THERE are two sources of support for those who find conspiracies behind the creation of the Covid State, who believe that it must all be about ‘something else’.
One is the ‘they know they are lying’ argument of former Pfizer executive and research scientist Mike Yeadon and others, who suggest that even if the politicians don’t fully realise that the Wuhan virus is not a global threat, their public health advisers surely do. They therefore MUST know that they are telling lies, day after day. If they are lying, why? Who or what is behind the Covid State’s lies? On this view, there must be something hidden and menacing in play.
The second source of support for seeing Covid conspiracies is the fact that so many of the decisions taken by democratic governments are so patently stupid and pointless. So much of what has passed for rational decision-making – ‘we are simply following the science’ – is risible. Locking up the healthy rather than protecting the vulnerable? Making people wear masks that, for decades, we have known not to work? Allowing people with life-threatening illnesses to die for want of attention from supposedly stretched hospitals and doctors? Wrecking the economy? Changing the rules every other day on a whim? Spending billions on contact-trace technology that achieves nothing save spreading further needless panic? The very idea that governments can control, let alone eliminate, rapidly spreading viruses?
Now, there are a number of explanations other than the two obvious ones – conspiracy or stuff-up – that seek to explain the flight from rationality of our politicians and their ‘expert’ advisers these past eighteen months. Elementary political science tells us that there are several models of decision-making seeking to explain why politicians do the things they do.
One theory is called ‘the rational actor model’, and it might well sum up what the ordinary punter believes to be abilities and motivations of governments. This model assumes that well-informed politicians with a clear understanding of the problem to be solved think through the options and make the best choice. Perhaps even use some cost-benefit analysis. Clarify the problem, list the options, weigh the issues carefully, consider likely outcomes, recognise the downsides of any actions taken, be consistent, measure success (evaluate) with standardised and agreed methods.
I know – try not to laugh. But the rational actor model probably best described how the bureaucracy used to work. Frank, fearless advice based on research and understanding of issues was offered to elected officials by disinterested public servants. That proposition is now as naïve as believing that their political masters are rational actors.
But you would like to think that politicians should aspire to be well-motivated, well-informed and determined to achieve the best outcome possible for the good of the country or state over which they preside.
Yet we seem to be falling very, very short of the ideal. Politicians are nowadays greedy, motivated by career, factionalised, prone to lying, controlled by outside interests, fearful of losing their power and seemingly willing to do anything to get off the hook. They are patently driven by the enjoyment of power, accessing the perks of office, protecting their mates, setting up post-political career opportunities and settling scores. There is little evidence that they are focused on problem solving (as per the rational actor model), even remotely interested in it or equipped to do it.
A second model of decision-making has been called ‘bounded rationality’. This is the idea that time-poor politicians facing complex problems do not seek the best policy, but are satisfied with an ‘acceptable’ solution, achieving as good an outcome as can be expected under the circumstances.
A third model of decision-making is called ‘incrementalism’. This suggests that no political decision is made in isolation. Every decision builds on what is already there. Its chief advocate (an American called Charles Lindblom) calls the approach ‘muddling through’.
A fourth model is that democracies consist of interest groups all vying for influence over decision-making, and that politicians simply respond to these interest groups in the decisions they make. They especially respond to loud, persistent, clever, monied interest groups. Like Big Pharma, perhaps? Or Big Tech? If this sounds corrupt, it is.
A fifth model of politics – public choice theory – suggests that politicians and bureaucrats have selfish interests like voters and like sellers and buyers in the marketplace that is the economy, and that they make decisions according to this self-interest. Leaders look out for number one. This is getting very warm, and isn’t remotely surprising. Nothing has been so clear during the Covid affair as the self-interest of politicians.
So, we have an array of theories trying to explain how politicians make decisions. But nothing, nothing, in the study of politics or of decision-making explains fully why governments all over the world simultaneously threw sanity out the window in seeking to deal with a middling, flu-like virus.
Two conclusions can confidently be reached, however. One is that to date there hasn’t been a sliver of very thin paper between the major parties on Covid policy. Right, left or centre, they are all equally panicked, all pandering to the fear in the community that they themselves have created, all scared witless – in the age of the social media pile-on – of instant electoral retribution. All are ignoring science, all are either crushing dissent or ridiculing those (few) who question their approach, and none are remotely able or willing to ask their advisers hard questions, and in doing so to act as our representatives in a quest for the truth.
The second conclusion relates to something called the ‘Overton Window’, which explains what governments are willing and unwilling to do when making decisions. How far they feel comfortable going. It is their window of opportunity (named after the guy who thought this model up), their area of safety, the constraints that stop them doing anything too ‘courageous’, as the fictional Sir Humphrey Appleby would have said.
