I have lived out and demonstrated my anarchism every day since February 2020. I will admit that there were about 3 days in the beginning that I washed my hands extra and didn't touch doorknobs, but after that I completely ignored every "order" and "mandate" in the 30 states I traveled as a truck driver. I was in NY and PA every week as a part of a dedicated run. For the first two weeks, my customers wouldn't even talk to me. After that, everyone had chin diapers and within a month or so, everything was back to "normal." There was a time in April 2020 where I had the genius idea to eat my Burger King burrito in a Dallas Texas truck stop shower since none of the slaves were allowed to sit at a table. There was a 45 minute wait so I sat in the floor...of a truck stop...during a "pandemic"...to eat my breakfast. No one batted an eye. I sat in the floor and ate, but if I would have sat my fat ass in a chair in the dining room, they'd have called the cops. You know, because safety. My family is defiant. My kids are defiant. What friends I have left are as well. The rest, well, fuck em.
My family are also defiant free thinkers (we're in Australia). We've just got on and lived our lives as normally as possible over the last 2 years and built a small community of like minded to replace the friends/family we lost to conformity and obedience. Never masked, never used a QR code check-in or downloaded any apps, never locked down, never tested and never even considered the injections. It hasn't always been easy, there have been moments, but the right decision isn't always the easy one.
5yo and 10yo have developed their own vocabulary of "free breathers" and "conformers, compliers and enablers".
I have never been a touchy feely person but as a result of the last 2 years, I have forced my self to hug people when I meet them as a small act of defiance & non compliance while others practiced social distancing.
Every day we try to live with grace, smiling as we refuse to conform and obey.
We are getting on with living our lives as fully as possible, while preparing for the worst and hoping for the best. Determined and resilient. Discovering and building local supply chains for food and other needs.
"Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
i have said this for years- "my revolution." whatever it is that i can do to withdraw. stay out of the medical industrial complex, go to doctors that don't take insurance, don't have flu shots, don't take mammograms, opt out of the smart meter they want to put on your house, put black tape over the camera on your computer, rip up your jury duty summons letters, don't pledge allegiance to a piece of cloth or a governmental system, don't join a political party, don't ever sully your vote on the "lesser of two evils," give your heart fully, read Wendell Berry, buy your food from local farmers, cook your own meals, plant a garden, keep chickens, get rid of your television, pay off your credit card debt, establish a community, laugh out loud at Klaus Schwab.
the greatest news is that Pfizer is stuck with expiring doses of their useless (and harmful vaccine). i'm sure they'll still get paid for them because that's how they roll, although i've heard of countries refusing to pay. the tragedy of course, beyond the people who complied and were damaged, is the people who lost their jobs, their friends, their families. they will have to create new jobs for themselves, make new friends, establish new families.
remember this always: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
― Buckminster Fuller -
my partner and i both lost our jobs. he retired to avoid confrontation and ridicule and so is still held in high esteem by his old co-workers although with the knowledge that they would turn on him in a heartbeat if they knew he wasn't vaccinated. i was simply not asked back to a job i had held, passionately and brilliantly, since 1980. it's like i never existed. they replaced me with someone unsuitable and the report i hear is that it's all a disaster. the governor finally made it illegal to have a policy of medical Jim Crow but too late for me.
i have taken the heart break and found an old restored plantation with rental cottages. we are emptying our bank accounts of soon to be useless fiat money and buying, with another friend, this wonderful land. the estate manager for the late owner is so happy that we want to preserve this legacy that he has planted vegetables for us in the raised beds and aisles of fruit trees. it's a leap of faith but every time we visit there, i am more sure that we are doing something extraordinary.
i am still a passionate and brilliant person; if my old job is foolish enough to cast aside someone they were so lucky to have for 4 decades, fuck 'em. i will pour my passion into this new land
oh that is so wonderful!! you can survive and maybe even thrive. you are so right not to try for an exemption. i didn't either. imagine asking permission to avoid something no one has the right to force you to do in the first place!!
as for me, i may not be doing as well as i like to think. i'm on the edge of tears a lot and this evening a cellist friend texted to tell me she would be here on saturday and couldn't wait to see me. i had to tell her that i'd been banished from the festival and that even though i would now be "permitted" into concerts, etc i would not go.
