PP NewsBrief: 2021-02-26

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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How Governments and the Media Help Corporations Get Away with Their Crimes

"“Surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens.” (Derrick Jensen)

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There is widespread evidence that corporations have influence over the regulators who are supposed to enforce the laws governing those corporations. When the financial system collapsed in 2008, it became clear that the financial regulator in the UK, the FSA, was unfit for purpose.(1) Instead of seeing themselves in a policing role, they saw themselves as ‘enablers’ of corporate activity. This allowed financial companies to engage in all manner of unethical and criminal activity.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is supposed to protect the environment, but its links to corporations are so strong that it fails to police polluting corporations effectively, and it is actively trying to weaken regulations protecting the environment.(2) Many of their scientific advisors receive funding from corporations, so their opinions are unlikely to be unbiased.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) represents both the consumer, and the food and drug industries, and receives much of its funding from industry. This has been compared to the police getting their funding from the mafia. Many FDA personnel come from the pharmaceutical industry. Pressure from corporations has caused it to fail in its duty to look after the public and allow drugs that are banned in much of the rest of the advanced world. The painkiller Vioxx was known to be dangerous and caused many deaths but the FDA failed to ban it. (It was eventually withdrawn by the manufacturer due to bad publicity.) On occasions when scientists at the FDA have tried to explain to the public that something might be unsafe, they have been sacked.

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In order to have any control over powerful corporations in rich countries, complex systems of laws have to be created and regulators have to be given sufficient powers. Many of the poorest countries do not have these systems. They are therefore unable to properly control corporations operating in their territory. This lack of regulation leads to exploitation and pollution, and helps to reinforce poverty for billions of people. All over the world there are mining companies in developing countries, pouring poisonous chemicals into the water supply, contaminating soil, and poisoning the air, creating huge problems for farmers, and the health of communities more generally. Huge areas of rainforest are cut down to make way for mining, logging, cattle ranches, and crops such as soya and palm oil, creating species loss.(4) As we saw in an earlier post, these are costs that society pays for, while corporations make the profits.

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One might expect leaders of advanced nations to help poor countries learn from our experiences and avoid the same mistakes, but instead of helping them implement the same sort of regulations that we have here, our governments apply obvious double standards and do the opposite. They support the tobacco companies whilst they repeat their excesses of the past by encouraging millions of people in poor countries to become addicted. The cigarettes in some poor countries are more addictive because there is weaker regulation on nicotine and tar content. The US agriculture department actually provided grants to help tobacco firms promote smoking overseas. In South Korea, the rate of increase in smoking tripled in 1988 when US companies began marketing in the country. In India, Brazil and Mexico, death rates due to smoking related diseases have increased dramatically. The companies deliberately target children, and when Taiwan tried to stop tobacco advertising to children, the US government forced them to allow it by threatening them with harsh penalties if they did not."

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Thinking Critically About Critical Thinking

"Michael J. Fox, the third president of the United States, was responsible for establishing Presbyterianism as the state religion of the new federation after its peaceful secession from the English empire.

Or did he? When you read that sentence, you probably scrunched up your forehead or raised an eyebrow in disbelief. Maybe you know that Michael J. Fox is the actor who played Marty McFly in the Back to the Future movies. Maybe you know the third president of the United States was Thomas Jefferson and that on point of principle, the United States has never had a state religion. I suspect you are probably aware that its citizens fought a war to gain independence and you may know that this independence was gained from Great Britain rather than England. What I am pretty sure you did not do was attempt to look at the sentence from multiple perspectives or evaluate the source.

The development of the capacity to think critically is an aim of education on which most of us can agree. It is a commonplace to amend a call for such a capacity to the issues of the day and so, if inclined, we may point to fake news, myths about COVID-19, and the ever-widening polarization of political debate as evidence for the urgent need to nurture critical thinking. Yet I am confident that we could justify such a call under the circumstances of any year since the advent of mass education. The need for critical thinking is not in question. Instead, the point of interest is how best to develop this capacity given that we have yet failed to do so at scale.

If you go to one of those conferences on education that serve a pleasing lunch then you will hear about critical thinking as a “skill.” The solution is simple—we just need to develop the capacity for critical thinking in young people by making them do critical thinking. Perhaps they could do a project about climate change (a popular choice) and as a result they will somehow—don’t bore me with the details here—kind of pick-up the ability to think critically. Perhaps we should teach them some heuristics such as, “look at the problem from multiple perspectives” or “write down a list of positive and negative points.”

Indeed, critical thinking is one of the “4 Cs” of the ageing 21st century skills movement, alongside creativity, collaboration, and communication. The Australian Curriculum has drawn upon these ideas in its model of “general capabilities,” one of which is “critical and creative thinking.” Unfortunately, critical thinking is not a skill that can be improved through practice—like a golf swing—nor is it a “general” capability. Instead, it is an abstract description of what humans can do as a result amassing a wealth of underpinning knowledge and skills relevant to the particular context in which thinking is to be deployed."

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Why Do the Election’s Defenders Require My Agreement?