Another name for this is the ‘meerkat theory of politics’. Meerkats emerge from their hidey-holes and look around to see what dangers there are and what possibilities are open to them. Our Covid politicians are like meerkats. They see what they might be able to get away with. They venture a little farther from the hidey-hole, but still look over their shoulders for electoral danger.
What the political class has done since March 2020 is massively to expand the Overton Window. The political science textbook has been thrown out and a new set of theories is needed to explain why freedom and economies have been destroyed.
We-the-people have allowed them to do this. We have let them throw away the rule book. Like the slowly boiling frog, we have sat there doing almost nothing, saying almost nothing, while our freedoms have been trashed. Now we are willing to stay locked in our home for no good reason, to bump elbows with friends, to dob in our neighbours for doing nothing remotely wrong or dangerous, to watch breathlessly every new announcement by a health bureaucrat, to tell the Government our whereabouts, to bow before the violent actions of thug-police, to have experimental, yet-to-be-approved drugs injected into our bodies, and to abuse anyone who won’t do these things.
Whatever else they are, our leaders are not being remotely rational. And yes, as Mike Yeadon says, they ARE lying and they must know their decisions are stupid and, on balance, massively harmful.
What on earth is the rule book for that?
July 31, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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Professor Neil Ferguson, the controversial epidemiologist who predicted there would be as many as 200,000 COVID cases a day in the UK if restrictions were lifted, is facing scrutiny after infections continued to drop for the 6th day in a row.
The day before so-called ‘freedom day’ in England, where most mask mandates and social distancing restrictions were lifted, Ferguson was asked by the BBC’s Andrew Marr where the country was heading as a result.
“It’s very difficult to say for certain, but I think 100,000 cases a day is almost inevitable,” said Ferguson, adding, “The real question is do we get to double that or higher? We could get to 200,000 cases a day.”

The professor went on to warn of “major disruption” to the NHS and the interruption of elective surgeries.
Ferguson is being proven wrong by the statistics once again, which today showed there were 24,950 new coronavirus cases, the sixth consecutive daily fall.
“Lockdown zealots will attribute this decline to the vaccines, but that begs the question of why they weren’t confident the vaccines would prevent cases from surging when they predicted armageddon last Monday?” asks Toby Young.
As Christopher Snowdon highlights, the scientists who claimed England’s unlocking represented “a threat to world” are also being proven spectacularly wrong. SAGE government advisers who claimed that relaxing restrictions was “a dangerous and unethical experiment” also face embarrassment.
The issue once again begs the question; Why does the government continue to follow advice given by arch-lockdown advocates who have got it wrong time and time again?
Don’t forget that it was Ferguson who infamously warned that half a million Brits would die without a draconian lockdown, despite the fact that countries like Sweden which didn’t impose lockdown had similar waves and infection rates.
Not only has Ferguson repeatedly proven himself to be totally unreliable (after having already disgraced himself during the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak), but he infamously betrayed what he really thought about the severity of the pandemic via his own behavior.
During the first lockdown, when Ferguson himself was predicting up to half a million deaths, the professor took the threat of the virus so seriously, he allowed his mistress to violate the rules by traveling back and forth across London to continue the pair’s sordid affair.
“It’s OK when we do it!”
Principia Scientific International editor’s note: For those who are not familiar with Neil Ferguson’s record:

This is from the BBC virus webpage yesterday:

As you can see, new cases are falling rapidly.
July 31, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, Human rights, UK |
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A U.K. member of Parliament has come forward writing a blistering op-ed for the Daily Mail. Part whistleblower, part human rights activist, Graham Brady is calling out his own government’s ill-advised Covid mitigation policies, originating from fear, rather than sound public health science.
July 31, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, Human rights, United States |
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Twitter locked talkshow host and author Dave Rubin out of his account and forced him to delete a tweet where he called out federal vaccine mandates and noted that people with the vaccine are getting and transmitting COVID.
“They want a federal vaccine mandate for vaccines that are clearly not working as promised just a few weeks ago,” Rubin said in the now-deleted tweet. “People are getting and transmitting COVID despite vax. Plus now they’re prepping us for booster shots. A sane society would take a pause. We do not live in a sane society.”
Twitter flagged the tweet for allegedly “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19” and ordered him to delete the tweet to regain access to his account.

But Rubin fired back by noting that the so-called misleading and potentially harmful information in the tweet echoed recent statements from President Joe Biden and the mainstream media.
“Everything I said in this tweet is true,” Rubin said. “Biden mentioned federal mandate today, the vax obviously isn’t working as intended, and Pfizer is talking booster shots.”