of course, she is well aware that these morning and afternoon chamber music concerts were the high point of my life. also, since i am the closest thing to an institution in the organization, she could not fathom my not being there.
well, that set me off.
honestly my BF and i discussed the absurd possibility of MOVING OUR HOUSE to the land we are buying and setting it up there- which is ridiculous since the property already has an 8 bedroom 6000 sq ft mansion, 6 long term rental cottages and a massive barn.
still, this house of ours is so deeply personal. i have designed every detail of it, restored the fireplaces myself, drawn etched glass windows that i found a sand blaster to make, laid out the kitchen. and it's not like it's finished. so even though i've lost the reason to be in this town, i just can't leave this house. not yet anyway.
we often have symphony musicians staying here who were originally from russia, bulgaria or slovenia. they always say that what is happening in the US over this covid thing looks an awful lot like what they were escaping from. it's very sad but it's, of course, why your new employers are so good for you! they know how bad things can be
I kept telling (pleading even) people around me: DON'T PLAY. Don't download a passport app. Take your shot if you want but don't allow them to coerce you into it. Simple. Don't consent to things that can only hurt all of us in the end. Alas, people needed to go to the restaurant and go on their trips to Santa Banana. They obeyed out of pure selfish self-entitlement pretending they were virtuous and doing it for the 'greater good'. Canadians took obedience for virtue.
When British Columbia announced restrictions segregating “vaccinated” and “unvaccinated”, I wrote an email to my coworkers along the following lines: “it took 18 months to go from ‘we are in this together’ and ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’ to ‘show me your papers’. That’s medical apartheid”. The only reply I got, which might be sent to all recipients read: “It’s good public health police”. And right there I knew the country was lost.
When my Synagogue demanded papers for the experimental shot, I wrote to the admin saying of all groups of people, Jews would be sensitive and abolish this insanity.
Zero reply.
No papers no attendance.
I left that synagogue.
Holding hands w Hitler and worshipping the golden calf is not for me.
Similar experience with my former Catholic parish. First, social functions (like a pancake breakfast after mass) were restricted to those who had papers to show... then, segregated mass (let’s call it the “mass of the unjabbed” and the “mass of the jabbed”). We complained, we wrote letters; nobody cared; the parish pastor couldn’t even understand how pathetic this situation was, considering the “All are welcome” placard that had been recently placed at the entrance. Done with that parish.
Considering that America's southern border is wide open to illegals with no vaxx requirement, while in Canada I believe if anything immigration increased throughout the lockdown ... No, I don't think they are.
7 million doses sitting in a warehouse unused. Wow. Now that's a great anecdote there. Hope does live, I guess. Of course, people like this guy will continue to be CEO of these companies. As far as I can tell, all the major companies in the world are "led" by people like this. Whenever we do "drain the swamp," we're going to have to purge 90 percent of the politicians, 75 percent of the bureaucrats, 99 percent of the mainstream journalists, editors and publishers and about 95 percent of the corporate CEOs and their top lieutenants. That's a lot of draining. Probably too much to happen.
Chris I’m glad you bought up Ireland but you’re looking at Cromwell not Lloyd George or John Major.
We are a mortal threat to our elites, which is why they’ve created a genocidal cult of Wokeness to cull us (mass killoff).
Disease (ongoing) and Hunger (begun) leading into Famine does most of that, there will be sufficient violence to assist the process- as noted earlier the Police have “withdrawn consent” and the military will as well.
Ceteris Paribus or Mutas Mutandis if we don’t fight and win we’re gone.
And as noted Irish Democracy has no effect, it was Irish rebellion and as much Irish voters in America that got the South the Free State.
Withdrawing consent: Its a nice cope, it has the same impact as pasting the Mona Lisa with a cream pie.
While I’m sure many swamp creatures have pretended to take the vax, there are many more useful idiots that bought their own bullshit. Give it a couple more boosters - they’ll drain themselves.
This is an amazing disclosure. So Pfizer just takes a loss on 7 billion unused doses? But the headline is what Chris highlighted with that tweet - the fact the world is "too uneducated" to do what the Pfizer CEO says we should do.
They aren’t taking a loss. We already paid for them.