"The 2020 election came down to a narrower margin than the 2016 contest: fewer than 43,000 rather than 77,000 votes in just three states. In 2016, nothing fishy in Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin—the states on which 2016 turned—was detected. Certainly nothing like:

• Counting shutdowns in five states, in which one candidate was ahead, only to lose after the counting resumed;
• “Found” tranches of ballots going overwhelmingly—sometimes exclusively—to one candidate, the eventual “winner”;
• Sworn affidavits alleging the backdating of ballots;
• Historically low rejection rates—as in, orders of magnitude lower—of mail-in ballots, suggesting that many obviously invalid ballots were accepted as genuine;
• Mail-in and absentee ballots appearing without creases, raising the question of how they got into the envelopes required for their being mailed in;
• Thousands upon thousands of ballots all marked for one presidential candidate without a single choice marked for any down-ballot candidate.
• The absolute refusal to conduct signature audits—indeed, the discarding of many envelopes which alone make such audits possible—i.e., of the kind of recounts which are performed not merely to get the math right but to evaluate the validity of ballots;
• Other statistical and historical anomalies too numerous to mention here.

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Sullivan dismissed all of this because “Trump tried in court and lost.” End of story. He alleged with a straight face that Trump put on a serious effort run by serious election experts. To put it mildly, that’s not the way it looked to me. In any case, quick dismissals by partisan or even impartial courts do not amount to “proof” that nothing was amiss, much less do they constitute a thorough vetting of what really happened. They might be “evidence”—but only of the fact that those particular courts wanted nothing to do with the election. Judges’ dismissals are certainly not dispositive evidence that there was no fraud.

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Sullivan’s most risible claim was that, if there is anything to any of this, it will all come out in the pending libel suits filed by that electronic voting company. But these private lawsuits were not filed, nor will they be litigated, to find evidence of electoral fraud. They were filed only to vindicate the public reputations of the plaintiffs and punish the defendants. The way this all will go down is that the plaintiffs will demand irrefutable proof from the defendants. When (inevitably) such is not produced, the plaintiffs will claim total vindication, which will then be trumpeted in the media.

It doesn’t matter if the plaintiffs lose the suit in the sense of not obtaining a favorable court judgment. All they need to “win” is a failure of the other side to produce proof that the media will accept as such. Since the media is nothing more nor less than the propaganda arm of the present regime, it’s foreordained to reject any such claims of proof and to deny that any and all evidence presented is credible. Hence the plaintiff’s victory in the court of “public opinion,” if not necessarily in an actual court, is guaranteed from the outset. Sullivan either knows this, is being willfully blind, or is a fool. I don’t think he’s a fool.

And, as I told Sullivan, I found the claims regarding the voting machines to be the least credible. Sullivan seized on that as a “concession” that the entire election was above-board. It is no such thing. None of the above other irregularities have been explained, nor will they ever be. Sullivan, like Ponnuru, refused even to address them.

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Sullivan repeatedly demanded that I explain how Our Democracy™ can survive as a democracy if something like half the country doesn’t believe in it anymore. The question was rhetorical. Sullivan knows the answer: it can’t. His purpose in asking was to shift blame from those who rig everything, refuse to explain anything but instead gaslight, gaslight, gaslight, onto those who, in response, decline to believe."

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Bernays and Propaganda – Democracy Control

A good overview of some basic history of propaganda in the United States. But I wish the piece had stayed away from "Jewish lobby" nonsense. It's elite who just happen to be jewish (and often weaponize that identity). There's plenty of downtrodden, average jews harmed by the elites' actions.

"From their experiences in the formulation, manipulation and control of public perception and opinion with the CPI, both Lippman and Bernays later wrote of their open contempt for a “malleable and hopelessly ill-informed public” in America. (1) Lippmann had already written that the people in a democracy were simply “a bewildered herd” of “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” (2) who should be maintained only as “interested spectators”, to be controlled by the elite “secret government”. They concluded that in a multi-party electoral system (a democracy), public opinion had to be “created by an organized intelligence” and “engineered by an invisible government”, with the people relegated to the status of uninformed observers, a situation that has existed without interruption in the US for the past 95 years. Bernays believed that only a few possessed the necessary insight into the Big Picture to be entrusted with this sacred task, and considered himself as one member of this select few.

“Throughout his career, Bernays was utterly cynical in his manipulation of the masses. In complete disregard of the personal importance of their sincerely held values, aspirations, emotions, and beliefs, he saw them as having no significance beyond their use as tools in the furtherance of whatever were the commercial and political ends of his hirers.”

In his book ‘Propaganda’, (3) (3a)(4) Bernays wrote, “It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind. It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was not possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace. The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

Bernays’ original project was to ensure US entry into the European war, but later he primarily concerned himself with the entrenchment of the twin systems of electoral democracy and unrestricted capitalism the elites had created for their benefit, and with their defense in the face of increased unrest, resistance, and ideological opposition. Discovering that the bewildered herd was not so compliant as he wished, Bernays claimed a necessity to apply “the discipline of science”, i.e., the psychology of propaganda, to the workings of democracy, where his social engineers “would provide the modern state with a foundation upon which a new stability might be realized”. This was what Lippmann termed the necessity of “intelligence and information control” in a democracy, stating that propaganda “has a legitimate and desirable part to play in our democratic system”. Both men pictured modern American society as being dominated by “a relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses”. To Bernays, this was the “logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized”, failing to note that it was his European handlers who organised it this way in the first place.

