PP NewsBrief: 2021-02-22
We need to begin to reclaim control over the institutions which have such oversized roles in our lives. As you read this people work tirelessly to see to it that you are dumb and docile. Let's stop them.
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Crocodile Evolution Rebooted by Ice Age Glaciations
"Over 3 million years ago, the formation of the Isthmus of Panama altered global ocean circulation, connecting North and South America and establishing the Caribbean Sea. This resulted in widespread mixing of species on the continent and separation in the seas. On land, mammals from North America such as mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, horses, and camels invaded South America, and strange mammals like giant ground sloths, armadillos, and opossums from South America invaded North America. This event is known as the Great American Interchange, and the opposite happened in the seas, where new species of corals, clams, and fishes evolved in the separated Pacific and Caribbean waters.
The question a group of McGill and Panamanian researchers asked was: how distant are the Pacific and Caribbean populations from each other and does it match the geological record? Researchers have long suspected that American crocodiles living on the Pacific coast should have diverged genetically enough from Caribbean populations to become unique species."
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The Decline of the West: American Education Surrenders to ‘Equity’
"The new world order for education is built around the concept of “equity,” sometimes described as using the public education system to “ensure equitable outcomes.” But the concept itself is deeply flawed as the pursuit of equity means treating all American unequally to guarantee that everyone that comes out of the schools is the same and has learned the same things. That is, of course, ridiculous and it penalizes the good student to make sure that the bad student is somehow pushed through the system and winds up with the same piece of paper.
And the quality overall of public education will sharply decline. One might reasonably observe that imposition of a totalitarian style “equity” regime based on race will inevitably drive many of the academically better prepared students out of the system. Many of the better teachers will also move to the private academies that will spring up due to parental and student demand. Others will stop teaching altogether when confronted by political correctness at a level that prior to 2020 would have seemed unimaginable. The actual quality of education will suffer for everyone involved
All of that has been bad enough, but the clincher is that his transformation is taking place all over the United States with the encouragement of federal, state and local governments and once the new regime is established it will be difficult or even impossible to go back to a system where learning is actually a discipline that sometimes requires hard work and dedication. In many school districts, the actual process of change is also being put on the back of the taxpayer. In one Virginia county the local school board spent $422,500 on a consultant to apply so-called Critical Race Theory (CRT) to a new program of instruction that will be mandatory for all employees and will serve as the framework for teaching the students. When schools eventually reopen, all kindergarteners, for example, will be taught “social justice” in a course designed by the controversial Southern Poverty Law Center and “diversity training” will be integrated in all other grade levels. Teaching reading, writing and arithmetic will take a back seat of “social justice.”"
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Vaccine Pregnancy Trials Begin in Bid to Fill Data Void
"COVID-19 vaccine developers are beginning trials in pregnant women, looking to provide reassurance that the shots are safe for expectant mothers.
Pfizer Inc. and German partner BioNTech SE dosed the first patients in a trial of their messenger RNA vaccine in 4,000 women in the latter stages of pregnancy, the companies said on Thursday. The partners will run a mid-stage study for 350 volunteers between 27 and 34 weeks gestation to confirm safety, before moving into advanced trials for women between 24 and 34 weeks pregnant."
This is insane if not criminal. Let's be clear: this is experimentation on human fetuses with the so-called "informed consent" of the mother.
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Madrid police shows VIDEO of crackdown on Covid-rule-breaking teen party, with scared guests snatched from inside wardrobes & beds
"The video, released by the Madrid Municipal Police and obtained by RT’s Ruptly video agency, begins with the officers going up the stairs in one of the central residential buildings. The five-man patrol arrived on-site after receiving complaints from neighbors about noise.
When the owners of the apartment answered the door, they insisted they were alone. But it didn’t take long for police to spot signs of a party, including several chairs arranged around a table, fast-food wrappings and unfinished glasses with booze and soft drinks.
The video then showed how teens literally attempted to play hide-and-seek with the officers – with the latter turning out to be much better at the game. Police found several teens hiding under mattresses, behind a bed and inside a wardrobe.
It’s quite clear what the youngsters were trying to dodge: fines for breaking coronavirus rules start from 600 euro in Spain."
