Public health or private wealth? How digital vaccine passports pave way for unprecedented surveillance capitalism
[Economic] [Social][Justice]
Public health or private wealth? How digital vaccine passports pave way for unprecedented surveillance capitalism
Jeremy Loffredo and Max Blumenthal
Posted November 26, 2021
For those yearning for an end to pandemic-related restrictions, credential programs certifying their vaccination against Covid-19 have been marketed as the key to reopening the economy and restoring their personal freedom. But the implementation of immunity passports is also accelerating the establishment of a global digital identity infrastructure.
And as the CEO of iProove, a biometric ID company and Homeland Security contractor, emphasized to Forbes, “The evolution of vaccine certificates will actually drive the whole field of digital ID in the future. So, therefore, this is not just about Covid, this is about something even bigger.”
For the national security state, digital immunity passports promise unprecedented control over populations wherever such systems are implemented. Ann Cavoukian, the former privacy commissioner of Ontario, Canada has described the vaccine passport system already active in her province as “a new, inescapable web of surveillance with geolocation data being tracked everywhere.”
For tech oligarchs such Bill Gates and neoliberal institutions such as the World Economic Forum, digital ID and digital currency systems have already enabled the extraction of unbelievable profits in the Global South, where hundreds of millions of people remain “unbanked” and therefore outside the sphere of electronic payments systems. More…
The Facts:
Surveillance and tracking are growing, not receeding. The Covid “crisis” has provided the perfect opportunity to institute vaccine passports, which will be the gateway to additional tracking and surveillance as well as a digital ID system.
Reflect On:
Regardless of whether you are vaccinated or not, do you really want to leave your children a dystopian world in a “papers please” society where all their movements and purchases are tracked by government, oligarchs, and transnational corporations?
The Four Layers of Reality — and Why We’re Only Allowed to Talk About One
[Social] [Economic] [Media] [Spiritual] [Political]
The Four Layers of Reality — and Why We’re Only Allowed to Talk About One
by Lee Camp
Posted November 25, 2021
No matter which mainstream media segment you’re currently watching, I can promise you it’s not getting to the heart of any issue. By definition they only participate in surface level analysis. For example, there are three or four levels of reality we should be discussing when we talk about any United States election.
we have three or four levels of reality that we should be discussing all the time because they’re incredibly important. But, generally speaking, American politicians and media don’t talk about the deeper layers. In fact, they only talk about the surface layer (because they’re corporate tools).
So, using this past presidential election as an example: Layer one was — Who’s going to win? Biden or Trump? That’s the surface layer. It was fair to talk about it and fair to debate it. But if we stop at that and don’t dig deeper, we don’t actually know anything about reality. It would be like licking the top crust of an apple pie and saying, “I get it. It tastes like crust. It’s dry and crumbly.” But in fact, you still have no idea what an apple pie is.
Now let’s move on to layer two (which is already a layer beyond what your mainstream corporate media will ever report on). Layer two is the slightly deeper understanding that American oligarchs win each election no matter what. They win it in multiple ways — one is by making sure progressives, socialists, libertarians, anarchists, communists, etc. are purged from the process. The other way they dominate every election is with cold, hard cash. And the third — perhaps the most important way — is that our system simply does not pass anything through the government that isn’t beneficial to the business community, AKA Corporate America. More…
Physicians and the Vaccine Tyranny
[Social] [Media] [Community]
Physicians and the Vaccine Tyranny
By Blaise Edwards, M.D.
Posted November 24, 2021
I find myself in the position that I must use an alias for fear of reprisal. Those days may be quickly coming to an end, as hospitals are denying requests for vaccine exemptions with impunity. I will likely soon be out the door, with nothing to lose. Even if I survive this round, if the “pandemic” continues, it won’t be long before I am shelved like a can of spam.
Doctors need to be called out. From early in the pandemic, it was like a mass hypnosis or forgetfulness of everything we had learned in medical school. Immune system knowledge was shelved and replaced by government dictates. The thought of early outpatient treatment with “off label” drugs that could modulate the immune system was forbidden. We essentially told patients that they had to go home and wait until they were sick enough to be hospitalized, then treatment would begin. Imagine telling all diabetics that there is no metformin, Glucophage, or insulin. Would we really wait until patients are in diabetic ketoacidosis, and then treat them only at the hospital? It is medical malfeasance of a grand scale.
We physicians gave up our training and our reasonable medical thought process. The reasons are multiple. First, it was the easy way out. Second, many of us are employed and fear reprisal. Third, despite what the public thinks, we physicians are not bold leaders, we tend to be sheep, and are afraid of having an entire institution ostracize us or our colleagues to think us crazy. More…
The Frightened Class
[Social] [Media] [Community]
The Frightened Class
By Thomas Harrington
Posted November 23, 2021
They’re all around us, especially those of us who live in relatively prosperous metropolitan neighborhoods in the US or Western Europe. Despite being—at least in material terms—among the most fortunate people who have ever walked the earth, they are very scared. And they want you to be very frightened too.
Indeed, many of them see your refusal to be as frightened as they are about life’s inevitable risks as a grave problem which entitles them and their often powerful and influential fellow travelers to recur to all manner of authoritarian practices to insure that you adhere to their increasingly neurotic view of reality.
This tendency has been in full bloom lately as the people who have sat safely behind their laptops during the last 20 months have harangued and threatened those who have been out on job sites and meatpacking plants mixing freely with others and the virus, to internalize their own obsessions.
And when these supposedly ignorant others—whose storehouse of empirical evidence about the dangers of the virus easily outstrips that of the laptoppers—refuse to buckle to the demand to be scared, they are met with all sorts of opprobrium. Viewed in historical terms, it’s an odd phenomenon. More…
The ‘untranslatable’ emotions you never knew you had
[Spiritual] [Community]
The ‘untranslatable’ emotions you never knew you had
by David Robson
Posted November 22, 2021
From gigil to wabi-sabi and tarab, there are many foreign emotion words with no English equivalent. Learning to identify and cultivate these experiences could give you a richer and more successful life.
Have you ever felt a little mbuki-mvuki – the irresistible urge to “shuck off your clothes as you dance”? Perhaps a little kilig – the jittery fluttering feeling as you talk to someone you fancy? How about uitwaaien – which encapsulates the revitalising effects of taking a walk in the wind?
These words – taken from Bantu, Tagalog, and Dutch – have no direct English equivalent, but they represent very precise emotional experiences that are neglected in our language. And if Tim Lomas at the University of East London has his way, they might soon become much more familiar. More…
The Empire of Lies Breaks Down: Ugly Truths the Deep State Wants to Keep Hidden
[Justice] [Political] [Social]
The Empire of Lies Breaks Down: Ugly Truths the Deep State Wants to Keep Hidden
By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
Posted November 22, 2021
America is breaking down. This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, racism, classism, fascism, fear-mongering, political correctness, cultural sanitation, virtue signaling, a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing government corruption and brutality, a growing economic divide that has much of the population struggling to get by, and militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment)—is manifesting itself in madness, mayhem and an utter disregard for the very principles and liberties that have kept us out of the clutches of totalitarianism for so long.
In Washington, DC, a tribunal of nine men and women spoke with one voice to affirm that the government and its henchmen can literally get away with murder and not be held accountable for their wrongdoing. The Supreme Court’s latest rulings are yet another painful lesson in compliance, a reminder that in the American police state, “we the people” are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to ‘serve and protect.”
Time has insulated us from the violence perpetrated by past regimes in their pursuit of power: the crucifixion and slaughter of innocents by the Romans, the torture of the Inquisition, the atrocities of the Nazis, the butchery of the Fascists, the bloodshed by the Communists, and the cold-blooded war machines run by the military industrial complex. More…
How to Dodge the Sonic Weapon Used by Police
[Justice] [Political] [Social] {Community]
How to Dodge the Sonic Weapon Used by Police
By Lynne Peskoe-Yang
Posted November 21, 2021
Military weapons have now come home to our streets
The LRAD is like a car alarm from hell—and if you aren’t careful, it could permanently damage your hearing.
Audio producer Cory Choy was reporting on the 2014 Black Lives Matter protests in New York City when he first experienced sound as a weapon. “Horrible, nauseating pain hit my body,” he tells Popular Mechanics, “and then I realized it was sound. At first you just think, ‘What’s happening to me?’ Your body goes into complete pain and panic mode. It’s the sound equivalent of looking into the sun.”
Despite his professional-grade headphones, the effect of the weapon—a long-range acoustic device, or LRAD—was so disorienting at first that Choy couldn’t tell which way to run and was forced to randomly pick a direction. But he was lucky.
“People in the direct line of fire [of the LRAD] didn’t run,” he says. “They just dropped to the ground and started screaming.” More…
Texas Case Illustrates Raw Tyranny of Civil Asset Forfeiture
[Justice] [Social]
Texas Case Illustrates Raw Tyranny of Civil Asset Forfeiture
by Brian McGlinchey
Posted November 20, 2021
Violating the American justice system’s cornerstone presumption of innocence, those whose property has been taken via civil asset forfeiture must prove their property wasn’t involved in a crime—or lose it forever.
In a real sense, the property itself is on trial. That’s reflected in the bizarre case names associated with civil asset forfeiture proceedings, such as “Nebraska v. One 1970 2-Door Sedan Rambler (Gremlin).”
That particular case illustrates that, even where a crime is charged, civil asset forfeiture can still be the instrument of terrible injustice: Police seized the Gremlin after arresting its owner for mere marijuana possession, saying it had been used to “transport” marijuana. The seizure was upheld by the state supreme court.
Property is regularly taken from third-party owners too. For example, the Philadelphia district attorney’s office has pursued the forfeitures of houses simply because a child living in the home had been caught selling drugs. More…
The Facts:
In 2014, the amount of money taken by federal law enforcement using civil asset forfeiture exceeded all burglaries.
Reflect On:
How can a society claim that one is “innocent until proven guilty” coexist with cicil assett forfeiture where one has to prove they were not involved in a crime?
The Snake-Oil Salesmen and the COVID-Zero Con
[Political] [Social] [Community] [Media]
The Snake-Oil Salesmen and the COVID-Zero Con
by Julius Ruechel
Posted November 19, 2021
If a plumber with a lifetime of experience were to tell you that water runs uphill, you would know he is lying and that the lie is not accidental. It is a lie with a purpose. If you can also demonstrate that the plumber knows in advance that the product he is promoting with that lie is snake oil, you have evidence for a deliberate con. And once you understand what’s really inside that bottle of snake oil, you will begin to understand the purpose of the con.
One of the most common reasons given for mass COVID vaccinations is the idea that if we reach herd immunity through vaccination, we can starve the virus out of existence and get our lives back. It’s the COVID-Zero strategy or some variant of it.
By now it is abundantly clear from the epidemiological data that the vaccinated are able to both catch and spread the disease. Clearly vaccination isn’t going to make this virus disappear. Only a mind that has lost its grasp on reality can fail to see how ridiculous all this has become. More…
This Biden Proposal Could Make the US a “Digital Dictatorship”
[Social] [Justice] [Political] [Community]
This Biden Proposal Could Make the US a “Digital Dictatorship”
by Whitney Webb
Posted November 18, 2021
A “new” proposal by the Biden administration to create a health-focused federal agency modeled after DARPA is not what it appears to be. Promoted as a way to “end cancer,” this resuscitated “health DARPA” conceals a dangerous agenda.
Biden’s newly announced agency, if approved by Congress, would integrate those past Obama-era initiatives with Orwellian applications under one roof, but with even less oversight than before. It would also seek to expand and mainstream the uses of these technologies and potentially move toward developing policies that would mandate their use.
If ARPA-H/HARPA is approved by Congress and ultimately established, it will be used to resurrect dangerous and long-standing agendas of the national-security state and its Silicon Valley contractors, creating a “digital dictatorship” that threatens human freedom, human society, and potentially the very definition of what it means to be human. More…
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Quotable Sayings
There is no chance, no destiny, no fate that can circumvent or hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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You do not become a billionaire through labor. You become a billionaire through inheritance, corruption or economic rents – or, in most cases, some mixture of all three.
Grace Blakeley
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Mainstream American liberals think they’re clear-eyed because they can see the propaganda strings being pulled by Fox and Donald Trump, and mainstream American conservatives think they’re clear-eyed because they can see the propaganda strings being pulled by MSNBC and the Democrats, but the propaganda strings on both trace back to the same puppet master. And seeing that is just the beginning.
Caitlin Johnstone
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You alone are the judge of your worth and your goal is to discover infinite worth in yourself, no matter what anyone else thinks.
Deepak Chopra
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It is obvious that the US government is destroying Assange to signal to journalists the consequences of publishing information. It is therefore also obvious that any journalist who fails to use whatever platform they have to speak out against Assange’s persecution has no intention of ever publishing anything that the US government doesn’t want published. Their silence on or support for what is being done to this man can and should be taken as an admission that they are nothing other than state propagandists.
Caitlin Johnstone
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It’s quite fitting that the – imperially pre-determined – judicial fate of Julian Assange is being played out in Britain, the home of George Orwell.
Pepe Escobar
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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
Mark Twain
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