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The history of propaganda and its use in manipulating and controlling public opinion in the US, and in Western democracies generally, is a long story involving many apparently disparate and unrelated events. A major crisis point for elite control of American democracy was the Vietnam War, the one period in history when the American people were treated to accurate media coverage of what their government was actually doing in another country. Due to the horrific revelations of American torture and brutality, public protests were so widespread that the US was on the verge of anarchy and became almost ungovernable. Americans were tearing up their military draft notices and fleeing to Canada to escape military service. Streets and university campuses were overwhelmed with protests and riots, at least until Nixon ordered the students shot in the back. (13) (14) (15) That was in 1970, but in 1971, Daniel Ellsberg stole “The Pentagon Papers” from the RAND corporation where he worked, and leaked them to the media, and that was the beginning of the end. After the political fallout and Nixon’s resignation, Bernays’ secret government went into overdrive and the American political landscape changed forever.

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During his presidential election campaign in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt said, “Behind the visible government there is an invisible government upon the throne that owes the people no loyalty and recognizes no responsibility”, (22) and claimed it was necessary to destroy this invisible government and undo the corrupt union of business and politics. Roosevelt again:

“It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor and other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness. These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”"

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India and the Weaponization of Human Rights

"“In 2010, 187,000 Indians killed themselves – one fifth of all global suicides….. Latest statistical research finds strong causal links between areas with the most suicides and areas where impoverished farmers are trying to grow crops that suffer from wild price fluctuations due to India’s relatively recent shift to free market economics.”

“It is often forgotten that over 833 million people – almost 70% of the Indian population – still live in rural areas. A large proportion of these rural inhabitants have not benefited from the economic growth of the past twenty years. In fact, liberalization has brought about a crisis in the agricultural sector that has pushed many small-scale cash crops farmers into debt and in many cases to suicide.”

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This sparse attention to the horrors suffered by destitute Indians, often ignored even at the United Nations specialized agencies, grossly contrasts with the overwhelming focus on ostensible human rights abuses of which China is accused by the Western media, and within the UN Security Council.

India’s current Prime Minister Modi hails from the political party implicated in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the great leader of India’s independence from Great Britain. It seems clear that Modi is determined to return India to the Western hands that enslaved her until 1947. Modi is a very obedient servant in pleasing India’s former masters.

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Perhaps, because India is now following the orders of her former slaveholder, Western imperialism, the horrifying number of suicides of their destitute farmers, the degradation of the women (innumerable gang rapes and murders of impoverished girls) receive little attention in the corridors of power at the United Nations, subsumed under general toothless resolutions upholding the rights of women."

While the focus on India is good, the piece falls prey to the common trap of excusing the horrors of China because they're not "Western Imperialists". But reeducation camps are unacceptable assaults, always. They can never be defensive measures as the author argues.

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USPS Selects Oshkosh Defense to Build Greener Mail Truck

"The postal service last updated its mail-delivery trucks 30 years ago, and there have been major changes in the service's operations since then. Traditional mail volumes have declined, while the service now delivers millions of packages from online retailers like Amazon that did not exist when the previous mail vehicle was introduced.

The new vehicles will have more room for packages, and will be updated with modern safety and driveability standards like cameras, airbags and collision avoidance systems. The vehicles will also be a combination of electric and gasoline powered, but the gasoline-powered new vehicles will have the ability to be retrofitted with new electric systems in the future."

Let's hope those cameras are only for the driver's benefit and not to track their behavior.

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Slate indefinitely suspends Mike Pesca after he argued the n-word is valid to be used when discussing racism

"In his final point, Pesca said:

“I don’t think it’s proper to use it in casual conversation and I’m in no position to tell Black NY Times workers that they shouldn’t be worried it’s going to pop out of a colleague’s mouth at some point. If you want my opinion it’s that there are some limited reasons why a non African American journalist or professor to use the word when conveying a quote in the name of clarity or factualness […] But it’s not a comfortable point to even pursue right now. If I had the opposite opinion I know a hundred ways I could make the opinion I actually have seem horrible and racist, and you know what, maybe it is.”

The conversation, which lasted hours, was eventually shut down by Slate’s CEO Dan Check.

The next day, Slate’s editor-in-chief Jared Hohlt condemned Pesca’s argument saying, “While we are a workplace where people argue all the time, it’s also a workplace where we must think very hard about the lived experience of colleagues whose experience is different than ours.”

On Friday, Pesca was told that he would be on a one week suspension without pay. However, speaking to the Times, he said that on Monday he was suspended indefinitely pending an investigation.