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Salon owner fined $1,000 after undercover inspector tricks them into cutting hair
"On December 11, 2020, Alberta Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Deena Hinshaw outlawed salon services such as haircutting. This Salon provides hairdressing services, but also sells a large variety of personal care products. Thus Mr. Dagher did open his shop, but only for the purchasing of hair products. The door to the shop was kept locked and customers would have to knock in order to be allowed inside.
On December 27, a woman knocked on the door of the salon and Mr. Dagher allowed her in, while under the impression she wanted to buy products. Once inside, this woman asked the owner for a haircut. The owner answered yes, keeping in mind the favour asked by this one woman and the current financial constraints of his family business.
The woman then announced herself as AHS health inspector Anne Hoang and told Mr. Dagher that he had broken the law by agreeing to cut her hair, and that he would receive a ticket. In addition to fining the salon $1,000, Hoang proceeded to issue a notice to the public, stating that the business is violating public health orders and is cutting peoples hair. The JCCF argues that this has led to an unfair amount of public contempt towards the salon. This notice was also posted on the door of the salon and Mr. Dagher was not allowed to take it down as it would violate the Public Health Act."
This was one of the most exciting days in this joyless bureaucrat's miserable little life I'm sure.
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'Fact-checking' organization furious that Twitter's fact-checking tool said Tim Pool was correct
"Poynter claimed that the reason ordinary users were allegedly wrong in their fact-checking was because of "a lack of fact-checking expertise." "None of the top 10 users [of Birdwatch], according to their Twitter bios, are professional fact-checkers or journalists."
"Fact-checking is actually hard work in that it’s mentally demanding," PolitiFact editor-in-chief Angie Holan wrote in an email. "You really have to concentrate and push through mental inertia to identify claims and then brainstorm means of debunking or verifying them.""
I don't know about you but that's not how I experience fact checking in my everyday life. But I'm not a professional fact checker so what do I know? I'm also not the type of fanatic that thinks they could ever possess the one true Truth...maybe that's got something to do with it?
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Pandemic Revelations
This piece is a very long read (grab a whole pot of coffee) but worth it. The author attempts to weave together history and philosophy to help us orient ourselves in the current moment. And if you don't have the time I attempted to excerpt in such a way as to hopefully give you a fair impression of the author's intent.
"How could people even countenance a term like lockdown, with its overtones of imprisonment and total control, let along coming to think well of it and condemning and shaming its violators and critics? My argument was that societies like Canada had, for a long time, been “practicing” – we’d already turned the concepts on which our pandemic policies have been founded into common sense.
These concepts include risk, safety, pro-active management, science as a mighty oracle speaking in a single authoritative voice, and above all, Life, as a quantum to be preserved at all costs. Gradual naturalization of these concepts has made the policy that has been followed seem so rational, so inevitable, and so entirely without alternative that it has been possible to freely vilify its opponents and largely exclude them from media which might have made their voices politically influential. But knowing this doesn’t make it any easier to swallow. What has come into stark relief during the pandemic may have been already latently there, but to see it actualized as the outline of a new social order is still a compelling and somewhat frightening experience. It seems worthwhile, therefore, to look further into what the pandemic has revealed and brought to light.
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But the main question here is why there has been no discussion of the public health implications of the policy that has been followed.
I will try to answer this question as it touches on various institutions, notably media, but first I’ll continue with my discussion of science. This word is, in my opinion, a source of fatal confusion. The basis of this confusion is that the term functions at the same time as a myth and as a description. Words possess denotations – the objects, real or imagined, at which they point – and connotations – the cloud of associations and feelings which they generate. The word science, in everyday talk, is all connotation and no denotation – the crucial attribute of those verbal puffballs that German scholar Uwe Pörksen calls “plastic words,” and Ivan Illich “amoeba words.”[14] It points to no agreed object – there are so-called hard sciences, and therefore, by inference, soft sciences, observational sciences and mathematical sciences, historical sciences and experimental sciences – and it possesses no agreed method. One often hears of “the scientific method” but even the most cursory survey of the philosophy of science will yield multiple competing accounts of what it might be. Because of this the word science, when its meaning is not further specified, functions as a collage of meanings whose rhetorical purpose is very often to induce nothing more than a radiating field of positive connotations. It is, in in this respect, what French theorist Roland Barthes calls a myth.[15] Myths, according to Barthes, “naturalize” the phenomena they aggregate and summarize. In the case of science, a diverse, heterogeneous, and sometimes internally contradictory phenomenon is smoothed out and compressed into an apparent compact and consistent object which can be then made into a social protagonist and a grammatical subject: science says, science shows, science demands etc. An actual history, with all its twists and turns, has been replaced by what appears to be an unproblematic natural object – intelligible, obvious and at hand.
