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Douglas Murray, the director of the British Free Speech Union,
announced a new initiative on Monday aimed at doxing critics of Israel
for "hate speech" and keeping them from getting jobs.
"Douglas
Murray is Director of the British Free Speech Union. He is now going to
lead an initiative to have harsher penalties for those accused of hate
speech, and bar 'bigots' from employment opportunities based on social
media posts!" Keith Woods commented on X.
Proposing a Hate Offenders List akin to the Sex Offenders
list for those convicted of Hate Crimes would streamline law enforcement
efforts, imposing travel restrictions, limiting access to certain
public places, and significantly impacting job opportunities to deter
the wielders of hatred from positions of power.
Utilizing the SEO from social media platforms like
Twitter(X)/TikTok/Facebook posts reported onto D.A.V.I.D. will have
hyper visibility using a simple google search, affecting the individuals
employment opportunities and reputation. D.A.V.I.D. employs facial
recognition to identify bigots from photos or videos. AI spiders crawl
social media platforms, detecting antisemitic content in posts,
comments, and images.
A frightening overview of our preparation for war in the West: The wrong tools for the wrong war! and still it looks like we are rushing head first into a conflict about which nobody understand the consequences. Isn't it the definition of stupidity?
Another amazing interview from Tucker Carlson. This time we get a close up view on how the deep state really works. It is simply amazing.
Ep. 75 The national security state is the main driver of censorship and election interference in the United States. "What I’m describing is military rule," says Mike Benz. "It’s the inversion of democracy."
This is about the end of free speech in France but make no mistake it's coming to yours likewise if you live in the West. As we let big corporations take over our democratic systems, the next stage will be force. Wasn't it all predictable?
History does seem to be on fast forward, doesn’t it?
A
major battle is brewing throughout the Western world over the basic
principle of free speech. Is it going to be protected by law? It’s not
entirely clear what the outcome will be. We seem to be on the precipice
of a potential calamity if the courts don’t decide the right way. Even
if we squeak out a victory, the question is already in play. Our free
speech rights have never been more fragile.
Turn your attention to France right now. In the dead of night, a new law slipped
through the General Assembly that would make it a crime to criticize
mRNA shots. Critics call it the Pfizer law. It calls for fines up to
45,000 euros and possibly three years in prison for debunking an
approved medical treatment.
A
general view of the French National Assembly (Assemblee Nationale) is
seen in Paris on July 17, 2023. (Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images)
Like
all Western nations, criticism of the mRNA platform has already been
subjected to vast social-media censorship. Even given this, there has
been a major and global consumer turn against these shots. People are
not convinced that they are necessary, safe, or effective. Still,
government imposed mandates for everyone, billions of people worldwide.
This was a form of conscription that has driven a deep divide between
the rulers and the ruled.
Rather than back down, however,
governments, which have been captured by pharmaceutical interests, are
going to bat for the companies and the technology to threaten
imprisonment of anyone who speaks out openly against them.
Here is
where censorship becomes severely weaponized. It’s the next logical
step. First you deploy every power to keep the distribution channels of
information free of dissent. When that doesn’t entirely work, simply
because people find alternative means of getting the word out, you have
to intensify matters and institute outright controls.
It
stands to reason that this would happen. After all, the whole point of
censorship is to curate the public mind to put down opposition to regime
priorities. When mainstream corporate media is falling apart
and new media is rising, the next stage is to go the full way to
flat-out criminalize opinion, like any totalitarian government.
We are very close to that stage.
If it can happen in France, it can happen throughout Europe, then the
Commonwealth, and then the United States. We know this much about
politics today. It is global. The elites that have seized control of our
governments coordinate across borders. This is why it is hugely
important to pay attention to what’s going on across the pond.
As a second item, I’m alarmed to read the lead piece in the New York Times opinion section that celebrates a defamation case about which I had not previously heard.
It is by Michael Mann, professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He
had sued a writer for the Competitive Enterprise Institute for taking
issue with Mann’s climate change model, and the so-called hockey stick
in particular.
This is not my area of specialization at all but I
have no doubt that mainstream climate science should be subject to
vigorous criticism. If the COVID era has taught us anything, it
is that the “scientific consensus” can be outrageously wrong and needs a
check that comes in the form of writing, some of it zippy and cutting.
Scientist
Michael Mann attends the New York screening of the HBO Documentary "How
to Let Go of the World and All The Things Climate Can't Change" in New
York on June 21, 2016. (Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for HBO)
Dr.
Mann filed a defamation lawsuit. Defamation is a very high bar: it
means to deliberately lie about something with the intention to harm.
One might not suppose that many things could qualify as that, certainly
not criticism of a climate model. Indeed, most defamation lawsuits are
dismissed outright simply because this country generally values free
speech.
This one, however, was accepted by the judge in
Washington, D.C. court. After a full decade in litigation, and a full
hearing, the jury ended up deciding in favor of the plaintiffs. One
defendant, Rand Simberg, has been told to pay $1K and the other, Mark
Steyn, $1M. Simberg says he will appeal and stands by every word that he
wrote. Steyn agrees and is ready to appeal.
Essentially this verdict is criminalizing hyperbole, said the defense attorney.
The
op-ed writer, however, says this is justice. “Our recent trial victory
may have wider implications,” he says. “It has drawn a line in the sand.
Scientists now know that they can respond to attacks by suing for
defamation.” He mentions in particular people who have disagreed with
the COVID consensus—disagreeing with Anthony Fauci—or otherwise make
“false claims about adverse health effects from wind turbines.”
Can you imagine? Criticize a wind turbine or pandemic lockdowns and find yourself hauled in front of a judge!
Will
this case have a chilling effect on criticism of government?
Absolutely! Indeed, it is terrifying to think what it implies. And the
writer leaves nothing to the imagination. He sees this case as a wedge
to make scientific criticism of any area of life—from vaccines to
climate change to the conversion to EVs—essentially illegal. In any
case, if not that, it comes close by erecting so many landmines that
critics essentially shut up for fear of having their whole lives ruined.
This
case went on for ten years. The article in question was published 12
years ago. How is it possible that litigants pushed a case for that
long? It was to establish a serious precedent. That precedent is now
clearly established. The definition of defamation is so malleable that
juries can decide anything. Just the prospect of being hauled before a
judge over ten years is enough to deter speaking out.
We can hope
that this appeal reverses the decision. But let’s face it: free speech
should not rest on such a thin foundation of jury-created law and
arbitrary judicial edict. This is all extremely dangerous and flies in
the face of the First Amendment.
Essentially, every critic of the
“scientific consensus” in every area has been put on notice. They are
already fair game. That’s the world toward which we are moving.
Here’s
the issue. Censorship works when government can control all the
distribution channels of information. What happens when that no longer
works? The powers that be have to use more direct methods, even when
they fly in the face of the First Amendment. Those who say that this
cannot happen here need to pay closer attention to the reality of what’s
happening.
Many people are excited to see the breakup of old media. Certainly I am but consider how the censors will respond.
They are getting hardcore, relying more on law rather than capture, and
hoping the courts can act to shut up the critics permanently. That’s
the future we are looking at. It is extremely dangerous. Under this
trajectory, free speech will be no more. The First Amendment will be a
dead letter.
The United States has
become so utterly dependent upon an uninterrupted supply of affordable
electricity that, as our grid becomes ever more fragile American society
has become fragile along with it.
Former CIA director James
Woolsey testified before the U.S. Senate in 2015 that, if America’s
electric grid were to go down for an extended period, such as one year,
“there are essentially two estimates on how many people would die from
hunger, from starvation, from lack of water, and from social disruption.
“One estimate is that within a year or so, two-thirds of the United States population would die,” Mr. Woolsey said. “The other estimate is that within a year or so, 90 percent of the U.S. population would die.”
Chris Keefer, president of Canadians for Nuclear Energy, concurred.
“The energy grid is a civilizational life support system, and without it, modern society collapses very quickly,” he said.
Mr.
Keefer is one of the experts featured in energy analyst, author, and
documentarian Robert Bryce’s new film, “Juice: Power, Politics and the
Grid.” This five-part docuseries looks at how and why America is now
“fragilizing” and destabilizing the engineering marvel that is the
central pillar of our society.
“We are seeing the grid’s reliability, resilience, and affordability all declining,”
Mr. Bryce told The Epoch Times. “We wanted to get people and policy
makers to understand that our most important energy network is being
fragilized, and we ignore this danger at our peril,” Mr. Bryce said.