Speaking to the Defector, a Slate employee said, “I feel outraged,” while referring to Pesca’s arguments on the McNeil discussion. “I cannot believe I had to watch him enthusiastically provoke people on whether or not it is appropriate to use a racist slur,” the anonymous staffer added.

Pesca, who has worked at the current affairs, politics and culture online magazine for seven years, told the Times that he felt “heartsick” for hurting his co-workers. However, he added that, “I hate the idea of things that are beyond debate and things that cannot be said.”"

If you're so emotionally immature that you cannot hear a certain word as an adult you need to seek help. Barack Obama, former president of the United States, bragged on his podcast (one of his latest grifts) about breaking someone's nose for calling him a "coon." Young Barack can be forgiven for this. After all he was an emotionally immature child. But he should be absolutely ashamed for bragging about it as an adult.

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House Democrats, Targeting Right-Wing Cable Outlets, Are Assaulting Core Press Freedoms

"Not even two months into their reign as the majority party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress, key Democrats have made clear that one of their top priorities is censorship of divergent voices. On Saturday, I detailed how their escalating official campaign to coerce and threaten social media companies into more aggressively censoring views that they dislike — including by summoning social media CEOs to appear before them for the third time in less than five months — is implicating, if not already violating, core First Amendment rights of free speech.

Now they are going further — much further. The same Democratic House Committee that is demanding greater online censorship from social media companies now has its sights set on the removal of conservative cable outlets, including Fox News, from the airwaves.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee on Monday announced a February 24 hearing, convened by one of its sub-committees, entitled “Fanning the Flames: Disinformation and Extremism in the Media.” Claiming that “the spread of disinformation and extremism by traditional news media presents a tangible and destabilizing threat,” the Committee argues: “Some broadcasters’ and cable networks’ increasing reliance on conspiracy theories and misleading or patently false information raises questions about their devotion to journalistic integrity.”

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But what House Democrats are doing here is far more insidious than what is revealed by that creepy official announcement. Two senior members of that Committee, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Silicon-Valley) and Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-CA) also sent their own letters to seven of the nation’s largest cable providers — Comcast, AT&T, Spectrum, Dish, Verizon, Cox and Altice — as well as to digital distributors of cable news (Roku, Amazon, Apple, Google and Hulu) demanding to know, among other things, what those cable distributors did to prevent conservative “disinformation” prior to the election and after — disinformation, they said, that just so happened to be spread by the only conservative cable outlets: Fox, Newsmax and OANN.

In case there was any doubt about their true goal — coercing these cable providers to remove all cable networks that feature conservative voices, including Fox (just as their counterparts on that Committee want to ban right-wing voices from social media) — the House Democrats in their letter said explicitly what they are after: namely, removal of those conservative outlets by these cable providers

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For the last four years, we were inundated with media messaging that Trump posed an unprecedented threat to press freedoms. The Washington Post even flamboyantly adopted a new motto to implicitly ratify that accusation (while claiming it was not Trump-specific). Other than the indictment of Julian Assange — which most Washington Democrats cheered — what did the Trump administration do in the way of attacking press freedoms that remotely compares to Democrats abusing their majoritarian power to force the removal of conservative cable outlets from the airwaves, just days after doing the same with dissident voices online?

There is not a peep of protest from any liberal journalists. Do any of the people who spent four years pretending to care so deeply about the vital role of press freedom have anything to say about this full frontal attack by the majority party in Washington on news outlets opposed to their political agenda and ideology?

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Just imagine if, during the Trump years, the GOP Senate had abused its power to bully cable outlets into removing MSNBC from their platforms, or banning liberal journalists and activists from using social media platforms, on the grounds that they were spreading conspiracy theories and fake news. It is hard to overstate how extreme the rhetoric would have been that Trump and the Republicans were engaged in authoritarian measures to destroy free speech and a free press."

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Over Half of Military Families Do Not Want COVID Vaccines – Employers Cannot Legally Mandate Experimental Shots

"The Vaccine Reaction is reporting that a recent survey found that 53 percent of U.S. military families do not want to take the experimental mRNA COVID injections.

   A survey conducted in December 2020 by the Blue Star Families, a non-profit military advocacy organization, found that 53 percent of U.S. military families do not want to get the experimental COVID-19 vaccines being distributed under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) granted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

   Of the of 53 percent of military families who responded to the survey indicating that they would not get the vaccine, nearly three-quarters cited a distrust of the development process or timeline.

Among deployed troops overseas, most of them are refusing the COVID shots, according to The Vaccine Reaction:

   According to the Pentagon, U.S. troops deployed overseas and those charged with critical national security missions are declining to get vaccinated for COVID-19.

   Some 320,000 service members and civilian personnel have been vaccinated, leaving a significant amount of the 769,000 doses available to Department of Defense (DoD) unused.

   Pentagon officials said as long as the COVID-19 vaccines are classified as EUA by the FDA and not fully licensed, the DoD cannot mandate service members to take the vaccine.

   Air Force Brigadier General Paul Friedrichs said that even those personnel responsible for manning America’s nuclear weapons are refusing to get the vaccine.