The result is that the myth obscures and absorbs the actual object(s). Actual sciences are limited and contingent, conditional and conditioned bodies of knowledge. These limits are of various kinds. Some are practical: evidence may be contradictory, insufficient, inaccessible, or impossible to obtain without exposing the subjects of the research to some unacceptable harm. Some are limits in principle: ignorance expands with knowledge, reductive methods will necessarily fail to disclose the reality of the whole phenomena which they disassemble analytically, all scientific procedures rest on philosophical pre-suppositions which cannot themselves be put in question and so on.
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A realistic image of the various sciences as they are actually practiced is a necessary foundation for political conversation. The myth of Science on the other hand is utterly corrosive of politics insofar as it supposes a body of immaculate and comprehensive knowledge that renders politics superfluous. I do not think this is an exaggeration. Again and again in the last year I have listened to political statements that present Science as a unified, imperative and infallible voice indicating an indisputable course of action.
The implication is that knowledge can replace judgment. But it cannot – because knowledge, as I have argued, is limited both in practice and in principle. Moral judgment is unavoidable, and is the proper domain of politics. To institute a lockdown which protects that part of the population able to shelter at home, while exposing another part to the harms that follow from lockdown, involves a political judgment. To disguise it as a scientific judgment is, in the first place, deceitful. At the time the decision was made no evidence whatsoever existed to support a policy of mass quarantine of a healthy population. Such a policy had never even been tried before and, even after the fact, is not really amenable to controlled study in any case. But more important was the moral abdication that was involved. Instead of an honest evaluation of the harms avoided and the harms induced, the public was told that Science had spoken, and the case was closed. The politicians and the media were then free to rend their garments and tremble in sympathy over all the harm the virus had done without ever having to admit that much of this damage was politically induced. Where there was no science, the myth of Science became a screen and a shield behind which politicians could shelter themselves from the consequences of decisions they could deny ever having made.
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It is my belief that trust in a Science that stand above the social fray – immaculate, oracular, disinterested – is already fatally eroded – both by several generations of patient study of what the sciences actually do and actually know, and by the dogmatism of the noble liars who have driven unanswered skeptics into the desperate straits of conspiracy theory (more on that in a moment). I would like to plead for a new picture in which a mystified Science is replaced by diverse sciences, dissensus is recognized as normal, limits to knowledge are admitted as being in the nature of things, not a temporary always about-to-be-overcome embarrassment, and the rough and ready moral judgments that are the proper stuff of politics are flushed out of the cover currently provided for them by Science-as-myth. It has been my view for a long time that only after the myth of Science is overcome will we be able to see what the sciences are and escape the spell of what they are not. Unhappily one of the revelations of the pandemic seems to be that this myth is entrenching itself ever more deeply in our social imagination.
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Perhaps most striking of all, the Great Barrington Declaration was made in a handsome, converted mansion in bucolic Western Massachusetts, the home of the American Institute for Economic Research, an institute founded on a vision of a society of “pure freedom and private governance” in which “the role of government is sharply confined” and “individuals can flourish within a truly free market and a free society” – a view commonly called libertarian.[23] This was a rather discordant setting for Sunetra Gupta, avowedly “Left-wing” and a proponent of “the need for publicly owned utilities and government investment in nationalised industries.” Among other things it allowed her opponents to associate her with “climate change denial” (though that is, in fact, something of a caricature of the AIER’s actual position which questions climate policy more than denying climate change as such.) But more important for me is the transposition of what, for Gupta, ought to have been a left-wing position into a right-wing position. What this illustrates, I think, is just how inept, deceptive and confining these antique political descriptions have become.
The terms left and right originated in the French National Assembly of 1789 when the friends of the revolution sat to the left of the chair and the supporters of the king to the right. Over time they evolved into signifiers of the balance of power between state and market according to which predominated as an allocator of resources and locus of social decision-making. Today they are verbal straitjackets and fetters on social imagination. Like the legendary Procrustes who chopped or stretched his guests in order to adapt them to the bed he had available, they distort our circumstances more than describe them. The pandemic has made this plain. It is demonstrable that lockdown and economic shut-down have been applied at the expense of those least able to protect themselves. Some former fat cats have suffered too, of course – airlines, travel companies and the like have been decimated across the board – but it is generally true that the poorer and weaker have paid a heavier price than the stronger and more well-to-do. Grocery clerks have stayed at work, while civil servants have worked from home; the working class have lost jobs while most professional employment has continued; small businesses have failed, while big businesses have held on; the economically marginal have been driven to addiction, homelessness and suicide while the well-heeled and well-housed have suffered little more than an excess of one another’s company. Since the left ostensibly speaks for the less-advantaged, one might have expected anti-lockdown to become a left-wing issue but the case has been quite dramatically the reverse. Criticism has come almost exclusively from the right with only the bravest of leftists, like Sunetra Gupta, daring to cross the aisle.
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I see two great problems here. The first is the violent reciprocity that turns left and right into warring factions and confines each one ever more tightly in its proper box. What the enemy says is wrong – entirely and a priori – simply because the enemy has said it. Let me take an example. For some years the media have been building up a laughingstock called the “anti-vaxxer.” This is not a person who questions some element or aspect of mass vaccination on some rational ground – those who hold the correct opinion deny in advance and on principle that there can even be such questions or such grounds – it is rather a social enemy, someone whom you know by definition to be unpardonably ignorant, selfish and irresponsible, and whose arguments you can therefore disregard. Having created this scarecrow, it then becomes quite easy to assimilate to it a new bogeyman called the “anti-masker.” Now you have an instant characterization for all who may question the policy of lockdown. In actual fact the question of masks is scientifically quite murky. Until last spring both the W.H.O and Canada’s chief medical officer, Teresa Tam held that they were of no utility in blocking an infectious agent as miniscule and as wily as a coronavirus.
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This is the first problem: making judgments whose only grounds are the dynamic of enmity: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, whatever the enemy says or thinks is wrong, and so forth. On this basis, once Donald Trump has said that the cure for COVID shouldn’t be worse than the disease, as he did last spring, then this thought becomes unthinkable and unspeakable by his opponents simply because Donald Trump has said it. This inability to think the enemy’s thoughts is fatal to sound reasoning. That the cure must not be worse than the disease is a principle that goes back to Hippocrates and remains true even in the mouth of a scoundrel. Reflexive polarization creates false dichotomies, cleaving opposites that should be held together into warring half-truths. The second problem that I want to highlight is the inadequacy of the left-right political map on which battle lines are currently being drawn. The difficulty lies in what is omitted when all political decisions are plotted on a single axis running from state to market, public to private provision, administrative control to the “pure freedom” espoused by Sunetra Gupta’s erstwhile host, the American Institute for Economic Research. The first thing that is ignored is scale. This theme was introduced into contemporary political thought by the Austrian writer Leopold Kohr in his 1956 book The Breakdown of Nations. “Behind all forms of social misery,” Kohr wrote, there is “one cause…: bigness.” “Whenever something is wrong something is too big.”[29] With this book, Kohr founded a new school of political ecology that his student and successor Ivan Illich called “social morphology.”[30] British biologists D’arcy Wentworth Thompson and J.B.S. Haldane had studied the close fit between form and size in nature and concluded that natural forms are viable only at the appropriate scale i.e. a hawk’s form would not be viable at the scale of a sparrow, or a mouse’s at the scale of an elephant.[31] Kohr was the first to argue that social form and size show the same correlation. E.F. Schumacher, another student of Kohr’s, would later popularize the argument in his Small is Beautiful. Illich also developed and extended Kohr’s crucial idea in his book Tools for Conviviality.
