Friday 29th of March 2024

some of us got lucky. we found love before the big social distancing stick...

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Western civilization, led by the US government and media, has embarked upon a campaign of mass psychological terrorism designed to cover for the collapsing economy, set up a new pretext for Wall Street’s ongoing plunder expedition, radically escalate the police state, deeply traumatize people into submission to total social conformity, and radically aggravate the anti-social, anti-human atomization of the people.

The pretext for this abomination is an epidemic which objectively is comparable to the seasonal flu and is caused by the same kind of Coronavirus we’ve endured so long without totalitarian rampages and mass insanity.

The global evidence is converging on the facts: This flu is somewhat more contagious than the norm and is especially dangerous for those who are aged and already in poor health from pre-existing maladies. It is not especially dangerous for the rest of the population. 

The whole concept of “lockdowns” is exactly upside down, exactly the wrong way any sane society would respond to this circumstance. 

It’s the vulnerable who should be shielded while nature takes its course among the general population, who should go about life as usual. Dominionist-technocratic rigidity can’t prevent an epidemic from cycling through the population in spite of the delusions of that religion, especially since Western societies began their measures far too late anyway.

So it’s best to let herd immunity develop as fast as it naturally will, at which time the virus recedes from lack of hosts (and is likely to mutate in a milder direction along the way). This is the only way to bring a safer environment for all including the most vulnerable. 

The fact that most societies have rejected the sane, scientific route in favor of doomed-to-fail attempts at a forcible violent segregation and sterilization is proof that governments aren’t concerned with the public health (as if we didn’t know that already from a thousand policies of poisoning the environment while gutting the health care system), but are very ardent to use this crisis they artificially generated in order radically to escalate their police state power toward totalitarian goals.

The whole concept of self-isolation and anti-social “distancing” is radically anti-human. We evolved over millions of years to be social creatures living in tight-knit groups. Although modern societies ideologically and socioeconomically work to massify and atomize people, nevertheless almost all of us still seek close human companionship in our lives.

(I suspect most of the internet police-state-mongers are not only fascists at heart but are confirmed misanthropic loners who couldn’t care less about human closeness.)

This terror campaign seeks to blast to pieces any remaining human closeness, which means any remaining humanity as such, the better to isolate individual atoms for subjection to total domination. Arendt wrote profoundly on this goal of totalitarian governments, though even she didn’t envision a state-driven cult of the literal physical repulsion of every atom from every other atom.

So far the people are submitting completely to a terror campaign dedicated to the total eradication of whatever community was left in the world, and especially whatever community was starting to be rebuilt.

Some dream of this terror campaign somehow bringing about a magical collective transformation. They don’t explain how that is supposed to happen when everyone’s so terrorized they’re desperate to detach physically from their own shadows, let alone physically come together with other people. But any kind of political or social action, any kind of movement-building, requires close person-to-person contact.

It seems that for most erstwhile self-alleged dissidents, the fact that social media is no substitute for face-to-face organizing and group action, a fact hitherto universally acknowledged by these dissidents, is another truth suddenly to be jettisoned replaced by its complete antithesis.

Thus the terror campaign is a virus causing those it infects to abdicate all activism and all prospect for all future activism, for as long as they remain insane with the fever of this propaganda terror.

Far more profoundly and evoking despair, the terror campaign is a virus causing those it infects to fear and loathe all human contact, all companionship, all closeness, all things which ever made us human in the first place. Prior totalitarian regimes sought this lack of contact and trust through networks of informers. 

These networks are part of today’s terror campaign as well, encouraged from above and spontaneously arising from below as a result of the feeling of terror as well as the exercise of prior petty-evil intentions on the part of petty-evil individuals.

But today’s totalitarian potential is far worse than this. Now the regimes aspiring to total domination have terrorized and brainwashed the vast majority of people into an automatic physical distrust of all other people. One no longer fears that someone is an informer, but fears the very existence of another human being.

Any kind of human relations, from personal friendship and romance to friendly social gatherings and clubs to social and cultural movements become impossible under such circumstances. This threatens to be the end of the very concept of shared humanity, to be replaced by an anthill of slave atoms with no consciousness beyond fear and the most animal concern for food and shelter, which already is allowed or denied in the same way experimenters do with lab rats.

And the more people fear and loathe the literal physical existence of all other people, the more the situation becomes ripe for every epidemic of murder, from the spiking rate of domestic violence and killings to incipient lynch mobs to pogroms to Nazi-style extermination campaigns.

