Oh Canada, True North Not So Strong or Free

Meghan Murphy writes at Spiked A Canadian dystopia.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Justin Trudeau’s ‘liberal’ government is riding roughshod over liberty.

Bored of its reputation as inclusive, open-minded and accepting, Canada opted for an authoritarian rebrand last year.

That, at least, seems to have been the intention of prime minister Justin Trudeau. Over the past year, he has led the way towards making authoritarianism great again, forcing thousands of Canadians to live as second-class citizens, while vilifying those who remain fond of their rights as dangerous bigots who should be cut off from society.

Our beta test for Tyranny 2.0 began with the Covid lockdowns in 2020.

Would Canadians agree to stay at home, mask up, abandon their elderly loved ones to die alone in hospitals and long-term care homes? Would they ostracise family members who dared to suggest a funeral for grandma? Would they shut down their businesses, host virtual cocktail hours and pretend that banging pots and pans from their windows equates to some kind of community-building exercise? Would they scream at strangers who dared to breathe too close to them on a hiking path, or who took off their masks for a bike ride? Would they turn their neighbours in to the police for hosting Christmas dinner? Why, yes they would!

After Canadians passed that test, the Liberal government pushed Covid restrictions further in 2022. At the start of the year, Canadians had to sign up to one app in order to leave the country and to return, and use another app to access restaurants, bars, gyms and sporting events. Kids were kept out of schools – indefinitely, it seemed back then – ensuring an entire generation fell behind in their education, mental, social and emotional development.

In the meantime, while everyone was distracted by Zoom meetings, or was furiously tweeting about anti-vax Nazis giving out free hot dogs in the streets, the Canadian government moved on to rolling back women’s rights in the name of ‘trans rights’.

Male prisoners claiming to have a female gender identity have been housed in women’s prisons for several years now. But in 2022 this was made official prison policy all across Canada. A federal directive in May stated: ‘Offenders will be placed according to their gender identity or expression in a men’s or a women’s institution, if that is their preference, regardless of their sex (ie, anatomy) or the gender / sex marker on their identification documents.’

This has led to rapists in wigs being moved over to women’s prisons for safekeeping. It’s surely no coincidence that 50 per cent of transfer requests from men seeking to be moved to female prisons involve sex offenders. Perhaps the government thinks women prisoners, many of whom have suffered abuse in the past, won’t mind a few more rapists, murderers and paedophiles in their lives.

Some Canadians have pushed back against Trudeau’s ‘liberal’ tyranny. In January, for instance, Canadian truckers, clearly fearing that the restrictions, lockdowns and vaccine mandates introduced during the pandemic might not be temporary, formed a ‘Freedom Convoy’. This convoy then drove across Canada, right to the prime minister’s door in Ottawa, as protests convened outside parliament. Trudeau, our brave leader, responded to the sight of bouncy castles and Canadian flags by fleeing the capital.

In a last-ditch effort to stop the protests, Trudeau began freezing the bank accounts of Freedom Convoy leaders and supporters, correctly discerning that not having access to money cuts people off from the means to live. The government clearly thought the truckers and their supporters deserved such a punishment for having the audacity to demand their constitutional rights be respected.

Canada Buys 88 F-35s for $19 Billion January 2023

After the government’s stand-off with the truckers, which did ultimately put a stop to the Covid restrictions, the Liberals set about finding other, more creative ways to restrict Canadian citizens’ liberties.

They eventually came up with the idea of taking away people’s hunting guns and trucks.

Introduced in November, the Liberals’ Bill C-21 is an amendment to Canada’s gun-control legislation that, if enacted, will end the onslaught of gun violence against birds and deer. This proposed ban on hunting arms would constitute the largest gun ban in Canadian history. And it would leave Canadians even more dependent on big-box grocery stores and imported meat, protecting corporations and billionaires from the ever-encroaching threat of geese hunters.

This still left the government with the problem of trucks. So in December, the Liberal government’s environment minister, Steven Guilbeault, proposed new regulations that would mandate one-fifth of all new vehicles sold be electric. These regulations are part of a long-term plan to ensure that all passenger vehicles sold in Canada are electric by 2035. It’s not hard to see how this will limit truck and car ownership. A move to replace old-school petrol-powered vehicles with electric ones makes owning a truck or a car much more expensive, and limits journeys to shorter distances. Guilbeault’s parliamentary secretary, Julie Dabrusin, explained that the new electric-vehicle mandate ‘was about making sure that Canadians have access to the vehicles they want’.

And, as far as the government is concerned, what every good Canadian citizen wants
is access to no vehicles at all. Perfect for staying at home!

At this rate, Canada’s poor and working class will soon no longer need to concern themselves with the stress of autonomy at all. Because there will be no choices for them to make.

As far as the government is concerned, it is merely trying to keep Canadians safe and sound. But the result is dystopian. Trudeau and Co are creating a society in which all lack basic freedoms, and women are deprived of their rights. A society in which individuals will be stuck at home, waiting on Amazon orders, while plugged into the Metaverse and choosing which Japanese anime porn character to be.

And if you find that vision of the future too depressing –
remember, in Canada, euthanasia is always an option.

 

 

 

Why Was Covid-19? Follow the Money.

Michael Bryant has the background in finances and health to help us understand why Covid-19 plandemic  pandemic happened the way it did.  His off-guardian article is COVID-19: A Global Financial Operation.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The COVID phenomenon cannot be understood without understanding the un-televised 2019-2020 unprecedented financial collapse threatening the entire global financial system.

The Covid-19 Pandemic story makes little sense when viewed through the lens of health, safety and science. Viewed through the lens of money, power, control, and wealth transfer, however, then all of it makes perfect sense.

The lockdowns, mandatory muzzles, anti-social distancing and the plethora of additional measures did nothing to protect or improve public health- they were never designed to do so.

The numerous mandates birthed by the onset of the Covid-19 scenario were all designed to deliberately break the global economy and crush small businesses as well as break people’s minds, will and the social fabric, in order to “build back a better society” that conforms to the dystopian visions of the psychopaths waging this class war.

The desired result is a billionaire’s utopia, in which they will own and control the planet in the form of a techno-feudal fiefdom where digitally branded humanity is regulated like cattle in a super-surveilled technocracy.

What this manufactured crisis conveniently camouflages is that we are in the midst of a planned total economic collapse- a collapse which was inevitable.

The timing of the COVID fraud became necessary as world markets were faced with an emergency debt crisis in Fall of 2019 which popped up in formerly mostly liquid markets: Repo Markets, Money Markets and Foreign Exchange Markets.

Western governments began a rush to salvage this decaying system, stem this cataclysmic landslide, bail out large scale investors and proactively install a security infrastructure to control the inevitable social disorder resulting from this collapse. This would be followed by a global financial reset, after a period of hyperinflation, destroying both the value of debt and the corresponding paper claims.

The financial system was already in an advanced stage of decline by the fall of 2019 as illustrated by the Fed taking over the Repo market in September to short-circuit the Repocalypse. This collapse began in earnest in 2008/09 and attempts over the last decade and a half to salvage this corrupt economic system only delayed the inevitable.

In the Fall of 2019 the crisis began to rapidly unravel again.

A dramatic decrease in industrial production characterized the banking crisis of August 2019– the so-called Repo crisis when suddenly banks started to refuse US sovereign debt instruments as collateral for overnight loans, forcing the Federal Reserve to step in and print money to cover this massive shortage.

The Repo market is where banks borrow money each day so that they have a certain percent of liquid assets at the end of each day in order to meet certain fiduciary requirements.

Around the middle of September the Fed started pumping $10-20 billion per day into the Repo market to keep interest rates down so banks could borrow the money to stay in business. Even as the Fed was pumping as much $10’s of billions per day into the Repo market it was still not enough.

