COVID reveals propensities towards tyranny
We know that China isn’t the least bit interested in liberty, and so policies such as these should not shock us:
Imagine a nation in such a state of distress that its citizens were reduced to bartering for food. A nation where women were so desperate for something to cook and eat that they started swapping sanitary towels for vegetables. A nation where families were so hungry that they would trade their cigarettes for a cabbage. This country actually exists. And it isn’t one of the poor, sometimes famished nations of the global South. It’s China. More accurately, it’s China under the policy of ‘Zero Covid’. …
The bartering for grub and other basic supplies is taking place in the city of Xi’an in north-west China right now. There has been a spike in community Covid infections in Xi’an and the authorities have responded with ferocious authoritarianism. Thirteen million people have been confined to their homes since 23 December. Initially they were allowed out once every two days to buy food, but even that infinitesimal scrap of liberty was done away with on 27 December. Since then, the people of Xi’an have been under literal house arrest. They are not permitted to leave their place of residence for any reason, not even to buy food…
To get around the rather important matter that people will become gravely ill if they don’t have food, officialdom in Xi’an has arranged to deliver essentials to people’s front doors. Not surprisingly, this hasn’t gone entirely smoothly. Residents have complained about not receiving enough to eat. Others say they have received no aid at all. Citizens have taken to Weibo to share images and videos of themselves bartering for foodstuffs…
Much more at the link.
The question of how far the leaders of a country will go in response to COVID – or with COVID as an excuse – is certainly not limited to China. We’ve learned a lot about the West as well, in the last two years. And a lot of it is very very bad.
The news from the northern part of Australia is more shocking than the news from China, because Australia used to be considered a country that placed some value in liberty:
Today, [Northern Territory Chief Minister Michael] Gunner announced that due to Omicron, he is taking the concept of lockdowns one step further. Effectively 1pm today, anyone who is not vaccinated is, by decree, designated as locked out of civil society in the region. Without notice, and effective almost immediately, the unvaccinated citizens in the Northern Territory are to remain confined in their homes and are not permitted to work.
At 1pm on Monday the lockout will be lifted; however, a mandatory vaccine passport process will be fully implemented in the territory, and the unvaccinated will continue to be locked out of all non-essential, businesses, operations and services in society.
And then there’s France. I’m not sure whether this comes under the heading of liberté, égalité, or fraternité, but I suspect it’s “none of the above”:
French President Emmanuel Macron feels emboldened by the rise of COVID fear. Pretenses are being dropped as these words were spoken yesterday about the citizens of France:
(EuroNews)”Macron told Le Parisien that he had decided to act against the non-vaccinated, by ‘limiting as much as possible their access to social life activity’. ‘The unvaccinated, I really want to piss them off. And so we will continue to do so, to the bitter end. That’s the strategy,’ the head of state said. ‘When my freedom comes to threaten that of other people, I become irresponsible. An irresponsible person is no longer a citizen.’”
“An irresponsible person is no longer a citizen”? Extraordinary. Does he realize the line he’s crossed? I suppose so, and I suppose it’s intentional. The inner tyrant emerges into the light of day. This happens all too often nowadays, but it’s still quite astounding to see in countries such as Australia and France, and even parts of the US.
[NOTE: This focus on vaccines is particularly odd considering that they really only mitigate the serious effects of the illness, on average. But to tyrant wannabees such observations are irrelevant.]
Once a government does something unprecedented once it is much easier to do it the second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. time.
This was part of Dennis Prager’s argument that this was the biggest policy mistake ever. That was almost two years ago now.
Too many sheep went along with this and now it will be with us in varying forms for a long, long time to come.
It has been obvious for quite some time, to all sane persons, that COVID-Zero (the policy of the CCP and some others) is a chimera, that the Wuhan-virus is now endemic, that lockdowns, masks, mandates, and testing are almost entirely counter-productive, that the figures for deaths from COVID have been manipulated up in the West and down in China, that the vaccines are no panacea, and that natural immunity and therapeutics have been shamefully neglected by the mostly worthless “public health establishment”, yet, thanks to the tyranny of Big Tech, expressing these sensible opinions would have one permanently banned from Twitter (Parag being even worse than Dorsey).
The vaccines are ineffective against omicron, which, at our current testing frequencies, appears to have a case fatality rate around 0.3%. So, the solution is forcing vaccines on people. Idiocracy is now.
The countries like Norway which successfully locked out the virus in 2020 discovered in 2021 that they needed an exit strategy, so let’s put ourselves in the same predicament. Idiocracy is now.
Sure seems like the public’s response to the tyrannical covid policies just shows that many (most?) folks can become Nazis, or at least go along with whatever policy a govt. mandates.
No need to be German.
I never understood the Nazi -German culture connection anyway. After all, Stalin/Lenin/Trotsky never had problems recruiting folks to engage in mass genocide.
Castro, Pol Pot, Mao, Kim Jong Un, et. al., never had problems recruiting folks who actually did the dirty work.
And even here in the USA, we have the DOJ, FBI and the demonkrats singling out for special punishment those arrested for the Jan 9 events or targeting for prosecution those individuals they wish to destroy.
When it comes to exercising power and authority, there never is a shortage of volunteers, irrespective of the tasks they are ordered to complete.
Art Deco,
It’s even worse than that. The vaccines were designed for the original version from two years ago and the boosters they are all increasingly forcing on people are also for the early version of COVID.
This could be why they are somewhat less effective.
But hey, Pfizer has all them doses ready to go so what the hell commence the injections.
It is truly insane.
I guess an analogy could be they are forcing people to get the flu shot… from five years ago.
Trillions in government money mostly wasted. Lives shattered, businesses ruined, and yet they double down.
Trust in government agencies that are supposed to protect the public is gone. Politicized, competing narratives keep citizens confused and fearful. “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” We’re seeing it up close and personal.
Down here in Florida things are approaching normal. Whereas the great blue domains are shutting down again. To what end? It seems that since omicron is known to be less virulent then shutting down is pointless.
I love my country but fear my government.
I never understood the Nazi -German culture connection anyway.
Because the Nazi Party existed in Germany and Austria and hardly anywhere else, perhaps? The closest analogue elsewhere in Europe might have been the Croatian Ustase.
Emmanuel Macron is 44 years old. He was 12 when the Berlin Wall fell. Putting the gerontocracy at the top of U.S. politics/media to the side as an outlier, the bulk of Western political elites are now made up of people whose adult lives have primarily, if not entirely, been post-Cold War.
These people believed we were at the end of history, that all major questions had been answered, all major issues resolved, and all that was left was for THEM to guide Mankind into a glorious future that essentially looked and functioned forever EXACTLY as things did in the 1990s.
We’ve had a few global economic crises since then and some military conflicts, but the negative impact of them were almost exclusively limited to the hoi polloi. COVID has really been the first time most of the current Western political elite have had to recognize they don’t know everything, they don’t control everything, and that the majority of humanity might actually have their own ideas and desires.
I once worked at a business that was relatively successful. Then some new corporate managers came in and made radical changes to try and “open up new markets and opportunities.” Those changes proceeded to crash the business and left it a good bit less successful than it was before. None of the people responsible for the disastrous changes could ever acknowledge they were to blame, so scapegoats had to be found elsewhere. We’re pretty much seeing the same dynamic at work now when it comes to COVID.
Mike
In quite a few states, the COVID machine refuses treatment for the illness (monoclonal antibodies) to white people, baldly, out in the open, irrespective of supply, with an unsupportable flimsy excuse of policy reparations for past imagined injustices. Where are the lawsuits? Where is the uprising, with violence? Where are the voices in the medical institutions speaking out against plainly illegal policies? Where are the anonymous bureaucrats installing these policies quietly, with no explanation and no public face to be held accountable?
When things go this far with no articulated responses, I fear the backlash. It will be violent, intemperate, unsparing – and long overdue.
But hey, Pfizer has all them doses ready to go so what the hell commence the injections.
It pays the same.
“An irresponsible person is no longer a citizen”? Extraordinary. Does he realize the line he’s crossed?
Thank you, neo, for putting that in words. Maybe I need to follow twitter to find out, but I haven’t seen any right leaning politicians here that ought to be calling out Macron’s comments. It needs to be called out and France sanctioned while he is President. That may seem a stretch, but it should at least be stated that his comments crossed a line for what is supposedly is a democracy. If a national leader can deem citizenship based on whether voters get a vaccine or not; then that nation has a tyrannical leader and cannot be trusted.
None of the people responsible for the disastrous changes could ever acknowledge they were to blame, so scapegoats had to be found elsewhere. We’re pretty much seeing the same dynamic at work now when it comes to COVID.
Good point.
Perhaps M. Macron is in a bit of a snit because his personal life is the subject of all kinds of rumors on social media. His wife Brigitte is 25 years his senior; they met when he was 15 and she was his high school French and Latin teacher. They were finally married in 2007. Macron has described their affair as “a love often clandestine, often hidden, misunderstood by many before imposing itself.” Mme. Macron has three children by her first husband; the younger of the two daughters is only 7 years younger than Macron himself.
At present, Mme. Macron “plans to take legal action after a bizarre disinformation campaign was launched against her falsely claiming she was born a man. The rumors appeared to have originated in a March Facebook post before spreading in mid-October . . . .During Macron’s successful 2017 campaign for office, he was forced to deny claims that he had a gay affair.”
https://nypost.com/2021/12/22/emmanuel-macrons-wife-brigitte-plans-to-sue-over-false-claims-she-is-transgender/
No wonder he wants to change the subject to COVID vaccinations.
These governments seem quite confident. Not unlike Nicolae Ceau?escu in 1989 Romania. Later convicted of “economic sabotage” with his sentence promptly carried out to much celebration
Australia’s Northern Territory is Abo Land.
Guess who has shocking life expectancy because utterly unsuited to and incapable of adapting to modernity (alcohol, free handouts, abundant carbohydrates, etc.) and are more easily knocked over by the Covid or any other virus?
Now the problem is that having a bunch of Abos die on your political or bureaucratic oversight (hugely well remunerated industry ‘managing’ abo welfare) watch is career-ending.
So they will lock anyone and everyone down and engage in all kinds of Theatre to mitigate against this.
Well Griffin, our own Soviet State Board of Health will apparently be meeting 1/12/2022 to discuss applying current infectious disease WAC codes to include Covid-19 for all WA State residents.
Among the proposals to be discussed:
• Allowing local health officers to use law enforcement (WAC 246-100-070) to force an emergency order to involuntarily detain a person or group of persons (families) to be isolated in a quarantine facility (WAC 246-100-045) following refusal to voluntary comply with requests for medical examination, testing, treatment, counseling, vaccination (WAC 246-100-040). These specifics come from WAC 246-100.
• Including the Covid-19 injections as part of school immunization requirements using WAC 246-105.
Because these policies worked so well for California. I wonder if the Toppenish ‘temporary internment center’ from WW2 Japanese days is still available.
DEADLINE for Public Comments – 12:00 Noon, Friday January 7
Here’s the public comment link: https://sboh.wa.gov/Meetings/ProvidePublicComments?fbclid=IwAR2GvuCSwNGNWI2eFQl4cdGDWHr5I5iRULZ0RVmw8H6YW-yO3OC0R9dfsxA
• To voice your concerns, register for the live webinar here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DjusY10WTj-EyQyDTdyxsw
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3162386/chinas-zero-covid-policy-under-renewed-scrutiny-economic
It will be interesting to see when China abandons Covid Zero.
Certainly not before the Winter Olympics.
General Winter gets a say, too, come to think of it. Probably not before the Summer at the very, very earliest. Spring, not Winter, is the real flu season in this part of the world.
And there’s the minor detail that 2022 is when, under the Post-Deng Dispensation, there would be the decennial transfer of leadership. Not. Going. To. Happen.
Salowly, salowly… as the Thais say.
Before I got off of Facebook, I followed LTC Allen West’s comments very closely. He was outspoken against Covid power grabs and, although he is black himself, seemed to hate BLM, being more of a MLK guy himself. He was outraged when the memorial to the Black Regiment that was portrayed in the movie “Glory” was vandalized, publicly vowing to destroy “ this movement.” He is a big second amendment supporter, often running around Texas with his open carry gun on his hip. He was the chairman of the Texas Republican Party and is currently challenging Governor Abbot from the right.
https://west4texas.com/news/
I have been reading Robert Kennedy Jr’s book, “The Real Anthony Fauci.”
I have long thought of him as a nut but the book is good with tons of references.
The CEO of Pfizer talks about an FDA approved pill that has an organic microchip that reports when it is swallowed, ensuring compliance. I got this link originally off of Ace of Spades site.
https://mobile.twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/1476560686662799377
jon baker
My wife and I were on the Freedom Trail in Boston last spring. The monument to the 54th MA Volunteer Infantry had been taken to storage for safe keeping. Outrageous.
The tyrant wannabes include a number, a large number, of Karens and their male counterparts who glory in making people do stupid stuff
The full slogan may explain:
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, ou la Mort!
@Mary Catelli:
“Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, ou la Mort!”
*rummages around inside his upturned hat*
Congratulations! You’ve drawn the Vendée in this round of the game.
It’s Sink or Swim Time.
Allons!
“propensities towards tyranny.”
“Raw desire for raw power.”
There is a proper response to that.
Z may not be able to grasp that the heavy handed Australian Northern Territory bureaucrats don’t want the aboriginal people to die from the WuFlu irrespective of their own political self interests. They may actually see the aboriginal people as actual people. Imagine that.
IIRC there is a certain sensitivity in Australia regarding the vulnerability of the aboriginal people to novel, in this case from the CCP, diseases. The Spanish flu decimated the aboriginal peoples during the last century IIRC.
Maybe like Z those bureaucrats just shouldn’t give a damn? Eugenics and Aktion T4, Z?
@Om:
Believe me when I say that it would be all for the best in the best of all possible worlds were a mob of Top End Abos to move in next door to you. Just imagine all the Christian Charity you’d be able to practice.
They’re certainly more human to me than they are to the average bureaucrat bugxirson. It’s just that they’re not the kind of humans I’d want living anywhere near me. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
It’s OK to not like other peoples and want to avoid them, BTW:
Do you have something against the Sentinelese and their innate desire for Free Association? That would be Racist! 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeBzAp3G690
I would be very unhappy if I had to be locked down so that some bureaucrat could achieve his Abo-preservation KPIs and keep zis or xir job and get a bonus. That was the point. Swoosh, of course.
Jon,
Pfizer is working on an mRNA Shingles Vaccine too…
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/588335-pfizer-teaming-with-biontech-to-develop-mrna-based-shingles-vaccine
Wonder if NIH gets a patent royalty on that too.
Z invents a new
name for his kind of humans, ‘Sent…..’ something or whatever. Do they blow smoke whenever they speak and have relations (familial) with Strawmen and Scarecrows?
For those not up on ‘Z speak’ KPI is Key Performance Indicator, a very critical buzzword to buttress Z’s amazing insights. Or not.
These people are evil and there’s only one way to deal with this level of evil.
“An irresponsible person is no longer a citizen”
Let that quote sink in. Even if it was stated partially as hyperbole, it was stated. Not by Xi, Putin, Kim, or Maduro. Not even by those bogeymen liberals love to scorn: Bolsonaro and Modi.
No, it was stated by the democratically elected head of state of one of the world’s oldest democracies, and (up until recently) one of the freest countries in the world.
Seriously…let it sink in. Really reflect on it. That it was said, who said it and the presumed lack of any serious blowback from it, speaks volumes, maybe even a whole library, on the state of the West at present
I’m going to stop with the “they mitigate severe effects of the disease” Narrative.
That was then, this is now.
They never statistically significantly decreased death, which I’ll argue is the severe effect we should have been looking at, as hospital care was totally arbitrary early on and involved early intubation and ventilation, and now, based on data out of Denmark, UK, Canada–the most injected have the highest rate of hospitalization.
The uninjected are faring best.
Yes, there can be all sorts of reasons for that—but I am not going to say something that in any way makes experimental genetic therapy sound beneficial at this point in time, especailly knowing what we do about early treatment.
And am I concerned about the 40% increase in deaths in Q3 and 4 being reported in 18-64 year old employed people. They aren’t all OD’ing over the weekend.
The judge forcing the data out from Phizer in the next eight months instead of fifty years is our friend.
Here’s Geert van den Boosche’s latest letter to the WHO:
https://www.voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org/videos-and-interviews/second-call-to-who-please-dont-vaccinate-against-omicron
Australia’s Northern Territory is Abo Land.
70% of the population has no indigenous ancestry to speak of.
1/3 of the population lives in Darwin and another 1/4 lives within commuting distance of Darwin. It’s a city-state with a lot of trash land.
By the way, Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington State is encouraging state lawmakers to make it illegal to question the validity of an electoral outcome. Jay is not the brightest bulb on the string. He owes his election to the fact that WA has had universal mail-in voting for many years now, during which time NO Republican has won a state-wide office. So it obviously works like a charm.
King Jay of Inslee continues to be a curse on all the houses of Washington.
The John Lithgow character in ‘Footloose’ has clearly inspired this Australian authoritarian.
https://twitter.com/aginnt/status/1479474017052413952
Lee:
I have never seen any data that indicates that “the uninjected are faring best” – unless, of course, you’re talking about children and the very young, many of whom often are both uninjected and virtually never get severe COVID anyway.
For all statistics about vaccinated and unvaccinated people one must take into consideration what percentage of the population is vaccinated, plus whether deaths are from COVID or with COVID. Otherwise the statistics are meaningless and misleading. For example, in a country in which the elderly are the most highly-vaccinated group, and “with COVID” stats are included along with “from COVID” stats, you’ll get a lot of deaths of vaccinated people because death rates of the elderly from all causes are much higher than in younger people. That’s obvious.
I have read links provided by commenters such as yourself that purport to prove the type of thing you assert here. But so far they have proven nothing of the sort. Here you don’t even offer a link to that data you mention, but my guess is that it’s much the same data I read earlier.
neo, data from both Denmark and UK show higher per capita infections and hospitalizations in the boosted as Omicron has played out. Likely Gibraltar as well, and Vermont too.
Steve Kirsch, Alex Berenson, and Robert Malone’s substacks are likely where I have seen that data and would have the references you are seeking. Perhaps some of Peter McCollough’s slide presentations.
Innate and cellular immunity are the first line of defense for respiratory viruses, not the AB for the alpha spike that gets made in response to the mRNA injections. Both are markedly depressed for the first two weeks after mRNA injections, and they remain so for the length of the studies. Additionally, ramping up one’s ability
to produce ABs for the alpha spike protein, which do very little to inhibit Omicron (why two out of the three monoclonals have little effect on Omicron–in in vitro studies , they don’t bind to the new spike) may take “immune energy” AWAY from effectively fighting the Omicron virus. (Original antigenic sin theory.).
And as you note, younger people make up a bigger per centage of the uninjected, and as we know, are not likely to be hospitalized for any Covid infection–alpha, delta or Omicron, which will be reflected in that data.