Rubin pointed to several mainstream media articles that agree with the points he made in the tweet including a USA Today article describing Biden’s Thursday announcement of some vaccine mandates, a Washington Post article that describes how the director of Emory Vaccine Center was Walter A. Orenstein, associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center “struck by data showing that vaccinated people who became infected with delta shed just as much virus as those who were not vaccinated,” and a CNN article about Pfizer releasing new data that supports a third booster shot.
In an interview with Fox News, Rubin described how Big Tech’s misinformation rules are only applied to certain perspectives while others get a pass.
“If they’re going to delete people for misinformation, you’d have to delete basically every single Democrat on Twitter because they all claimed that there was Russian collusion, that Trump was an agent of Russia for four years, they claimed that Brett Kavanaugh was a serial rapist, they claimed that the Covington kids were all racist, they claimed that Jussie Smollett was almost lynched, Hillary Clinton tweeted that Donald Trump was an illegitimate president, there are all endless lies from these people,” Rubin said. “Who decides what COVID misinformation is? If you’re banned for COVID misinformation, Fauci should be banned from the internet in perpetuity.”
This is the latest of many examples of independent creators being censored for posts about the coronavirus while those deemed to be “authoritative sources” by Big Tech get a pass.
Last year, numerous mainstream media outlets that are often boosted by Big Tech for supposedly being authoritative sources downplayed the coronavirus by suggesting that it’s no more dangerous than the flu and advised against wearing masks. These outlets weren’t censored by Big Tech, even after rules were introduced that expressly prohibit claims that COVID-19 is no more dangerous than the flu or claims that wearing a face mask does not help prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Meanwhile, independent creators or members of the public that simply debate or question these same issues are swiftly censored by the tech giants.
July 30, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, Twitter, United States |
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“New Normal Newspeak” is a series of short articles highlighting how our language has come under assault in the past eighteen months.
***
We have a backlog for these NNNS posts, but I saw this today on Twitter, and it made me laugh so it gets to jump the queue.
A few days ago, Saudi Arabia announced they would be introducing vaccine passes for, essentially, anyone that wanted to do anything.
And then Max Boot, the neo-liberal warmonger who’s paid to squat over his keyboard and squeeze out columns for the Washington Post, called it “progressive”:

There it is in black and white – an absolute monarchy that still practices public beheadings, has no religious freedom, democracy or equal rights, has decided to add to their delightful resume by introducing digital surveillance, enforced experimental vaccination and medical apartheid. Doesn’t that sound so progressive?
The Council of Foreign Relations fellow has since deleted the tweet. And it’s not hard to see why.
Maybe no other word has had its meaning as brutally violated as “progressive” in the last decade. It is used to stifle freedom of speech, to camouflage corruption of “liberal” candidates, as a casus belli for regime change and to bang the drum for new cold wars with both Russia and China.
But applying it to Saudi Arabia is a whole new level of stretched meaning.
It’s also a little preview of how the billionaire-owned MSM will be selling medical apartheid to their hypnotized “liberal” readers in coming weeks.
July 30, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, Saudi Arabia, Washington Post |
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The Department of Justice and the FBI have a message for local police departments: start charging more white people with hate crimes or invite an investigation.
Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta told an assembly of FBI agents yesterday that they are now tasked with hounding police departments in their district if they do not register any “hate crimes.”
Gupta and FBI Deputy Assistant Director of the Criminal Investigative Division Jay Greenberg have declared “hate crimes” by “racially motivated violent extremists” (a euphemism generally reserved for right-wing white men) to be a national threat priority — a rare designation.
According to Greenberg, the FBI will be increasingly specialized in pursuing “hate crimes” through increased training in the matter, an aggressive media campaign designed to recruit victims in “underrepresented and targeted populations,” and putting federal pressure on local law enforcement to charge and report hate crimes when they otherwise wouldn’t.
Hate crimes laws are political and racially motivated. Blacks and Jews are heavily overrepresented as supposed victims in the FBI’s “hate crime” database, while whites are charged at higher rates than general crime rates. For example, last month a black man who shot five white men in a multi-state shooting spree told police his sole motive was that he hated white people, yet neither local prosecutors or the FBI have charged him with a hate crime.
According to the FBI’s 2019 hate crime report, blacks are 49% of victims of racial bias while Jews are 60% of crimes motivated by religious animosity. Most of the blacks in the data were victims of “intimidation,” an often Constitutionally dubious charge. A large number of reported hate crimes targeting both blacks and Jews are hoaxes, as seen in famous cases like the Jussie Smollett incident and the thousands of bomb threats targeting Jewish community centers that were the work of a Jew in Israeli.