This is the system’s end goal. It’s the logical end where every trend of today leads. All of it is trumped up over an epidemic which objectively is a flu season somewhat rougher than average.

Why do the people want to surrender and throw away all reality and future prospect of shared humanity, happiness, freedom, well-being, over so little? Is this really a terminal totalitarian death cult, the globe as one massive Jonestown?

So far it seems this is what the majority wants. If they don’t really want this consummation of universal death in spirit, emotion and body, they’d better snap out of their terror-induced mental delirium fast, before it’s too late.

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/07/27/the-ultimate-divide-and-conquer/

curled-up in our self-imposed prison cells...

 

It has frequently been observed that terror can rule absolutely only over people who are isolated against each other and that therefore one of the primary concerns of tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result. This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from people acting together, acting in concert; isolated people are powerless by definition.

 


Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

 

 

Johanna "Hannah" Cohn Arendt (/ˈɛərənt, ˈɑːr-/,[11][12][13] also US: /əˈrɛnt/,[14] German: [ˈaːʁənt];[15] 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975), also known as Hannah Arendt Bluecher, was a German-American philosopher and political theorist. Her many books and articles on topics ranging from totalitarianism to epistemology have had a lasting influence on political theory. Arendt is widely considered one of the most important political philosophers of the 20th century.

 

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt

 

See also:

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/32297

 

and:

philosopher at work ahead...

operation miracle...

If any one country has displayed in actions the human solidarity required to build a better world amid grinding poverty, malignant malnutrition, and endless bloody wars it is surely Cuba. 

Amid the treacherous global COVID-19 pandemic the small socialist island in the Caribbean with just over eleven million citizens has defiantly declared in words and practice that another world is possible. Selfish greed, obscene hoarding of wealth and grotesque disparities in access to health, housing, and education are the realities of life in it’s rich and powerful American neighbour ninety miles away but Cuba embarrasses the US every day in terms of healthcare, education, housing and welfare.

Recently nominated for the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize the Cuban Medical Brigades have reminded the world of the importance of human compassion and solidarity. It really is one of the greatest stories that has never been told. The billionaire owned mainstream media carry meaningless and vacuous stories daily but how many of you were aware that 3,300 Cuban doctors, nurses and technicians were formed into 34 COVID-19 international medical brigades to assist in the fight against the pandemic in 28 countries across the world? Or that 28,000 medical professionals from Cuba are currently providing healthcare in 59 countries, many at no cost to the host countries or, of course, the recipients of the care?

How many have heard of Operation Miracle, the programme that has given free sight-saving operations to four million people in need, or the thousands of child victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster treated by Cuba, or the island’s response to the Pakistan earthquake in 2006, or its offer of help to the US following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or it’s medical teams despatched to the frontline in Haiti’s battle with cholera, and the medical teams it sent to West Africa to combat Ebola in 2014?

Cuban Medical Brigades Win Awards for Self-Sacrificing Care

As soon as the COVID-19 virus engulfed other countries and threatened to over-run their respective health systems Cuba offered medical assistance. By March 21st, a 52-strong brigade was sent to Italy to assist the worst affected Lombardy region and other cities, the first time Cuba has sent an emergency contingent to Italy, one of the world’s richest countries. Only two weeks ago thirty-eight Cuban doctors and nurses were awarded Civil Merit medals by the Piedmont Regional authority in Italy recognising their dedicated and lifesaving efforts:

“The Cuban health professionals worked alongside Italian medics in Turin for three months. Their awards recognise “the role the medical team has played during the 2020 health emergency, dedication and high professionalism lavished daily caring Piedmontese patients with Covid-19”.

The words of one of the doctors on the day they flew out to Italy in March are inspirational from a human solidarity point of view:

“We are all afraid but we have a revolutionary duty to fulfil, so we take out fear and put it to one side,” Leonardo Fernandez, 68, an intensive care specialist, told Reuters late on Saturday shortly before his brigade’s departure.

“He who says he is not afraid is a superhero, but we are not superheroes, we are revolutionary doctors”.

Cuba Lost Over Half its Doctors After the 1959 Revolution

Immediately after the January 1959 Cuban revolution that overthrew the brutal Military General Batista who ruled for the rich and was in the pockets of the US government and big business concerns such medical solidarity across the world would have been impossible. Over half the island’s doctors, the best paid ones, fled for Florida leaving only 3,000 in a country of eleven million. Undeterred by the obstacles Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and the other revolutionary leaders set about building a society which prioritised welfare over warfare and dedicated maximum available resources to health and education across poverty ravished Cuba.

Remarkably, and despite a cruel and illegal economic embargo, blockade and very punitive sanctions regime imposed by successive US governments but recently increased by Trump, Cuba today has a life expectancy comparable with the world’s richest nations and an education system and literacy rate comparable with the best in the world and better than its rich bad neighbour.

Today in Cuba 26% of the national Gross Domestic Product is dedicated to free public health care. In the US, 56 million people struggle to pay for health insurance and inability to pay healthcare bills is the number one cause of family bankruptcy.

Cuba’s Primary Healthcare System Now World Admired

Cuba’s vast and universal primary healthcare system is now studied admiringly from across the world as it places over 10,000 family doctors and over 10,000 family nurses into every community with a pro-active agenda targeting at risk families and promoting early intervention strategies based on the time served maxim that prevention is better than cure. Cuba’s healthcare system is genuinely local and universal. A key plank of that system, and one which an independent Scotland must pursue urgently, is its publicly owned pharmaceutical and biotech industry. Public health not private profit drives the pharmaceutical research and development in Cuba which is why life enhancing breakthroughs are regularly made.

In the US and UK, the pharmaceutical industry is underpinned by maximising profits and therefore drugs that actually cure illnesses are supressed as there is more money to be made in drug treatments than drug cures. Cuba has had to develop its own vaccines, cancer treatments and medicines, and continues to develop more. At first Cuba only produced pharmaceuticals for its own population but in recent years it has started exporting them around the world.

From lung cancer to neck and various head cancers through to diabetes treatment Cuba, despite the atrocious blockade on essential equipment and supplies imposed illegally by the US, has pioneered new treatments with remarkable prospects of success but it is in the interests of the big and powerful privately owned pharma companies to encourage the continued blockade and refusal of patenting licences.

One Cuban medicine, Interferon Alpha 2b, is now being used in China to fight Coronavirus. Wouldn’t it be ironic indeed and worthy of celebration if the treatment for COVID-19 is developed not by one of the profit-obsessed private pharmaceutical companies benefiting from lucrative rich government research grants but socialist Cuba committed to the production of drugs and vaccines for the health of the world not the further enrichment of the few.

Cuba Combatted Covid-19 with Minimal Loss of Life Despite Blockade

Fourteen days ago, Cuba reported four new cases of Covid-19, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 2,432. There were no new deaths, 2,275 people had recovered and 70 were still infected. In the whole month of June, only four people had died, bringing the total number of deaths from Covid-19 since March to 87.

 

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/202007291080009818-solidarity-with-cuba--the-country-which-leads-the-way-in-internationalism/

 

 

Read from top.

#lonely.... and congratulation to richard tonkin!...

There are 2.3 million Australians who are at risk of experiencing yet another public health pandemic: Loneliness.

As COVID-19 rages on, social health experts say we need to pay close attention to ourselves and each other, to make sure the grip of loneliness doesn’t get too tight.

That’s especially relevant for Victorians facing the harshest lockdown yet.

The feeling has been shown to be a precursor to the development of mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.

The warning comes as new research has revealed that the drivers of loneliness change depending on what age group you’re in – and that changes over time.

A team of researchers at Maastricht University and in the Public Health Service South Limburg in the Netherlands interviewed 26,000 people between the ages of 19 and 65.

They found loneliness was more chronic in older people – half of adults aged 50 to 65 reported extreme loneliness.

Two out of three young adults (19 to 34) and middle-aged adults (35 to 49) marked the same feelings.

In Australia, those most at risk are the 2.3 million people who live alone.

The science of being alone

It’s more than just physical isolation that can make us feel alone, the research authors say.

If we feel out of step with our peers, we get that isolated feeling, they wrote.

Younger people were more likely to say a lack of contact with friends and low educational achievement were factors, while employment status was a factor for middle-aged adults.

For older adults, health problems came into play.

Everyone except the younger adults cited lack of family contact as a factor in their loneliness.

Current interventions may be ineffective because they fail to take people’s ages into account, the authors conclude.

 

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2020/08/05/loneliness-lockdown-coronavirus/

 

Read from top

 

And congratulation to Richard for his fantastic poem. See:

From Blog To Book! (True Lockdown Love Stories Wanted!) in Covid Has No Heart