Why does scale matter in the present case? Under cover of restricting the spread of COVID, emergency administrative regulation and control is being extended into areas normally outside the purview of the state – friendship, family life, religious worship, sexual relations etc. (One Toronto city councilor, in her newsletter to her constituents, recommended masturbation, under the slogan “you are your safest partner.”[32]). In the past, prerogatives justified by war have often been retained even after peace has been restored, and it seems prudent to assume that elements of the current regime will outlast the present emergency. One can already see the emerging outline of what one might call, on the model of the National Security State, a new Health Security State. The modern image of a social body comprised of individual citizens associating freely with one another is being replaced by the image of a giant immune system in which each is obliged to the whole according to principles of risk and overall system integrity – an assembly of “lives” comprising ultimately one overarching Life. In the name of this new social body, any obligation whatsoever can potentially be interrupted and proscribed. The most shocking and telling example for me is the way in which the dying have been left alone – unaccompanied, untouched unconsoled. But this is not an issue on which the left-right diagram sheds any light whatever. The answer to such a state is not a market in which private rather than public actors keep us penned in protective isolation form one another. The issue is one of scale – the prerogatives of friendship, affinity, and mutual aid v. the imperatives of system health – and of culture – are we to be allowed other gods than Health?
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The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker all contribute their mite to G.N.P. alongside Amazon and General Motors, but they don’t really belong to the same world. Money may change hands, but many of the small enterprises that make localities habitable, hospitable and vivid belong more to the world of subsistence than to the grow-or-die world of The Economy. The performing arts also belong in this category. This whole dimension has been badly and, often enough, fatally injured during the pandemic. Undertakings patiently built up and patiently built into communities over many years are failing. At times, conviviality itself has been given a bad name, as it is in caricatures of the reckless young, endangering their elders by getting too close to one another. But none of this really registers on a spectrum on which the masked left is pitted against the unmasked right, conviviality is conflated with “economic growth,” and civil liberty is consigned to the care of armed militias menacing American state legislatures.
What this points to – its “revelation” in terms of my theme – is the desperate need for political realignment. Left and right are very old wineskins that are exploding all around us as they are made to try and contain some very new wine.[34] Sunetra Gupta finds a platform only among libertarians who conflate freedom with free markets because there is no ground on the left for a position that punctures the dream-world of total safety and total control. The libertarians for their part affirm the indifferent operations of free markets as the only foundation for economic justice because they see a tyrannical state as the only alternative. The religious are driven to the right because the left sees religious duty as no more than a revocable privilege granted by that “mortal god,” the state.[35] The friends of the common good are driven to the left because they see nothing on the right but idolatry of the monstrous machinery of the market. They defend lockdowns as “care” while overlooking the collateral damage that care can do when it acts at the scale of mass quarantine. The right acknowledges the damage but can only enunciate a competing view of care in terms that reinforce an economic system that is rapidly chewing up the entire biosphere. Mightn’t it be time to talk?
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How many are called conspiracy theorists when they just want to ask a question, how many others are driven to real conspiracy theories when their questions are not answered or acknowledged? Awareness of this problem began for me with the figure I mentioned earlier of the “anti-vaxxer,” a belittling name that seemed to establish itself in public discussion almost overnight a few years back. It affected me because I had been reflecting on the question of vaccination for many years without being able to come to a firm conclusion – I was quizzical rather than pro or anti, a position that had been summarily driven from the field with the invention of the anti-vaxxer. My questions began when my infant son contracted a frightening, potentially fatal (but, in this case, happily not) cerebral meningitis at the age of eight months following his MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination. My wife and I subsequently heard of other such cases. Anecdotal evidence, yes, but I began to wonder – could you really prove the connection, should there be one? Children and adolescents who follow recommended schedules receive up to sixteen different vaccines, many of which are boosted several times. Can anyone really say with certainty that they know all the effects or how they interact or how they are expressed? It should not be controversial to observe that this is a fairly massive attempt to supplement and manipulate the workings of the immune system. Is it impossible that the plague of allergies and auto-immune diseases that seem to characterize our time is related, as some suppose, to this systematic interference? Might we better off with less vaccines, while still recognizing that some have been invaluable?
To even begin to answer such questions it is necessary to recognize, first of all, that they have a philosophical, as well as an empirical dimension. There are limits to knowledge in the study of complex systems, but these are often denied in the effort to foster the “trust in science” I wrote about above. These limits to knowledge must be acknowledged, as must the consequent limits on what can be imposed on people in the name of science. Within that framework it may then be possible to shed some light on the empirical side of the questions I’ve raised. But the omens in this respect are not good. Let me take a couple of examples. In 2016 a documentary film appeared called “Vaxxed: From Coverup to Catastrophe.” It claimed that during the course of a CDC (Centers for Disease Control) study into a possible link between autism and the administration of MMR vaccine to infants, documents were destroyed and data fudged in order to make emerging evidence of such a link disappear. This claim was made by one of the scientists involved, William Thompson, in recorded phone conversations with environmental biologist Brian Hooker. Thompson’s report could be false, or in some way manipulated, but, on its face, it is impressive and ought to have, at the least, led to wide public discussion. What has happened instead is that the film has been effectively suppressed. This began when Robert de Niro, under pressure, cancelled a scheduled screening at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016. The film has since disappeared from the internet and is available only by purchase from the filmmakers’ web-site.[39] The Wikipedia biographies of all the principals in the film show evidence of malicious editing with recurring references to fraud, false information, discredited views and the like. This does not give the impression of a fair, frank or open discussion but of a ruthless orthodoxy which ostracizes all dissent.
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War imposes uniformity of opinion, and that has been particularly evident with the CBC and The Globe and Mail. Some dissent has begun to creep in to the more conservative papers, the National Post and the Sun, but both the Globe and the CBC seem to conceive their role not as platforms for discussion but as guardians of correct thought. The listeners and readers are to be encouraged, edified, occasionally chastised for incipient “complacency,”[52] but at all times treated as unified and homogeneous mass – all in this together, all sharing the same sentimental regard for our health care champions etc. What this has meant, I think, is that an elite consensus, fortified by the elemental power of mythic tropes like war, solidarity in crisis, loyalty, heroism, and sacrifice, has imposed itself on the public. The result has been that two crucial realities have been been hidden, overlooked or suppressed. The first is the scientific dissensus I spoke of earlier. The second is the residual popular common sense that instinctively prefers mutual aid and muddling through to centralized bureaucratic control. I realize that common sense is a tricky term, regularly coopted by right-wing populism, as it was in Ontario in the mid-1990’s when the Conservative government of Mike Harris dressed up neo-liberal laissez-faire and municipal “amalgamation” as a “common sense revolution.” But this apparent tendency of populism to skew to the right precisely illustrates the difficulty we are in. Many historians, anthropologists and political theorists, in our time, have tried to describe forms of resistance to the state that do not terminate in an even more oppressive state, like Ontario’s “common sense revolution,” or a hundred other variants from fascism to Peronism to Trumpism. E.P. Thompson wrote of “the moral economy of the crowd”; James C. Scott has described various forms of ethnic and agrarian resistance; Christopher Lasch portrayed American populism as a defense of the moral and religious integrity of community life against elite and “meritocratic” disruption; and Ivan Illich tried to mark out a “vernacular” sphere in which both state and market are kept at bay.[53] But these forms of populism remain largely unrecognized in the journalistic discourse I have been talking about. The result is that populism is forced to the right and its dignity denied. The outright contempt that is regularly expressed for Trump voters – Hilary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” – illustrates this dynamic.
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Whether Mike Yeadon’s claim – that our “puny efforts” to contain the pandemic have been absolutely without effect – can eventually be proved remains to be seen. What it seems quite safe to say right now is that there is substantial evidence, first, that we are in the grip of a powerful and inexorable natural process and, second, that some considerable part of the pretence that determined leaders with bespoke policies ought to be able to dominate this process is mostly bravado, ritual and anthropocentric self-importance.
The conclusions I draw from these two points are not comforting. Ivan Illich, speaking in Toronto in the fall of 1970, evoked the view of the earth from space that had recently been obtained by American men-on-the-moon. This image, he said, could be interpreted in two radically different ways. The first was as a call to repentance, a call, in effect, to sink back into the earth and to live within its affordances. The second was as a call to “manage planet earth,” as The Scientific American would later say, or, with even greater hubris, to “save planet earth.”[59] The first he saw as a choice to live freely, joyfully and even wildly, within our means; the second as a decision to perpetually skirt disaster, living always at the very edge of the biosphere’s tolerances, and entangling ourselves in an ever more comprehensive net of hygienic and environmental controls in order to keep this precarious enterprise “sustainable.” Today, looking out my door at the masked and fearful people passing on the street, it is hard not to think that Illich’s prophecy has come to pass. From the beginning of the pandemic there were critical virologists, immunologists and epidemiologist who made three crucial points: first that no one knew the severity of the new disease, i.e. its infection mortality rate; second, that no one knew how different populations and different sub-groups within populations would weather it; and, third, that no one knew how the possibly devastating consequences of prophylactic mass quarantine – lockdown – would compare with the suffering that might be caused by the disease.