By early March the Fed was pumping $100 billion into the Repo market in order to stem this existential crisis.

Simply everyone on Wall Street was loaded with enormous debt and was holding on to US cash in order to service this debt, refusing to finance purchases of foreign currencies and then US currency as the Repo Market froze at 10% interest on overnight Repo loans. US treasury bonds and even US bills were being rejected as collateral for Repos.

In March 2020 the liquidity crisis spread from primary dealer markets (TBTF banks and Hedge funds were bailed out in September) toward all other stocks, commodities, bonds, Collateralized Loan Obligations, Mortgage Backed Securities, Mutual Funds, Exchange Traded Funds, as well as various Ponzi schemes such as Structured Derivative Products traded on proprietary platforms representing up to several thousand trillions of dollars.

When US treasury bonds became illiquid due to exponential growth of public, but mostly private, dollar debt, even as the FED was sucking up cash from financial markets all hell broke loose.

The entire House of Cards which was falling for six months could not be stopped so COVID hysteria was manufactured to cover up to what amounts to $10-15 trillion of FED bailout in cash and stock boosts via Permanent Open Market Operations (POMO)- a fancy way of saying that the Fed is buying Treasuries, pumping money into the financial markets and handing out guarantees of value of collateral used in structured derivatives.

The end game, currently in motion, is for the Central Banks (Fed) to buy up all the toxic, worthless debt from the hedge funds and banks, including the 1.5 quad trillion of derivatives, and then transfer the debt to the treasury as sovereign debt. They will then print money to infinity, already fully underway, to service this fictitious debt to sink the dollar via hyperinflation and then foreclose on the US and everyone else holding debt in worthless dollars.

More than 25,000 troops from across the country were dispatched to the US capital on January 13, 2021 and stayed until end of May 2021.

That’s the coup: global hyperinflation to vaporize the assets of the masses and the states in order to hand over public assets to private investors. This allows the ruling class to mop up properties (bankrupted small businesses, foreclosed homes etc.) in order to stake limitless claims on everything in the world.

The timely arrival of the Covid-19 “emergency” provided the rationale and the opportunity to freeze the US banking collapse with massive injections of cash. Somewhere in the neighborhood of $8-10 trillion was paid to US banks up until March 2020 with an additional $5 trillion in economic stimulus promised by the Fed.

The manufactured perception that there was a global medical emergency, beginning in March 2020, was an artifact of mass media manipulation, behavioral conditioning techniques and social engineering. All of this was made possible through institutional programming and accelerated media messaging disallowing basic cognitive processes and eliminating critical thinking possibilities.

With this incessant and overwhelming media drumbeat of the Virus Narrative, and the world unified in its response to the ‘Covid Pandemic’, no other stories were permitted to exist in the media or the public conscience.

Without any external threat like a ‘Killer Virus’ this massive financial collapse would have immediately caused panic and threatened dollar credibility. Without the Covid-19 smokescreen this widespread Ponzi Scheme and the ongoing historical wealth transfer would be seen for what they are- ongoing theft by the financial aristocracy.

The Covid Operation: The Trojan Horse to Usher in the New World Order

As the “War on Terror” illustrated, these deep events are constructed to exploit as many different lines of acquisition as possible. With the “Covid Pandemic” replacing the phony “War on Terror” yet another revamped “worldwide crisis” miraculously morphs into a ruling class multi-purpose golden opportunity.

While the immediate necessity was to staunch the bleeding of the global financial system many other purposes were and are to be served by this multifaceted operation. None of this is accidental. All of this is hidden in plain sight, planned and executed as evidenced in multiple tabletop exercises such as “Event 201” and delineated in numerous documents such as “The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”

The Covid Operation itself covers many objectives:

  1. Pre-emption of and disguising the reasons for the aforementioned economic implosion;
  2. Acceleration of the largest upwards transfer of wealth in human history;
  3. Justification for and entrenchment of the Bio-Security State, including AI surveillance across multiple sectors of society;
  4. Empowering and enriching the Security State’s counterpart the Big Tech Cartel via tracking apps, proliferating and normalizing social media and communication platforms as “the middle man” in all walks of life. Moving all social life towards the technological imperative– meals ordered via DoorDash, meetings on Zoom, increased spending via Visa/MasterCard by ordering goods online with Amazon, films via Netflix etc., were all forced onto a gullible and largely compliant world public during the Covid tyranny;
  5. The creation of “The Pandemic” as a financial mechanism. Manufactured pandemics have become mammoth investment opportunities that increase the wealth of billionaires and further consolidate their power;
  6. Expansion of the public health industry itself into all walks of public and economic life. The public health industry is now directly tied to global markets and financial conglomerates and has become one of the most critical financial instruments for investors;
  7. Creation of an entirely new and lucrative Bio-Medical “health management” system in order to introduce and codify an entirely new Bio-Tech medical model for the Pharmaceutical Industry with a focus on “revolutionary” uploadable mRNA “vaccines”;
  8. Expansion of and normalizing the use of digital IDs, including vaccine passports, connecting these to a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC); a Universal Basic Income (UBI) scrip, allowing for the tracking of purchases; medical interventions, “lifestyle choices”, etc. “nudging” us towards ‘desired’ behaviors or shutting us out of the system altogether as they wish;
  9. A re-organisation, privatization and reduction of public services under the pretense of making them “more nimble” for “public emergencies”;
  10. Conditioning the public to perpetual “States of Emergency” preparing them for the implementation of “The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”
A final Word

We are living through the biggest worldwide organized crime since WW2. The scale of the deception is too large for even many who consider themselves “in the know” to accept or comprehend and remain trapped in some version of the “Covid” merry-go-round. Others are still asleep or traumatized as the social fabric is being smashed to pieces as the world around them is being completely transformed.

The financial elites know that they have run up massive unpayable debts and deficits. They know the promises of pensions and benefits cannot be paid. They know the system has reached its Waterloo and social unrest is inevitable.

They know they must act rapidly and comprehensively to subvert this inevitable collapse in order to protect the financial Leviathan which underpins their capacity to maintain power and control.

Put simply, Covid-19 was not a widespread medical emergency, it was a money laundering scheme, a massive psychological operation and a smoke screen for a complete overhaul and restructuring of the current social and economic world order.

Covid-19, the disease, is nothing more than a disease of ATTRIBUTION.

Covid-19, the media event, was the Trojan Horse constructed to usher in a complete transformation of our society.

Covid-19™, the operation, was never an epidemiological event, it is a business model meant to increase the portfolios of the super-wealthy.

There is no such thing as “Covid 19” except as a criminal conspiracy.

 

 

Swiss Central Bank Bets on US and Loses

Tyler Durden reports at Zerohedge Massive Hedge Fund, Also Known As Swiss National Bank, Suffers Colossal $143 Billion Loss In 2022.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The last time we looked at the massive money-printing (literally) hedge fund that also moonlights as the Swiss National Bank, we were stunned to learn that its US equity holdings had exploded to a record $177 billion at the end of Q1 2022, orders of magnitude more than the mere $27 billion it held as recently as 2014.

But while we wait for the SNB’s year-end 13F which should be published in about a month’s time, we already know the damage suffered by the Swiss hedge fund in 2021 and it is staggering: on Monday, the SNB reported an annual loss of 132 billion Swiss francs, or $143 billion, for fiscal 2022, the biggest loss in its 115-year history as falling stock and fixed-income markets hit the value of its share and bond portfolio. The recent drop in the US Dollar also did not help.

Monday’s provisional figure, which marked a reverse from a 26 billion franc profit in 2021, was far bigger than the previous record loss of 23 billion francs chalked up in 2015, and according to Reuters, it is equivalent to slightly more than the annual GDP of Morocco.

According to the bank, the bulk of the loss, or 131 billion francs, was from its foreign currency positions – a broad term used to describe the more than 800 billion francs in stocks and bonds the SNB bought during a long campaign to weaken the Swiss franc. Indicatively, the amount is also almost precisely the same as the GDP of Switzerland.

The losses accelerated as global stock and bond markets tumbled in unison – 2022 was the first year in over a century when both stock and bond market suffered double digit losses – as central banks around the world, including the SNB, hiked interest rates to combat inflation. Meanwhile, the strong Swiss franc – which rose above parity against the euro in July – also led to exchange rate-related losses.

And while the SNB lost money in pretty much everything there was one solitary asset class that generated a profit (take a wild guess which one): that’s right, the SNB’s gold holdings which stood at 1,040 tonnes at the end of 2021, gained 400 million francs in value during 2022.

The 2022 loss meant the central bank will not make its usual payout
to the Swiss central and regional governments, it said.

Last year the SNB paid out 6 billion francs. In fact, if the SNB followed similar accounting rules and logic as any other bank, it would have been wiped out with a loss that obliterated all of its equity capital. But in the magical world of seigniorage, where central banks are assumed to be able to print – again, literally – their way out of everything, the bank never loses and the SNB will continue its merry existence as if nothing happened.

Still, the loss is unlikely to have an impact on SNB policy. It hiked interest rates three times in 2022 as Chairman Thomas Jordan moved to stem high Swiss inflation, analysts said.

“The SNB’s colossal losses will not change its monetary policy at all,” said Karsten Junius, an economist at J.Safra Sarasin. “The high reputation of the SNB helps that it doesn’t have to change anything.”

Well, it may have a record loss that’s bigger than the GDP of most medium-sized countries, but at least it has its “high reputation” earned courtesy of years of laborious and exhausting… money printing.

And yes, because we live in a kangaroo world in which there are never any adverse consequences for colossal central bank stupidity, the SNB’s monetary policy will most certainly not change at all.

Footnote: Swiss Federal Budget Cuts

Swiss federal government signs off on negative budget

Negative government budgets are not the norm in Switzerland. Over the 23 years since 2000, 14 federal budgets have been positive and 9 negative. This week the federal government signed off on a negative budget for 2023 with a hole of CHF 4.8 billion in it, bringing the number of negative budgets since 2000 to 10.

In 2023, Switzerland’s federal government expects to spend CHF 86.2 billion, CHF 4.8 billion more than CHF 81.3 billion it expects to collect.

A large part of the deficit relates to a CHF 4 billion reserve that is expected to be lent to the electricity company Axpo, which faces a liquidity crisis. Axpo, which is owned mainly by Swiss cantons, owns and operates nuclear (49%), hydro (27%), fossil fuel (19%) and solar and wind (5%) power plants. The company has been hit by recent price disruption in the energy market. Rapid price shifts and efforts to deal with these by hedging future sales have consumed large amounts of cash.

The budget was accepted in parliament by 137 votes to 49. Ahead of vote an extra CHF 15 million was added to spending to fund marketing of Swiss wine, protect wolves, to support sport and a few other activities.

Not everyone was happy with the spending plans for 2023. Some on the left wanted higher spending on humanitarian aid to Ukraine, international funds, the Erasmus programme and support for clean energy and the circular economy, and less spending on the military.

Calls by the UDC/SVP for cuts to spending on the environment, health, energy, migration and culture were also rejected. Broadly, the party wanted across the board cuts with the exception of the military and welfare support for farmers.

FBI Morphed into cyber KGB

Lee Smith documents the hideous journey at his Tablet article How the FBI Hacked Twitter.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

After journalist Matt Taibbi published the first batch of internal Twitter documents known as the Twitter files, he tweeted that the company’s deputy general counsel, James Baker, was vetting them.

“The news that Baker was reviewing the ‘Twitter files’ surprised everyone involved,” Taibbi wrote. That apparently included even Twitter’s new boss, Elon Musk, who added that Baker may have deleted some of the files he was supposed to be reviewing.

Baker had been the top lawyer at the FBI when it interfered in the 2016 presidential election. News that he might have been burying evidence of the spy service’s use of a social media company to interfere with the 2020 election, is rightly setting off alarm bells.

In fact, the FBI’s penetration of Twitter constituted just one part of a much larger intelligence operation—one in which the bureau offshored the machinery it used to interfere in the 2016 election and embedded it within the private sector. The resulting behemoth, still being built today, is a public-private consortium made up of U.S. intelligence agencies, Big Tech companies, civil society institutions, and major media organizations that has become the world’s most powerful spy service—one that was powerful enough to disappear the former president of the United States from public life, and that is now powerful enough to do the same or worse to anyone else it chooses.

Records from the Twitter files show that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million, apparently for actions in connection with the 2020 election and nominally a payout for the platform’s work censoring “dangerous” content that had been flagged as mis- or disinformation. That “dangerous” content notably included material that threatened Joe Biden and implicated U.S. officials who have been curating the Biden family’s foreign corruption for decades.

The Twitter files have to date focused on FBI and, to a lesser extent, CIA election interference. However a lesser-known U.S. government agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) also played a significant role in shaping the 2020 vote. “CISA is a sub-agency at DHS that was set up to protect real physical infrastructure, like servers, malware and hacking threats,” said former State Department official Mike Benz, now the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. “But they expanded ‘infrastructure’ to mean us, the U.S. electorate. So ‘disinformation’ threatened infrastructure and that’s how cybersecurity became cyber-censorship.

CISA’s mandate went from stopping threats of Russian malware to stopping tweets from accounts that questioned the integrity of mail-in voting.”

The censorship industry is based on a “whole of society model,” said Benz. “It unifies the government and the private sector, as well as civil society in the form of academia and NGOs and news organizations, including fact-checking organizations. All these projects with catchphrases like building resilience, media literacy, cognitive security, etc., are all part of a broad partnership to help censor opponents of the Biden administration.”

Notably, Baker was enlisted in one of the civil-society organizations at the same time he joined Twitter as deputy general counsel. According to Benz, the National Task Force on Election Crises is something like a sister organization to the Transition Integrity Project, the group founded by former Democratic Party officials and Never Trump publicists who war-gamed post-2020-election scenarios.

“The outfit Baker was part of,” said Benz, “effectively handled the public messaging
for an organization that threatened street violence and counseled
violating the constitution to thwart a Trump victory.”

Baker’s presence at Twitter, then, and his review of the Twitter files, was deeply disconcerting. “This is who is inside Twitter,” the journalist and filmmaker Mike Cernovich tweeted at Elon Musk this spring. “He facilitated fraud.”

Musk replied: “Sounds pretty bad.”

In fact, Musk has done more in two months to bring to light crimes committed by U.S. officials than William Barr and John Durham did during their three-year investigation of the FBI’s election interference activities during the 2016 election. Musk now owns what became a crucial component of the national security apparatus that, seen in this light, is worth many times more than the $44 billion he paid for it.

The FBI prepared America’s new public-private censorship regime for the 2020 election by falsely telling Twitter, as well as other social media platforms, press outlets, lawmakers, and staff members of the White House, that Russians were readying a hack and leak operation to dirty the Democratic candidate. Accordingly, when reports of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden and giving evidence of his family’s financial ties with foreign officials were published in October 2020, Twitter blocked them.

In the week before the election, the FBI field office in charge of investigating Hunter Biden sent multiple censorship requests to Twitter. The FBI has “some folks in the Baltimore field office and at [FBI headquarters] that are just doing keyword searches for violations,” a company lawyer wrote in a Nov. 3, 2020, email.

The documents also show that Twitter banished Trump after misrepresenting his posts as incitement to violence. With U.S. intelligence services reportedly using informants to provoke violence during the January 6th protest at the Capitol, the trap closed on Trump. Twitter and Facebook then moved to silence the outgoing president by denying him access to the global communications infrastructure.

Twitter was more than a one-way mirror: The FBI also seems to have embedded its own spy structure within the social media company to siphon off the personal data and behavior of users. Dozens of former intelligence officials were installed within Twitter after the election of Donald Trump. Some had active top secret security clearances. Twitter’s director of strategy was Dawn Burton, former FBI Director James Comey’s deputy chief of staff. Perhaps most significant was Baker himself, who appears to have led the FBI’s internal organization at the platform. Efforts to reach Baker for comment on this story were unsuccessful.

Under Baker, Twitter became more than just an instrument to censor
the opposition; it also spied on them.

Newly released court documents show that Twitter coordinated with the DOJ to intercept the communications of users potentially dangerous to the Biden campaign, like Tara Reade, ​the former Biden Senate staffer who alleged that Biden had sexually assaulted her decades earlier. The DOJ subpoenaed her Twitter account, likely with the purpose of giving the company cover for finding out which journalists had contacted her about her allegations.

Perkins Coie’s lead attorney for Twitter v. Holder was former DOJ cybersecurity expert Michael Sussmann. He and Baker were friends. The FBI lawyer thanked him in a September 2014 letter for a recent meeting that included Twitter’s top lawyer Vijaya Gadde and others, but affirmed that giving specific numbers would reveal “properly classified information.” Why that would endanger sources and methods, as the government claimed, Baker never explained. But no one at DOJ knew more than Baker about FISA, the most intrusive surveillance program that U.S. intelligence services have in their arsenal.

Given what we know now, it’s clear that special counsel John Durham’s case against Sussmann was even more troubled than it first seemed. His star witness, Baker, wasn’t a hero in the story but a co-conspirator, to whom Durham gave a pass so he could charge Sussmann with a process crime.

What few understood was that the issue wasn’t just the 2016 election but the 2020 vote, too. Baker had to tread carefully or else risk exposing the job for which Sussmann had helped plant him at Twitter. It was one of the spy service’s most sensitive operations—infiltrating social media platforms to fix a presidential race. So Sussmann was acquitted—and the FBI’s hack of Twitter continued.

The Obama administration also realized that it could lean hard on monopoly social media platforms in order to gain political advantages—and it could make companies that weren’t compliant pay a price. First strike got you a dressing down from the White House: Weeks after the 2016 vote, for instance, Obama pulled Mark Zuckerberg aside at a conference in Peru and read him out about not doing more to keep Russian disinformation off Facebook. The reality is that Russia spent around $135,000 on Facebook ads, a small percentage of what presidential campaigns typically spend on a single day before lunch. But Obama wasn’t worried about Russia—he struck deals with Vladimir Putin to advance his own idiosyncratic foreign policy goals, like the nuclear agreement with Russia’s ally Iran. Obama’s problem was Trump.

As he was leaving office, Obama stamped the U.S. government’s seal of approval on Russiagate, ordering his spy chiefs to draft an official assessment claiming Putin helped put Trump in the White House. Since then, in Deep State parlance, “Russia” equals Trump and stopping “Russian disinformation” means censoring Trump, his supporters, and anyone else opposed to the national security apparatus’s takeover of the public communications infrastructure. Since Zuckerberg didn’t keep Trump off Facebook in 2016, he had to put up $400 million to drive votes to Democrats in 2020—and even that wasn’t enough. In 2021, Democratic Party insiders working together with Zuckerberg’s Big Tech competitor, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, sent a fake whistleblower after him to testify before congress that Facebook was bad for teenage girls.

The censorship regime would regulate out of existence anyone who resists it. To make the case for the hegemony of government censors, it found an eminent pitchman: Barack Obama.

In April, as Musk first said he wanted to buy Twitter and save free speech, Obama embarked on a “disinformation” tour, which took him to several college campuses to promote the un-American virtues of censorship. He first visited his hometown to speak at a University of Chicago conference, “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy.” Other guests included Anne Applebaum, an early advocate of the collusion conspiracy theory who pushed the spy-service fiction in dozens of her Washington Post columns. Also in attendance was former CISA head Chris Krebs, now famous for congressional testimony in which he claimed the 2020 election was the most secure ever.

The purpose of Obama’s speech was to present a choice to his audience: Either you impose a scorched-earth policy against the establishment’s opponents, or else you will face the kind of regulation that every company knows will be its death knell. Moreover, if they made the right choice, Obama showed, there was money in it for them.

“In effect, Obama announced that the funding channels are open for people who want to do disinformation work,” said Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. “It’s like what happened with climate change. If you were an academic who wanted federal funding for anything, you made sure you made reference to climate to get grants. Same now with disinformation. Obama was saying, ‘here’s where the puck is moving, so skate here if you want federal funding.’”

In retrospect, the failure of the Russiagate conspiracy theory
accelerated the spy service’s takeover of social media.

Though no one is likely to be held accountable anytime soon, or ever, it was enough that the details of the operation were exposed by Patel and Nunes. In response, the spy agencies moved much of their operations out of the federal government and into the private sector, where even if congressional investigators found it, there wasn’t much they could do. Republicans could threaten to regulate social media, but their threats were empty. They might even find themselves—and their campaign ads—banned from Twitter.

The public-private sector merger worked only because, as a unifying myth for the U.S. elite, if not as a legal or political maneuver, Russiagate was a great success. If there were any fears of how news of the FBI’s spying operation on a presidential campaign might be received by the press, civil rights activists, and the left, the reception to Russiagate dispelled those concerns. The media offered itself up as a platform for information operations and published illegal leaks of classified information while the rest of the ruling class promoted a conspiracy theory and celebrated the assault on the constitutional rights of their fellow Americans as a success story.

Barr resigned from the administration a month after the election, outraged that Trump kept pushing him to investigate election fraud when, according to Barr, there was no evidence of it. And yet on his watch, law enforcement agencies under his authority ran the biggest election interference operation in U.S. history. William Barr did not respond to a request for comment.

It seems Barr’s contempt for the president he served blinded him—along with the class of people to which he belongs, Democrats and Republicans alike—to an essential fact: A whole-of-society industry designed to shape elections and censor, propagandize, and spy on Americans was never simply a weapon to harm Donald Trump. It was designed to replace the republic.

Footnote:  Soviet Humor:

“Lubyanka (KGB headquarters) is the tallest building in Moscow. You can see Siberia from its basement.”

 

 

 

Great Reset 2023 Outlook

From the Burning Platform Is the New World Order on the Precipice?.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  H/T Tyler Durden

The New World Order nobility may be receiving more roadblocks for their plans than they had anticipated. The entire scam is based on the ignorance and complacence of the great mass of people in the western based economies. Control of the West is essential for world domination. We are the source of wealth and innovation which makes it imperative. The new platform has begun to get rickety with energy problems, war and civil strife bubbling to the surface.

China is believed to be a huge source of economic and political power but actually without the West being a customer, China is a backwater without technology, markets, energy and foodstuffs. The government is unstable as shown in the past few weeks with the new attempted lockdowns. Their food shortages of the past two years are not mentioned by the simpletons of the media but contribute to general instability. The Chinese are a huge unknown to our “intellectual elite” whether they realize it or not.

Control of the sluggish population of Chinese is an easy task compared to Europe and North American farmers, but all are now stirring.

This does not even consider India and Russia. By adding these cards to the deck the game plan of the WEF attempted coup appears poorly designed with a small chance of successful domination. That leaves two options regarding their plans, either they are rather sophomoric or there is a plan simmering as yet unknown. I vote for sophomoric. All international schemes have revolved around the US for 100 years because of our ability to fund any type of debauchery. The current unknown is how do they expect the US consumer to drive the economies that they expect to dominate if we are poor, hungry and cold.

Europe has been used as test bed for the new system as
they are used to being dominated by a system of their betters.

The clock is ticking as we speak for a major crash that will test the controls set up by the Reich in Europe. The citizens are getting chilly and unappreciative in the support for the new order. The power bills have skyrocketed while farmers’ land is being confiscated. France has been using a colonial type franc to fund its ex-territories in Africa while sucking them dry causing huge migration. Italy and France have begun a war of words about illegal immigrants. Hungary has said it will veto additional sanctions on Russia. The Reich has used the Euro to tap money from the Mediterranean countries so they are running on empty. Britain is in their own mess financially as well. Where will originate the funding for this extension of socialism?

Theoretically the last option would be expanding the Belt and Road system financed by China. Unfortunately China is experiencing tougher times than expected at home and it is a road to nowhere. Bluffing about Taiwan is amusing, not dangerous. Even their border with India has become volatile.

The Reich is left again bumping into the Russian Bear that is blocking its’ expansionist dreams. WEF intellectualism is revealed again to be suspect at best. Russia is only interested in its’ own empire and historically defends against the Reich. Certainly the sanctions invoked by the EU for the war are a thorn for Russia but an obvious disaster for Europe.

The traditional answer to world financial trauma is to have the USA make the payoffs through gold or more recently inflation. Today there is little room for maneuver in our finances. In 1907 we spent 7% of our GDP on government. Today it is about 46%. There is nothing left for the banks to steal. That leaves one option for world stability. That is of course our military.

Europe has none since the US has paid for its’ unruly teenager for 90 years. In WW2, 1 of 11 men were in the army. Today it is about 1 in 200 and there is a 25% deficit in recruiting. Our young men are not being fooled into supporting a corporate empire building system again. US hegemony is past but there is no one to take our place as the relatively benign thief in charge. This is a new horizon in history which places a great deal of pressure on the “intellectual” class to react to unknown situations.

Their record in the last century for functional innovative thought is 0 wins vs 100 losses.

 

 

From Nature Conservation to Climate Calamity

Ruy Teixeira writes at his substack blog From Environmentalism to Climate Catastrophism: A Democratic Story (Part 1 of 3).  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Conservation, the Environmental Apocalypse, and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism

The beginnings of the environment as an issue can be traced to the conservation movement of the late 19th and early 20th century associated with figures like Gifford Pinchot, head of the Forest Service under Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club. They were Republicans but many Democrats also embraced the movement; Woodrow Wilson created the National Park Service in 1916. And the New Deal in the 1930’s had a prominent place for conservation activities, most famously in the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) where young men were employed to improve forests and national parks. Trail systems and lodges from that era are still widely used today.

With varying degrees of strictness the conservation movement’s guiding principle was to insulate unspoiled parts of nature from development by market forces, thereby preserving them for healthy leisure and recreation. The movement, like all future iterations of the environmental movement, assumed an unending conflict between man and nature that required good people to take the side of nature.

As development proceeded over the course of the 20th century, the stresses on nature became ever larger and more obvious, leading to the emergence after World War II of an apocalyptic strain in the conservation movement. The argument gained traction that economic and population growth would, if unchecked, destroy the environment and lead to civilizational collapse. Accompanying that strain was a milder version of the idea that directly challenged the old conservation ethos: simply conserving what was left of nature was not enough. The reality of the interdependent natural world meant that man’s activities were having dire effects everywhere on the planet—where people lived and where they didn’t. These activities were upsetting a finely balanced system, resulting in the degradation of both nature, as conventionally understood, and people’s lives.

Restoring and preserving that balance was what it meant to be an environmentalist.

The movement proved enormously effective as a reform movement. Carson’s book veered toward the apocalyptic, but the movement she inspired was laser-focused on practical reforms that would immediately reduce pollution and safeguard the environment. A raft of legislation in the Johnson administration followed like the Clean Air and Water Quality Acts and, in the Nixon administration, the creation of the Environmental Protection Act and the promulgation of the NEPA (National Environmental Protection Act) standards. This legislation and subsequent action was directly responsible for a radical reduction in pollution of all kinds in the next decades.

But the apocalyptic strain of environmentalism, which saw industrial society as an imminent threat to human life and to the planet, was not eliminated by these reforming successes. Instead a closer relationship evolved between mainstream environmentalism and a radical view of the fundamental dangers of industrial society. The first manifestation of this was the anti-nuclear power movement which arose in the 1970’s and was turbo-charged by the 1979 Three Mile Island incident, Building on public fears of nuclear meltdowns and radiation poisoning, the movement was successful in stopping the build-out of nuclear power in the United States.

In the 1990’s, as a scientific consensus emerged that greenhouse gases were steadily warming the earth, this movement was superseded by the climate movement. Here was clear proof that industrial society and human civilization were counterposed. Initially meliorist in orientation, the movement has become more radical as it has gathered strength.

The quest to eliminate the possibility of dire scenarios has met the reality
that industrial societies built on fossil fuels are likely to change only slowly,
for both political and technical reasons.

This has promoted a sense that radical action to transform industrial society must be taken as fast as possible. That view has gained hegemony within the Democratic party infrastructure, supporting activist groups and associated cultural elites. Practical objections about the speed with which a “clean energy transition” can be pursued and concerns about effects on jobs and prices are now outweighed for most Democrats by the perceived urgency of the mission. That has set the Democrats apart from the working class voters they aspire to represent for whom these practical objections and concerns loom large.

It has become a significant factor in the Great Divide that has opened between postindustrial metros and the rural areas, towns and small cities of middle America.

See World of Energy Infographics

After World War II the movement took a different turn. The devastation of the war, combined with the breakneck pace of economic development, fed a sense that industrial civilization was out of control and threatened the entire planet. The key figures promulgating this view were Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr. (Our Plundered Planet, 1948) and especially William Vogt, whose Road to Survival was also published in 1948. Vogt was an ornithologist and ecologist whose experiences in the developing world had convinced him that economic growth and overpopulation would inevitably lead to civilizational collapse unless both growth and population were radically curtailed.

Vogt argued that beliefs in progress were weighing humanity down and were actually “idiotic in an overpeopled, atomic age, with much of the world a shambles.” He concluded that the road to survival could only lie in maximizing use of renewable resources and accepting lower living standards or reduced population.

In his language and outlook, one can see all the strands of apocalyptic environmentalism (now focused on climate change) that we see today. This especially applies to his description of the United States and its economic system.

More benignly, Vogt’s (and Osborn’s) books marked the evolution of conservationism into environmentalism. Stripped of the apocalyptic verbiage, they were arguing that conservation of nature was not enough. The interdependence of man and nature meant that human activities could not be isolated and instead were having negative effects on the entire planet—wilderness, settled areas, oceans, everywhere. The balance of nature was being destroyed, dragging down the natural world and humanity with it. Restoring that balance, not merely conserving parts of the ecosystem, was the new meaning of being an environmentalist.

Also key to Vogt’s analysis was the concept of “carrying capacity”—how much the environment/planet could sustainably bear of a species’ imprint before disaster ensued. This was not precisely defined but it is easy to see the relationship of this idea to how climate change is conventionally thought of today.

The burgeoning strength of the environmental movement started what became a blizzard of legislative action to protect the environment and roll back pollution. That began under LBJ with the Clean Air Act, Solid Waste Disposal Act, Water Quality Act and Air Quality Act. Then under Nixon there was the National Environmental Policy Act, proximate to the Santa Barbara oil spill and widely-publicized Cayahoga River fire, establishing the (NEPA) environmental standards and reviews that are still with us today. Also under Nixon, the Environmental Protection Agency was established, the Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts passed and the Clean Air act strengthened. The first Earth Day was on April 22, 1970, clearly marking the environmental issue as a mass cause for those on the left of the political spectrum.

An interesting aspect of all this activity is that it was meliorist and profoundly reformist. That is, despite its origins in the Vogtian Silent Spring, with its apocalyptic overtones, the drive to clean up the environment was pursued through a steady accumulation of legislation and consciousness-raising about the issue. There was a sense that the problem was solvable through such activities and did not require the massive changes in economic activity and human behavior that an advocate like Vogt would have called for. Of course, there was always a radical fringe of the environmental movement, typified by Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, and the Earth First! group, formed in 1980, but they were a small and not particularly influential part of the overall movement.

Not only was environmentalism of this era reformist but it was very successful reformism. Consider: Because we are now so used to having a fairly clean environment in terms of air and water quality, it is easy to forget just how far we have come since the early 1960’s. Rivers and lakes back then were far more likely to be polluted and essentially unsafe for human activity than not; the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland famously caught fire in 1969. But since that era, water quality has improved dramatically; the number of water bodies meeting standard quality criteria has roughly doubled. Such icons of pollution as Boston Harbor have been cleaned up. And everywhere towns and cities are investing in waterfront leisure developments that would have been a tasteless joke a generation ago.

Air quality has increased dramatically as well. Between 1970 and 2021, emissions of the six key air pollutants that impact public health—ozone, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and lead—were cut by 78 percent, even as GNP has increased increased by nearly 400 percent. Acid rain has declined by two-thirds and smog is down by about a third. These trends are truly amazing and would have been considered scarcely believable back in 1970. They underscore the tremendous success of modern reformist environmentalism.

See also Progressively Scaring the World (Lewin book synopsis)

 

Canada 2023 Political Foibles

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivers an address at the Laurier Club Holiday Event, an event for supporters of the Liberal Party of Canada, in Gatineau, Que., on Dec. 15, 2022. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)

1.  Hope for a Federal Election in 2023

Epoch Times reports Nearly Half of Canadians Want a Federal Election in 2023: Poll.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Nearly half of Canadians say they want a federal election in 2023, a new poll finds, and a slim majority indicate that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should step down as Liberal leader in the new year.

Conducted by Ipsos on behalf of Global News, the poll shows that 49 percent of Canadians hope for a federal election next year, despite one not being legally mandated until 2025 and the NDP’s promise to keep the minority Liberal government in power so long as their “supply and confidence” agreement holds till then.

The desire for an election varies across provinces, with those living in Atlantic Canada (63 percent), Alberta (60 percent), Saskatchewan (55 percent), Manitoba (55 percent), B.C. (53 percent), and Quebec (60 percent) showing more interest than those residing in Ontario (46 percent), said the poll, released on Dec. 26.

Nationally, only 43 percent believe that a federal election will take place.

A majority of Canadians (54 percent) said Trudeau should step down as Liberal leader in 2023 and that the country should have a new prime minister, though just 27 percent believe he will do so.

This view is more widely held by men (58 percent) than women (49 percent), according to the online poll. Researchers noted a similarity in regional variation, with Alberta (65 percent) being most likely to hold this position. Atlantic Canada took the second spot at 57 percent, while Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario tied at 56 percent. B.C. followed closely behind at 54 percent whereas only 43 percent of Quebecers think Trudeau shouldn’t run in the next election.

The approval rating for Trudeau (45 percent) is higher than that of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre (41 percent), according to the poll.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, who recently returned to her role after a short hiatus, has an approval rating of 39 percent.

Yves-François Blanchet, leader of the Bloc Québécois, had the approval of 43 percent of Quebecers, while approval for People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier was 26 percent.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh received the highest approval rating at 53 percent.

In an interview with Global News, Ipsos CEO Darrell Bricker said popularity doesn’t necessarily mean more votes.

“As we’ve seen in elections past with NDP leaders, they tend to do well in the polls and they don’t do so well on Election Day,” Bricker said. “So even though they might like him a little bit, they’re not necessarily prepared to vote for him unless something changes.”

The survey was conducted based on a sample of 1,004 Canadians aged 18 and over Dec. 14–16. It is considered accurate within plus or minus 3.5 percentage points 19 times out of 20.

2. Crackdown on Political Incorrectness

Toronto Sun reports Jordan Peterson threatened with psychologists licence being revoked over political statements online.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Is Jordan Peterson about to lose his licence to practice psychology in Ontario? That’s what Peterson is claiming online and, so far, the College of Psychologists of Ontario (CPO) has not denied it.

Peterson took to Twitter on Tuesday to say that he was ordered to take social media training or face a disciplinary hearing.

“BREAKING: the Ontario College of Psychologists @CPOntario has demanded that I submit myself to mandatory social-media communication retraining with their experts for, among other crimes, retweeting @PierrePoilievre and criticizing @JustinTrudeau and his political allies,” Peterson tweeted Tuesday morning.

Peterson isn’t being asked to reconsider his actions towards a fellow psychologist online, he’s being asked to submit to social media training for political statements he’s made. None of the people who have lodged complaints are clients, Peterson said, nor are they connected to clients. They haven’t experienced personal harm from Peterson, but they want the good doctor to be punished.

In a series of tweets, Peterson said that many professions in Canada are now run by associations or colleges that are highly political and which impose fear on their members. He said this included physicians, lawyers, psychologists and among others.

“This means that your care and legal counsel has been rendered dangerously unreliable,” Peterson tweeted.

 

3. Barely Hidden Globalist Agenda

There are currently about 1,300 graduates of this school, and the list of alumni includes several names of those who went on to become leaders of the health institutions of their respective nations:

Wentworth reports Klaus Schwab’s “Young Global Leaders” school rules the world?.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

How is it that more than 190 governments from all over the world ended up dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic in almost exactly the same manner, with lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination cards now being commonplace everywhere?   Always vaccines, never therapeutics like vitamin D, zinc, ivermectin or — like Trump suggested — HCQ.

The answer may lie in the Young Global Leaders school, which was established and managed by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, and that many of today’s prominent political and business leaders passed through on their way to the top.

The German economist, journalist, and author Ernst Wolff has revealed some facts about Schwab’s “Young Global Leaders” school … in a video from the German Corona Committee podcast.

The story begins with the World Economic Forum (WEF), which is an NGO founded by Klaus Schwab, a German economist and mechanical engineer, in Switzerland in 1971, when he was only 32. The WEF is best-known to the public for the annual conferences it holds in Davos, Switzerland each January that aim to bring together political and business leaders from around the world to discuss the problems of the day. Today, it is one of the most important networks in the world for the globalist power elite, being funded by approximately a thousand multinational corporations. …

Wolff points out that very few graduates of the Global Leaders school list it on their CVs. He says that he has only seen it listed on one: namely, that of the German economist Richard Werner, who is a known critic of the establishment. …

Another thing that the Global Leaders graduates have in common is that most of them have very sparse CVs apart from their participation in the program prior to being elevated to positions of power, which may indicate that it is their connection to Schwab’s institutions that is the decisive factor in launching their careers. This is most evident when the school’s alumni are publicly questioned about issues that they have not been instructed to talk about in advance, and their struggles to come up with answers are often quite evident. Wolff contends that their roles are only to act as mouthpieces for the talking points that those in the shadows behind them want discussed in public debate. …

Transcript of Peterson Video Above

When I look at Trudeau there’s a couple of things that I see. I see someone who hasn’t grown up. One of the most appalling things about the budget, as far as I was concerned, is that it provides ample evidence (if such was not already sufficiently provided) that Trudeau is exactly what you would be afraid of. He doesn’t have an answer to a problem that isn’t overwhelmingly predictable ideologically.

It’s like you don’t even need him, you just have to run the ideology, it has the answers. What’s the big problem: equity between men and women? I’m sorry that’s not the big problem, that’s not even scratching the surface of the problem with that approach. And your solutions? You can learn those your first week in women’s studies. They are the sorts of solutions children toy with when they have no idea what they’re contending with.  Well there’s there’s not a lot there I’m afraid.

Fixing these complex systems is unbelievably complicated and you’re likely to make them worse when you’re mucking about with them haphazardly. And so it’s way easier just to do what Trudeau said back in 2016. Why do we have women half of the cabinet? Because it’s 2016! It’s almost impossible to overstate how shallow that comment is. And not only shallow but also casually malevolent in an unconscious sense. Because he had a job to do, which was to evaluate his MPs thoroughly and skeptically and pick the best people, period. But that isn’t what he did. Instead he said: “Oh well, it’s 2016 so I’ll appoint half women.”

Everybody gave them a pass on that so here we are now. We have a budget that’s equity focused, well good luck with that.

When I look at Trudeau there’s a couple of things that I see. I see someone who hasn’t grown up so he’s Peter Pan. I see someone who knows how to behave in public. That’s one thing you can say, he’s got that that easy charisma and charm that comes from being good-looking and being from a favored background. He’s got by on that favored background.

I believe that if he had any true character that he would not have run. Because he ran on the strength of his name and he hadn’t earned the right to do that. But people elected him, and so here we are, and this is what we get. He pulled out the ideological card when he formulated the cabinet and Canadians all went: “Oh isn’t that cute.” No it’s not cute, it’s not acceptable and now we’re paying the price for it.

Update National Hysteria in Canada

Canadian flag flying at half-mast on the West Block of Parliament Hill in Ottawa on June 2, 2021. (The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick)

Brian Giesbrecht writes at Epoch Times Canada’s National Hysteria in the 21st Century.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Mass hysteria is the spontaneous manifestation of a particular behaviour by many people. There are numerous historical examples: Middle Age nuns at a convent in France spontaneously began to meow like cats; at another convent, nuns began biting one another. In 13th-century Germany, spontaneous dancing broke out and entire city populations danced until exhausted. But perhaps the best-known mass hysteria was the Salem Witch Trials, where people, seized by visions, accused others of bewitching them. Many were executed.

But hysteria episodes are not only historical. They have occurred in modern times as well. Remember the daycare panic of the 1980s, when daycare workers were accused of horrible crimes against children, including satanic abuse. Many falsely accused spent years in jail. Lives were ruined. The strangest thing about that mass hysteria is that it spanned continents. It started in California, but then moved through Canada, Europe, and even New Zealand, before it burned itself out.

Obviously, those caught up in mass hysteria do not realize at the time that they are not seeing things clearly.

Could it be that some of us are even now victims of self-induced mass hysterias?

For example, what are we to make of the insistence that a man who chooses to live as a woman actually becomes a woman? To most of the world this claim is nonsensical. It is neither scientific nor factual. A woman has XX chromosomes, while a man has XY. Case closed. But to others, a man actually becomes a woman simply by stating that s/he is one. In the future, will this strange thinking be considered a mass hysteria?

Or what about the odd response that most Western nations took to the COVID-19 pandemic?

For reasons that remain unclear, most Western countries decided to copy communist China’s lockdown strategy, which was a radical approach that had hitherto been rejected by all Western scientists and emergency planners. The misery we see playing out in China, as they finally abandon it, is absolute proof of its absurdity. Yet even today, many still insist that we were right to lock down. And some say that we should do it again! Is this an example of a mass hysteria?

And are the most extreme of today’s anti-fossil fuel exponents caught up in some version of a mass hysteria? I’m not referring to people with legitimate concerns about global warming and the need to find cost-effective, non-polluting energy. I mean those who insist that everyone must give up all fossil fuels by a date they invent. Will history judge this to be a hysteria?

But perhaps the strangest ongoing episode of mass hysteria might be playing out in Canada. That is the claim that 215 indigenous children were secretly killed at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School and then covertly buried at night, with the forced help of children “as young as six.”

If true, this would easily be the biggest crime in Canadian history. The very idea that the nuns and priests running the school would be responsible for the deaths of 215 children, and then force other children to bury their comrades, never made sense. For one thing, there was not one single historical record of any indigenous parent in Kamloops—or anywhere else—reporting that their child had disappeared after attending Kamloops IRS. But more to the point, there was never any factual reason to believe that the nuns and priests who operated the school were the ghouls that the accusation demanded.

But then the strange accusations multiplied. Other indigenous leaders chimed in, with claims that there were “thousands, tens of thousands” of such intentionally killed and secretly buried residential school students all over the country. The prime minister ordered flags to be flown at half mast for months, hundreds of millions of dollars were committed to search for these phantom children, and a cabinet minister, Marc Miller, called anyone who even dared to question these bizarre claims a “ghoul.”

The country went into a panic. A new national holiday honouring these “missing children”
(who were never missing) was declared.

But there was never any credible evidence to support any of these claims. The only information that could even be loosely termed “scientific” was an embargoed report by a junior archaeologist that she had detected 215 “soil disturbances” that might be graves. It now appears that it is much more likely that those soil disturbances are clay pipes from a 1924 septic field.

We do know that the bizarre stories of priests killing and secretly burying indigenous children have gained more prominence since the 1990s, when a defrocked minister began spreading conspiracy theories. But how is it that ordinary, sensible Canadians seemed willing to accept these same preposterous, and deeply anti-Catholic, stories?

Will future historians see this strange episode as some kind of mass hysteria?

Footnote: Toronto Temperature History

H/T greyfalcon

Facebook is Constantly Telling Me to Check Temperature Rise in My Area — This is Factual Data For It: The Temperature in Toronto Canada Has Not Been Breaking Records. In 1936 It Reached 40.6°C, 2.4°C Hotter Than the Hottest It’s Been This Century. Source: Meteorological Service of Canada

Woke Comes Out of the Shadows

Auguste Meyrat writes at American Mind Shadows on the Wall.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The “Twitter Files” remind us how wokeness has infected the tech elites.

With each new batch of the “Twitter Files,” it’s becoming increasingly apparent that Twitter censors were not only duplicitous scoundrels aiming to advance an agenda but also incompetents who failed to see the consequences of their actions. Whether it was suppressing the Hunter Biden storyshadow banning and de-amplifying popular conservative figures and certain medical professionals, and removing a sitting president of the United States from the platform, they convinced themselves that they were making the world a better place.

At no point did they seriously question themselves beyond violating their own rules. It never dawned on them that their constant gaslighting jeopardizes the freedom, health, and safety of all Americans. It seemed to matter little that they oversaw a platform that promised open public discourse but degenerated into a leftist propaganda outlet infested with bots and child pornography.

Not only did these censors do real damage at the bidding of a corrupt FBI but they ruined a potentially successful business.

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, there were few real conversations happening on the platform, and Twitter was relatively small compared to other social media platforms. For the great majority of users, scrolling through one’s Twitter feed was never an enlightening, connective, or even fun experience but more a mindless habit to pass the time.

Seeing that this is the case, it’s fair to ask what really drove the moderators to do what they did. They could have easily let the First Amendment be their standard for content moderation and sipped their lattes while attending useless meetings. Why did they feel the need to risk their cushy careers by setting into motion a hostile takeover by Elon Musk and an incoming onslaught of lawsuits from users?

