Author Archives: rg

Nearly a Third of GenZ Favors ‘Government Surveillance Cameras in Every Household’

That's like, Totally Orwellian

Writes Tyler Durden:

Nearly one-third of Generation Z says they’d be just fine with government-installed surveillance cameras in every household under the guise of reducing domestic violence and other illegal activity.

“Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity?” asks a new survey from the Cato Institute. Of the responses, 29% of those aged 18-29 said yes.

When it comes to other age brackets, 20% of millennials (between the ages of 30 and 44) also want everyone watched.

Then, wisdom appears to kick in – as just 6% of Americans aged 45 and older were OK with government surveillance in every home.

Broken down by politics, 19% of liberals and 18% of centrists agreed that our daily lives should be monitored by the government for our own safety, while 9 – 11% of those who identify as conservative, very conservative, or very liberal agreed in what appears to be a “horseshoe” issue that unites both ends of the political spectrum.

Continue reading here.

My interpretation: The government has, over generations, covertly and increasingly overtly taught people in schools that they should seek salvation in government. This is now the result.

WHO launches new “digital health initiative”

Chalk up another “I told you so” for the Conspiracy Theorists.

Writes Kit Knightly:

On Monday, the World Health Organization and European Union announced the launch of their new “partnership”, building on the EU’s “highly successful” digital certification network, which was introduced during the “pandemic”.

From the WHO’s website [emphasis added]:

WHO will take up the European Union (EU) system of digital COVID-19 certification to establish a global system that will help facilitate global mobility…

This would be those digital health passports that “conspiracy theorists” warned about, but which we were all told weren’t ever going to be a thing.

Continue reading here.

Can we finally tell the truth about lockdown?

This inhuman experiment must never be repeated.

Writes Fraser Myers:

There have been a number of different attempts to estimate excess deaths during the pandemic period, but whatever methodology is used, the data always show two significant things. Firstly, there is no obvious correlation between the length or stringency of a nation’s lockdowns and the level of excess deaths. Secondly, Sweden, which infamously shunned hard lockdowns, has ended up with some of the lowest excess deaths from the pandemic in Europe. Whichever calculation of excess deaths you use, whether it’s from the Lancet, The Economist, the Spectator or the World Health Organisation, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that lockdown brought little gain for a lot of pain.

Proponents of lockdown see things differently, of course. As early as June 2020, an Imperial College London study declared the UK’s first national lockdown a stunning success, claiming that it had saved a whopping 470,000 lives. This figure relied on a model Imperial had produced, which predicted that 500,000 people would die from Covid unless severe restrictions were imposed. The actual number of deaths (around 30,000 at the time) was then subtracted from the projection. The trouble is, when applied to Sweden, the same modelling assumptions predicted 96,000 deaths by summer 2020. The actual death toll by that point, despite there being no lockdown in Sweden, was 6,000. Nevertheless, these highly questionable models were used to justify new lockdown measures throughout the pandemic. And they have since been held up as ‘proof’ that lockdowns saved countless lives.

Reade the rest here.

Jordan Peterson interviews Robert F. Kennedy jr.

The "rogue" Democratic candidate

Video here. (1 h 35 min)

Noteworthy points from Kennedy’s statements in the interview:

In the US, 70% of all newsshow adverts are from the pharmaceutical industry.

The pharma industry is a “criminal enterprise”. The 4 principal companies (he mentioned Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and another one I didn’t catch) have collectively paid $35 bn dollars in criminal damages and penalties over the past decade. For lying to doctors, defrauding regulators, falsifying science and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Pharmaceutical drugs are the 3rd largest cause of death in the US after cancer and heart failure.

Medical journals have become vessels of the pharma industry. The Cochrane charitable organisation has been an important counter-balance to this situation. [They recently debunked the myth that masks help prevent covid.] However, Bill Gates has recently started funnelling money into them, so he’s probably going to undermine them.

Kennedy thinks he has a chance as a Democratic candidate for presidency because polls show he would fare better against Trump than Biden would. However, the trick is to get this information out to the public, because the elite that control the legacy media certainly don’t want Kennedy to win (nor do they want Trump to win).

Biden won’t want to debate. Neither will Trump on the Republican side. So Podcasts and other alternative media are the way forward.

JP has this question: The Right knows where its “pathological” limits on the fringe are, and that is e.g. Holocaust-denial, racism etc. The Left does not seem to know an equivalent limit. Where does Kennedy see the limit of politics that can be countenanced?

Kennedy side-steps the answer (a bit of a red flag for me), he says he’d rather think about building bridges than disassociating himself.

JP clarifies that he thinks the left-wing idea of “equity” (equality of outcome) is pathological.

On the subject of climate warming, Kennedy says he definitely believes its happening and that man-made CO2 and methane are significant culprits. However, he is strictly against fearmongering and top-down, tyrannical solutions. He would remove all subsidies for energy and “use the free market”.

He exudes some naivete when he says that once the wind and solar farms are set up they will deliver free energy, all that is missing is a proper grid. I think he’s surprisingly wrong here. Solar panels will have to be replaced from time to time, as will wind turbines (and both will become hazardous waste).

However, interestingly he says that he is an environmentalist not out of fear for the future but out of love for nature (that chimes with me a lot).

Regarding Ukraine he says we have trapped the Ukrainians in a supposedly humanitarian mission. All we are doing is extending the war, therefore shovelling money into the US military-industrial complex.