But these cautions, to the extent that they were even heard, did not seem to induce any hesitation or produce that alert but quizzical and deliberate attitude that ought to attend such ignorance. From the very beginning any idea of enduring, adapting or mitigating was condemned as fatalism or “yahoo” recklessness. The emphasis was always on control – “wrestling the virus to the ground”[60] – and on knowledge – gained by colonizing and appearing to tame an uncertain future with mathematical models founded on “educated” guesses. This posture was reinforced by media who stood by ready to taunt any politician who refused to accept these shibboleths or was unwilling to pretend that control was possible and that scientific knowledge was at hand. And these media in turn, as I wrote in an earlier essay, were acting as the agents of imperative concepts like risk, safety, management, and life – concepts that have by now entrenched themselves in our minds as unquestionable certainties.
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It is clear enough, I think, that at least while the pandemic lasts, public health authorities are in a position to prescribe the gestures, all the gestures, we will make – where we can go, who we can see, how far away we should stand from them, what we should wear etc. – and to proscribe those we won’t, including even absolute social and cultural fundamentals like care of the sick and dying, artistic performance, religious celebration, and the maintenance of family and community relationships. Whether these are only emergency powers, or, as Agamben clearly fears, the inauguration of a permanent state of emergency in which health security will at all times trump other cultural and social obligations, remains to be seen. Meanwhile his argument – that science in the guise of bio-medicine now superintendents a comprehensive cult whose central object of reverence is life – is persuasive. People fail to see it or take it for granted only because life and the saving of “lives” has been so compellingly consecrated that it can no longer be examined or reasoned about.
What is important in Agamben’s argument for me is the claim that we are witnessing the establishment of a new religion and the consolidation of its cult. To explicitly name this religion as science or medicine can be tricky because one is not just talking about the various practices of these fields, but about their presiding myths. The institutions of science and medicine supply this new cult with part of its priesthood but they are not what constitute the religion. What makes a religion, as Emile Durkheim argued more than a century ago, is the designation of a sacred dimension which is not to be touched, investigated or interfered with.[63] The sacred has the power to strike people dumb, to amaze them and, if necessary, to sacrifice them. This power now inheres in the demi-gods health, safety, risk awareness and, their epitome, life. So long as a certain course of action is seen to be saving lives, it’s not really necessary to ask what else it might be doing.
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Agamben’s concern, which he has bravely expressed since the beginning of the pandemic, is that the rule of the religiously-sanctioned health security state has become “all-pervasive,” “normatively obligatory,” and deeply corrosive of any form of life that stands on competing grounds – funeral rites are an obvious example of such forms of life, and the outlawing of such rites, along with the abandonment of the dying, was one of the first elements of the pandemic regime to shock and alarm Agamben. What is demanded in response, he says, is that “philosophers must again enter into conflict with religion,” – something that has “happened many times in the course of history.” I believe this to be so, and I believe that what he means by philosophy is not a professional discipline open only to initiates but the very practice of freedom insofar as that practice requires us to understand how we came by our ideas, the grounds on which we are governed, and other such elementary matters. What Agamben calls “conflict with religion” might also be understood as a claim for freedom of religion (since it is arguable that no one can avoid having a religion, and therefore the best we can aspire to is to hold – and hold off – that religion freely).
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If Illich and Agamben are right, the truly powerful churches – the ones that tell us not only how we ought to live but how we must live – exert their claims on us in the name of education, health, safety, risk reduction and other shibboleths of the new religion. It follows that we now need what Illich’s dear friend, the American critic Paul Goodman, called a “new reformation.”[65] The freedoms for which the first Reformation fought must now be fought for again."
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Prisons Prime Testing Ground for Dehumanizing Hi-Tech “Advances”
"The concept behind social impact bonds requires a fully digital ecosystem that can track and aggregate data on individuals who are a part of any kind of state or municipal service such as prisons. With such pervasive tracking, a subject’s progression through that system can be measured and linked to milestones tied to financial instruments, which investors (or stakeholders) can hold, buy or sell on the open market.