From any angle, this seems utterly foolish—that is, except from the woke angle. While rational actors would have understood the sheer destructiveness of censoring users without cause, facilitating the rigging of elections, and endangering the public by denying them important information on a pandemic, woke actors lack this capacity. They operate on feelings and self-regard, not evidence and logic.

Elon Musk famously called wokeness a “mind virus.”

It infects people’s mental faculties and drives them to act and express themselves irrationally. Gad Saad expounds upon this in his book The Parasitic Mind. He bemoans the decline of academic scholarship and intellectual debate at today’s universities all in the name of establishing social justice. Of course, rather than create a more equitable and just world, the woke swarm only achieves the opposite—a world of unforgiving hierarchy and hypocrisy. But instead of learning from their failure, they double down and become ever more unreasonable.

For Saad, this is less an ideology and more an “idea pathogen.” In his scientific opinion, victims of wokeness specifically suffer from “Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome (OPS),” substituting for reality a fiction in which “science, reason, rules of causality, evidentiary thresholds, a near-infinite amount of data, data analytic procedures, inferential statistics, the epistemological rules inherent to the scientific method, rules of logic, historical patterns, daily patterns, and common sense are all rejected.”

Unfortunately it’s still an open question of how to “defeat wokeness,” as Elon Musk recently declared. Anyone who has experienced an encounter with the woke infected knows that exposing their falsehoods and contradictions (“sunlight is the best disinfectant,” or, in the new favored expression, “democracy dies in darkness”) only makes them sicker and more dangerous. This is why the “Twitter Files” have mostly elicited silence from the corporate media. Maybe a few of them are pleading the Fifth and hoping the story goes away, but it’s more likely that most don’t understand what these revelations mean, nor do they really care.

So does that mean that releasing and discussing the “Twitter Files” is worthless? Not at all. Even if it doesn’t cure the woke censors or their woke supporters, it fortifies the intellectual immune system of everyone else. Americans now know that they are not crazy; in truth, they are living throughnew kind of totalitarianism where Big Tech platforms control speech, impose a social credit system, and fabricate overarching narratives out of thin air.

While this is not exactly a consoling thought, it’s at least the beginning of a solution. The problem has now been identified, and there are now enough informed members of society to have a constructive conversation about the issue. This in turn could lead to finding a cure to the woke pandemic. If these problems continue going ignored and unchecked, the civilized world will surely crumble into ruin, adopting the same chaos, stupidity, and hypocrisy inherent in today’s woke culture.

 

Decolonizing Attack on Science

Update Dec. 30 at end

Rex Murphy writes at National Post Science does not need to be ‘decolonized’.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Does Concordia University wish to be an instrument of learning, or a funnel for wokeness?

Scholars at Montreal’s Concordia University are planning to trace and counter what they say is colonialism in physics, which they describe as a “social field” rather than one of “pure knowledge.” — True North, Campus Watch

How would a person decolonize penicillin? Or anesthesia? Or open-heart surgery? Or the miracle advances the past century gave the world through the understandings — still not complete — of quantum physics?

First of all, you would have to ask the question: what could “decolonize” even mean in these miracle domains?

(I use miracle here only as metaphor, or in its now weaker and more normal usage as an advance scarcely dreamed of but brought on by science, science which is the application of mind, of intellect — not politics — to the understanding of nature.)

Scientific truth is the truth of bare fact. The only reverence science knows is the genuflection before hard, physical reality. Science wears no ribbons of fealty to causes, colours or the predispositions of any mentality or ideology, other than the asking of questions and the submission to the answers provided by absolutely neutral inquiry — answers always tentative, always open to revision or correction; science is never final.

Short form: Science does not wear badges.

There have been instances where science has been forced to wear a political coat. A certain regime in Germany during the 1930s, under the tenure of a racist madman, declared that there was no such a thing as “Jewish” science. And, therefore, it was innately false, to be banned, alas along with the great Jewish scientists.

That Einstein was Jewish, therefore he was wrong,
has to have been the most warped equation ever.

There was in Hitler’s imperium, room for only “Aryan” science. And there was the deadly flaw. Science allows no qualifying epithets, no qualificatory precedent adjectives.

(I dare say Whoopi Goldberg doesn’t know this, but then, there is much that Whoopi Goldberg doesn’t know. That’s why she’s on The View.)

Communism in the hard days of ruthless Stalin also had a Marxist “line” on what science had to be. In both cases, radical and totalitarian regimes tried to subdue thought itself, the functioning of intellect, to their grim, idiotic and malign ideologies.

Science is science, and it is only science, or it is not science: with any limiting descriptive it is just a rigged machine for producing approved results. Politics acts on science as an acid to truth: it distorts inquiry and banishes rigour and dispassion — the core qualities of science.

So let me curl back to the otiose question of “decolonizing” science. What can Concordia possibly mean by such a project?

Is the university, directly or indirectly, saying that the manifold revelations brought about by adherence to scientific methodology, since the days of Isaac Newton — the premier figure in the advance of empirical thought — are wrong? Is Concordia saying Western science is bent by racial considerations and thereby should be dismissed? Side-stepped? Layered over?

Does the university agree with the judgment that since science is “colonized,” it must be “corrected?” That E = mc², perhaps the most basic equation of the whole universe, proceeds from a “colonialist” mentality?Is it saying that because much, but by no means all, of the science came from people with a certain colour of skin — that would be white — it is therefore not only fallible but an imposition of “colonial” understanding on young minds, whatever that ridiculous phrase may be taken to mean?

Concordia has a fairly well known project called Decolonizing light. And what could that mean? Does it challenge the speed limit of the universe, that light travels at 186,000 miles per second? What alternative measurement is it offering from its decolonized science?

And most pertinently how can it be that a university — an institution for the transmission of knowledge and truth — would bend to the woke notions of our over-politicized times and offer that the progress of scientific truth is but one more unfolding of “imperialist,” “colonizing” white thought?

Speak up Concordia. Or trim your fees.

There are few things that offer more despair in these fad-ridden times than the easy, cowardly concessions to racial and ethic politicization by (once) prestigious institutions.

Penicillin works. Anesthesias have saved millions from pain. The second law of thermodynamics has no reference to race or creed. The scientific method is the very closest attempt in all of history to remove all prejudice, of any kind, from the attempt to answer any question. Its kernel, its very ultimate idea, is submission to what is really seen, what is really there, what is really to be understood.

Most important of all, the colour of the skin of a discoverer has no bearing on the discovery.

You cannot “decolonize” science, because science has no colonies, it wishes none, and would lose all verity if it owed any allegiance except to cold observation, relentless questioning, and the utter exclusion of secondary impulses, most particularly those of race and activism.

Concordia has a choice to make, a choice many other universities must also face. Does it wish to be an instrument of learning, or a funnel for the trite obsessions of a very particular moment?

Update Dec. 30

I am prompted to add a clarification to this post.  By attacking historic findings of scientists, the aim is to discredit the scientific process.  That is, the real threat to institutional power over individuals is “sciencing”, the activity of asking skeptical questions and independently thinking and seeking answers.  When people on the left say we should trust the “science,” they mean trust the institutional authorities who approve and disapprove the ideas and conclusions.

If  literate people are allowed to do “sciencing”,  they can and do arrive at ideas and findings not approved, or even disapproved by the authorities.  We have seen how this works in the censorship of highly qualified immunologists who disagreed with rationales for Covid poliicies.  Also highly credentialed climate scientists have been demeaned and demonized for contradicting the global warming/climate change narrative.

Instead of “sciencing,” here is their idea of “research”

See also Sciencing Vs. Scientism