He
has been fixated on America’s electric grid for decades and authored
the 2020 book, “A Question of Power,” one of the more comprehensive
studies of how electricity grids work and why they may not work as well
in the coming years.
Steven Pinker, author and Harvard psychology
professor, wrote in a review of the book that “energy is our primary
defense against poverty, disorder, hunger, and death.”
And yet,
many nations in the West have engaged in a game of Russian roulette with
their power grids, in an attempt to reduce global temperatures.
A ‘Dire Warning’
The
warnings don’t just come from the analysts featured in the documentary;
electricity regulators are becoming more vocal in sounding the alarm as
well.
In a May 2023 report,
the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), charged
with overseeing grid reliability, stated that a majority of America’s
grid is now at heightened risk levels for outages.
“This report is an especially dire warning that America’s ability to keep the lights on has been jeopardized,” National Rural Electric Cooperative Association CEO Jim Matheson stated.
It
was the near-collapse of Texas’s power grid during winter storm Yuri in
2021 that compelled Mr. Bryce to make the documentary. He partnered
with film director Tyson Culver, who along with Mr. Bryce, experienced
the crisis first-hand while living in Austin.
“I didn’t plan to
make another documentary after we made our first film that we released
in 2019,” he said. “I just thought, ‘I can’t do this; it costs too much
and takes too long.’
“But then we learned that the [Texas] grid
nearly failed, and if it had failed, tens of thousands of people would
have died,” he said. “And we realized, if this could happen in Texas,
the energy capital of the world, then the electric grid is really being
undermined.”
The North American electric grid is rapidly being
transitioned from one in which coal had once dominated to one that is
seeing an ever increasing share of wind, solar, and natural gas. In the
process, America’s electric grid is changing from something that was
once so reliable that consumers rarely thought about it, to one that
increasingly features rolling blackouts and may, one day soon, be on the
brink of long-term failure.
The Fatal Trifecta
The destabilization of the power grid is the result of what analyst and author Meredith Angwin deems the “fatal trifecta.”
“The Texas grid almost collapsed because of what I call the fatal trifecta,” Ms. Angwin states. “The first part of the fatal trifecta is over reliance on renewables, which go on and off when they want to.
“The
second part is over reliance on natural gas, which is delivered just in
time and can be interrupted just in time,” she says. “And the third
part is relying on a neighbor to help.”
All of these factors came
into play during Texas winter storm Yuri in 2021. Wind and solar
facilities were unable to deliver in freezing weather, and supplies of
natural gas were interrupted by freezing temperatures as well, just as
people needed electricity to heat their homes.
According to a Texas comptroller’s report,
natural gas supplied 51 percent of Texas’ electricity; wind 25 percent;
and coal 13 percent. As these sources went offline, utilities
frantically enacted blackouts to cut demand, fearing that a mismatch of
supply and demand that lasted more than several minutes would cause
long-term damage to the grid’s hardware.
While Texas
missed having a months-long outage of its electric grid by only a matter
of minutes, the damage from short-term outages was severe.
“Rolling
blackouts were intended to take stress off the power grid but turned
into outages that—in some parts of the state—lasted several days,” the
report stated. In that short time, at least 210 deaths were attributed
to the outage, which also caused an estimated $195 billion in economic damage.
The third leg of the “fatal trifecta” is the ability of regions of the grid to support each other.
For
all its fragmented sources, utilities, and regulations, the North
American power grid is interconnected in a way that allows one region to
shift electricity to another region if one has an excess and the other a
shortfall. Utilities routinely rely on this to balance supply and
demand at any given moment.
Increasingly, however, with excess
reserves dwindling as coal plants are aggressively shut down across the
United States, this ability to “phone a friend” is going away.
Following Europe and California
In
many ways, Texas followed the lead of Europe and California in
transitioning their grid to wind and solar energy, retiring coal plants
and sometimes nuclear plants as well, to halt global warming and please
anti-nuclear activists. Because wind and solar are weather-dependent, a
dispatchable backup source is needed, and that source is typically
natural gas.
As Europe, California, and Texas have learned, this transition creates vulnerability compared to coal and nuclear plants,
where fuel can be stored on-site. It has also led to sharply increasing
prices for electricity, as dual systems of power generation need to be
built, along with additional transmission infrastructure.
According to a 2021 Princeton Study,
relying on wind and solar to achieve net zero by 2050 would require
America’s high-voltage transmission network to triple in size, at a cost
of $2.4 trillion.
In what appears to be a surrender, or at least a
retreat, from the net-zero transition, some European countries, like
Germany, are restarting their coal plants as wind and solar fail to meet
demand, even at inflated prices.
“What we see in Europe from this
misguided infatuation with renewables is a stark warning, and I think
we can see the same thing in California—skyrocketing electricity prices
and no significant reduction in CO2 to speak of,” Mr. Bryce said.
At
the same time, the drive to achieve net-zero CO2 emissions has led to
political and corporate campaigns to shift ever more products onto the
electric grid. This includes such essentials as home heating, transportation, and cooking.
Laws
and regulations in Europe and the United States have sought to ban or
phase out oil and gas heating in homes, along with gasoline-powered
cars, trucks, and buses. The effect of this will be to make people more
dependent on electricity while pushing up demand to levels that many say
the grid cannot meet.
“The grid is already cracking under
existing demand,” Mr. Bryce said. “We’re seeing the grid’s reliability,
resilience, and affordability all declining, while these pressure groups
are trying to put yet more demand on it.
“This is a date with disaster.”
Wind and Solar Devour Open Spaces
Added to this is the insatiable hunger of the wind and solar industry for the consumption of land.
According to a May report
by The Nature Conservancy (TNC), reaching the goal of net-zero carbon
dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2050 would consume more than 250,000 square
miles, or 160 million acres, of land.
“With current siting
practices, an area the size of Texas is required to accommodate the wind
and solar infrastructure we need to reach nationwide net-zero emissions
by 2050,” stated Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at TNC, a renewable energy advocate.
Many
energy experts and environmentalists are coming to the conclusion that
nuclear energy is the best choice to generate reliable, affordable
energy, while cutting CO2 emissions. Despite headline nuclear
catastrophes at plants in Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima,
many countries are building new plants or delaying closures of existing
nuclear plants, considering it the cleanest and least environmentally
harmful source of electricity.
According to a report
by the Nuclear Energy Institute, wind farms require up to 360 times as
much land area to produce the same amount of electricity as a nuclear
energy facility, and solar facilities require up to 75 times the land
area. Compared to coal and natural gas plants, wind and solar consume at least 10 times as much land, according to the left-leaning Brookings Institution.
In
addition to a smaller footprint, nuclear power stations also typically
do not require the construction of thousands of miles of new
transmission lines to reach remote locations, where wind and solar
facilities are typically built.
With nuclear, Mr. Bryce said, “we don’t need to expand the grid; we can use the grid we have.”
Climate Activists Embrace Nuclear
Even ardent supporters of green-new-deal initiatives are starting to accept that nuclear must be at least part of the plan.
“What
we’re seeing out of Congress, and to some extent out of this White
House, is more accommodation for nuclear energy,” Mr. Bryce said.
A 2022 report
by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reports that “France,
the EU’s leading atomic state with nuclear weapons and fifty-six power
reactors, is poised to launch a major reinvestment in nuclear power.”
Bulgaria,
the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, and Poland are also preparing to
build new nuclear reactors, the report states, while other European
nations—Austria, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, and Portugal—remain
opposed to nuclear power.
California regulators, meanwhile, opted in December 2023 to keep the state’s nuclear facility at Diablo Canyon
open through at least 2030, having previously ordered its closure in
2025. This is a retreat for a state that has been plagued with rolling
blackouts as it jumped headlong into a wind and solar future.
“If
we are going to agree that climate change is an issue, with more
[weather] extremes for longer, it’s total insanity to make our most
important energy network dependent on the weather,” Mr. Bryce said. “We need weather-resilient, weather-resistant generation, not weather-dependent generation.”
“With
the Inflation Reduction Act and the investment tax credits, production
tax credits, all of the financial incentives in the power-gen sector are
to build more wind and solar,” he said. “To me, that is just absolute
crazy town.”
Amazing article which helped me see the light and realize that I was a "New Denialist"! What an amazing concept which applies to scientists (mostly I suppose) who believe (quite rightly) that the Earth is warming (very slightly and moderately as 0.7C in 100 years would indicate) starting from a very low base in 1880 and that mankind has very little to do with it. (As many scientists in many fields, glaciology, geology, oceanography and others also believe.)
The problem with Global Warming is not scientific. There is a debate. Some people argue for one side, others against. This is normal and the truth should emerge, slowly but eventually from this debate.
Politics doesn't work like that. The decisions being taken imply trillions of dollars and must therefore be based on certainties. And therefore the debate must be stifled less a doubt remains and policies cannot be implemented, including, in the emergency "packages", solutions which have nothing to do with climate and everything to do with control...
Could
Michael Mann, the inventor of the so-called Hockey Stick graph, be a
covert “New Denialist”? Or is there a split happening in the pro-climate
change camp?
That’s two readings of Mr. Mann’s latest book “Our Fragile Moment.”
Either being true would be a good thing, and both are even better.
The
“new denialists” is a new term coined to describe people who believe
that while climate change is real, it is an open question of how much is
manmade, and what the policy response should be.
Mr. Mann is not someone whom you would normally associate with such a position.
He
has been famous in climate circles since 1998 when, as a newly-minted
doctor in geology and geophysics, he was the principal author of Mann,
Bradley, and Hughes 1998 (MBH98), also known as the Hockey Stick graph, a
paleoclimate reconstruction of 1,000 years of earth’s temperature which
showed unprecedented warming in the late 20th century.
It
undermined the consensus view which was that temperature fluctuates
quite significantly over centuries, and it was probably cooler now than
it had been during the Roman climatic optimum and the Medieval warm
period.
You may have seen its star role in Al Gore’s agitprop “An
Inconvenient Truth” (“agitprop” because the film was ruled by a British
court to be unsuitable for showing to school students without
accompanying corrections because it contained “nine scientific errors”).
Mr.
Gore had the graph on a large backdrop and emphasised the steepness of
the blade, and thus the urgent need to stop CO2 emissions, by rising up
beside it in a scissor lift while holding a large pointer in his hand.
That
graph and successor hockey sticks are the standard bearers (if you’ll
forgive me for mixing metaphors) of climate change catastrophism, and
they’ve been used to hit (metaphor again) “climate deniers” over the
head.
I’ve never had any regard for the hockey stick.
Not
only did it purport to erase the consensus on the basis of one
reconstruction, but its statistical techniques were shown to produce
hockey sticks out of any random data. So it seemed unlikely to be
correct.
But on top of that, Mr. Mann did something that is completely impermissible in statistical analysis.
When the proxy data that he was using came into the modern era they clashed with thermometer records. They showed cooling but the thermometers showed warming.
Mr. Mann “fixed” this by abandoning the proxies and splicing actual temperature records in, without revealing the reason.
This is why I call him “Piltdown Mann.”
The
one “n” Piltdown Man is a scandal where an amateur paleoanthropologist
claimed to have found the “missing link” between man and ape but it was a
forgery where a modern human cranium had been combined with an
orangutang jaw and teeth.
Mr. Mann’s technique is similarly defective and deceptive.
If
the proxies don’t measure real temperature now, how could they be
supposed to be measuring real temperature in the past? The whole proxy
exercise had obviously failed and should have been abandoned.
If
you want a further, very succinct reference on the Hockey Stick, I can
only refer you to the judge in the case of Mann v. Simberg and Steyn,
currently running in court 132 in the District of Columbia Superior
Court. Mr. Mann is suing the two defendants for some very caustic
comments about his hockey stick.
Presiding Justice Irving said:
“As
to Mr. Steyn, his statements about the bogus, fraudulent nature of the
Hockey Stick graph in his mind were substantially and entirely true.”
Unfortunately,
Mr. Mann won, and the matter is likely to go on appeal, but the case
deserves an essay all of its own, so I will leave that there for the
moment.
Not the End of the World?
So I approached the opportunity to review Mr. Mann’s latest book with caution. A man who will mislead his scientific colleagues is likely to be even less reliable with the general public.
I was not disappointed, and at the same time, I was.
On
the one hand, some propositions are surely false, while on the other
there were insights that are most probably true. And then the final
twist, where Mr. Mann showed himself to be relaxed about the near-term
prospects for the world, unlike, say, prophets of doom like Greta
Thunberg.
This is where he joins the ranks of what is being termed the “new denialists,” which seems to be a term to cover anyone who takes a “Don’t Panic” approach to changes in the climate.
The
book is an example of the seductiveness of capitulating to expert
opinion. Mr. Mann has a theory of everything, and that is that CO2 is
the thermostat that controls Earth’s temperature. Except he occasionally
allows for the sun to have a role at times through Milankovitch cycles.
Unlike
most climate scientists, he understands geology and has a long-term
view of the world, which means there are a lot of weeds for the amateur
to get lost in.
My advice is to read the book, and then go and search out some contrary views.
The future might be all speculation, but once you get further back than yesterday’s dinner, the past can be just as speculative.
Maybe
CO2 is a genuine thermostat, but then how do you explain this graph
where the earth can be quite cold with high concentrations of CO2 and
warm with low concentrations?
Mr.
Mann deals with some of this by the concept of Earth System
Sensitivity, which is the idea that there is a certain amount of inertia
in the earth system and it may take quite a time for changes to
manifest.
He posits that sensitivity may be higher in
interglacials, and lower during glacials, partly a result of the fact
that ice sheets, which dominate glacials, reflect a lot of sunlight and
therefore act to keep temperature low, despite changes in CO2 pushing
temperature in the other direction.
Ice sheets therefore melt very slowly causing temperature to also warm very slowly.
That brake on
temperature change doesn’t exist when most of the ice sheets have
melted, as they have today, so warming can be more instantaneous.
Perhaps.
I
think it needs a lot more research but do please delve into the book—it
has a wealth of detail which is hard to convey accurately, or at all,
in a short review.
And definitely read the last chapter where I will let Mr. Mann speak for himself:
“But
breathless claims of imminent climate-driven ‘human extinction’ and
‘runaway warming’ are both scientifically unsupportable and unhelpful.”
Let’s Do This Properly
I’ve always been a “new denialist,” or if not always, since somewhere in the 90s.
Manmade
climate change is a fact, to the extent that emissions of CO2 created
by us have some effect on the climate. But to what extent is an open
question, as is what to do about it.
What is certain is
that the cost to human life of precipitately stopping the use of fossil
fuels is immeasurably higher than any benefit.
We rely on them not
just for electricity and transport, but for steel, plastics, glass,
explosives, and fertilisers, without which it would be impossible to
sustain the 10 billion or so humans who will live on this earth by the
end of this century.
If we stopped all that tomorrow, how many humans could the earth support? 500 million? Take that figure from 10 billion, and that’s how many billions you would kill.
It
would be wise to transition away from fossil fuels, and also wise to
understand that any transition will be in the order of centuries, not
decades.
After all, the first steam engine was developed in 1712,
but it wasn’t until the early 20th century that it became dominant in
sailing technology. Internal combustion engines have been around since
1860, but they are still developing.
Why should the decarbonised economy take only a matter of decades?
But to have a rational debate it requires rational premises all around, and this book is a good contribution to it.
And
hopefully, it reflects a broader recognition amongst realists on the
more climate-catastrophic end of the debate that if everything is a
crisis, people will become so worn out that eventually, nothing is a
crisis, because what’s the point, we can’t do anything about it?
Crisis overload.
If Mr. Mann can help to cool the debate, then I’m happy to have his support, even if his science might be less than rigorous.
“Our
Fragile Moment: how lessons from the Earth’s past can help us survive
the climate crisis” is published by Scribe and retails for AU$35.
Views
expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not
necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
For most people, the Covid crisis is behind. A bad experience for sure but mostly something belonging to the past. This cannot be further from the truth.
Not only our medical system, but our whole society has been transformed for the worse. We are no less bankrupt than four years ago although the dollar is quickly losing its preponderant position. Our society has become far more autocratic with what in Europe has become a legal control of information. But more ominously, no lesson whatsoever has been learned from the Covid medical fiasco and consequently we, as a society, are ready for a replay.
Most people I talk to believe that it is impossible. "People won't fall twice for the same old tricks." They are wrong! Change the paradigm slightly, increase the shrill and the pressure, limit the reach of divergent opinions and we're on for another round.
This is why it is so important to reflect on what Really happened during the Covid crisis as the article below skillfully does.
I am thinking of a certain industry. See if you can guess what it is...
This
industry is huge, constituting a large portion of the nation’s GDP.
Millions of people earn their living through it, directly or indirectly.
The people at the top of this industry (who operate mostly behind the
scenes, of course) are among the super-rich. This industry’s
corporations lobby the nation’s government relentlessly, to the tune of
billions of dollars per year, both to secure lucrative contracts and to
influence national policy in their favor. This investment pays off
richly, sometimes reaching trillions of dollars.
The corporations
supplying this industry with its materiel conduct advanced, highly
technical research that is far beyond the understanding of the average
citizen. The citizens fund this research, however, through tax dollars.
Unbeknownst to them, many of the profits gained from the products
developed using tax dollars are kept by the corporations’ executives and
investors.
This industry addresses fundamental, life-or-death
issues facing the nation. As such, it relentlessly promotes itself as a
global force for good, claiming to protect and save countless lives.
However, it kills a lot of people too, and the balance is not always a
favorable one.
The operational side of this industry is
emphatically top-down in its structure and function. Those who work at
the ground level must undergo rigorous training that standardizes their
attitudes and behavior. They must follow strict codes of practice, and
they are subject to harsh professional discipline if they deviate from
accepted policies and procedures, or even if they publicly question
them.
Finally, these ground-level personnel are handled in a
peculiar manner. Publicly, they are frequently lauded as heroes,
particularly under declared periods of crisis. Privately, they are kept
completely in the dark regarding high-level industry decisions, and they
are often lied to outright by those at higher levels of command. The
“grunts” even significantly forfeit some fundamental civil liberties for
the privilege of working in the industry.
What industry am I describing?
If you answered, “the military,” of course you would be correct.
However, if you answered “the medical industry,” you would be every bit as right.
In President Eisenhower’s farewell speech
of Jan. 17, 1961, he stated that “... in the councils of government, we
must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether
sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Sixty-three
years on, many Americans understand what he was referring to.
They
see the endless cycle of undeclared wars and decades-long foreign
occupations that are undertaken on nebulous or even outright false
pretenses. They see the ever-hungry mega-industry that produces
super-expensive, high-tech killing devices of every imaginable form, as
well as the steady stream of traumatized soldiers that it spits out. War
(or, if you prefer its Orwellian nickname, “defense”) is big business.
And as Eisenhower warned, as long as those profiting from it drive the
policy and the money stream, it will not only continue, it will continue
to grow.
Other mega-industries - the medical industry in
particular - have generally fared better in public perception than the
military-industrial complex. Then came COVID.
Among its
many harsh lessons, COVID has taught us this: if you substitute Pfizer
and Moderna for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, and swap the NIH and CDC
for the Pentagon, you get the same result. The “medical-industrial
complex” is every bit as real as its military-industrial counterpart,
and it is every bit as real a problem.
As a physician, I
am embarrassed to admit that until COVID, I possessed only an inkling
that this was so—or more accurately, I knew it, but didn’t realize how
bad it was, and I didn’t worry about it too much. Sure (I
thought), Pharma engaged in dishonest practices, but we’d known that for
decades, and after all, they do make some effective drugs. Yes,
physicians were increasingly becoming employees, and protocols were
dictating care more and more, but the profession still seemed
manageable. True, healthcare was far too expensive (gobbling up a reported 18.3 percent of the U.S. GDP in 2021), but healthcare is inherently expensive. And after all, we’re saving lives.
Until we weren’t.
By
early-to-mid 2020, it became obvious to those paying attention that the
COVID “response,” while promoted as a medical initiative, was in fact a
military operation. Martial law had effectively been declared
approximately on the Ides of March 2020, after President Trump was
mysteriously convinced to cede the COVID response (and practically
speaking, control of
the nation) to the National Security Council. Civil liberties—freedom
of assembly, worship, the right to travel, to earn one’s living, to
pursue one’s education, to obtain legal relief—were rendered null and
void.
Top-down diktats on how to manage COVID patients were handed
down to physicians from high above, and these were enforced with a
militaristic rigidity unseen in doctors’ professional lifetimes. The
mandated protocols made no sense. They ignored fundamental tenets of
both sound medical practice and medical ethics. They shamelessly lied
about well-known, tried-and-true medicines that were known to be safe
and appeared to work. The protocols killed people.
Those
physicians and other professionals who spoke out were effectively
court-martialed. State medical boards, specialty certification boards,
and large healthcare system employers virtually tripped over each other
in the rush to delicense, decertify, and fire dissenters. Genuine,
courageous physicians who actually treat patients, such as Peter
McCullough, Mary Talley Bowden, Scott Jensen, Simone Gold, and others,
were persecuted, while non-practicing bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci
were hailed with false titles like “America’s Top Doctor.” The
propaganda was as nauseating as it was blatant. And then came the jabs.
How did this happen to medicine?
It all seemed so sudden, but in fact it has been in the works for years.
COVID taught us (by the way, COVID has been such a harsh tutor, but haven’t we learned somuch from
her!) that the medical-industrial complex and military-industrial
complex are deeply connected. They are not just twins, or even identical
twins. They are conjoined twins, and so-called “Public Health” is the tissue shared between them.
The
SARS CoV-2 virus, after all, is a bioweapon, developed over a period of
years, funded by U.S. tax dollars in a joint effort between Fauci’s NIH
and the Department of Defense to genetically manipulate the
transmissibility and virulence of coronaviruses (all done in the name of
“Public Health,” of course).
Once the bioweapon was out of the
lab and into the population, the race was on within the
medical-industrial complex to develop and market the supremely
profitable antidote to the bioweapon. Cue the full-on military takeover
of medicine: the martial law lockdowns, the suppression of cheap and
effective treatments, the persecution of dissidents, the ceaseless
propaganda and anti-science, and the unabashed whoring of most hospital
systems for CARES Act money.
We know the rest. The
ill-conceived, toxic, gene-therapy antidote, falsely billed as a
“vaccine,” was foisted upon the population by blackmail (“the vaccine is
how we end the pandemic”), the effective bribery of medical authorities
and politicians, as well as other Deep-State directed psyops designed
to divide the population and scapegoat dissenters (“pandemic of the
unvaccinated”).
The end result even sounds like the
aftermath of a gigantic military operation. Millions are dead, many
millions more are psychologically traumatized, economies are in tatters,
and a few warmongers are fantastically rich. Moderna CEO Stephane
Bancel (who, incidentally, oversaw the construction of the Wuhan
Institute of Virology years ago) is a freshly minted billionaire. And
not one of those who caused all the mischief are in prison.
At
this writing, virtually all the major healthcare systems, specialty
regulatory boards, specialty associations, and medical schools are
standing at attention, still in lockstep with the received—and by now,
clearly false—narrative. Their funding, after all, be it from Pharma or
the Government, depends upon their obedience. Barring dramatic change,
they will respond in the same fashion when orders come down from above
in the future. Medicine has been fully militarized.
In his farewell address, Eisenhower said something else that I believe is most prescient here.
He
described that a military-industrial complex fostered “a recurring
temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become
the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.”
Many interesting comments about AI by this brilliant expert.
unlike him, I do not believe we can control AI once it becomes AGI. You simply cannot control something which is more intelligent than you are. Worse, AGI cannot be a little more intelligent than we are. As soon as it reaches a level were it can improve itself significantly, and we may be frighteningly close to this point, that's it. As Ray Kurzweil explained, almost instantly, you have an intelligence singularity. Because the machine will, (it already does) think a million times faster than we do!
I like his analogy of fighting a chess game with a grand champion. It feels OK for a while, you may even think that you are doing rather well, and suddenly you've lost! Although it will be different. Our society is already too complex for anybody to fully understand all it's technical, social and psychological aspects. Slowly, we will have to delegate more and more control to AI, simply because it will get better results than anybody can. Until the AI controls everything? Or just some critical aspects? Could it be that super-intelligence is just the AI doing things we do not fully understand? And in this case, how do we know it's not already there?
Already in the chess and go games, AI can do amazing moves. Moves which are surprising but are eventually winning ones. Can everything be seen as a gigantic game of go by AI? One question remains: If the AI is just player the "games" we ask it to play, then all should be fine. But if the AI starts playing for itself. what happens?
Do you need consciousness to do that? Probably not. You just need one human to ask the AI the right questions: to optimize it's chances of survival for example. The question has probably already been asked...
Finally creating an AI from scratch is complicated but once you have found the solutions, the right configurations, the right networks, replicating an AI may be relatively simple... That question is not discussed in the interview below although I believe it's the most potent one. So many questions. So little time!
By interviewing Vladimir Putin, Tucker Carlson is making history. Will it change the world? I don't know. But one thing that is being transformed is journalism. The mainstream medias have already almost completely lost their legitimacy but with Tucker Carlson it becomes obvious and painful to see.