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While the military acknowledges that they cannot legally require anyone to receive an experimental injection not yet approved by the FDA, some businesses in the U.S. are attempting to do just that.

Last month we reported that a nursing home in Wisconsin was firing employees who refused to get an experimental mRNA COVID injection. See: Wisconsin Nursing Home Believed to be First in U.S. to Fire Staff for Refusing Experimental COVID Injections

Townhall.com later reported that the nursing home faced a backlash for their policy, and one employee is now represented by an attorney who has reportedly sent a cease-and-desist letter.

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If federal law and federal guidelines issued by the CDC and FDA make such mandatory requirements illegal, then why are some employers trying to make the shots mandatory as a requirement for employment?

They are trying to rely on a statement issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) which claims employers have a right to exclude employees from the workplace if they refuse the COVID shots."

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Post-Pandemic Social Landscapes: Surveillance Capitalism, Behaviour Modification as the New Consensus Reality

"The ‘COVID Event’ handed the unreal world its great coup over the place of the real. This perception intervention gave the final stimulus necessary to tip the twenty-first century into an awaiting technologically manipulated reality. A new landscape is emerging where, for the first time, the human mind is finding itself out-of-place within its own territory. Emerging ‘post-pandemic’ landscapes are likely to be hazardous territory for our mental, emotional and physical states. The human condition is under modification.

New forms of power are rising, embedded within structures of health security, re-imagining our social lives, living and workspaces, and our physical and digital movements. Until now, the spider’s web of social control mainly operated below the waterline in a space where an almost intangible world existed beyond governance or accountability. Now the Kraken awakes and unashamedly rises to the surface. The beast of behaviour modification spreads its tentacles through our established social and cultural landscape without shame – all in the name of health security (the new nom de plume for social management). It is encroaching upon our media, city life, the office, and – perhaps most of all – the online digital world. The modification of these spaces is set to further desensitise, anaesthetise, and dehumanise us – the collective human mind is being groomed and prepared for a new consensus reality of “normalised dissonance.”

The post-pandemic landscape is merging physical world pandemics with its own viral digital epidemics that now infect the human psyche. The Italian philosopher Franco Berardi has noted that our “electronic mediascape” places “the sensitive organism in a state of permanent electrocution.”1 The social body is deliberately targeted by strategies that cause anxiety, fragmentation, exhaustion, confusion, polarisation and fear. We can see this happening through national and local lockdowns; social distancing; anti-social interaction; social ostracisation; loss of economic independence, and more.

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Something insidious creeps into the global collective that is attempting to create a world of sleepwalkers, plied with fear-pills, updated with vaccines, programmed with nonsense, and dismissive of alternative thinking. As a conscious, biological organism, we are being prepared to mimic the automation of the machine. Humanity is mentally sleeping and slipping into the void where a new form of the ‘social collective’ awaits us.

Techniques are being devised and employed to produce normalised and standardised behaviour for a socially manageable populace. The collective human mind is being adapted and adopted into an infrastructure of control that operates largely through modes of digital connectivity. I refer to this rising mechanism of social engineering as the modern power-machine (MPM) that exerts control over human expression and autonomy of behaviour. To enact this, a consortium of institutions have been selected to structure contemporary societies toward specific functions that offer the promise of security and human well-being whilst developing increased social dependency. This is the post-pandemic landscape now rapidly arising and to which all future generations shall be born into.

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We are witnessing an unprecedented migration of humanity from the physical space to the digital-sphere – an environment of surveillance and technocratic social management. Incoming generations will recognise no fundamental difference between the digital-sphere and the physical world as this merging will form the reality they are born into. To the new generations, the digital-physical-sphere will be their only reality for they will have been born without the offline-online distinction. In the words of Luciano Floridi, they are born onlife. This is their reality, and it is ‘onlife’. The world that many of us recognise as being human will never be the same again. With the ‘onlife’ mode, a new era of history begins. Childhood ends when you stop being a child and become a user. The user inhabits whole new realities – realities believed to be ‘user-generated’ when in fact the reverse is likely the case.

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It is no exaggeration that humanity is entering a period of existential crisis, perhaps not witnessed since the Middle Ages. But this time we don’t have the religious institutions to offer us salvation. The responsibility is upon our shoulders to find salvation by becoming fully human in the face of dehumanising forces. At present, we are being bombarded with such contradictory information leaving many people unable to find coherence or make a whole picture out of the shards. That is, the human mind is finding it increasingly difficult to see the patterns and connect the dots. Many people will also now be experiencing forms of cognitive dissonance: “Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviours. This produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviours to reduce the discomfort and restore balance.”10

The result is that the mind desperately wishes to reduce this discomfort and restore balance by seeking – or being provided with – a coherent picture, or closure. This ‘closure’ or ‘coherent picture’ may be provided by an institution or body (a structure of orthodox ‘authority’), and many people will accept it as a way of gaining closure, and thus comfort. In truth, we need to find this coherence and closure within ourselves – through our own resources.

