Emergencies Act since it was passed in 1988, to replace the old martial law first enacted in 1914. The War Measures Act had been used during the two world wars to impose controls on the Canadian economy and imprison citizens of German, [Italian] and Japanese origin. It was most recently used in 1970 by Trudeau’s father Pierre, to crack down on Francophone separatists in Quebec who had kidnapped a lawmaker. Almost 500 people were arrested during the period now known as the October Crisis.
A May 2021 project report by the U.K. Ministry of Defense, created in partnership with the German Bundeswehr Office for Defense Planning, offers shocking highlights of the dystopian cybernetics future that global technocrats are pushing mankind toward.
The report, “Human Augmentation — The Dawn of a New Paradigm, a Strategic Implications Project,”1 reviews the scientific goals of the U.K. and German defense ministries, and they are precisely what the title suggests. Human augmentation is stressed as being a key area to focus on in order to win future wars.
But human augmentation will not be restricted to the military ranks. It’s really a way to further separate classes of humans, with the rich and powerful elite being augmented “super-humans.” It’s worth noting that anything released to the public is a decade or more behind current capabilities, so everything in this report can be considered dated news, even though it reads like pure science fiction.
“… the field of human augmentation has the potential to transform society, security and defense over the next 30 years,” the report states. “We must begin to understand the implications of these changes and shape them to our advantage now, before they are thrust upon us.
Technology in warfare has traditionally centered on increasingly sophisticated platforms that people move and fight from, or artefacts that they wear or wield to fight with. Advances in the life sciences and converging developments in related fields are, however, beginning to blur the line between technology and the human …
Many technologies that have the potential to deliver strategic advantage out to 2050 already exist and further advances will undoubtedly occur … Our potential adversaries will not be governed by the same ethical and legal considerations that we are, and they are already developing human augmentation capabilities.
Our key challenge will be establishing advantage in this field without compromising the values and freedoms that underpin our way of life …
When we think of human augmentation it is easy to imagine science fiction inspired suits or wonder drugs that produce super soldiers, but we are on the cusp of realizing the benefits in a range of roles now. Human augmentation will help to understand, optimize and enhance performance leading to incremental, as well as radical, improvements.”
Changing What It Means To Be Human
As noted in the report, “Human augmentation has the potential to … change the meaning of what it means to be a human.” This is precisely what Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), has stated is the goal of The Fourth Industrial Revolution.2
WEF has been at the center of global affairs for more than 40 years, and if you take the time to dive into WEF’s Fourth Industrial Revolution material, you realize that it’s all about transhumanism. It’s about the merger of man and machine. This is a dystopian future WEF and its global allies are actively trying to implement, whether humanity at large agrees with it or not.
Schwab dreams of a world in which humans are connected to the cloud, able to access the internet through their own brains. This, of course, also means that your brain would be accessible to people who might like to tinker with your thoughts, emotions, beliefs and behavior, be they the technocratic elite themselves or random hackers. As noted by history professor Yuval Noah Harari in late 2019, “humans are now hackable animals.”3 As noted in the featured report:4
“Human augmentation will become increasingly relevant, partly because it can directly enhance human capability and behavior and partly because it is the binding agent between people and machines.
Future wars will be won, not by those with the most advanced technology, but by those who can most effectively integrate the unique capabilities of both people and machines. The importance of human-machine teaming is widely acknowledged but it has been viewed from a techno-centric perspective.
Human augmentation is the missing part of this puzzle. Thinking of the person as a platform and understanding our people at an individual level is fundamental to successful human augmentation.”
Key words I’d like to draw your attention to is the affirmation that human augmentation can “directly enhance behavior.” Now, if you can enhance behavior, that means you can change someone’s behavior. And if you can change a person’s behavior in a positive way, you can also control it to the person’s own detriment.
Theoretically, absolutely anyone, any random civilian with a brain-to-cloud connection and the needed biological augmentation (such as strength or speed) could be given wireless instructions to carry out an assassination, for example, and pull it off flawlessly, even without prior training.