Just yesterday, a white man was charged with “ethnic intimidation” for putting up stickers that say “I Love Being White.” The FBI wants more police departments to exploit the legal gray area and lack of First Amendment advocacy groups for white dissidents to juke crime statistics and distort the reality of crime. Blacks commit roughly 90% of violent interracial felonies, a statistic the Critical Race Theorists at the FBI find inconvenient.
The mad rush for white racists at the FBI is bound to cause more embarrassments for the increasingly discredited agency. Last year, the theater put on by the FBI over NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace’s “noose,” which turned out to be a hoax, served to reveal the hyper-politicization and lack of seriousness at the Bureau.
July 29, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception | FBI, Human rights, United States, Zionism |
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An investigation into fatal floods has been launched in Belgium’s Wallonia region, the worst hit by the disaster earlier this month. Prosecutors are looking into “involuntary homicide by lack of foresight or precaution.”
An investigative judge has been appointed to identify possible officials who allegedly may be responsible for manslaughter during this month’s deadly floods, a public prosecutor’s office in the city of Liege announced on Wednesday. A prosecutor has already taken note of various public positions relating to the chain of events preceding the floods, adding that those in charge might be responsible for the “lack of foresight or precaution,” according to local media.
The inquiry relates to the severe floods that hit the region in the south of Belgium on July 14. The province of Liege suffered the worst, and 41 deaths have been confirmed in Wallonia in total, with at least two more persons still missing, local media reported this week, citing regional government. At least 202 of 262 municipalities in Wallonia can claim support from the disaster fund, region’s prime minister Elio Di Rupo announced at a press conference earlier this week, saying that “this shows the scale of the disaster.”
Locals have also called for an independent investigation. Residents and businesses in the town of Chaudfontaine in the Liege province have joined forces in a “People against flows” collective, planning to file a complaint against the state, according to local media. They suspect that the mishandling of dams in the region could have possibly led to the disaster, while also blaming officials’ negligence in terms of evacuation orders. At least some damage could have possibly been prevented by lowering water levels at a major dam following bad weather forecasts, specialists have suggested.
The flooding in Belgium has damaged infrastructure, leaving thousands without power and drinking water. In neighboring Germany, dozens were killed in the massive flooding, and the disaster has also hit Switzerland and Austria. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel has said her country will continue to “oppose” the destructive forces of nature, while calling for a tougher climate protection policies.
July 29, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | European Union, Human rights |
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How is a citizenry to respond to Evil, to publicly made threats that they are now in a period where novel viruses, cyberterrorism, and food shortages may strike at any moment?
What about the fact that making threats to achieve political or ideological aims is the very definition of terrorism itself, or the fact that using the internet to do this is the definition of cyberterrorism? When we look at those who have benefited politically and financially from the lockdowns, and who will undoubtedly do the same with the coming cyberterrorism seasons, we are reasonable in asking: Is the World Economic Forum website in fact a terrorist website?
Are the Davos people terrorists? Certainly, the plausible deniability here is that these ‘threats’ are actually just warnings, warnings that other nefarious actors like the so-called DarkSide, “thought” to be behind the Colonial Pipeline attack, are lurking in the shadows of supposed anonymity may carry out attacks or make threats.
What about the rising phenomenon of censorship, and the taking of political prisoners?
Well how about a bit of wisdom from wiseguys and gangsters, new and old, which goes something like this: those delivering warnings work for those behind the threats.
We ought to be able to warn about impending doom without being accused of being the agent of said doom. But in normal criminology, we ask – who benefited, and who had the power to carry it out. When a single agent can both gain from something, and had the power to execute it, they become a suspect.
It is reasonable therefore to look at those giving ‘warnings’, because they become threats when understanding that they also have the most to gain from their own proposed ‘solutions’ to said threats, and also have the power to carry out the attacks themselves. These aren’t solutions, they are the ultimatums.
They furthermore have direct control over political actors whose nominal obligations are to protect and serve the public. In many ways, it is a perfect crime. And if it can happen, then it will happen, and likely has already happened. We should go so far as to propose that this is indeed what has happened, and is happening to us right now.
Fascism at Home
We are nevertheless asked to believe that it’s merely an incredible coincidence that just as the U.S. deep state failed to make victory in a whole array of geopolitical endeavors, that they launch an attack on civil society called ‘the new normal’. It was reasoned by Marxist revolutionaries Antonio Gramsci and Leon Trotsky a hundred years ago that the roots of Fascism lie in dying and frustrated empires; that when the costs of empire exceeded the gains, that the final solution was to turn the gears of the machinery of the state apparatus against the home population of the empire itself.
Then the politics of divide and conquer, deceit and confusion – normal within parliamentary systems anyhow – becomes a deadly game of cancel culture but with mass graves and concentration camps. This is how evil operates in the world
Perhaps this is what we are seeing today. Because we really need to ask, does anyone else find it amazing that right as this series of imperial failures happened all within the short span of a few years, that magically the entire narrative of society transmogrifies overnight into a giant ritual sacrifice to prevent novel viruses, cyberterrorism, and food shortages?
Here we are also asked to suspend rational thinking and science, in the name of rationalizing and trusting the science. Provisions that governments make against an ever-mutating virus are more often at odds with science and the pre-Covid understanding of how transmission works, or what infected means, and what the significance of symptoms are or aren’t. All of the provisions seem aimed at stoking fear, furthering divisions, and transforming this fear into an anger, but yet not at those who created the virus in a laboratory – as U.S. Senator Rand Paul has explained in hearings.
Instead we are required in our obligatory two-minutes of hate, to redirect this weaponized anger at those who question the entire narrative.
Indeed the hallmarks of fascism are abundant, even if in a very superficial and superstructural way the apparent ‘roles’ were reversed. Fascistic gangs (despite their leftist ideology) financed by big business in the form of Antifa and BLM ran rampant for a whole year, in protests that were 95% peaceful and 5% arson and murder. But going back to wiseguys and gangsters, maybe one only needs to take out 5% of adversaries to instill fear in the other 95%. On the streets it’s called ‘making an example’.
Of Stolen Elections & Political Prisoners
Once the populist forces – ‘the Historical Block’ – a united front of minorities, workers, veterans, students, the unemployed, and small and medium business owners nevertheless won the battle of democracy in what appeared as a Trump landslide on election night 2020, the election was stolen.
But the real affront was that it wasn’t truly stolen, it was taken – and taken in broad daylight in front of everyone and God – in an openly publicized non-conspiracy by the Transition Integrity Project, financed by the World Economic Forum’s Nicolas Berggruen and led by Clinton favourite John Podesta, working with Big Tech oligarchs like Zuckerberg and advertised by Jeff Bezos’ The Washington Post.
Even Time Magazine’s write-up read as a confession. No doubt this was to inoculate the last dozen or so geriatric readers of Time Magazine, before they heard about it from friends. First impressions, after all, are lasting impressions.

Then on January 6th, when a tiny fraction of the historical block, still numbering countless tens of thousands, mobilized in a peaceful march on the Capitol, the FBI may have launched a false-flag attack that justified a coordinated parliamentary ‘about-face’ which brought to a halt the hopes of more than 70 million voters that the steal could be stopped. The corrupt DOJ would then proceed to hold a number of political prisoners, as they do to this very day, in grotesquely delayed proceedings on charges that in fact do not resemble the media charge of ‘insurrection’. And there are mounting credible reports that these political prisoners face torture and permanent bodily injury.

As attorney Joseph McBride, representing January 6th prisoners, stated in no uncertain terms in an interview that aired on NewsMax and reported by the Gateway Pundit:
“What I can say about the Jan. 6 protesters who remain incarcerated or detained at this point, is that their constitutional rights and human rights are being violated by the Department of Justice and the Federal Government at this very moment. The law is clear that no type of punishment is appropriate for a detainee. Despite that numerous detainees are being held in solitary confinement for long periods of time. They’re being denied medical care. They’re taking beatings. They’re being denied sleep. They’re being psychologically, emotionally, and physically tortured on a regular basis [by guards,],”
That the torture and abuse of political prisoners is being ignored by the same corporate media that promoted the fraudulent electoral outcome which in turn provoked the demonstration in the first place, is of course no surprise.
But the eminent threat besides the fact that this torture is occurring, is that social media – which until five years ago was a relatively safe bastion for free expression – is now openly collaborating with government to silence dissent.
The ‘real cyber-terrorism’ from the point of view of the corporate-state apparatus aren’t the false flags, past and future, which they have planned for the public. Rather, the threat is citizens utilizing the horizontal, peer-to-peer nature of social media as real people to communicate the real existing dangers in an authentic way.
We Are Plagued by Evil
In conclusion we can say that we are plagued – plagued by an elite which has come to view authority and the correct exercise of power through the lens of the corporate boardroom’s social Darwinism. We have meditated on the utility of this term, of evil, knowing very well the metaphysical connotations it carries.
But we use it now with certainty. There were other ways to carry out changes in society, if in fact climate change and human overpopulation were the actual problems to be solved – if indeed these are problems (questions we have debated elsewhere).
As we have written, this would largely include a process of manufacturing consent through a system of positive reinforcement, not punitive measures, isolation, and coercive technologies. Planned obsolescence would have been done away with, making the production of goods which are the primary cause of carbon emissions, to decrease many-fold almost overnight. This actual solution also happens to fit precisely with the needs of a rising multipolarity which, at least for some intermediate time, appears to necessitate a slow-down of global supply chains. It also fits with the rise of automation and an increasingly post-labor economic system, if we admit that the planned obsolescence model was as much at keeping people employed as it was about increasing the velocity of money in the economy.
Similar goes with cyberterrorism, and as the public has become increasingly aware but reluctant to admit, the over-use of online systems to manage critical infrastructure and food distribution.
It had been noted with great alarm that consequences of the ‘attacks’ such as the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack on May 7th of this year, were unnecessary. There is no rational underlying reason why the computerized system that Colonial uses, which regulates its pipelines, needs to be connected to computers which are in turn connected to the internet.
This raises serious questions about why it was deemed a good practice to have arranged this in the first place. And it also raises serious questions as to whether its computerized system controlling valves, measuring pressure, etc., was indeed connected to the internet. After all, Colonial’s shutting down in turn calls the entire official narrative into question, leading up to more and more of the ‘Russian hackers’ narrative.
In truth, whatever attack occurred or did not really occur, was claimed in thorough reportage to have affected its billing system, not the systems governing physical distribution. And yet, access to the pipeline was cut-off, affecting countless citizens in the process. Why? Was Colonial simply saying that if they don’t have a way to process payments, then we shut down distribution until further notice? Did Colonial attack itself?
The writing is on the wall. The medium is the message. For reasons explained in our works on this subject, the present elite in the west is governed by a misanthropic principle, which views the exercise of power as something measured by the degree to which it can be exercised in the most painful way.
So long as activists on the left and activists on the right are fighting over whether the Great Reset, lockdowns, and cyberterrorism is actually a capitalist plot or a communist plot, then it will be difficult for the public to organize an effective resistance to what this really all is: Evil.
July 29, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, False Flag Terrorism, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Subjugation - Torture, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, FBI, Human rights, United States |
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If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
– Henry David Thoreau
WE LIVE in the age of the oxymoron. Diversity means everyone thinks the same. Tolerance means the vicious exclusion of anyone who doesn’t. Levelling up is literally exacerbating inequality to medieval levels. Freedom passports means you require papers to watch football. Vaccines don’t prevent the infection or transmission of disease. Democracy is the imposition of new laws and policies no one voted for. Journalism is propaganda. Modern Monetary Theory means effect before cause, the ‘wet pavements cause rain’ branch of economics. Education is the process of removing information rather than importing it. That you don’t think but repeat is more important than that you learn and grow. Asymptomatic transmission means the healthy can infect the immunised. Sociopaths are philanthropists. Virtue signalling is camouflage for a collapse in morality. The green new deal is neither green, new or a deal. Environmentalists means a collection of the world’s most polluting corporations. Climate change policies are any act which preserves the most extreme forms of exploitation. War is peace, freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Owning nothing is happiness, as Orwell might have added if he were around today. Probably on social media (another oxymoron, they’re hard to escape).
A parlour game for this age of absurdity is to see how many of these logical inversions you can think of. Now I want to head in a different direction and consider two questions: What is the effect of collective cognitive dissonance? Where will it lead us?
I believe the effect of collective cognitive dissonance is the mass abdication of responsibility to authority. When something becomes impossible to understand or reconcile, the natural human instinct is to rely on authority figures – to herd. When people feel intense insecurity they abdicate freedom for perceived safety.
According to psychologist Erich Fromm (1900-1980): ‘Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking – and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority.’
Fromm described the concept of automaton conformity as ‘changing one’s ideal self to conform to a perception of society’s preferred type of personality, losing one’s true self in the process’. Fromm described the desire to subsume the self into the herd.
The human species now sounds like a herd of animals with the relentless repetition of alliterative phraseology: for build back better I hear moo moo moo, new normal baa baaa etc. A cacophony of mindless agreement is expressed as poetic assonance: ‘double jabbed’, we yabber at each other like a flock of jabbering birds. Another parlour game for the next lockdown is to list all the new terms and phrases which sound like advertising slogans or neuro-linguistic programming. Why the repetition? Why the repetition?
The real pandemic is everyone thinking the same, a culture so mono it feels as if ISIS won. So why is this conformity reckless?
The width of the edge is what really matters in society. Too wide and we have anarchism, too narrow totalitarianism. Mass conformity is the mechanism of totalitarianism, it is the most reckless act. Progress is always ground up, never top down. All the good stuff happens at the edge. Great art is never produced by corporations. Scientific discoveries take place in patent offices, medical breakthroughs in dirty Petri dishes, great music is made by the unemployed, entrepreneurs succeed via repeated failure. Mandela didn’t change the world from Davos. The moment the pressure on de Klerk forced him to widen the edge, the idea of freedom nursed by Mandela blossomed like a giant protea. The campaigners for women’s suffrage were on the edge of society. Nothing changes from the middle. A third game might be to look around you and list everything born of the maverick. Start with the device you’re most likely reading this article on and work your way out.
Returning to the Thoreau quote at the top of this piece: mavericks need space to dance to a different tune. The edge needs to be just wide enough. ‘And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music,’ as Nietzsche might have said. Reckless conformists hear only one note, mavericks the whole range. Think of us as the control group.
July 29, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights |
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IN THE early hours of Monday, and with fewer than half of MPs present in the Chamber of Deputies, France’s parliament voted into law some of the most draconian legislation since the Second World War Vichy régime, which will shortly see unvaccinated citizens run out of restaurants, chased out of cafés and barred from bars. They will no longer be allowed on long-distance public transport and, as I reported two weeks ago, (Farewell, Liberté | The Conservative Woman ) will not be permitted to enter hospitals either as visitors or patients (an exemption was eventually made for ‘emergency admissions’). Health workers have until mid-September to get the vaccine or face dismissal.
The list of venues in France where a ‘health pass’ will be demanded is already extensive, broadly covering all leisure from sports centres to cinemas, and even weddings on public property (all must take place in the town hall to be legally recognised). Amendments from MPs to limit the scope of the pass – including one to rule out extending it to polling stations – were rejected, meaning that any ‘public place’ could, as deemed necessary, become subject to restrictions (and if it’s already going to happen in hospitals then who knows what will be next?)
Encouragingly, popular resistance to the new measures is growing. Anecdotally, many bars and restaurants are refusing to check health passes. A railworkers’ union has told its members not to check passengers’ health passes and has promised to strike if any of its members are sacked for not having one themselves. A Lyons hospital is going on indefinite strike from Thursday to protest against the pass, and the compulsory-vaccination-in-all-but-name of its staff.
An official estimate (on the low side) put demonstrator numbers on Saturday July 24 at 161,000 nationwide, about 50 per cent more than the previous Saturday, and marches are being planned for this Saturday and in the interim. Despite the measures being introduced when traditionally at least half of the country is on holiday (in other words, a good time to bring in a bad law), more than a third of French people polled said they supported last weekend’s protests.
The government is clearly feeling the pressure. Olivier Véran, the Health Minister, unfeelingly dismissed a social media video of a nurse in tears because she would have to leave her job if forced to take a vaccination as ‘unrepresentative of the profession’. President Macron, visiting French Polynesia at the weekend, waded into the debate, flanked by dozens of masked hospital workers, and gruffly asserted that there was ‘no such thing as freedom without duty’. ‘If you infect me, I’m the victim of your freedom,’ he claimed, while dismissing protesters as ‘selfish’ and ‘irrational’.
Worryingly, if not untypically, the main opposition is trying to take the government in an equally authoritarian direction. The president of the Paris region and potential presidential candidate, Valerie Pécresse, is one of many arguing that the way around a divisive health pass is to make the vaccination obligatory for everyone. That she cannot see that this is the de facto goal of the health pass, and the outcome of her own proposal would also be social division, simply reflects the poverty of mainstream political leadership in the country.
Thankfully, France has a vigorous tradition of popular protest which now and again turns insurrectionary. Macron’s state troopers had to deal with months and months of Yellow Vest protests throughout 2019, which it used military-grade weaponry to put down, ultimately exhausting the movement physically. But though that patriotic, democratic rebellion has been through the wringer, it’s not quite ready to be hung out to dry, and popped up to co-ordinate marches on Saturday in Paris and in dozens of towns up and down the country. Meanwhile, Frexiteer Florian Philippot (who advocates France leaving the EU) had his own, substantial Paris rally, and the Left-wing, selective defender of civil rights, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has lent support to the anti-vaccine passport cause from within and without Parliament, meaning the government is getting hit from all sides.
Unity between these diverse groups may be a pipe dream, but the shared determination to stand up for individual freedom could end up a powerful motivating force towards overcoming division, as it was during the years of the French Resistance. For now, may each dissenter find the protest that suits him best and aux armes, citoyens!
July 29, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism | COVID-19 Vaccine, France, Human rights |
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A court in Nigeria’s central state of Kaduna has acquitted Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky, leader of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria, and his wife of all the charges levelled against the duo.
The trial at the Kaduna State High Court started on May 15, 2018 and dragged on for over three years. The high court issued its final verdict on Wednesday, Ishaq Adam Ishaq, their lawyer, said in a statement.
They were released from detention following the ruling, he added.
“At last, we defeated them. we won,” hailed the legal representative, adding, “They have gained their freedom. They are now freed and with us.”
Zakzaky and his wife, Mallimah Zeenat, were standing trial in the court on an eight-count charge of alleged culpable homicide, disruption of public peace and unlawful assembly among others levelled against them by the Kaduna state government.
They had pleaded not guitly.
In December 2015, Nigeria’s military launched a crackdown as part of a deadly state-ordered escalation targeting the movement that Abuja has branded as illegal.
The campaign saw the troops attacking Zakzaky’s residence in the town of Zaria in Kaduna, afflicting him and his wife with serious injuries that reportedly caused the cleric to lose his left eye.
During the crackdown, the military also attacked the movement’s members as they were holding religious processions, with the government alleging that the Muslims had blocked a convoy of the country’s defense minister.
The movement has categorically rejected the allegation, and said the convoy had intentionally crossed paths with the IMN’s members to whip up an excuse to attack them.
The violence led to the death of three of Zakzaky’s sons and more than 300 of his followers.
The couple were kept in custody despite a 2016 ruling by Nigeria’s federal high court that ordered their release from prison.
Amid the long-drawn-out jail term, the couple were allowed to leave for India for medical purposes. Their stay was, however, reportedly plagued by the state’s interference aimed at preventing them from receiving proper medical treatment.
The couple’s freedom came following tireless activism on the part of Nigeria’s Shia faithful and repeated damning reports about their situation by international human rights bodies.
July 28, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism | Human rights, Nigeria |
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In a Los Angeles Times editorial predictably hyping up the extreme danger to “national security” arising from the January 6 Capitol protests, the Times quotes Capitol police officer Harry Dunn as saying, “We represent the good side of America, the people who believe in decency.”
Really?
So tell us, Officer Dunn, what is decent about the following actions of the U.S. government:
1. The torture center and prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.
2. The indefinite detention of people at Guantanamo Bay without charges or trial.
3. The denial of trial by jury in terrorism trials at Guantanamo Bay.
4. The use of evidence acquired by torture at Guantanamo Bay.
5. The use of confessions acquired by torture at Guantanamo Bay.
6. The use of hearsay to secure convictions in terrorism “trials” at Guantanamo Bay.
7. The secret monitoring of communications between attorney and detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
8. The torture of people at the hands of U.S. officials in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other parts of the world.
9. The intentional destruction of videotapes depicting the torture of people at the hands of U.S. officials.
10. The invasion, occupation, and war of aggression against Iraq, a country that had never invaded or attacked the United States.
11. The invasion of Afghanistan and the resulting 20-year destruction of life and property.
12. The secret mass surveillance of the American people.
13. The secret illegal surveillance partnerships with American telecoms.
14. The sanctions against the people of Iraq, which contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.
15. U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright’s infamous statement that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions, while difficult, were “worth it.”
16. The decades-old embargo against Cuba, which has been a major factor in the suffering of the Cuban people.
17. The sanctions against Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, and other countries, with the aim of causing death and suffering among the citizenry to achieve regime change.
18. Trade wars against China and other nations.
19. MKULTRA.
20. The invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
21. Coups and invasions for the purpose of regime change, including against democratically elected foreign presidents and prime ministers.
22. State-sponsored assassinations and executions, including of American citizens, along with cover-ups of such assassinations.
23. Official lies, including under oath.
24. The secret hiring of Nazis to secretly serve the U.S. government.
25. COINTELPRO.
26. The “war on terrorism.”
27. Secret illegal surveillance of American officials and American citizens for the purpose of blackmailing them.
28. The racist war on drugs, along with civil asset forfeiture, mandatory minimum sentences, and deadly no-knock raids.
29. The war on immigrants, which has brought untold death and suffering to countless people.
30. The immigration Berlin Wall along America’s southern border.
31. The immigration police state along America’s southern border, including domestic highway checkpoints, warrantless searches of farms and ranches, boarding of Greyhound buses to check people’s papers, and violent raids on American businesses.
32. The unexplained killing of Ashli Babbit during the January 6 Capitol protests.
33. Soaring federal spending and debt.
34. Waco and Ruby Ridge.
35. The undeclared Vietnam War.
36. The undeclared Korean War.
37. Inciting crises and new official enemies to justify ever-increasing budgets for the national-security establishment and its army of “defense” contractors.
38. The Federal Reserve and decades of monetary debauchery and debasement.
39. The IRS.
40. The persecution and prosecution of people who disclose the evil and sordid dark-side secrets of the U.S. government.
Pray tell, Officer Dunn: Is all this the official “decency” to which you refer?
July 28, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, United States |
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