Now Pfizer has not only been pod for these vaccines, but likely gets to apply some accounting trick to write off the unusable inventory and reduce whatever tax burden they may have had.
if we had, oh, I don't know, about seven billion empty syringes we could suck all the water right outta that swamp. i wonder where we could get that many empty syringes.
I once lived close to a Lisu hilltribe village in Northern Thailand, and was fascinated by how they kept their way of life and tradition going, when I figured out that they stay quite aloof from the control hungry claws of the centralized Thai state. They are extremely weary of all the modern conviences and so called life improvements and make consessions just when it is absolutely necessary to not feel the wrath of the central power. But they forego all the sweet traps and do without: sacrifice for independence and relative freedom. We need to be able to forego things in not participating in the clown shows of the clown towns of our world.
what's really funny- listen to bourla. he says that the vaccines in storage that no one wants, they were going to be given to low income countries for free. sounds pretty altruistic, but then he clarifies- the US government and the EU BOUGHT them from Pfizer to give to the low income countries so Pfizer isn't on the hook for anything. Pfizer wasn't altruistic- your government was WITH YOUR MONEY. no one asked if you wanted to make such a gift.
then he goes on to say that there aren't enough "educated populations that believe the vaccines IS doing well.." in the text, they've corrected it to read "are doing well" but he clearly says IS while complaining about other people's lack of education
Sometime around late 2021, I was a bit anguished. Canada had already been turned into a Prison State and medical apartheid was in full swing. Turning to thinkers and political dissidents, I rediscovered MacIntyre "After Virtue" (1981): "If the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without hope ... We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict." The "Benedict Option", along with Czech author and dissident Vaclav Havel's "parallel society" have since reshaped my attitude, and "Don’t show up for the clown show" has been a big part of it.
Havel and Solzhenitsyn would agree. "Live not by lies" . On a side note, when was the last time you heard of a business not particularly financially stressed about 7 billion of its products being shelved?
Havel and Solzhenitsyn lived by Fantasy and freed none.
Freedom came from KGB reformers (Gorbachev), John Paul II, Reagan, Thatcher, Casey (Casey told Wall Street to turn off the USSR subsidy) and the Poles, Afghans, CIA all aligned in result if not intentionally.
Havel and Solzhenitsyn are the Harriet Beecher Stowe’s of The Cold War, nothing more.
I'm a bit late chiming in but I believe in what I call a "conspiracy of consent" or "conspiracy of shared apathy." You don't need a conspiracy for incredibly evil shit to happen. You just need people who don't really give a shit or tacitly agree with the outcome.
College professors have been telling every student for YEARS that the world is headed for Malthusian doom. Even while the growth rate has slowed to a near standstill and is trending naturally toward negative with the increased spread of economic benefits they still keep the same signal on high. So.... when it turns out something is killing large numbers of strangers, elites don't panic and try to fix it. They don't blow whistles. They just don't go out of their way because they think a few million less people is good.
And when the political pressure is on to release a vaccine or otherwise generate an outcome, the expedient always trumps the noble path because the problems a lack of integrity cause are far away and unlikely to bounce all the way back to their door. The immediate problem wins out and the harm it will inevitably cause is heaped with undeserved doubt.
Sometimes the claim of incompetence is a lie but most of the time competent people leave the scene long before the harm is obvious enough to force them to make a moral choice. Competent people resign from leadership and their teams get sidelined or follow them out. The incompetent are left - they are the ones who lack sufficient expertise to be certain they are perpetrating an monstrous act.
Organizations that tip into a culture of dis-integrity and incompetence end up in a downward spiral. Competent people smell it and go somewhere else for work. Pockets of competent people that remain end up in increasingly awkward or marginal positions.
When you are a performative asshat who knows just enough to put buzzwords on a powerpoint and you're well connected and credentialed you have enormous political advantages over productive people who have to remain committed to real missions that create real results.
That's why kingdoms have dynastic changes. Wealth and riches make weak, entitled children. As the leadership shifts from captains to courtesans the capacity to create effective outcomes goes to zero. Eventually whatever individual or group can assemble effective captains into a force overcomes the primping asshats. Then the cycle starts over.
I have a pat response to people who confront the beast.
The Bill of Rights isn't an exhaustive list of your rights. It is a the list of those rights that are absolutely necessary to maintain a free people in control of their government.
What you can do is to STRENUOUSLY and JEALOUSLY defend the rights in the Bill of Rights from ANY infringement. Defend your own and other people's rights. AND recognize that you are a member of WE THE PEOPLE.
For instance, YOU are accountable for defending free speech IN YOUR SOCIETY. Just because the government is the one enjoined from controlling speech doesn't mean you and I are off the hook. We are the government. If we find ourselves involved in supporting the silencing of people we disagree with it is our job to stop it or at least to withdraw our support for it. Whenever we act collectively WE ARE GOVERNING SOMETHING.
If those rights remain intact authoritarianism is impossible, totalitarianism is impossible, tyranny is impossible.
As it turns out the Bill of Rights are Amendments, that the core document of who holds power in Articles 1-3 is or rather was more important as they specify who holds what powers and they are overrun.
I have lived out and demonstrated my anarchism every day since February 2020. I will admit that there were about 3 days in the beginning that I washed my hands extra and didn't touch doorknobs, but after that I completely ignored every "order" and "mandate" in the 30 states I traveled as a truck driver. I was in NY and PA every week as a part of a dedicated run. For the first two weeks, my customers wouldn't even talk to me. After that, everyone had chin diapers and within a month or so, everything was back to "normal." There was a time in April 2020 where I had the genius idea to eat my Burger King burrito in a Dallas Texas truck stop shower since none of the slaves were allowed to sit at a table. There was a 45 minute wait so I sat in the floor...of a truck stop...during a "pandemic"...to eat my breakfast. No one batted an eye. I sat in the floor and ate, but if I would have sat my fat ass in a chair in the dining room, they'd have called the cops. You know, because safety. My family is defiant. My kids are defiant. What friends I have left are as well. The rest, well, fuck em.
Every bit this.
My family are also defiant free thinkers (we're in Australia). We've just got on and lived our lives as normally as possible over the last 2 years and built a small community of like minded to replace the friends/family we lost to conformity and obedience. Never masked, never used a QR code check-in or downloaded any apps, never locked down, never tested and never even considered the injections. It hasn't always been easy, there have been moments, but the right decision isn't always the easy one.
5yo and 10yo have developed their own vocabulary of "free breathers" and "conformers, compliers and enablers".
I have never been a touchy feely person but as a result of the last 2 years, I have forced my self to hug people when I meet them as a small act of defiance & non compliance while others practiced social distancing.
Every day we try to live with grace, smiling as we refuse to conform and obey.
We are getting on with living our lives as fully as possible, while preparing for the worst and hoping for the best. Determined and resilient. Discovering and building local supply chains for food and other needs.
"Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Excellent!
Beautiful!
i have said this for years- "my revolution." whatever it is that i can do to withdraw. stay out of the medical industrial complex, go to doctors that don't take insurance, don't have flu shots, don't take mammograms, opt out of the smart meter they want to put on your house, put black tape over the camera on your computer, rip up your jury duty summons letters, don't pledge allegiance to a piece of cloth or a governmental system, don't join a political party, don't ever sully your vote on the "lesser of two evils," give your heart fully, read Wendell Berry, buy your food from local farmers, cook your own meals, plant a garden, keep chickens, get rid of your television, pay off your credit card debt, establish a community, laugh out loud at Klaus Schwab.
the greatest news is that Pfizer is stuck with expiring doses of their useless (and harmful vaccine). i'm sure they'll still get paid for them because that's how they roll, although i've heard of countries refusing to pay. the tragedy of course, beyond the people who complied and were damaged, is the people who lost their jobs, their friends, their families. they will have to create new jobs for themselves, make new friends, establish new families.
remember this always: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
― Buckminster Fuller -
my partner and i both lost our jobs. he retired to avoid confrontation and ridicule and so is still held in high esteem by his old co-workers although with the knowledge that they would turn on him in a heartbeat if they knew he wasn't vaccinated. i was simply not asked back to a job i had held, passionately and brilliantly, since 1980. it's like i never existed. they replaced me with someone unsuitable and the report i hear is that it's all a disaster. the governor finally made it illegal to have a policy of medical Jim Crow but too late for me.
i have taken the heart break and found an old restored plantation with rental cottages. we are emptying our bank accounts of soon to be useless fiat money and buying, with another friend, this wonderful land. the estate manager for the late owner is so happy that we want to preserve this legacy that he has planted vegetables for us in the raised beds and aisles of fruit trees. it's a leap of faith but every time we visit there, i am more sure that we are doing something extraordinary.
i am still a passionate and brilliant person; if my old job is foolish enough to cast aside someone they were so lucky to have for 4 decades, fuck 'em. i will pour my passion into this new land
This makes me happy - I’m excited for your new chapter, and inspired by your strength :)
oh that is so wonderful!! you can survive and maybe even thrive. you are so right not to try for an exemption. i didn't either. imagine asking permission to avoid something no one has the right to force you to do in the first place!!
as for me, i may not be doing as well as i like to think. i'm on the edge of tears a lot and this evening a cellist friend texted to tell me she would be here on saturday and couldn't wait to see me. i had to tell her that i'd been banished from the festival and that even though i would now be "permitted" into concerts, etc i would not go.
of course, she is well aware that these morning and afternoon chamber music concerts were the high point of my life. also, since i am the closest thing to an institution in the organization, she could not fathom my not being there.
well, that set me off.
honestly my BF and i discussed the absurd possibility of MOVING OUR HOUSE to the land we are buying and setting it up there- which is ridiculous since the property already has an 8 bedroom 6000 sq ft mansion, 6 long term rental cottages and a massive barn.
still, this house of ours is so deeply personal. i have designed every detail of it, restored the fireplaces myself, drawn etched glass windows that i found a sand blaster to make, laid out the kitchen. and it's not like it's finished. so even though i've lost the reason to be in this town, i just can't leave this house. not yet anyway.
we often have symphony musicians staying here who were originally from russia, bulgaria or slovenia. they always say that what is happening in the US over this covid thing looks an awful lot like what they were escaping from. it's very sad but it's, of course, why your new employers are so good for you! they know how bad things can be
Be ungovernable.
This 👆
?
They don’t want to govern us.
They want us dead.
We’re not in their plans for the future nor are we citizens in the present.
So uh, sure.
Irish democracy lol
I’m Irish American
Bloodline is Feinian
This is utter nonsense, a myth propagated by the Cowards who hung back
I kept telling (pleading even) people around me: DON'T PLAY. Don't download a passport app. Take your shot if you want but don't allow them to coerce you into it. Simple. Don't consent to things that can only hurt all of us in the end. Alas, people needed to go to the restaurant and go on their trips to Santa Banana. They obeyed out of pure selfish self-entitlement pretending they were virtuous and doing it for the 'greater good'. Canadians took obedience for virtue.
Canada played. And GOT PLAYED.
When British Columbia announced restrictions segregating “vaccinated” and “unvaccinated”, I wrote an email to my coworkers along the following lines: “it took 18 months to go from ‘we are in this together’ and ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’ to ‘show me your papers’. That’s medical apartheid”. The only reply I got, which might be sent to all recipients read: “It’s good public health police”. And right there I knew the country was lost.
When my Synagogue demanded papers for the experimental shot, I wrote to the admin saying of all groups of people, Jews would be sensitive and abolish this insanity.
Zero reply.
No papers no attendance.
I left that synagogue.
Holding hands w Hitler and worshipping the golden calf is not for me.
Similar experience with my former Catholic parish. First, social functions (like a pancake breakfast after mass) were restricted to those who had papers to show... then, segregated mass (let’s call it the “mass of the unjabbed” and the “mass of the jabbed”). We complained, we wrote letters; nobody cared; the parish pastor couldn’t even understand how pathetic this situation was, considering the “All are welcome” placard that had been recently placed at the entrance. Done with that parish.
Absolutely. Any house of worship that forces these death jabs to attend is demonic in my opinion, not Godly.
They may not realize they are worshipping Satan, but they are.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
It’s a masochist bunch! They love the beatings.
It all comes down to non-compliance. Refuse to obey and their proclamations become so much noise.
Of course, that doesn't help us get the borders open.
I’ve wondered if they (US and CAN) aren’t using the covid vaccination requirement as some a sort of de facto immigration control mechanism.
Considering that America's southern border is wide open to illegals with no vaxx requirement, while in Canada I believe if anything immigration increased throughout the lockdown ... No, I don't think they are.
