“The stakes could not be higher, and it has never been more essential to seriously engage with uncomfortable possibilities – even if that means interrogating explanations that move beyond reducing what we are all experiencing to blunder and incompetence.”—Dr Piers Robinson
We welcome to the programme Dr Piers Robinson—co-director of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies—for an in-depth interview on his recent article: “Cock-up or Conspiracy? Understanding COVID-19 as a ‘Structural Deep Event’ “.
As debate over “The Science” has intensified, increasing numbers of people are coming to question the Covid-19 Event. What best explains the often bizarre, and sometimes frightening, responses by authorities over the last two and a half years? Irrational panic by well-intentioned but incompetent politicians and health experts? Profiteering and power seeking by corporate and political vested interests? Or might we be looking at something more—a “structural deep event”—in which globally powerful actors might have harnessed (or even instigated) the Covid-19 Event in order to drive deep structural changes in society? Arguing that all possible explanations need to remain firmly on the table, Dr Robinson appeals to all thinking people to ask such difficult and uncomfortable questions, because to understand the past and the present is to guard the future and “the stakes could not be higher”.
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When I sat down to write a piece reflecting on the second anniversary of the March 2020 lockdown, I initially thought it would be about what the past two years have taught us about law, civil liberties, and the state. Instead, I’d like to talk about the thing that has occupied my mind most ever since Boris’s famous press conference shortly before the “lockdown” was given legal effect: namely, the nihilism of modern life. This is illustrated perfectly by the way in which the interests of children were treated during the pandemic.
Evidence based medicine has been corrupted by corporate interests, failed regulation, and commercialisation of academia, argue these authors
The advent of evidence based medicine was a paradigm shift intended to provide a solid scientific foundation for medicine. The validity of this new paradigm, however, depends on reliable data from clinical trials, most of which are conducted by the pharmaceutical industry and reported in the names of senior academics. The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented. Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220316191824/https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o702
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Why hospitals are like prisons – Spiked
Foucault saw the tendencies to try to control, normalise and rationalise everything as ubiquitous in industrialised society. ‘The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge… [E]ach individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behaviour, his aptitudes, his achievements.’ Foucault asked: ‘Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?’
…To turn Foucault on his head, you could easily argue that it is the medical staff who are the slaves, rather than the masters, in the NHS Panopticon. Those in the blue and green uniforms, the masked and overworked, are expected to metaphorically slave all day for the needs and whims of those of us who lie around all day, doing nothing but eating, reading, sleeping or messing around on the internet.
Published November 2020
As global conflicts take on increasingly asymmetric and “grey” forms, the ability to manipulate the human mind employing neurocognitive science techniques and tools is constantly and quickly increasing. This complements the more traditional techniques of manipulation through information technology and information warfare, making the human increasingly targeted in the cognitive warfare.
Any user of modern information technologies is a potential target. It targets the whole of a nation’s human capital.
Cognitive Warfare, June-November 2020, p. 6
Original: https://www.innovationhub-act.org/sites/default/files/2021-01/20210122_CW%20Final.pdf
This time on #SWYSI, Peter Hitchens discusses the British police’s historic transformation into a form unrecognisable from decades past. He agues that the British police were once unique in the world. They were an important conservative & very English institution which was set up in complete distinction from continental police forces. Parliament had seen European police forces become tools of oppression. They were armed & uniformed state police whose job was to enforce the will of the state — and it was not felt that such a body should exist in Britain. Consequently, the British police force that was set up was very different: unarmed, not given special powers, limited in their abilities. This is no longer the case.
Our government has used Covid as an excuse to turn Australians into digital products. It is the perfect scam. Every dictatorship knows that humans are cheap, renewable, and disposable. Our digital identities are worth a fortune to the right third-party buyer, while the ability to track and control our movements presents a unique opportunity for politicians wishing to manage democracy instead of being a victim of its whims.
At a panel discussion about the Great Reset hosted by the World Economic Forum in mid-November, former Secretary of State John Kerry – Biden’s would-be special presidential envoy for climate – firmly declared that the Biden administration will support the Great Reset and that the Great Reset “will happen with greater speed and with greater intensity than a lot of people might imagine.”
The study is important because of the social structure of control here. It’s one thing to observe no effects from national lockdowns. There are countless variables here that could be invoked as cautionary notes: demographics, population density, preexisting immunities, degree of compliance, and so on. But with this Marine study, you have a near homogeneous group based on age, health, and densities of living. And even here, you see confirmed what so many other studies have shown: lockdowns are pointlessly destructive. They do not manage the disease. They crush human liberty and produce astonishing costs, such as 5.53 million years of lost life from the closing of schools alone.
https://www.aier.org/article/even-a-military-enforced-quarantine-cant-stop-the-virus-study-reveals/
This is an archive of a series of Tweets by Bob Moran, cartoonist for The Telegraph. It has been formatted for readability but otherwise kept intact.
Bob Moran is an award-winning cartoonist. He has worked for The Daily Telegraph since 2011. In 2017, Bob was named Political Cartoonist of the Year by the Cartoon Arts Trust and in 2018 became The Telegraph’s lead cartoonist.
The choice we have been presented with from the beginning is a false one. The government says – and most people seem to believe – that we must choose between sacrificing freedoms and livelihoods or letting thousands of people die.
This is not, and has never been, the choice. The reality has always been that a lot of people were going to die this year (though possibly no more than any other year). The choice we had to make was between two groups of people; if we let one live, the other would possibly die.
The first group of people is, almost exclusively, very old people who are already very sick, with an average age which exceeds the average life expectancy. The size of this group is around 20,000 – that is the number we hope to save, although in this context, ‘save’ really means delaying their imminent death by a few months.
The second group of people consists of all ages with a much, much younger average age and contains children and newborn babies. This group numbers at least 200,000 but is probably a lot bigger. The loss of life, therefore, is huge.
Every decision taken has been about making this choice, between these two groups. As a society, we were presented with an opportunity to demonstrate our understanding of the value of life, the preservation and protection of the young and our adherence to moral principles.
And we chose the wrong group. We chose to let the much larger group of much younger people die and, just to make it even more wicked, we did it without any certainty that we would ‘save’ anybody in the first group.
This decision shames us all. It will scar us for generations.
We have made the wrong choice and now, we’ve done it a second time. The people who support lockdown, who wear masks, who download the app, who get tested, who strain every sinew to make this virus seem frightening, they are declaring that this choice was the right one.
They want this undeniable evil to be the new moral philosophy on which our society is built. There is no longer room for hindsight, no excuses for not understanding what we were doing. It has been clear since April.
This is what I am standing against. The good, kind, decent people who oppose all of this are not whingeing about their own freedoms being taken away, they are not moaning about the ‘inconvenience’ of it all, they are desperately trying to protect our collective sense of good.
Unless you want our children to grow up in a world based on wickedness, stand up to this. Fight it. Reject it. Say, “No.”
At the very least, don’t let there be any doubt as to which side you are on.
Read the original Tweet here.
- The ‘rule of six’ has no scientific evidence to back it up, and may well end up having major social consequences.
- Increased activity at the end of summer leads to an increase in acute respiratory infections, as it does every year.
- Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence Based Medicine: no scientific evidence on the effects of measures such as distancing on respiratory viral spread. No study pointing to the number six. If it’s made up, why not five or seven?
- Admissions for Covid, critical care bed occupancies and deaths are now at an all-time low.
- There are currently 600 patients in hospital with Covid compared to over 17,000 at the height of the epidemic. An average of ten patients a day die with Covid registered on their death certificate, compared to over 1,000 at the peak.
- Shift in focus away from the impact of the disease is a worrying development.
- Severity of the pandemic was monitored by numbers of cases, numbers of admissions, and deaths. All three measures are open to misinterpretation if their definitions are not standardised.
- Cases are being over-diagnosed by a test that can pick up dead viral load.
- Hospital admissions are subjective decisions made by physicians which can vary from hospital to hospital.
- Even deaths have been misattributed.
- Cases will rise, as they will in winter for all acute respiratory pathogens, but this will not necessarily translate into excess deaths.
- Models ignore the vast expertise of our clinicians and public health experts who could provide a more robust approach based on their real-world healthcare experiences.
- The current Cabinet is inexperienced:
- the Health Secretary has been in post for just over two years now;
- the PM and the Chief Medical Officer a year;
- The Joint Biosecurity Centre is overseen by a senior spy who monitors the spread of coronavirus and suppresses new outbreaks;
- New chair of the National Institute for Health Protection who has little or no background in healthcare.
- The recognised alert threshold for ‘regular’ acute respiratory infections is 400 cases per 100,000.
- Britain’s mental health has deteriorated. During lockdown, a fifth of vulnerable people considered self-harming, routine healthcare came to a standstill, operations were cancelled, and cancer care put on hold.
- The most glaring initial blunder was not observing what was going on in other European nations and learning from their mistakes.
- Life should return to as close as possible to normality.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/boris-johnson-needs-to-bin-the-rule-of-six
FORCING school children to wear masks is part of a scattergun approach by a government “lacking the political will” to study the actual evidence, a professor warns.
Dr Carl Heneghan said that the mask doctrine came into place even as the deputy chief medical officer admitted there was no strong evidence they would help with the disease. This was despite the social and psychological damage masking pupils would cause, he said. He pointed out that with drug interventions, high quality testing was required before they were implemented.
…He said: “Wearing masks can interfere with social wellbeing. We clearly understand with drugs the need to do proper research on the benefits against the harms before we use them.
This is a huge intervention to impose on society with many unknowns and potentially damaging consequences, but we are not doing the research to justify it.”
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The Lockdown Lobotomy – The Critic
While naysayers may pick holes in specific studies, the quantity and consistency of evidence is overwhelming: lockdown is stressful, it harms cognitive function, and it makes you susceptible to disease. Ultimately, the toll is high. A meta-analytic review (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015) found that social isolation increases the likelihood of mortality by 29%. In short, lockdown is murder.
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Face masks make you stupid – The Critic
Face masks make you suggestible; they make you more likely to follow someone else’s direction and do things you wouldn’t otherwise do
In Joost Meerloo’s analysis of false confessions and totalitarian regimes, The Rape of the Mind, he coins a phrase for the ‘dumbing down’ of critical resistance – menticide. “In the totalitarian regime,” he wrote, “the doubting, inquisitive, and imaginative mind has to be suppressed. The totalitarian slave is only allowed to memorise, to salivate when the bell rings.”
…The fact that masks likely don’t even work brings us to the final reason that wearing one inculcates stupidity and compliance: through a bombardment of lies, contradictions, and confusion, the state overwhelms your ability to reason clearly…
…As Theodore Dalrymple wrote, “In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”
The sad but unavoidable fact, that the disease is little danger to most young and healthy people but is especially deadly to the old and ill, is also now beyond dispute…
The ceaseless assumption of the Government and the BBC that the shutdown ‘protected’ the NHS is simply not borne out by any facts. The NHS was never going to be overwhelmed. Covid deaths in this country peaked on April 8 – an event far too soon to have been caused by the shutdown announced on March 23 and begun the following day.
In fact, the country with the highest number of deaths per head is Belgium (843 per million). Yet Belgium introduced one of the tightest and most severe shutdowns on the planet. Sweden, without a shutdown at all, has suffered 472 deaths per million.
The UK figure of 620 per million may be inflated by our lax recording methods but hardly suggests that we did better than Sweden by throttling our economy and grossly interfering in personal liberty. Japan, which also did not shut down, suffered just over seven (yes, seven) deaths per million…
I believe that forces hostile to our country, its history and nature, have seen this as an opportunity. Probably incredulous to begin with, they realised the British people really had gone soft, accepting absurd and humiliating diktats, believing the most ridiculous claims.
Are we going to stand for the pathological coercion of our nation – or finally start organising against it?
Many people who lived through the last war – or whose parents have vivid recollections of it – will tell you that they are infuriated by any suggestion that our present emergency is anywhere near comparable to that experience. We are not descending into bomb shelters at night, emerging in the morning possibly to find our homes and family possessions destroyed. The deprivations that we are enduring today are relatively trivial: locked in, as most of us are, with our myriad electronic devices and forms of entertainment which would have seemed magical to that stoical population gathered around the wireless every evening to listen to whatever the government permitted the BBC to offer.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/06/06/tell-mps-not-name-horrified-social-experiment/
Covid conformism must be confronted. In their echo chambers, where they’re all trying to outdo each other in their levels of commitment to smashing Covid, the political and media elites have become increasingly blinkered, dogmatic and intolerant on everything related to Covid-19. The lack of relaxed, freely stated opposition to their lockdown mania means they become madder and madder in their commitment to it. The corrosion of freedom of thought in relation to Covid-19 has deadly consequences, because it means the lockdown endures – nine weeks now – when many people know in their heart of hearts that it is wrong and deeply damaging to the future of this country.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/25/the-public-must-lead-us-out-of-the-lockdown/
[M]any of these measures were not included in the government’s initial decree for phase two of the easing. Many of these changes are due to pressure applied by the public and civil society.
It was striking that one of the first changes was made after pressure from what is traditionally one of the most conservative sections of Italian society: the Catholic Church…Some brave priests were violating the lockdown.
Officially, the [lockdown] process has been led by experts. The government has created various committees of more than 450 experts to guide its coronavirus policies. These include a taskforce established on 10 April of economists, scientists, managers and psychologists to help the government navigate the path out of lockdown.
Economic hardship was undoubtedly a major factor compelling people to protest….Lots of Italians are angry because they can see there is no rationale or fairness in the way the government has chosen to ease the lockdown.
Only a truly democratic government, which draws its authority from the people, has a chance of dealing effectively with Covid-19 and the emerging social and economic crisis.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/21/the-people-are-leading-italy-out-of-lockdown/
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The war on transport – Spiked
It is hard to know where to start with transport. One certainly shouldn’t start from home, if at all possible. In our age of lockdown, transport away from the home is considered anti-social, if not downright dangerous.
In this atmosphere, it is worth recalling that democratic rights relate not just to free speech, but also to freedom of movement and freedom of assembly. Some restrictions on travel have been lifted recently. But with every new official statement about how we can and cannot move around, the government confirms that the state and only the state holds the cards in relation to our basic freedoms.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/21/the-war-on-transport/
This level of social distancing cannot go on indefinitely. It will break down, more than it already has. As much as people tell the pollsters that, if anything, the current regime is too soft-touch, many are already bending if not breaking the rules on meeting friends and family, weighing the risks, being careful, and deciding for themselves. And it’s not just among the supposedly selfish young, either. Older people want to see their kids and grandkids and to make the most of the time they have left.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/17/social-distancing-corrodes-society/