Alternatively, their physical body could temporarily be taken over by a remote operator with the prerequisite skills. Proof of concept already exists, and is reviewed by Dr. Charles Morgan, professor in the department of national security at the University of New Haven, in the lecture below. Using the internet and brain implants, thoughts can be transferred from one person to another. The sender can also directly influence the physical movements of the receiver.
The Human Platform
On page 12 of the report, the concept of the human body as a platform is described, and how various parts of the human platform can be augmented. For example:
Physical performance such as strength, dexterity, speed and endurance can be enhanced, as well as physical senses. One example given is gene editing for enhanced sight
Psychological performance such as cognition, emotion and motivation can be influenced to activate and direct desired behavior. Examples of cognitive augmentation include improving memory, attention, alertness, creativity, understanding, decision-making, intelligence and vigilance
Social performance — “the ability to perceive oneself as part of a group and the readiness to act as part of the team” — can be influenced. Communication skills, collaboration and trust are also included here
They list several different ways to influence the physical, psychological and social performance of the “human platform,” including genetics (germ line and somatic modification), the gut microbiome, synthetic biology, invasive (internal) and noninvasive (external) brain interfaces, passive and powered exoskeletons, herbs, drugs and nano technology, neurostimulation, augmented reality technologies such as external holograms or glasses with built-in artificial intelligence, and sensory augmentation technologies such as external sensors or implants. As noted in the report:
“The senses can be extended by translating frequencies beyond the normal human range into frequencies that can been seen, heard or otherwise detected. This could allow the user to ‘see’ through walls, sense vibrations and detect airborne chemicals and changes to magnetic fields.
More invasive options to enhance existing senses have also been demonstrated, for example, coating retinal cells with nanoparticles to enable vision in the infrared spectrum.”
They also point out that, from a defense perspective, methods to de-augment an augmented opponent will be needed. Can you even imagine the battlefield of the future, where soldiers are barraged from both sides with conflicting inputs?
As for ethics, the paper stresses that “we cannot wait for the ethics of human augmentation to be decided for us.” There may even be “moral obligations” to augment people, they say, such as when it would “promote well-being” or protect a population from a “novel threat.”
Interestingly, the paper notes that “It could be argued that treatments involving novel vaccination processes and gene and cell therapies are examples of human augmentation already in the pipeline.” This appears to be a direct reference to mRNA and vector DNA COVID jabs. If so, it’s an open admission that they are a human augmentation strategy in progress.
The Challenge of Unintended Consequences
Of course, there can be any number of side effects and unintended outcomes when you start augmenting an aspect of the human body or mind. As explained in the featured report:
“The relationship between augmentation inputs and outputs is not as simple as it might appear. An augmentation might be used to enhance a person’s endurance but could unintentionally harm their ability to think clearly and decisively in a timely fashion.
In a warfighting context, an augmentation could make a commander more intelligent, but less able to lead due to their reduced ability to socially interact or because they increasingly make unethical decisions. Even a relatively uncontentious enhancement such as an exoskeleton may improve physical performance for specific tasks, but inadvertently result in a loss of balance or reduced coordination when not being worn.
The notion of enhancement is clouded further by the intricacies of the human nervous system where a modifier in one area could have an unintended effect elsewhere. Variation between people makes designing enhancements even more challenging.”
Still, none of that is cause to reconsider or slow down the march toward transhumanism, according to the authors. We just need to understand the human body better, and for that, we need to collect and analyze more data on human performance, behavior, genetics and epigenetics. As noted by the authors:
“Devices that track movement, heart rate, oxygenation levels and location are already commonplace and will become increasingly accurate and sophisticated, making it possible to gather an increasingly wide array of performance data in real time. We can also analyze data in ways that were impossible even five years ago.
Artificial intelligence can analyze massive sets of information almost instantaneously and turn it into products that can inform decision-making. This marriage of data collection and analytics is the foundation of future human augmentation.”
Lab-Grown Designer Babies
As mentioned, by the time a technological advancement is admitted publicly, the research is already a decade or more down the road. Consider, then, the February 1, 2022, article in Futurism,5 which announced that Chinese scientists have developed an artificial intelligence nanny robot to care for fetuses grown inside an artificial womb. According to Futurism :6
“The system could theoretically allow parents to grow a baby in a lab, thereby eliminating the need for a human to carry a child. The researchers go so far as to say that this system would be safer than traditional childbearing.”