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Humanity has entered unprecedented times. Such times demand an unprecedented response. It appears we are now being asked to ‘step up’ to accept our responsibility for our human becoming – to become fully human. By doing nothing, we allow our behaviour to be modified and our self-identities to be splintered.

In these post-pandemic landscapes, the choices we make will be choices that, like never before, determine our future as a human species. I suggest it is time to declare our unity as an empowered fully human species and not accept the push of the power-machine for distanced and disempowered individuals."

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Fired High School Coach Sues Massachusetts School In Free Speech Lawsuit

"By all accounts, Flynn was a popular coach who reportedly turned around a losing football program and had good relations with the students. (There were protests after he was fired). He is also a parent with two daughters at the school and became concerned after reviewing the material for the course. Here is what the complaint states:

   20. During the first week of school, Plaintiff and his wife observed that the instruction their daughter was receiving in “World Geography and Ancient History I” was unrelated to the ancient history and world geography subjects described on the Dedham Public Schools website. Instead, the instruction concerned issues of race, gender, stereotypes, prejudices, discrimination, and politics, among others. In one assignment, Plaintiff’s daughter was asked to consider various “risk factors” and “mitigating factors” that two people identified as “white” and the other identified as “black” – purportedly might use to assess each other on a city street. Included among the various factors were skin color, gender, age, physical appearance, and attire. “Black,” “aggressive body language” and “wrong neighborhood” were among the “risk factors” purportedly assessed by the person identified as “white.” “White” and “Police officer” were among the “risk factors” purportedly assessed by the person identified as “black.”

   21. Plaintiff and his wife also observed that the instruction materials included a cartoon version of their daughter’s teacher -a “Memoji” – wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt, which Plaintiff and his wife reasonably interpreted as the teacher expressing support for the Black Lives Matter movement during class time.

Flynn states that he raised his concerns with the school and was later fired. The school sent out a note to families with children in the football program on January 20th that stated “We met with Mr. Flynn today because he has expressed significant philosophical differences with the direction, goals and values of this school district” and, as a result, it decided that there was a need for “different leadership for the program at this time.”"

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More Evidence That Private Equity Kills: Estimated >20,000 Increase in Nursing Home Deaths, 160,000 Life Years Lost Due to Cuts in Care

"Private equity has succeeded in exploiting economic choke points in much narrower sectors of the economy than experts in monopolies typically study. Health care is an idea area in which to exploit the leverage of providers compared to patients. You can’t haggle over which ambulance comes to fetch you. Similarly, most who get an operation or need ongoing treatments, like dialysis or chemotherapy, will use a facility nearby, which means private equity can create local oligopolies. Not only do private equity owners jack up prices (see Eileen Appelbaum on how private equity negotiates higher fees for outsourced physician practices) but they also lower service levels, as an important new study confirms.

An important study by Atul Gupta, Sabrina T. Howell, Constantine Yannelis, and Abhinav Gupta, published by the Becker Friedman Institute of the University of Chicago, covering approximately 7.4 unique Medicare patients in nursing homes to understand the impact of private equity buys of 1,674 nursing homes from 2000 to 2017. We’ve embedded it below and encourage you to read it and circulate it widely.

The study is very carefully done. It looks at changes in care and health/mortality in nursing homes after private equity acquisitions. That makes it apples to apples, since the acquired homes were already for profit institutions. The authors also adjusted for consolidations within nursing home chains (they compared consolidation within PE deals with consolidation of non-PE owned for profit homes) and changes in patient composition post purchase.

The findings are damning:

   A key measure of patient welfare is short-term survival. We find that going to a PE-owned nursing home increases the probability of death during the stay and the following 90 days by 1.7 percentage points, about 10% of the mean. This estimate implies about 20,150 Medicare lives lost due to PE ownership of nursing homes during our sample period. We use the observed age and gender distribution of Medicare decedents to estimate the corresponding implied loss in life-years – 160,000. Using a conventional value of a lifeyear from the literature, this estimate implies a mortality cost of about $21 billion in 2016 dollars. To put this in perspective, this is about twice the total payments made by Medicare to PE facilities during our sample period, about $9 billion.

Later in the paper, the authors underscore the significance of the 1.7% increased odds of dying in the first 90 days: “In the context of the health economics literature, this is a very large effect.”

Why did this happen? The private equity firms cut on patient care, in particular nurse staffing levels. Keep in mind that nursing homes in the US treat both short-term patients as well as long-term residents."

It sounds like Private Equity has done far more to kill Grandma than "irresponsible" partying young people or anti-mask "idiots".

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Artificial Intelligence and Profit Driven Supercomputers, Part of the Super-Rich “Money Game”

"Today, thousands of supercomputers calculate the worth of derivatives as part of a money game for the super-rich, a fixed round of poker. Few super computers are calculating how the use of massive amounts of electricity to power the next generation of AI will impact the climate over the next fifty years, or what the impact of the use of plastics will be on the oceans for that the next century, or what the prospects for the production of food for the 200 years will be in light of the rapid degradation of soil.