Known as stakeholder capitalism, this new form of exploitation is already being tested in many places around the world and prisons are among the main targets for its implementation, as they provide an ideal and literally captive market for its proof of concept.
Alison McDowell’s pioneering independent research on this topic has exposed many of the insidious ways in which pay-for-success schemes like SIBs and other human capital market ideas are being foisted onto America’s public education and healthcare systems through the “gamification” of schooling and health pathways."
The elite want to turn your entire existence into a profit making opportunity. **Every step you take, every move you make, we'll be profiting off you**
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How the Gates Foundation Seeded America’s COVID-19 Policy Catastrophes
"The common thread seen in the United States is the delegation of state policy to prediction modeling forecasts from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a Washington State-based institution that is wholly controlled and funded (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars) by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In March and early April, politicians were informed by the modeling “experts” at Gates-funded IHME that their hospitals were about to be completely overrun by coronavirus patients. Modelers from IHME claimed this massive surge would cause hospitals to run out of lifesaving equipment in a matter of days, not weeks or months. Time was of the essence, and now was the time for rapid decision making, the modelers claimed.
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These models, and the policy decisions that were made by relying on them, set off a chain of events that led to indefinite lockdowns, complete business closures, statewide curfews, and most infamously, the nursing home death warrants.
States across the nation went to extremes, resorting to full bunker mode while waiting for bodies to start dropping in the streets, but the IHME modeling never panned out. Hospital capacity was never threatened. Most states that had created “surge capacity” pop-up health care centers never even used these facilities. IHME, for its part, regularly “adjusts” its models, and has never acknowledged their routine failures to forecast outcomes.
Bill Gates has never discussed the catastrophic failures of his prized “health metrics” forecasting organization, and how it has contributed to the suffering of millions of Americans. Instead, he has seamlessly washed his hands of COVID mania, and has moved on to demanding that the western world sacrifice itself in the name of the latest “crisis” that is climate change."
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Techno-Censorship: The Slippery Slope from Censoring ‘Disinformation’ to Silencing Truth
"Martin Niemöller’s warning about the widening net that ensnares us all still applies.
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
In our case, however, it started with the censors who went after extremists spouting so-called “hate speech,” and few spoke out—because they were not extremists and didn’t want to be shamed for being perceived as politically incorrect.
Then the internet censors got involved and went after extremists spouting “disinformation” about stolen elections, the Holocaust, and Hunter Biden, and few spoke out—because they were not extremists and didn’t want to be shunned for appearing to disagree with the majority.
By the time the techno-censors went after extremists spouting “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, the censors had developed a system and strategy for silencing the nonconformists. Still, few spoke out.
Eventually, “we the people” will be the ones in the crosshairs.
At some point or another, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.
When that time comes, there may be no one left to speak out or speak up in our defense.
Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.
Watch and learn.
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Here’s the point: you don’t have to like Trump or any of the others who are being muzzled, nor do you have to agree or even sympathize with their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship would be dangerously naïve.
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No matter what our numbers might be, no matter what our views might be, no matter what party we might belong to, it will not be long before “we the people” constitute a powerless minority in the eyes of a power-fueled fascist state driven to maintain its power at all costs.
We are almost at that point now.
The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.
Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother."
This piece, while good, falls into a common trap: It seems to treat the entire concept of government as bad. But that's like saying guns are bad just because the occasional kindergartner gets shot.
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Trump says polls show ‘tremendous support’ for 2024 run, slams Democrats and McConnell in TV interviews
"In the first set of interviews since he left the Oval Office, former US President Donald Trump said he wouldn’t rule out a 2024 comeback and took swipes at both Democrats and the Republican leadership that tried to disavow him.
Trump appeared on One America News (OAN) and Newsmax on Wednesday evening, four weeks to the day since Joe Biden was sworn in as his successor. He is scheduled to phone in to Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News as well.
“I won’t say yet, but we have tremendous support,” Trump said when Greg Kelly of Newsmax asked him about a 2024 presidential bid. The poll numbers were “through the roof” and even better than before the election, the former president said."
A Trump2024 run benefits Trump's ego, not We the People.