As of now, the AI robot is only in charge of lab-raised animal embryos, as “experimentation on human embryos is still forbidden under international law.” However, that could change at any time. In May 2021, the International Society for Stem Cell Research went ahead and relaxed the rules7 on human embryonic experimentation.8
Up until then, the rule had been that no human embryo could be grown in a lab environment beyond 14 days. Human embryos may now be grown beyond 14 days if certain conditions are met. In some countries, laws would still need to be changed to go beyond 14 days, but regardless, there’s no doubt that as transhumanism gets underway in earnest, ethical considerations about growing babies in laboratories will be tossed out.
Combine the announcement of an AI robot nanny to care for lab-grown embryos with the 2018 announcement that Chinese scientists were creating CRISPR gene-edited babies. As reported by Technology Review, November 25, 2018,9 “A daring effort is underway to create the first children whose DNA has been tailored using gene editing.”
The embryos were genetically edited to disable a gene called CCR5, to make the babies “resistant to HIV, smallpox and cholera.” The embryos were then implanted into a human mother using in vitro fertilization. At the time, the lead scientist refused to answer whether the undertaking had resulted in a live birth, but shortly thereafter it was confirmed that one trial participant had indeed given birth to gene-edited twins in November 2018.10
In June 2019, Nature magazine published an article11 questioning whether the CRISPR babies might inadvertently have been given a shorter life span, as research had recently discovered that people with two disabled copies of the CCR5 gene were 21% more likely to die before the age of 76 than those with one functioning copy of that gene. The babies might also be more susceptible to influenza and autoimmune conditions, thanks to this genetic tinkering.
Should We Breed Chimeras to Satisfy Need for Organs?
Ethical considerations about animal-human hybrids (chimeras) will probably also fall by the wayside once transhumanism becomes normalized. Already, human-monkey hybrid embryos have been grown by a team of Chinese and American scientists.12
The hybrid embryos are part of an effort to find new ways to produce organs for transplant patients. The idea is to raise monkeys with human-compatible organs that can then be harvested as needed. Here, the embryos were grown in test tubes for as long as 20 days — and this was done before the ISSCR officially agreed to relaxing the 14-day rule.
The question is, if this kind of research ends up being successful, and the creation of animals with human organs is actually feasible, at what point does the chimera become a human?
How do we know that what looks like a monkey doesn’t have a human brain, with the intelligence that goes with it? Taking it a step further, even, what’s to prevent scientists from growing human organ donors? Human clones, even? It’s a slippery slope, for sure.
Privacy in the Age of Transhumanism
Perhaps one of the greatest concerns I (and many others) have is that not only are we moving toward a merger of man and machine, but at the same time we’re also increasingly outsourcing human morality to machines. I cannot imagine the end result being anything but devastating. How did that happen? Timandra Harkness, a BBC Radio presenter and author of “Big Data: Does Size Matter?” writes:13
“As the recent pandemic years have shown, the desire to be free from scrutiny unless there’s a good reason to be scrutinized is widely seen as, at best, eccentric and, at worst, automatic grounds for suspicion.
We simply can’t articulate why a private life is valuable. We have no sense of ourselves as autonomous beings, persons who need a space in which to reflect, to share thoughts with a few others, before venturing into public space with words and actions that we feel ready to defend …
Part of the appeal of technologies like AI is the fantasy that a machine can take the role of wise parent, immune to the emotion and unpredictability of mere humans. But this tells us less about the real capabilities of AI, and more about our disillusionment with ourselves.
The urge to fix COVID, or other social problems, with technology springs from this lack of trust in other people. So does the cavalier disregard for privacy as an expression of moral autonomy.
Technology ethics can’t save us, any more than technology can. Even during a pandemic, how we regard one another is the fundamental question at the root of ethics. So we do need to treat technology as just a tool, after all. Otherwise we risk being made its instruments in a world without morals.”
Last year, cartoons began to appear depicting an endless cycle of variants and government responses. They call to mind the definition of insanity (misattributed to Einstein) as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Or perhaps the less well known line from a 1990s Stephen King miniseries “Hell is repetition.”