Supercomputers are being employed to calculate profit, and not sustainability, and they are so assigned for a political, not a scientific, reason. Technology serves as a sheepskin for the most ruthless forms of economic exploitation. The powerful know that if AI was focused on sustainability over centuries, the answer from its calculations would be that we should stop using AI if we wish to survive.

We confuse science with technology at our peril.

...

Our culture could be changed if we wanted to change it. The fact that most people cannot read books, or focus for more than 10 minutes on a topic, is a result of habits created by exposure to technology that could be reversed if there were a will.

We could treat serious issues in a serious manner in our society, and we could discuss the history of how we got here, the reality of how our society works, and the wisdom of learning for oneself through art, music, philosophy and literature. We could give more emphasis to the wisdom passed on to us by our parents and grandparents than to the superficial sayings of those made famous by the media.

The murder weapon can be found in the hands of the advertising firms, the puppeteers behind the screen of media. They create a false reality that degrades; they label those who tell the truth false. They make sure that the citizen faces a wasteland on every TV channel, in every newspaper, in every corner of every mall and every office building. Their destruction of intellectual inquiry made possible the rise of clown tyrants and laid the foundations for a media circus dominated by the willful and the indulgent.

We can trace this war on intellectual inquiry back to the efforts of Sigmund Freud’s disciple Edward Bernays in the 1950s to develop concrete methods for manipulating the public through powerful images and simplistic slogans. Bernays gave corporations long-term strategies to make use of weaknesses in human psychology so as to turn citizens into consumers who are drawn to conventional interpretations presented by authority figures.

The manipulation of the human mind by the powerful has a long history. Yet the situation would not have become so dire if our seduction by the stunts of computers, by the legerdemain of mechanical reproduction, had not blinded us to the murder of scientific inquiry.

...

The obsession with the seen, and the neglect of the invisible and the abstract, is related to the precipitous decline of the intellectual in society.

This process was pushed forward by wealthy ideologues seeking to defend their power such as the Scaife family, the Koch family, and the Coors family. They paid top dollar to create and to circulate narratives in the media that suggested that business administration and marketing were practical and fundamental because they create wealth. They paid newspapers to repeat and repeat that the intellectuals who try to understand the fundamentals of the universe and of society are impractical and elitist.

The exploitation of nature, or of fellow humans, the manipulation of currency and capital by investors, was lauded by the new gurus that these groups funded, and then that argument was fed to us through the commercial media. The criminals who made wealth out of nothing through financial fraud like Elon Musk, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are presented to us as icons for genuflection.

...

It has become a commonplace comment that the entire world seems to have gone crazy. This compelling impression usually does not develop far beyond that primitive formulation.

Yes, the United States is governed by the insane; Yes, it has become a literal psychopathocracy.

The question is whether we are observing a periodic decadence, akin to the collapse of the Roman empire, or a different phenomenon?

...

Is it simply the case that greedy billionaires use technology as a means to reduce us to slavery as they seek to further increase their wealth, or are they also being drawn into the transhuman realm and losing their bearings in the process?

If we peer behind the curtains, will we discover that technology has taken over the entire system of things.

Could it be that there is an ultimate psychopath behind psychopaths like Bill Gates and Elon Musk?

The psychopath playing the flute for the billionaires as they lead us to our collective doom, is not a specific monster, but the network connecting together tens of thousands of supercomputers around the world. Those supercomputers are the real power that stand beyond the reach of the constitutions of any of the pathetic little nation states, or of any misshapen global institutions like the United Nations.

Those supercomputers purr softly as they calculate to the tenth decimal point how to maximize profit every day, every minute and every second. They make the ultimate decisions for international banks and corporations, and not only because they are fast and perfectly integrated. They are capable of something that no human can do: they can assess the monetary value of the entire Earth and can extract profit from every aspect of human society in perfect accord with the algorithms they were assigned, and do so without any hesitation, without the slightest ethical qualm. They were not programmed to calculate the sustainability of the Earth.

We do not have to wait for supercomputers to achieve consciousness in order to lose control of our civilization. All we need is for computers to set the priorities for our society on the basis of profit without any consideration for our long-term needs. If social media, videos and games, remap the neural networks of our brains, the computers will take over by default long before they have consciousness. We have delegated the administration of our economy to supercomputers without even noticing it."

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Synthetic mRNA COVID Vaccines: A Risk-Benefit Analysis

"With a “vaccine” based on untested technology, and safety trials still ongoing, is it safe to take the shot? And does it even work? And does a disease with an IFR of 0.2% even justify that risk?

Amidst the plethora of Covid-related issues, the Covid injections are the most imminent. Two formulations have received interim approval from the FDA, and Health Canada: Pfizer/BioNtech and Moderna.

Both these injections are employing the same technology, synthetic gene therapy (SGT), which is being dispensed to the populace for the first time in human history.

Medications are given to sick people to treat disease. Vaccines are given to healthy people to prevent an infection. Therefore consideration of risk-benefit analysis is paramount.

...

...Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) stats based on seroprevalence antibody studies are also inflated since T-cell immunity, is not measured in these studies. This may result in a 3-5X lower IFR for Covid. Regardless, the general IFR is on order of the seasonal influenza, approx. 0.2%.

Covid mortality is a reflection of increased mortality with age, more so than influenza/pneumonia of previous years. The median age of Covid deaths (86) exceeds average life expectancy in Canada. Tragically, 70% of the deaths in the province of Ontario took place in care homes. The mortality rate from Covid in Canada under 59 years of age is 0.0017%.

According to the CDC, the survival from Covid (with inflated stats) is as follows: (under 20) 99.997%, (29-49) 99.98%, (50-69) 99.5% and (over 70), 94.6%.

The Covid synthetic gene therapy injections employ synthetic, thermostable nucleotide sequences which are wrapped in a PEG (polyethylene glycol)-lipid nanoparticles to protect from destruction in the bloodstream and facilitate entry into the cells. The claim is that the cellular machinery will engage with these synthetic sequences and produce segments which code for the SarsCov2 S1 spike protein. It is believed that the immune system will mount a sufficient antibody response.

Dr David Martin, emphasized that this technology does not meet the definition of a traditional vaccine as per the manufacturers’ claims. The trials do not test for reduction in transmission. These therapies do not prevent infection, merely reduction in one or more symptoms.

Interestingly, Moderna describes its technology as the “software of life,” not a vaccine.

Media outlets, politicians, and public health officials have blared the 95% efficacy for both formulations. To the casual observer, this would denote 95% reduction in hospitalizations or deaths. When in fact the 95% is calculated, based upon the “Primary Efficacy Endpoints.”

In the trial literature these endpoints are described by both companies as non-severe cold/flu SYMPTOMS coupled with a positive PCR.

...

...people are not being informed that “95%” or so efficacy, is calculated based on a useless metric of relative efficacy and is therefore very misleading.

Eg.Pfizer/BioNtech:

•    8 “cases” in vaccine group
•    162 “cases” in placebo group
•    8/162 = 5%
•    100%-5%= 95%

Therefore, they are claiming that the synthetic gene therapy injections are 95% efficacious. What they are not factoring in is the size of the denominator. If it is large, then with 8 vs 162, the difference becomes less significant. It matters how many people were in each group, for example, whether this be 200, 2,000, or 20,000.

...

Approximately 5-6 symptoms listed as “side effects” are the same as Covid symptoms. Pfizer/BioNtech only started counting “cases” one week after the second dose, and Moderna, 2 weeks after the second dose. Therefore, if these side effects were labelled as “Covid” symptoms instead, even the paltry efficacy of about 1% would be relegated into the negative integers.

In others words, the injected group may have been sicker with “Covid” more than the placebo group.

There have been many critiques of the applicability of the limited data to the general populace, especially the vulnerable elderly. An important analysis of this was done by Dr James Lyons-Weiler who discovered the general population is dying at a rate 6.3 times the rate of participants in the Moderna trial (including placebo and injection groups).

   If Moderna’s on-vaccine death rate is so far below the national death rate and also simultaneously more than five times greater than Pfizer’s on-vaccine death rate, then Pfizer’s study sample appears even less representative of the entire population. This, too, requires due consideration.”

An integral question as to whether Pfizer/BioNtech and Moderna recruited supermen and women for their trials, comes to mind. The incidence of “severe” Covid in Placebo groups which scrutinizing the details, wasn’t necessarily severe presentation, is so low that trials of 30,000-40,000 lacked statistical power to determine reductions in hospitalizations and deaths, according to Tal Zaks, CMO Moderna.

Zaks is correct, the incidence of severe “Covid” was only 0.04% in Pfizer/BioNtech and 0.22% in Moderna. Due to this very low attack rate of severe presentation in the population, the absolute risk reduction in severe presentation, even taking data at face value, is nominal.

Therefore, potential SGT recipients must be informed that to reduce “severe” presentation, chances are over 99.5% that these synthetic gene therapies will not work.

...

According to the data, and elaborated by Tal Zaks (CMO of Moderna)the trials are not designed to demonstrate a reduction in transmission, due to “operational realities”. It is therefore baffling how medical doctors and public health officials are proclaiming these SGTs will promote herd immunity.

The manufacturers have also made it clear that efficacy beyond 2 months or so is unknown. Therefore, the 1% absolute risk reduction in mild/moderate, cold/flu symptoms may not last more than a few months.

Tragically, there is no pervasive data-centred discourse, only excessive fear-mongering. Without addressing the data people cannot make an informed choice about experimental SGTs.

...

To exercise informed consent, any recipient of this SGT must be made aware that they are now participating in a clinical trial. There is no claim about reduction of transmission. All risk-benefit analysis must be focused on the individual, as is treatment with a drug therapy.

Therefore, the potential trial recipient must understand IFR, the absolute risk reduction in symptoms, and potential side effects, including ADE as well as efficacious alternatives for treatment if the need arises.

If the potential trial subject is not relayed this information, or does not comprehend the information, it is a blatant violation of Nuremberg code.

The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential…This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.

This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment."