MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Big Brother is watching you’

Jab-erwacky (or, Why Are People So Crazy about Being Guinea Pigs?) – OffGuardian

Posted by M. C. on April 8, 2021

When major media openly muse about the virtue of permanent imprisonment, when “experts” tell us that life is about nothing but the constant fear of disease, when publicists insist that our most sacred duty is to sacrifice ourselves for the benefits of mega-corporations, it’s time to ask – seriously – whether our public messages help or hinder the cause of civilization.

https://off-guardian.org/2021/04/06/jab-erwacky-or-why-are-people-so-crazy-about-being-guinea-pigs/

Michael Lesher

Seek thou the Covid Jab, my son!
The genes that morph, the fraud that hypes!
Let Pfizer have its way, but shun
Those frivolous skeptic types!

(Big Brother has said, ‘Tis good, ‘tis good,
And so the sacrifice is just –
Submission now is hardihood,
In Big Pharma we all trust…)

And hast thou had thy Covid Jab?
Put on that mask, thou foolish lad!
Yes, you feel sick – that’s just the trick
That means we’ve all been had.

About twelve hours ago I passed a sort of personal milestone: I found, and read, an ecstatic Facebook post from the twentieth person I know who has received a dose of one of those experimental drugs the U.S. government, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars of our money, is trying to persuade us to turn loose on our immune systems.

Yes – I’ve been keeping count of those weird effusions of relief and self-congratulation from the latest dupes of the coronavirus coup. To be honest, they baffle me. And infuriate me.

At first, I couldn’t believe that anyone would boast of turning himself into a human guinea pig, without getting a cent in compensation, just to add to the profits of a corporate camorra. Then I couldn’t believe I’d find five such posts on Facebook. Then I bet myself that I’d never encounter ten of them.

Well, now I’ve seen twenty.

Twenty separate people bragging about handing themselves over to the biggest, and perhaps the most dangerous, medical scam of my lifetime.

So what’s next? Will people I know start making breathless Facebook posts each time they swallow arsenic or snort some airplane glue? Are they going to brag publicly about wading through chemical dumps? Am I supposed to applaud them if they do?

Or are these indiscreet posters trying to convince me – by lending their voices to the media hysteria about vaccines that aren’t vaccines, for an emergency that isn’t an emergency – that if we let a gang of drug pushers play with our cell structure, we’ll find ourselves somehow on the short road to paradise?

If that’s what they’re up to, they’re going to have to do a lot more convincing.

Because the whole thing is nuts.

To begin with, as of this writing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have already recorded 1,909 American souls for whom these “vaccines” really were tickets to paradise – in more prosaic language, to the morgue. When glossing over this fact, my Facebook “friends” have a numerical paradox on their hands. Think back to March 9 of last year, when the national coronavirus death toll officially stood at twenty-six – that’s right, twenty-six – and the whole chorus of coronavirus propagandists was screaming “emergency” and demanding that we acquiesce in the quashing of the Bill of Rights and the suspension of representative democracy in four-fifths of our states. Yet now, we’re supposed to shrug off a mortality figure more than seventy times that size – while Big Pharma is raking in billions from the indiscriminate use of scantily-tested experimental drugs?

And that’s not all. Even a cursory glance behind the curtain of vaccine propaganda reveals more than enough to give any rational person pause.

First, it’s an open secret that vaccines for respiratory viruses have never been a success; the United States is among the few countries where they are actively promoted, and this is largely due to the influence of the vaccine manufacturers, who successfully pressured the CDC to change its system for counting flu-related deaths in 2004 in order to raise public fears about respiratory viruses. (A CDC official virtually admitted this in a public interview ten years later.) Vaccines have never played more than a marginal role in stemming viral epidemics, and there’s no evidence that COVID19 will be any different.

Second, the mantra that COVID19 vaccines will hasten the development of “herd immunity” (a phrase the propagandists once reviled, but began to celebrate once they realized it could be used to turn bigger profits for drug makers) presupposes that the vaccines prevent transmission of the virus. But they don’t; the Food and Drug Administration has specifically denied, with respect to each of the drugs in question, any “evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from person to person.” So these drugs will play no role in slowing the epidemic, let alone stopping it.

This fact also gives the lie to the propagandists’ virtue-signaling to the effect that a “vaccinated” person no longer poses a health risk to others. Since there’s no evidence that these drugs prevent transmission of the virus, the truth is that they’re of no public value whatsoever; if they work at all, they benefit only the person who has been vaccinated (allegedly by reducing the severity of his symptoms upon infection).

In a word, the whole COVID vaccine-promotion bandwagon is built on a lie; in fact, it’s misleading even to call these drugs “vaccines” in the first place. Unlike every one of the vaccinations governments have mandated for over a century, a COVID19 vaccination offers no public protection of any kind. There is no legitimate rationale for requiring it, nor for using public money to promote it.

You might want to bear this fact in mind whenever you hear the propagandists nattering about “vaccine passports” to separate the privileged vaccinated from the rest of us, or about restricting the liberties of people who decline to be guinea pigs. Such talk isn’t about health, and it certainly isn’t about “science.” It’s a police-state project, pure and simple – built out of public hysteria, stoked with lies – and has exactly the same moral legitimacy as those infamous yellow stars Jews were required to wear under Nazi rule.

And there’s still more. Calling these experimental drugs a cure for a public health hazard turns reality on its head. In fact, the drugs themselves constitute a public health hazard.

Mind you, that isn’t conjecture; it is a simple fact of regulatory procedure. The FDA (never known to be excessively conservative where Big Pharma is concerned) at least requires certain animal-testing protocols to be followed before it approves drugs for human use. But the COVID19 “vaccines” have been specifically exempted from such tests.

What is more, that departure from basic safety procedures was premised on the false assumption that COVID19 represents an “emergency.” In fact, as scientists like Denis Rancourt have been showing for months, all-cause mortality figures for the United States have seldom been outside ordinary parameters since at least last summer. That rules out the existence of a health “emergency” – you can’t have an “emergency” when mortality figures fall within normal ranges – and absent an emergency, there’s no excuse for cutting short the normal testing requirements. And yet that’s exactly what our government has done – with the approval of the so-called “health experts” you see quoted in the New York Times, a fact that tells you all you need to know about whom those “experts” really work for.

An additional word is in order here. The “gene therapy” technology used in two of the three vaccines now available in the U.S. has never before been licensed for human use; when tested in an earlier form, it ran into trouble when vaccinated animals that were afterwards exposed to a “wild virus” experienced exaggerated and potentially deadly reactions. Testing of that sort isn’t performed on human subjects, so the Pfizer and Moderna drugs – both of which rely on the identical principle (involving “messenger RNA”) – have never been cleared of the danger of causing similar severe reactions when humans, after vaccination, are exposed to the pathogen in “wild” form.

In other words, as far as FDA supervision is concerned, anyone who takes these drugs is playing medical Russian roulette.

In fact, our government isn’t just refusing to protect us – without even an arguable excuse. Our government is going out of its way to subject us to dangers it is obliged to minimize. Even before these experimental drugs had reached the market, U.S. officials had taken the unprecedented step of granting the manufacturers blanket legal immunity for any adverse effects the drugs may cause. Then they exempted the “vaccines” from crucial stages of pre-approval animal testing (as I’ve mentioned already). And now, they’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds to pressure people into taking the drugs – while concealing serious questions about their safety, let alone their public utility.

Got that? The government is using scads of public money to persuade people to subject themselves to a medical hazard that same government could have protected us from, but has instead done everything in its power to intensify.

That’s worse than negligence. That’s a crime.

The cynicism of the indoctrination campaign is instructive, too. “Much anticipated new research,” according to NBC News, shows that…

See the rest here

Michael Lesher is an author, poet and lawyer whose legal work is mostly dedicated to issues connected with domestic abuse and child sexual abuse. His latest nonfiction book is Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland & Co., 2014); his first collection of poetry, Surfaces, was published by The High Window in 2019. A memoir of his discovery of Orthodox Judaism as an adult – Turning Back: The Personal Journey of a “Born-Again” Jew – was published in September 2020 by Lincoln Square Books.

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How Surveillance and Propaganda Work in ‘the Free World’ — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on November 13, 2019

The statistics obtained by Caught on Camera and comparitech differ markedly from those in the Bloomberg story which was retailed throughout the Western world by many news outlets, who increasingly refer to the West as “the Free World”. Comparitech records that as at August 2019 Moscow, with a population of 12.4 million, had 146,000 (not 200,000) cameras, while London’s 9 million citizens were being watched by 627,707 cameras.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/11/12/how-surveillance-and-propaganda-work-in-the-free-world/

  Brian Cloughley

A Bloomberg report of October 22 was concise and uncompromising in declaring Russia to be a surveillance state. Harking back to the good old days of the Cold War, as is increasingly the practice in much of the Western media, Bloomberg recounted that “The fourth of 10 basic rules Western spies followed when trying to infiltrate Russia’s capital during the Cold War — don’t look back because you’re never alone — is more apt than ever. Only these days it’s not just foreigners who are being tracked, but all 12.6 million Muscovites, too. Officials in Moscow have spent the last few years methodically assembling one of the most comprehensive video-surveillance operations in the world. The public-private network of as many as 200,000 cameras records 1.5 billion hours of footage a year that can be accessed by 16,000 government employees, intelligence officers and law-enforcement personnel.”

Terrifying, one might think. Straight out of Orwell’s 1984, that dystopian prediction of what the world could become, as noted in one description of how the face of the state’s symbolic leader, Big Brother, “gazes at you silently out of posters and billboards. His imposing presence establishes the sense of an all-seeing eye. The idea that he is always watching from the shadows imposes a kind of social order. You know not to speak out against The Party — because big brother is watching… The face always appears with the phrase Big Brother is watching you. As if you could forget.” Such is the terrifying Bloomberg picture of Moscow where there are supposedly 200,000 video cameras. You can’t blow your nose without it being seen. And wait for the next phase, in which Big Brother will hear you laugh.

In line with the Western approach, there is little mention of surveillance in other cities, but the website ‘Caught on Camera’ has analysed world-wide practices. It reports that there are some 25 million closed-circuit surveillance cameras world-wide and “the United Kingdom [with 4 million cameras] has more CCTV activity than any other European country, per capita… surprisingly, the Wandsworth borough in London in particular has more CCTV cameras than Boston, Dublin, Johannesburg and San Francisco put together. It is estimated there are 500,000 cameras dotted around London. The average person living in London will be recorded on camera 300 times in one day.”

The statistics obtained by Caught on Camera and comparitech differ markedly from those in the Bloomberg story which was retailed throughout the Western world by many news outlets, who increasingly refer to the West as “the Free World”. Comparitech records that as at August 2019 Moscow, with a population of 12.4 million, had 146,000 (not 200,000) cameras, while London’s 9 million citizens were being watched by 627,707 cameras. The picture (if one may use that word) is slightly slanted. To put it another way, London has 68 cameras for each 1,000 people, and the ratios elsewhere are enlightening: Shanghai 113 (China is in treble figures in three cities); Atlanta (Ga) 15; Chicago 13; Baghdad, Sydney and Dubai 12; Moscow and Berlin 11; and St Petersburg, Canberra and Washington DC tie at 5.

The slanting doesn’t stop there, because there are other ways of attacking Russia, spearheaded by such as the Washington Post, which highlighted the Bloomberg surveillance tale. The Post behaves like Big Brother focusing on Winston Smith, the hapless victim/hero of 1984 whose job it is “to rewrite the reports in newspapers of the past to conform with the present reality.” There is an eerie resonance in this, because the Post’s reportage on Russia verges on the obsessively censorious, while it avoids mention of anything remotely positive.

Understandably, the Post relies heavily on such sources as “Meduza, a Latvia-based online news outlet that covers the Kremlin” which reported that the Russian government “passed a law earlier this year that lets Vladimir Putin take all the country’s Internet traffic off the World Wide Web if he decrees that there’s an ‘emergency’.”

The fact that the intelligence services of the West have worked for a long time to devise strategies and tactics to destroy internet services in Russia and many other countries is neither here nor there, but it is important for Western propaganda purposes to condemn Russia for taking measures to counter the manoeuvres of the West’s cyberwar agencies. The Post emphasised that arrangements were made by various Russian ministries and agencies, including the Emergencies Ministry and the Federal Security Service which “is the successor to the KGB, where Putin was once an officer.”

The absurdity of that needlessly-injected personal point is amusing in a way, and serves to highlight the unending reiteration of detail intended to set the western public against Russia. Naturally, there is exclusion of information that could lead to audiences approving of Russia in any way.

The news site Axios states it aims to “deliver the cleanest, smartest, most efficient and trust-worthy experience for readers and advertisers alike” but when it comes to Russia it appears that there could be a bit of selectivity in that delivery. For example, in October the UK’s Guardian newspaper reported approvingly that according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), alcohol consumption in Russia “has dropped by 43% since 2003” and commented that the WHO had “put the decrease down to a series of measures brought in under the sport-loving president, Vladimir Putin, including restrictions on alcohol sales and the promotion of healthy lifestyles.” But Axios didn’t report it quite like that.

The Guardian also noted that “The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, led an anti-alcohol campaign with partial prohibition, which brought down consumption from the mid-1980s until 1990. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, alcohol consumption exploded, continuing to rise until the start of the 2000s. Under Putin, Russia has introduced measures including a ban on shops selling any alcohol after 11 pm, increases in the minimum retail price of spirits and an advertising blackout.” The result has been “increased life expectancies in Russia, which reached a historic peak in 2018, at 78 years for women and 68 years for men. In the early 1990s, male life expectancy was just 57 years.”

This is an amazing societal development. In no other country has there been a comparable initiative that resulted in such a massive and positive shift in community habits.

The BBC was more coy than the Guardian about allocating approval for the remarkable success of the programme, and confined itself to reporting that the WHO “attributed the decline to a series of alcohol-control measures implemented by the state, and a push towards healthy lifestyles.” There was no reference to President Putin, and indeed the credit went elsewhere, because “alcohol-control measures introduced under former President Dmitry Medvedev included advertising restrictions, increased taxes on alcohol and a ban on alcohol sales between certain hours.”

Axios followed suit, and ‘Radio Free Europe’ didn’t mention Presidents Putin, Medvedev or Gorbachev, retailing simply that the “decline in consumption was due to “alcohol-control measures introduced at the beginning of the 2000s.” There were no reports of the achievement in US mainstream outlets or the UK’s resolutely right-wing anti-Russia media. (The Guardian doesn’t carry a Russian flag; it merely reports without xenophobic bias.)

The WHO Case Study provides an admirably detailed timeline of legislature and other developments concerning Russia’s successful drive against alcohol abuse, recording, for example, that in 2018 there was a “presidential decree on ‘National Purposes and Strategic Development Challenges of the Russian Federation until 2024’… including in the field of public health. The aim is to increase life expectancy to 78 years by 2024 and to 80 years by 2030, as well as the proportion of citizens leading a healthy lifestyle and systematically engaging in physical activities and sports.”

Don’t expect such an initiative to be praised or even mentioned by the Western media. Big Brother prefers to slant the cameras.

 

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CCTV: New guidance for household security cameras - Telegraph

 

 

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