Was Anything Real Last Year?
First of all, a follow-up on the Fauci email news -
One of the most revealing emails that was released featured a Fauci collaborator named Kristian Anderson telling Fauci that it appeared parts of the virus were engineered.
It has now been discovered that on the same day of that email, he was lambasting American politicians who were asking whether a lab leak was a possible origin for the virus, declaring such a line of thought racist (apparently the story of Chinese people eating infected bats or pangolins is less racist than a lab leak). An accusation of racism is the ultimate conversation stopper, and it worked in this context too. But why the rush to shut down questions that these scientists were asking themselves in secrecy?
This leads to my question for the week - how much of everything that has happened on the global stage these past twelve months has been real, and how much of our `world` has been the structuring of narratives convenient to those in positions of power? The Fauci emails provide an interpretative key for so many of the big stories of 2020 and 2021.
Let me list a few.
Lockdowns
You probably won`t hear about this because politicians do not admit mistakes but the University of Munich just admitted that lockdowns did nothing to stop the course of infections. Of course, despite their own findings, they feel compelled to say that this does not mean lockdowns were a mistake. University researchers did not slip into poverty, after all.
But the futility of lockdowns has been confirmed in Sweden too, which famously did not lock down, stop school, or mandate masks. When they decided this, health authorities warned that their death rates would double. Well, analysis now shows that they likely had about 700 excess deaths over the past two years. None of them from Covid in school-going children not wearing masks. But obviously this is an unsayable point to make in polite society.
The same pattern was seen in South Africa. Research in the Western Cape province shows that lockdowns had no effect on infection rates:
George Floyd
Did the death of George Floyd reveal a genocide of black people by cops around the world? It seemed so. Just yesterday the English soccer team took a knee to honour him. An English cricketer made his debut last week for his country and was banned straight after the match when offensive tweets from his teen years were discovered.
Meanwhile, many other stories complicate the whole narrative. I could list them all but John McWhorter, a black professor at Columbia University in New York, has done it for me here. Let me give you a sample:
Tony Timpa was 32 years old when he died at the hands of the Dallas police in August 2016. He suffered from mental health difficulties and was unarmed. He wasn’t resisting arrest. He had called the cops from a parking lot while intoxicated because he thought he might be a danger to himself. By the time law enforcement arrived, he had already been handcuffed by the security guards of a store nearby. Even so, the police officers made him lie face down on the grass, and one of them pressed a knee into his back. He remained in this position for 13 minutes until he suffocated. During the harrowing recording of his final moments, he can be heard pleading for his life. A grand jury indictment of the officers involved was overturned.
Not many people have seen this video, however, and that may have something to do with the fact that Timpa was white. During the protests and agonizing discussions about police brutality that have followed the death of George Floyd under remarkably similar circumstances, it is too seldom acknowledged that white men are regularly killed by the cops as well, and that occasionally the cops responsible are black (as it happens, one of the Dallas police officers at the scene of Timpa’s death was an African American)…
Had Tony Timpa been black, we would all likely know his name by now. Had George Floyd been white, his name would likely be a footnote, briefly reported in Minneapolis local news and quickly forgotten. In fact, white people are victims of police mistreatment “all the time” too.
I was reminded of McWhorter`s perspective on the issue of race when I read this story the other day. It did not make international news. I found it on a small, regional newspaper`s website. An elderly fire man was shot in his car near his home in small-town America. The victim happened to be white. The killer black. The black man admitted to the killing. He wanted to take the car. After two hours of deliberation, the jury unanimously declared the confessed killer innocent. The defendant had argued that he killed the man because he felt threatened by the victim after he had demanded his car.
There are so many stories like this, which the media does not blare out daily to shape your perspective on all things to do with race. Let me state something so shocking that people lose their jobs because of how controversial a statement this is: all lives matter. And if you disagree with this statement, ask yourself why you spent so much time last year tracking the daily deaths of mostly old white people.
Vaccine deaths
Is the vaccine really perfectly safe?
Did you know the vaccine is given on emergency use only, as it has no long term data, and it was not tested on young people, old people, pregnant women, or those who had recovered from Covid? We have no idea if it will affect fertility either.
You would never know from the media, but there is a tool in the US used to measure bad reactions to all vaccinations. Doctors can post these events on a website to track vaccine safety.
Now, most doctors won`t do this because they do not want to make people afraid of vaccines that are mostly far safer than the many other drugs modern people imbibe. It is estimated that these reactions are underreported at a rate of 100 to 1.
Here are the latest figures for vaccine deaths:
We`re told that everybody needs to be vaccinated to help the vulnerable. You would never know that giving somebody treatment they don`t need for `the greater good` is in direct violation of the UN`s list of human medical rights, that notorious renegade organisation.
The Pro-Trump Riot at the DC Capitol Building
We have been told that the riot was an attack on American democracy. That it was the worst such attack since the Civil War that ended slavery and the secession of the southern states. That it was an insurrection, treasonous in nature. Trump was banned from all social media as a result. Biden has put the US on white terror alert.
Here is what you have not been told. Nobody took a gun to the protest. No prisoners were taken. Many of the protestors were allowed in by the cops. (Protestors entering government buildings is not a rarity in the US - in fact, a lady who planted a bomb in the Capitol in the 80s was pardoned by Bill Clinton and became a chief fundraiser for BLM last year.)
The only fatalities were those of Trump supporters. Two or three died of natural causes. One unarmed female Trump supporter was shot point blank in the head. We were also told Trump supporters killed a cop. This turned out be false too. The policeman who died had gone home after the events of the day and went to hospital later with a stroke.
Masks
We were told at the beginning of the pandemic masks were useless. Then we were told they would save us, because the virus could spread asymptomatically. There is no evidence for this at all.
Some Canadians asked their local government for the scientific basis, the research consulted, and the cost-benefit analysis done before masks were mandated. This was the response they got:
Meanwhile over a billion plastic masks are now floating in our oceans. Need I remind you, plastic is an endocrine disruptor and micro-particles inhaled or drunk in cause hormonal imbalances and reduced fertility. These masks will strangle untold numbers of beautiful sea creatures too.
Covid death counts
Read this from one county in the US:
Watch this from one American state:
And this policy governing the entire country:
Why were the field hospitals never used?
Why did nurses make all those TikTok dancing videos if they were run off their feet?
I don`t directly know anybody who died from Covid. I am not saying there was no pandemic. But I am wondering how many of my readers know somebody directly, not secondhand, who died from Covid, and was not seriously ill or elderly before? I would genuinely like to know, because it seems to me that the apparently deadliest plague of all time should leave behind these stories on a widespread scale. The plague brought us `Ring a ring of rosies`, a song about children sneezing, after which they all fall down and die. Was Covid the same? I have no idea.
To conclude:
We should ask ourselves, how much of everything we `experienced` this past year did we truly experience in our day to day lives? How much of what we consider the story of 2020 just never happened to us personally?
Why do we spend so much time in a world of media which is not our own?
Christopher Lasch, in his landmark book, The Culture of Narcissism, described our experience of modern reality as “an unstable environment of flickering images.”
In this environment:
“The best defenses against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs… Love and work enable each of us to explore a small corner of the world and to come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or else to expect too much of them. Our standards of `creative, meaningful work` are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of `true romance` puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.”
To escape the flickering images that allow us to possess the world as we possess a mirror when we gaze into it, Lasch tells us to accept the limits of a small corner of the world and the comforts of real work and real relationships, but realistically and not romantically. In this way, we choose ordinary suffering rather than emotional crippling.
I would like to say more about our culture of narcissism another time, but for now it is worth pondering the idea that we choose to live in a simulated world so as to avoid the constraints of our own one.
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