On Broken Science

"More research is needed."

Paper published by Net Zero Watch (PDF).

Introduction:

A fascinating experiment was conducted not too long ago. An experiment about experiments. About how scientists came to conclusions in their own experiments. What happened was this: social scientist Nate Breznau and others handed out identical data to a large number of researchers and asked each group to answer the same question. The question was: Would immigration reduce or increase ‘public support for government provision of social policies’?

That can be difficult to remember, so let’s reframe this question in a way more memorable, and more widely applicable to our other examples. Does X affect Y? Does X, more immigration, affect Y, public support for certain policies?

That’s causal language, isn’t it? X affects Y? These are words about cause, about what causes what. Cause, and knowledge of cause, is of paramount importance in science. So much so that I claim – and I hope to defend the idea – that the goal of science is to
discover the cause of measurable things. We’ll get back to that later.

Just over 1200 models were handed in by researchers, all to answer whether X affected Y. I cannot stress enough that each researcher was given identical data and asked to solve the same question.

Breznau required each scientist to answer the question with a ‘No’, ‘Yes’, or ‘Cannot tell’. Only one group of researchers said they could not tell. Every other group produced a definite answer. About one quarter – a fraction we should all remember –answered ‘Yes’, that X affected Y – negatively. That is, more X, less Y.

Now researchers were also allowed to give some idea of the strength of the relationship, along with whether or not the relationship existed. And that one-quarter who said the relationship between X and Y was negative ranged anywhere from a strongly negative, to something weaker, but still ‘significant’. Significant. That
word we’ll also come back to.

You can see it coming…about another quarter of the models said ‘Yes’, X affects Y, but that the relation was positive! More X, more Y, not less! Again, the strength was anywhere from very strong to weak, but still ‘significant’.

The remaining half or so of the models couldn’t quite bring themselves to say ‘No’: they all still gave a tentative ‘Yes’, but said the relationship was not ‘significant’.

You see the problem. There is, in reality, only one right answer, and only one strength of association, if it exists. That a relationship does not exist may even be the right answer. I don’t know what the right answer is, but I do know only one can be. Yet the answers – the very confident, scientifically derived, expert-investigated answers –
were all over the place and in wild disagreement with each other.

Every one of the models was science. We are told we cannot deny science. We are commanded to Follow The Science.

But whose science?

UK Government Conspired with Social Media, A.I. Firms to Monitor and Censor Lockdown Critics – Report

Originally in the Telegraph, reported by Breitbart

Writes Peter Caddle:

The UK government worked with social media and A.I. firms to surveil and censor critics of coronavirus lockdowns, a report has claimed.

Officials within the UK government reportedly worked clandestinely with social media companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter as well as A.I. firms to monitor critics of the lockdown regime, as well as to identify and ultimately censor speech criticising the draconian government policy.

Published by The Telegraph, the claims bear many similarities to the so-called “Twitter files”, which revealed how U.S. authorities worked hand-in-glove with social media firms to censor criticism of government COVID-19 policy.

Continue reading here.

Here is some more about Covid revisionism:

We’ve been firmly in the grips of Covid revisionism for a while. Celebrities and pundits and politicians have all taken steps to downplay their complicity or talk about how “crazy” the pandemic was, as if it was impossible not to get caught up in it.

Further, there is an onslaught of policy “re-evaluation” that ranges from nit-picking to sweeping but is united in its reinforcement of Covid myths. The re-writing of the role ventilators played was especially unpleasant.

However, this one might be more grating, simply for the smallness of it.

A couple of days ago the Telegraph ran a “scoop”, revealing that the UK government’s counter-disinformation unit censored lockdown critics at the height of the pandemic (This really isn’t news, but more on that in a few days). Former editor of the Sunday Times Andrew Neil tweeted about it, neglecting to mention (or apologise for) his column in the Daily Mail calling for “vaccine refuseniks” to be “punished”.

A willing spreader and consumer of propaganda, suddenly claiming to realise propaganda was terrible…pretty nauseating.

As the UK gears up for the latest hearing in its farcical “Covid Inquiry” we can expect more and more of this rewriting of history.

The war on disinformation is just a war on dissent

The British state’s monitoring of lockdown sceptics is a democratic outrage.

Writes Tom Slater:

We need to retire the word ‘disinformation’, the apparent dread of governments, BBC specialist reporters and NGOs everywhere. Or at the very least we need to remember what it actually means. The definition of disinformation is ‘false information which is intended to mislead’. Until recently, it was largely used to describe propaganda pumped out by hostile foreign states. But in the great disinformation panic of our time, sparked by the populist revolts of 2016 and sent into hyperdrive by the paranoia of the pandemic, the word has come to mean something very different among our elites. It has come to mean inconvenient facts, or a differing opinion. Tackling disinformation is now just a euphemism for demonising and silencing dissent.

Just take a look at the latest revelations about the British state’s monitoring of lockdown sceptics during the pandemic. A new blockbuster investigation by the Telegraph and civil-liberties group Big Brother Watch details the shady activities of the Counter-Disinformation Unit, which is still operating and was set up by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and the now-closed Rapid Response Unit, which was run out of the Cabinet Office. They compiled reports about prominent lockdown sceptics including Carl Heneghan, director of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, and Molly Kingsley, co-founder of UsForThem, which valiantly campaigned against Covid school closures. The government also employed an artificial-intelligence firm to ‘scour social-media sites’ for wrongthink.

Read on here.