Just to be clear. This is probably the best strategy. No argument there.
And it will lead to violence.
edit: The violence will likely arise from the State. Just ask any South American leader or Middle Eastern leader how not complying usually unfolds.
Or JFK.
7 million doses sitting in a warehouse unused. Wow. Now that's a great anecdote there. Hope does live, I guess. Of course, people like this guy will continue to be CEO of these companies. As far as I can tell, all the major companies in the world are "led" by people like this. Whenever we do "drain the swamp," we're going to have to purge 90 percent of the politicians, 75 percent of the bureaucrats, 99 percent of the mainstream journalists, editors and publishers and about 95 percent of the corporate CEOs and their top lieutenants. That's a lot of draining. Probably too much to happen.
Billions of unused doses -- with a B.
Chris I’m glad you bought up Ireland but you’re looking at Cromwell not Lloyd George or John Major.
We are a mortal threat to our elites, which is why they’ve created a genocidal cult of Wokeness to cull us (mass killoff).
Disease (ongoing) and Hunger (begun) leading into Famine does most of that, there will be sufficient violence to assist the process- as noted earlier the Police have “withdrawn consent” and the military will as well.
Ceteris Paribus or Mutas Mutandis if we don’t fight and win we’re gone.
And as noted Irish Democracy has no effect, it was Irish rebellion and as much Irish voters in America that got the South the Free State.
Withdrawing consent: Its a nice cope, it has the same impact as pasting the Mona Lisa with a cream pie.
...maybe he’ll just slap new expiration date over the old one & recycle them...
Gulp. Thanks for the correction. I was off by the proverbial "orders of magnitude!"
Sorry
While I’m sure many swamp creatures have pretended to take the vax, there are many more useful idiots that bought their own bullshit. Give it a couple more boosters - they’ll drain themselves.
7,000,000,000 is not seven million, Bill!
This is an amazing disclosure. So Pfizer just takes a loss on 7 billion unused doses? But the headline is what Chris highlighted with that tweet - the fact the world is "too uneducated" to do what the Pfizer CEO says we should do.
They aren’t taking a loss. We already paid for them.
Now Pfizer has not only been pod for these vaccines, but likely gets to apply some accounting trick to write off the unusable inventory and reduce whatever tax burden they may have had.
Pfizer:
Developed and tested and got onto the market new vaccine in about 10 months.
Got the government to waive all liability.
Got the government to do all its advertising.
Got the government to mandate or coerce pretty much 90 percent of the population to get this product (or one of their competitors).
Got the government to pay for all the vaccines.
Got the government to authorize booster shots every four or so months, ensuring that most customers got their product at least four times a year.
Got the government to push these vaccines every year perhaps forever.
Got them authorized for children 5 and older and is working on children 6 months and older.
.... Pretty good deal there from Pfizer's perspective.
All of this said, karma will kick in at some point. Prediction: Pfizer will be out of business in five years.
Purdue Pharma II: The Sequel.
I'm sure those excess doses were already paid for by us taxpayers
if we had, oh, I don't know, about seven billion empty syringes we could suck all the water right outta that swamp. i wonder where we could get that many empty syringes.
Change has to be a grass roots movement. Start local, local government, schools, what books your local library carries.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23419049
The Art of Not Being Governed
An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia
by James C. Scott
Yale University Press
I once lived close to a Lisu hilltribe village in Northern Thailand, and was fascinated by how they kept their way of life and tradition going, when I figured out that they stay quite aloof from the control hungry claws of the centralized Thai state. They are extremely weary of all the modern conviences and so called life improvements and make consessions just when it is absolutely necessary to not feel the wrath of the central power. But they forego all the sweet traps and do without: sacrifice for independence and relative freedom. We need to be able to forego things in not participating in the clown shows of the clown towns of our world.
The art of not being governed
what's really funny- listen to bourla. he says that the vaccines in storage that no one wants, they were going to be given to low income countries for free. sounds pretty altruistic, but then he clarifies- the US government and the EU BOUGHT them from Pfizer to give to the low income countries so Pfizer isn't on the hook for anything. Pfizer wasn't altruistic- your government was WITH YOUR MONEY. no one asked if you wanted to make such a gift.
then he goes on to say that there aren't enough "educated populations that believe the vaccines IS doing well.." in the text, they've corrected it to read "are doing well" but he clearly says IS while complaining about other people's lack of education
Ah, those ignorant Third World populations.
Associated with ungovernable truculence? So proud of my country.
Sometime around late 2021, I was a bit anguished. Canada had already been turned into a Prison State and medical apartheid was in full swing. Turning to thinkers and political dissidents, I rediscovered MacIntyre "After Virtue" (1981): "If the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without hope ... We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict." The "Benedict Option", along with Czech author and dissident Vaclav Havel's "parallel society" have since reshaped my attitude, and "Don’t show up for the clown show" has been a big part of it.
You perhaps understand why I sold my house and fruit trees in the city to move to 80 acres in a forgotten place to live as much as I can off the land.
I think that sounds like a very wise choice.
Ozymandias
BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias
Havel and Solzhenitsyn would agree. "Live not by lies" . On a side note, when was the last time you heard of a business not particularly financially stressed about 7 billion of its products being shelved?
Havel and Solzhenitsyn lived by Fantasy and freed none.
Freedom came from KGB reformers (Gorbachev), John Paul II, Reagan, Thatcher, Casey (Casey told Wall Street to turn off the USSR subsidy) and the Poles, Afghans, CIA all aligned in result if not intentionally.
Havel and Solzhenitsyn are the Harriet Beecher Stowe’s of The Cold War, nothing more.
I'm a bit late chiming in but I believe in what I call a "conspiracy of consent" or "conspiracy of shared apathy." You don't need a conspiracy for incredibly evil shit to happen. You just need people who don't really give a shit or tacitly agree with the outcome.
College professors have been telling every student for YEARS that the world is headed for Malthusian doom. Even while the growth rate has slowed to a near standstill and is trending naturally toward negative with the increased spread of economic benefits they still keep the same signal on high. So.... when it turns out something is killing large numbers of strangers, elites don't panic and try to fix it. They don't blow whistles. They just don't go out of their way because they think a few million less people is good.
And when the political pressure is on to release a vaccine or otherwise generate an outcome, the expedient always trumps the noble path because the problems a lack of integrity cause are far away and unlikely to bounce all the way back to their door. The immediate problem wins out and the harm it will inevitably cause is heaped with undeserved doubt.
Sometimes the claim of incompetence is a lie but most of the time competent people leave the scene long before the harm is obvious enough to force them to make a moral choice. Competent people resign from leadership and their teams get sidelined or follow them out. The incompetent are left - they are the ones who lack sufficient expertise to be certain they are perpetrating an monstrous act.
Organizations that tip into a culture of dis-integrity and incompetence end up in a downward spiral. Competent people smell it and go somewhere else for work. Pockets of competent people that remain end up in increasingly awkward or marginal positions.
When you are a performative asshat who knows just enough to put buzzwords on a powerpoint and you're well connected and credentialed you have enormous political advantages over productive people who have to remain committed to real missions that create real results.
That's why kingdoms have dynastic changes. Wealth and riches make weak, entitled children. As the leadership shifts from captains to courtesans the capacity to create effective outcomes goes to zero. Eventually whatever individual or group can assemble effective captains into a force overcomes the primping asshats. Then the cycle starts over.
I have a pat response to people who confront the beast.
The Bill of Rights isn't an exhaustive list of your rights. It is a the list of those rights that are absolutely necessary to maintain a free people in control of their government.
What you can do is to STRENUOUSLY and JEALOUSLY defend the rights in the Bill of Rights from ANY infringement. Defend your own and other people's rights. AND recognize that you are a member of WE THE PEOPLE.
For instance, YOU are accountable for defending free speech IN YOUR SOCIETY. Just because the government is the one enjoined from controlling speech doesn't mean you and I are off the hook. We are the government. If we find ourselves involved in supporting the silencing of people we disagree with it is our job to stop it or at least to withdraw our support for it. Whenever we act collectively WE ARE GOVERNING SOMETHING.
If those rights remain intact authoritarianism is impossible, totalitarianism is impossible, tyranny is impossible.
As it turns out the Bill of Rights are Amendments, that the core document of who holds power in Articles 1-3 is or rather was more important as they specify who holds what powers and they are overrun.