The direction of public health policy over the past two years has been difficult to understand. It may be a fool’s errand to use logic and reason for something that by design makes no sense. But coming at it as I do with no prior education in medicine or epidemiology, crude tools such as logic and common sense may still be useful: The basic principles of reality are true for all endeavors. For a plan to work, it must work within a finite time; for every on ramp, there must be an exit.
We started out with “Two weeks to flatten the curve.” If nothing else can be said in favor of this plan, credit must be given for how well it was explained. Pictures like this were clear enough. With my university-level education in math and physics, I understood that the area under the curve was expected to remain equal under both alternatives: the one with and the other without “precautions” (as the label in the diagram euphemistically refers to life under communism). The peak of the curve would be lower, at the cost of the epidemic being extended in duration.
While the plan might or might not work, it is possible to state the premise without contradicting laws of logic or common sense. The flattening plan does accept that nearly everyone will eventually be exposed and the contagion will exhaust itself. If the plan enables some people to delay their exposure, up to a point, that could buy doctors some time to better learn how to treat them. Or perhaps a miraculous vaccine will be introduced that would create sterilizing immunity and halt the outbreak in its tracks enabling those who had delayed to avoid infection entirely.
While the plan was clear, it was not guaranteed to work. Subtle effects could undermine the simple story told by the picture. Perhaps everyone staying at home will not help because people will get infected at home. Or perhaps too many people must leave home because essential critical infrastructure workers such as marijuana dispensaries must remain open to keep society running.
Some suggested then a policy that postpones population immunity would give the virus more time to mutate. Given enough time, people who were infected and have developed natural immunity to an earlier variant would face a virus sufficiently different that they might become infected again. Along these lines, biotech executive Vivek Ramaswamy and medical professor Dr Apoorva Ramaswamy MD, writing in the Wall Street Journal, question whether we should even try to slow the spread when “Speeding It May Be Safer.” Cognitive scientist Mark Changzi suggests “slowing the spread among the healthy not-at-risk, which just raises the frail’s chances of getting infected.” “Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, who have been asserting that you can’t vaccinate your way out of a pandemic for months” believe that vaccination during an outbreak accelerates the evolution of the virus away from the version targeted by the vaccine.
Quite likely the “precautions” did nothing to make the curve flatter. With the benefit of hindsight we can observe that outbreaks of the virus in proximate US states (or neighboring nations that are similar in size and demographics in other regions of the world) rise and fall side by side in cyclical surges, regardless of when or if efforts to slow the spread were made. There is no impact on the variability of any public health metric based on when a “precaution” was undertaken.
After the hospitalizations peaked and then declined to near zero in the spring of 2020, I naively expected that we had done what we could, and it was over. Whether we had flattened the curve, or, the virus did what it would have done anyway, was at that point irrelevant. Instead of ending the precautions, there was an unstated shift from the original strategy to a new one. Unlike the original, the new policy was not clearly explained. I suspect the reason is that it could not have been explained without it becoming obvious that it did not make any sense.
“Flatten the curve” assumes contagions come to an end – either through immunity or viruses burn themselves out for reasons we do not fully understand. All things come to an end. Even the plague of the Black Death ran out of gas before it wiped out the entire human race. If an outbreak ends when most of us have been exposed (and either died or developed immunity), how can slowing it down be said to save lives? Is it not the best we can hope for that some people are exposed and suffer the consequences later rather than sooner?
Evidence of the new reality appeared to me one day when I was stuck in a traffic jam, on a trip I (and many of my neighbors) made in violation of my locality’s “shelter in place” order. As I puzzled over this new reality, I noticed overhead digital signage (paid for by my governor’s massive ad spend on Covid propaganda), stating: “Stay at home: save lives.” This was the initial wave of a propaganda tsunami imploring us to “slow the spread.”
A story about a superspreader who went to a party and infected multiple people who subsequently died attributed the deaths to the careless person who probably did not wear a mask. Was there some alternate version of reality in which the dead partygoers lived out the rest of their natural life never being exposed to a virus to which they were vulnerable? Should the superspreader be held responsible for their exposure, or was it only a matter of time until the virus found them, one way or another?
Sanctimonious lockdowners heaped scorn and ridicule on countries that did not slow the spread. A small industry of curve-fitting explanations were offered to explain the “success stories:” they locked down, they wore face masks, they tested, they quarantined, they contact-traced, they social distanced. They did as they were told. They obeyed authority. And we should do likewise.
According to Dr. Anthony Fauci MD, it was the time for us ornery Americans to do as we were told. In retrospect every one of the virtuous nations had its own spike or two, or three, often after getting fully vaccinated, taking a victory lap, and dislocating both of their shoulders by patting themselves on the back overly vigorously.
Consider testing. Some virtuous nations tested. Based on the long lines of cars to get into the popup centers, the United States tested a lot too. When former president Donald Trump suggested that – perhaps – we were overtesting, he was subjected to enormous ridicule. Yet how could testing help slow the spread of a virus? By itself testing does nothing other than identify sick people.
Can a test do a better job at identifying sick people than they can do on their own simply by noticing whether they have symptoms? If testing once a week does not help, does testing twice a week? And if so, then why do we care about a test result, if asymptomatic people are not contagious? In reality testing produced too many false positives to be useful.
Testing could in theory help if combined with contact tracing and quarantines to isolate the infected people. Contact tracing was another ritual of the success stories – yet contact tracing could not possibly work if someone could be infected by coming within six feet of a sick person or walking down the same side of the street because the second-order contacts of contacts would rapidly explode to include everyone in an entire city or region. This was another instance of Yogi Berra’s observation that “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”
I wondered what the goals of the new policy of “slow the spread” could be. Was it zero-covid? Zero-covid was the objective of a small cultof fanatics that never gained much traction in the US. A serious go at it would require a country to permanently ban inbound international travel. This was done in a small and tightly controlled nation where a friend of mine lives. According to my friend, they had very low levels of infection; however, the nation’s economy was tourism-based and the continued success of the policy requires that travelers not enter the country. The operation was a success, the patient died.
We were not flattening the curve, nor did it look like a strategy of total eradication. We were in a strange middle ground. At best we were pushing the pain into the future but with no plan to ever deal with it. The goals and exit conditions of the plan were not clearly explained. I did at one point find a statement by Dr. Fauci that preventive measures could drive the disease down to a very low level. Was it assumed to remain low forever? If not, then from that low base, outbreaks could be somehow contained?
So when people heard in Summer 2020 that Biden aimed to “get covid under control,” some people imagined an optimistic state of affairs whereby, once we all got vaccinated or wore masks for just 100 days (link), covid might be suppressed to such a permanently low level that most of us could forget about it, just as we forget about polio. Such people imagined a one-time, short-term effort to “get covid under control,” like unlocking a door.
If we are to believe that a worldwide pandemic grew from an outbreak of twelve people in Wuhan, China to infect nearly the entire world (even indigenous tribes in the Amazon jungle who are by definition quarantined) why would it not do the same when we emerged from our underground fallout shelters? What if through assiduously standing in small circles painted on the floor in grocery stores and wearing underwear on our faces, we succeeded in driving the number of Covid infections down to a very small number? To pick a number, for example, twelve people. Why would the contagion not, in the absence of broader acquired immunity, spread again from that new base of twelve, until eventually reaching all of those remaining uninfected?
It took me some time to give it a name. I settled on “suppression.” The fundamental reason that suppression is not a policy is that it has no exit. For a thing to work it must work within a limited time. If the measures to slow the spread succeeded in slowing it, then what? The nature of the off ramp is the answer to the question, “What happens when we stop doing it?” If the answer is, “It would go right back to what it was doing before,” then there is no exit.
During 2020 I had people tell me that we could not end the lockdown because the epidemic would pick up right where it left off and millions would die AND (sometimes the same people ) that if we keep up the restrictive measures for a while then we could stop because the virus would not come back. A bit of logic rules out the possibility that the virus could both come back and not come back.
Do we then spend the rest of our lives acting out Covid theater? Dr. Fauci said that he would never shake hands again. Blue check marks fret about quarantining their children. Jenin Younes reflected on a survey in which hypochondriac epidemiologists who are afraid to open their mail explain that they now consider a normal life to be dangerously reckless. Substack author Eugyppius writes about a medical journal editor who “can’t work out what we’re even doing here, but he wants us to keep doing it.”
Dr Prasad explained the difference between finite and infinite strategies:
Even if most of Biden’s voters agreed with his campaign promise to “get covid under control” in the abstract, this slogan does not specify whether the state of being “under control” involves a one-time effort, or a sustained effort over time. If you unlock a door, you do it once and you can forget it; if you lift an overhead hatch, maybe you have to keep holding it up so that it doesn’t fall back down again.
Slowing the spread – if such a thing is even possible – means we get to the same place later rather than sooner. Flat or not, it is over when you reach the right tail of the curve. The strange middle ground of slowing the spread with no exit condition, would, if tried, ruin our lives forever. Are you willing to live under covid restrictions for the rest of your life? And your children for the rest of their lives and all subsequent generations? For some measures that slow the spread of disease, such as indoor plumbing, garbage removal and better diet, the answer is yes. But if our forebears during the plague of the Black Death had adopted a covid-like attempt at suppression, no one would have gone outdoors since the 15th century.
During this time of insanity, some of us went about our lives as best we could and ignored the restrictions. The rest of the world is now coming to terms with the understanding that the “precautions” don’t do much. At best what is going to happen anyway, happens. If there is no off ramp then the change is either permanent or it will go on until failure is evident and people stop caring. Then they will go back to normal one by one.
Robert Blumen is a software engineer and podcast host who writes occasionally about political and economic issues.
The Supreme Court is doing exactly what they said that they were going to do — blocking OSHA from imposing vaccine mandates on private companies but allowing states and cities to impose whatever vaccine tyranny they wish.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor refused to intervene on behalf of 15 people who said they are about to be fired from their jobs as New York City school employees because they refuse to get vaccinated against Covid-19.
This instantly leads to absurdity as jurisdictions governed by Democrats continue to impose vaccine fascism. If you work for the government in California or New York the state owns your body but if you work for the government in Virginia, thanks to the recent election, you have personal sovereignty.
Vaccine mandates in blue cities and states are a clear violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
In trying to sidestep the major Constitutional issues raised by vaccine mandates, the Supreme Court threw gasoline on the fire of political polarization in this country. Since it is illegal for OSHA to force companies to impose a vaccine mandate it should also be illegal, pursuant to the 14th Amendment, for hospitals and jurisdictions controlled by Democrats to impose vaccine mandates.
As I explained in an earlier article, the Constitution clearly gives us a right to bodily autonomy (via the First, Fourth, and Thirteenth Amendments) and the Supreme Court should have struck down the OSHA mandate on Constitutional grounds rather than the narrower statutory interpretation that they used (stating simply that ‘the original OSHA statutes did not give the agency that authority’).
Because the Supreme Court ruled on such narrow grounds, blue states continue to trample individual liberties. Now families have to flee blue states for sanctuary in red states which is leading to partition and possible civil war.
In the absence of clarity from the Supreme Court we must take matters into our own hands by passing a Constitutional amendment to protect bodily sovereignty.
OTTAWA – The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms today filed a lawsuit in Federal Court seeking to strike down the federal government’s mandatory Covid-19 vaccine requirements for air travellers. The court action is on behalf of several Canadians from across Canada whose Charter rights and freedoms have been infringed.
On October 30, 2021, the federal government announced that anyone travelling by air, train, or ship, must be fully vaccinated. The travel vaccination mandate has prevented approximately 6 million unvaccinated Canadians (15% of Canada’s population) from travel within Canada and prevents them from flying out of Canada. Some of the Canadians involved in the lawsuit cannot travel to help sick loved ones, get to work, visit family and friends, take international vacations, and live ordinary lives.
The main applicant in the case is former Newfoundland Premier, The Honourable A. Brian Peckford. Mr. Peckford, pictured, is the only surviving drafter and signatory 40 years after the 1982 Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted.
“It is becoming more obvious that being vaccinated does not stop people from getting Covid and does not stop them from spreading it”, says the former Premier. “The government has not shown that the policy makes flying safer—it simply discriminates”, he notes. “When I heard Prime Minister Trudeau call the unvaccinated ‘racists,’ ‘misogynists, ‘anti-science’ and ‘extremist’ and his musing ‘do we tolerate these people?’ it became clear he is sowing divisions and advancing his vendetta against a specific group of Canadians—this is completely against the democratic and Canadian values I love about this country”, adds Mr. Peckford.
“The federal travel ban has segregated me from other Canadians. It’s discriminatory, violates my Charter rights and that’s why I am fighting the travel ban,” explains Mr. Peckford.
The Justice Centre’s legal challenge cites violations of Charter rights including mobility, life, liberty and security of the person, privacy, and discrimination. The lawsuit also challenges whether the Minister of Transportation has the jurisdiction to use aviation safety powers to enforce public health measures.
In discussing effective border control measures at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, Canada’s chief medical officer, Dr. Tam, said: “As you move further away from that epicentre, any other border measures are much less effective. Data on public health has shown that many of these are actually not effective at all… WHO advises against any kind of travel and trade restrictions, saying that they are inappropriate and could actually cause more harm than good in terms of our global effort to contain.” (Canada House of Commons, Standing Committee on Health Meeting, February 5, 2020)
The World Health Organization (“WHO”) continues to maintain that position and on January 19, 2022, urged all countries to: “Lift or ease international traffic bans as they do not provide added value and continue to contribute to the economic and social stress experienced by States Parties. The failure of travel restrictions introduced after the detection and reporting of Omicron variant to limit international spread of Omicron demonstrates the ineffectiveness of such measures over time.” The WHO repeated that countries should: “not require proof of vaccination against COVID-19 for international travel.” (World Health Organization, Statement on the tenth meeting of the International Health Regulations (2005) Emergency Committee regarding the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, January 19, 2022.)
“Despite the confirmed science that the vaccine does not stop people from getting or spreading the virus and the repeated warnings from the WHO, it’s clear the federal government is out of step and arbitrarily restricting Canadians fundamental rights and freedoms,” says Keith Wilson, Q.C., lead counsel for the legal challenge. “It is profoundly disturbing that a marginalized group in Canada—the unvaccinated—are essentially prohibited from leaving the country,” he adds.
“Canadians have been losing hope in the Charter and our courts. We are going to put the best arguments and evidence forward so that the court can clarify where governments overstep,” concludes Mr. Wilson.
The court will be asked to hear the case on an expedited basis given the serious infringement on Canadians’ mobility and other rights. Canada is the only country in the developed world that has banned Covid vaccine-free travellers from air travel.
The ongoing Truckers for Freedom convoy in Ottawa has triggered a shockwave that is reaching all around the world. Even as our authoritarian federal regime continues to double down on measures and threatens to use brute force tactics against peaceful protesters, many provinces are nervously beginning to lay out a timeline for ending mandates.
But there is something important missing from the conversation surrounding the end of mandates. If the mandates are simply dropped today without calling out the underlying legal and ethical fallacy that was used to justify them, government overreach will have become normalized. We will be left without the legal protections to stop them from doing this to us again after the truckers go home. All it will take to put us back in a cage is for the government to point at the next wave, the next virus variant, or the next non-Covid emergency. We will have normalized that our rights, our freedoms, our bodily autonomy, and even access to our lives are conditional privileges, subject to opinion polls and technocratic impulses, and that they can be withdrawn again at any time, “for our safety.”
Quebec Health Minister Christian Dubé admits that vaccine passports and mandatory masks have no end in sight, and will remain “tools” to ensure a return to “normal life” when another wave hits. pic.twitter.com/TXJnN4xJ8x
In March of 2020, in violation of the principles embedded in our constitutions, governments around the world convinced citizens to give their leaders and public institutions the authority to overrule individual rights in order to “flatten the curve.” That impulse went unchallenged under the false assumption that human rights violations could be justified as long as the benefits to the majority outweighed the costs to the minority. By accepting this excuse for overriding unconditional rights, we transformed ourselves into an authoritarian police state where “might makes right”. That is the moment when all the checks and balances in our scientific and democratic institutions stopped functioning.
Liberal democracy was built around the principle that individual rights must be unconditional. In other words, they are meant to supersede the authority of government. Consequently, individual rights (such as bodily autonomy) were meant to serve as checks and balances on government power. They were meant to provide a hard limit to what our government can do to us without our individual consent.
If the government cannot override your rights to bend you to its will, then it will be forced to try to convince you by talking with you. That forces government to be transparent and to engage in meaningful debate with critics. Your ability to say NO, and to have your choice respected, is the difference between a functioning liberal democracy and an authoritarian regime.
The natural instinct of fearful people is to control those around them. Unconditional rights force people to negotiate voluntary participation in collective solutions. Thus, unconditional rights prevent the formation of echo chambers and provide an important counter-weight to rein in uncontrolled panic. When no-one has the option to use the brute force of State power to force others to submit to what they think is “the right thing to do”, then the only path forward is to keep talking to everyone, including to “fringe minorities” with “unacceptable views”. When we allow rights to become conditional, it is virtually a certainty that during a crisis, panicked citizens and opportunistic politicians will give in to their worst impulses and trample those who disagree with them.
Unconditional individual rights prevent governments from taking unwilling citizens on crusades. They prevent scientific institutions from transforming themselves into unchallengeable “Ministries of Truth” that can double down on their mistakes to avoid accountability. They ensure that the checks and balances that make science and democracy work do not break down in the chaos of a crisis. In the heat of an emergency when policy decisions are often made on the fly, unconditional rights are often the only safeguards to protect minorities from panicked mobs and self-anointed kings.
If we allow our leaders to normalize the idea that rights can be switched off during emergencies or when political leaders decide that “the science is settled”, then we are giving the government terrifying and unlimited power over us. It gives those who control the levers of power the authority to turn off access to your life. That turns the competition for power into a zero-sum game: the winners become masters, the losers become serfs. It means you can no longer afford to allow the other side to win an election, at any cost, nor agree to a peaceful transfer of power, because if you lose the winning team becomes the master of your destiny. And so, a zero-sum game of brutal power politics is set in motion. Unconditional individual rights are the antidote to civil war. Liberal democracy collapses without them.
Withdrawing mandates because “the Omicron variant is mild” or because “the costs of continuing the measures outweigh the benefits” does not undo what has been normalized and legitimized. If the legitimacy of mandates is not overturned, you will not be going back to your normal life. It may superficially look similar to your life before Covid, but in reality you will be living in a Brave New World where governments temporarily grant privileges to those who conform with the government’s vision of how we should live. You will no longer be celebrating your differences, cultivating your individuality, or making your own free choices. Only conformity will enable you to exist. You will be living under a regime in which any new “crisis” can serve as justification to impose restrictions on those who don’t “get with the program” as long as mobs and technocrats think the restrictions are “reasonable”. You will no longer be the master of your own life. A golden cage is still a cage if someone else controls the lock on the door.
Politicians and public health authorities MUST be forced to acknowledge that mandates are a violation of civil liberties. The public MUST be confronted by the fact that liberal democracy ceases to exist without the unconditional (inalienable) safeguards of individual rights and freedoms. The public MUST recognize that science ceases to function when mandates can be used to cut off scientific debates. Our governments and our fellow citizens MUST be made to understand that unconditional rights are especially important during a crisis.
If the legal and ethical fallacies that were used to justify mandates are not called out as inexcusable violations of our constitutional rights, we will have inadvertently normalized the illiberal idea that, as long as someone in a lab coat says it’s okay, this can be done to us again, at any time, whether to fight the next wave of Covid, to take away freedoms to fight “climate change”, to seize assets to solve a government debt crisis, or simply to socially engineer outcomes according to whatever our leaders define as a “fairer and more equitable world”.
How we navigate the end of mandates determines whether we win our freedom or whether we allow our leaders to normalize a Brave New World with conditional rights that can be turned off again during the next “emergency”.
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.
The main applicant in the case is former Newfoundland Premier, The Honourable A. Brian Peckford. Mr. Peckford, pictured, is the only surviving drafter and signatory 40 years after the 1982 Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted.
Aletho News 