By destroying their control group once the EU was authorized, we are NEVER EVER going to know if the claims made about the injection are valid. The apparent protection offered by the injections could simply be from behavioral changes adopted by the people who chose to get injected–especially people who participate in a study of a novel therapeutic, or were early adopters.
Do they all take vitamin D every day too? Do they never go out to dinner? Do they go to church? use public transportation? Do they still just see people in their pod?
We have no idea if these “excess” deaths we are seeing are long term side effects of the injections, or just some random thing that happens to be killing people that attacks working people.
Lee:
I have not seen statistics that say what you are describing, and you have not provided them. In addition, I have seen data that says the opposite, and most definitely data that says that serious cases are far more common in the unvaccinated.
And of course there’s also the issue of the vaccinated being an older and more vulnerable population.
So…. when do you think the vaxxed will receive their 18 digit (3 groups of 6) tattoos, to mark them….?
Jus’ Wonderin’….
}}} Sure seems like the public’s response to the tyrannical covid policies just shows that many (most?) folks can become Nazis, or at least go along with whatever policy a govt. mandates.
No need to be German.
I personally assert this is a direct result of what we call “The Germanic System of Education”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
Give me a time machine… one of the first people I’d go back and kill in the crib would be Horace Mann.
:-/
neo, here’s what you say you don’t see:
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/new-big-data-study-of-145-countries
Lee:
There’s so much wrong with the article you linked that it would take an enormous amount of time and study to explain. I’ll be more brief than that.
First of all, how many people on earth can understand it? Can you, for example? It is incredibly long and to understand the math it purports to use is beyond the ability of nearly everyone.
But that’s just the beginning of the difficulties. A lot of studies are difficult to understand and have complex math, but they’ve been published and peer-reviewed, and we at least know the training and credentials of the authors. Part of that review process involves other scientists vetting where the statistics (the numbers that are being crunched) come from, and whether they are accurate. As far as I can tell, this is not done at all for the article you linked. Where did author “Kyle A. Beattie” get these country statistics in the first place and in particular are they accurate? You may recall that in an earlier Lancet study on COVID, the initial statistics were “garbage in” and the study was discredited when the authors were asked to validate them and could not. What about this one?
I couldn’t even ascertain who this author – “Kyle A. Beattie” – is, but in the comments section at Substack, people said he’s a Canadian political scientist. I don’t know whether that’s true, but if it’s true then it certainly doesn’t inspire confidence that he knows what he’s doing in the sense of statistics of this complexity.
The trajectory of COVID in each country is very different even WITHOUT vaccines. Some countries were very lightly hit and some very heavily hit – prior to vaccines. Many countries also have had cycles (prior to vaccines) of high infection and low infection alternating back and forth. That represents a tremendous drawback to any study such as the one the author purports to have done. Unless all of that is controlled for in each country – as well as other factors such as age, changes in virus mitigation such as masking and distancing, methods of reporting, definitions of cases and deaths, definitions of what vaccinated means (how many?) and what brand of vaccines were used – it is impossible to say the data means anything.
This part in particular caught my attention (from the actual study itself, not the Substack article):
This makes no sense. Those countries that weren’t hard hit earlier often experience an increase later – it has to do with virus patterns, weather patterns, all sorts of things that we poorly understand. “Later” could certainly be after vaccines are introduced, but that would not mean any increase was caused by vaccines. And some countries (whether vaccinated or not) simply don’t seem to have much COVID ever, whether because of weather patterns, previous exposure of the population to related viruses, genetic resistance in that population, use of certain medicines in the general population, age of population, density of population, all sorts of things we poorly understand. These countries with lower disease rates will of course have lower vaccination rates for obvious reasons. But such countries (Burkina Faso, Chad, DRC, South Sudan, as used in the study) are typical only of themselves and do NOT represent the natural course of COVID as it would be in a country such as Italy or the UK if such a country didn’t have vaccines. That’s absurd.
From a Substack comment:
Another comment:
And another comment: