“In other Cases, some had
Gardens, and Walls, or Pales between them and their Neighbours; or Yards, and
back-Houses; and these by Friendship and Entreaties, would get leave to get
over those Walls, or Pales, and so go out at their Neighbour’ Doors; or by
giving Money to their Servants, get them, to let them thro’ in the Night; so
that in short, the shutting up of Houses, was in no wise to be depended upon;
neither did it answer the End at all; serving more to make the People
desperate, and drive them to such Extremities as that they would break out at
all Adventure. And that which was still worse, those that did thus break out,
spread the Infection farther by their wandring about with the Distemper upon
them…” (Journal, Defoe, 47. Orig. pub. 1722)
WHAT SHOULD I WRITE ABOUT THIS
WEEK? That's always a problem. Deciding. Well, for starters it seems that
LOCKDOWNS will be ending soon here in Ontario and mask mandates will be gone by
mid-month, if I’m not mistaken. Several provinces are “opening up”, even though
our federal government lags behind with its border restrictions for
unvaccinated “essential” truck drivers entering Canada and the quarantine
requirements for Canadian truckers returning to Canada while performing their
apparently now not so “essential” services. And that’s despite last month’s
well-publicized “Freedom Convoy” protests. (Was it only last month? It seems like
ages ago!) Most public places like gyms and supermarkets, and such still require
mask-wearing, but probably/hopefully things will return to “normal” by the summer.
Normal. Whatever that is.
DID THE LOCK-DOWNS DO what
they were supposed to do? Was it all worthwhile? Some scientists think the
costs to shutting down our societies for so long far exceeds the benefits:
“At the same
time, lockdowns cause severe adverse effects for many millions of people,
disproportionately for those already disadvantaged among us. The collateral
damage included severe losses to current and future well-being from
unemployment, poverty, food insecurity, interrupted preventive, diagnostic, and
therapeutic healthcare, interrupted education, loneliness and deterioration of
mental health, and intimate partner violence.” (Joffe, “Rethinking”)
THEN THERE'S THE WHOLE QUESTION OF VACCINES. Were they worth it? “The Jabs” were supposed to be the
answer. Rushed to market, not fully tested, these products originally claimed
to prevent infection and spread of the disease. They helped. Some better than
others. But immunization nirvana they are not! During the latest Omicron variant wave, several studies were published, as reviewed in a recent article in The Guardian newspaper,[see link below] suggesting that the reinfection rate, that is the rate of contracting Covid-19 after vaccinations or a previous infection, seems to be lessened when natural immunity (i.e. when antibodies are produced after infection by the virus) is combined with a single dose of the vaccine. This treatment, the studies conclude, is as effective, or more effective, in preventing reinfections than the three-shot vaccine regime currently mandated. Yet the efficacy of natural immunity in fighting the coronavirus is not widely accepted or commented upon.
YOUTUBE COMMENTATOR RUSSELL BRAND cites Professor of Molecular Biology Eric Topol's review in The
Guardian which states that researchers in Israel, the United Kingdom and the Cleveland Clinic concluded that a single shot plus natural immunity is more effective in preventing reinfections, and should be used for those who are vaccine hesitant and for low income countries where there is a need to increase vaccination rates and lower treatment costs.
Russell suggests this is a reasonable compromise, a "middle-ground" between the
vaccine hesitant and those who see full-compliance as the answer. In addition,
he points out that the pharmaceutical industry’s advocacy for multi-dose vaccination regimes
might just come with a pecuniary bias. Just sayin’.
AND THERE'S THE TOPIC OF PROTESTERS that I could write about and how they're being treated by the powers that
be. Our Prime Minister has been criticized recently for over-stepping his
authority by unnecessarily invoking “Emergencies Act” legislation to
end the “Freedom Convoy’s” vaccine mandate protests in Ottawa and other cities across the country. While the legislation was revoked after only a few days, the harm was done, and a mostly peaceful protest ended with pepper spray, harsh fines, imprisonment,
and confiscation of financial contributions and personal property and bank accounts.
NICE WORK! GO
CANADA! Meanwhile, PM-in-Waiting, our Finance Minister, Christina Freeland, who
was once described by a former colleague some years ago as
“the Nurse
Ratched of the New World Order,” seemed
almost giddy during a press conference a couple of weeks ago when she mentioned
the federal government now had the
"financial controls" to stop
protesters—both current and future ones.
(Keep yer placards to yerselves,
citizens!) As if the government didn’t have enough control over our lives!
And once such power has been ceded to them, only a fool would assume they’ll
give it up without a fight. Power is an intoxicating and seductive dance
partner. So, stay tuned for further hijinks, eh? *
AND THERE’S THE
WHOLE Klaus Schwab/WEF/We'll own nothing soon/brain plug or
whatever it is that all of us are supposed to get during The Great Reset. In Canada, that looks on hold for the moment, with vaccine mandates waning, digital vaccine passports being discontinued or not taken up seriously (except for international travel), and so they're not yet set to become our portal keys to some demonic digital hellscape (at least for now). However, many businesses still insist on proof of (3-shot) vaccinations (PoV), and that's despite the lifting of mandates by most provincial governments. THIS PATCHWORK of districts and public spaces, some demanding, some not demanding PoVs may lead to a gradual acceptance of a some kind of permanent digital ID-Passport system that could have the potential of growing into something like China's dystopian social credit system. What a clusterfuck if that happens! We'll be watching for any moves in that direction, especially since our PM is such a fanboy of China's authoritarian government. Though on the positive side,
everyone will be de-masking in Ontario NEXT WEEK! Or it will be voluntary. Fingers crossed!
SOME READERS MIGHT FEEL this laggardness smacks of a kind of ID-passport hesitancy on the part of a
large portion of the Canadian population (but not the majority, by any
means) and in so doing creates a bit of a speed bump along the way to permanent digital IDs,
digital currencies, social credit systems2,
smarter-than-you-smart-phones, sub-dermal QR code patches, CCTV-cameras, facial recognition apps,
talking fridges, drones over our cities, and not to forget the nifty new financial
"tools" in Nurse Ratched's toolkit, and other government chicanery
being developed to keep you compliant, lest they confiscate your money every time
you open your big mouth to complain about something! So, keep smiling,
citizen.
MAYBE I COULD WRITE on the topic of War--something I fortunately know very little about, like this Ukraine business. So, here
goes: Putin is an autocrat, and his invasion of his neighbour is a crime.
People are dying; millions are being displaced. The fighting seems to be
getting nasty and entrenched. Talks are underway to reach a peace deal and it's anyone's guess how far Putin will go. It’s shameful and a war crime under international
law, which states that it is illegal to invade another country, unless in self-defense. And it could have (probably) been
avoided if NATO had been dissolved when its bête noir, the USSR went
away in 1991. Instead, the military alliance crept eastward, despite Russia’s
legitimate complaints and security fears.
BUT, HEY! There was too much money to be
made arming all those new NATO members and, besides, Russia was a teddy
bear in the years after the Berlin Wall fell. But Ukraine’s insane application for
membership in NATO is a non-starter as far as Russia is concerned (and, really, everyone knew: Ukraine was never going to get membership, so why keep up the pretense?), especially with the
unacceptable potential for heavy armaments, even nuclear missiles, being stationed on Russia’s borders.
Putin’s invasion is unacceptable but his reasons are understandable; the West prodded the bear and it finally struck back. Nowadays, the level of hypocrisy and jingoism
from the chattering classes is at a fever pitch, and only diplomacy and a
willingness to compromise will see a resolution to this tragedy any time soon. Meanwhile,
our genius politicians, on all sides, are playing chicken with nukes! What could possibly go
wrong?
AND WHAT'S THIS I HEAR ABOUT bio-weapon facilities in Ukraine ready to turn every one into zombies? The US State Department’s Victoria Nuland had
a foot-in-mouth moment during a Senate committee hearing the other day when she
revealed the “Pentagon” was funding several biological “research” facilities in
Ukraine. Huh? WTF?
INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER GLEN GREENWALD gives an excellent over-view1
of what is and is not covered under the 1975 United Nations’ Bio-Weapons
Convention, and it’s an eye-opener. This important agreement saw the
destruction of stockpiles of biological weapons by all co-signers, with the
promise not to produce any more of the lethal pathogens, like weaponized
anthrax, Ebola, and tried-and-true mustard gas. But the agreement allows countries to
produce more virulent strains of, say, smallpox or flu viruses if such material
is used for defensive purposes (i.e., to develop antidotes and
anti-toxins, and vaccines to counteract possible future attacks). But Glen
raises an important question: Where do you draw the line between defensive research
and offensive weapons development? Answer: You don't; the line doesn’t exist. Oopsie!
Our bad.
So, such pathogens are still being developed in labs, but they say they're for defensive
purposes. Thank goodness! That makes me feel a whole lot safer. It's the same
type of "gain of function" research thingy that was going on
in that lab in Wuhan, China. That turned out okay, didn't it?
ANYWAY, NULAND
SPILLED THE BEANS by acknowledging such labs exist in Ukraine and the United
States is concerned their “research” materials might fall into Soviet
Russian hands. Question: Why is the US government funding such research, and why in
Ukraine? And what exactly are they worried about being uncovered as the fog of
war gradually lifts? Answer: To be cont'd....
I COULD WRITE ABOUT MY FAVOURITE CONSPIRACY: MK-ULTRA, the CIA's brainwashing “research” program from the 1950s and 60s which saw numerous
mental patients, prisoners and unwitting volunteers subjected to medical
procedures, behaviour modification routines and chemical treatments, some of
which caused permanent brain damage. One “goal” of the
experiments was to see whether a patient’s personality could be “erased” and
another one put in its place, á la The Manchurian Candidate (staring Laurence
Harvey and MILF extraordinaire Angela Lansbury).
AND DON'T FORGET! THE CIA "RESEARCH" PROGRAM has a Canadian
connection, the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal where various studies were conducted during that time. Today, after all these years, there is a class action lawsuit against the Canadian government which knew about the experiments yet kept silent on the issue for decades. The suit has been in limbo
for years but has been recently green-lighted to proceed through the courts. Hopefully, it won’t take until the following century before the survivors and their
families receive their well-deserved compensation and perhaps an
apology to boot. “OH, Ca-na-da! Our home and na-tive land…”
OR MAYBE I COULD WRITE ABOUT Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities that I just finished reading or Daniel Defoe’s A
Journal of the Plague Year that I’m almost done. Dickens' great novel is set primarily in Paris during the French Revolution and
is about the victory of the personal or private over the public, and how
faith, love, relationships and family, and even the daily "business" of banking for characters like Mr. Lorry, are what truly bind people together, even to the extent of making a nation—not the abstract
ideals and platitudes, and the banners and placards of grand political notions.
MEANWHILE, Defoe’s novel depicts the
hellscape that is London of 1665 when Bubonic plague finds its way across the English Channel to infest the City. Tens of thousands die as Defoe’s unnamed narrator walks the streets, meeting the brave and the damned, all trapped in an macabre and horrific Dance of the Dead. It gives the reader some perspective on our own disease vectors, here in 2022. At least we're not having to listen to calls of "Bring Out Your Dead!" and the mournful clanging of bells as the dead-carts rumble by. ALSO I WANT TO DO A REVIEW on historian Alfred McCoy's new book, To Govern the Globe, but I haven't even started it! He takes a broad and deep historical dive into the processes that give rise to civilizations and what, almost invariably, brings about their fall. I need to get busy!
FINALLY, I COULD WRITE ABOUT a small print I have on my wall. I've had it for years but never knew anything about it. I recently learned it was painted in 1857 by the French painter, Jean-Francois Millet and it's called "The Gleaners". I've always liked it and saw it as a depicting the triumph of the individual over the collective demands of society. IN
THE FOREGROUND there is a row of three peasant women working in the
fields. They are gathering the remaining sheaths of wheat left behind from the
main harvest. Two are bent over, absorbed in their back-breaking work, their
faces mostly obscured by the colourful scarves they wear. A third woman seems
to be in the process of standing, perhaps to stretch. She turns slightly to the
viewer, her face, while still in profile, is more defined. If you were to draw
a line touching the top of each woman's head, from left to right across the
canvas, the line ascends, and sharply, with the third woman.
IN THE PAINTING'S MIDDLE-GROUND are three huge stacks of harvested wheat. The third
'stack' is actually a wagon piled high with wheat being drawn to where it will
be off-loaded next to the other two. Visually, it looks as if all three are in
the same row, but that's a trick of perspective. In contrast, a line
drawn across the tops of the wheat stacks descends from left to right across the
canvas. AND the third 'stack' is different from the other two; like the third
woman, it is in motion; it is ‘unfinished’ in the sense that it has not yet been unloaded to
become a stack of standing wheat with the others. Similarly, the third
woman is different from the other two women. She no longer performs the work
all three are tasked with. Her movements are her own and like the third
'stack' she is ‘unfinished’, no longer a part of the communal, and is,
therefore, full of possibilities, of individual choices. The standing woman creates tension between
the group of women and the stacks of wheat. If the “private” or "personal"
is represented by the line of women, and it rises from left to right
across the canvas, while, on the other hand, the row of harvested wheat, if seen to
represent the “public” or communal aspects in life and in which the gleaners have
their role, and this line we have drawn falls as it moves across the canvas—this suggests,
perhaps, that private or personal roles are becoming more important than the
public ones.
THE THIRD WOMAN'S PROFILE also mimics the owner(?) or overseer seen seated on a horse in
the painting's middle-ground, suggesting there is some relationship, or equality, between the two. And It's interesting to note in the painting's
background how the hazy treeline off in the distance mimics the ascending line
of the three women, perhaps suggesting a correspondence between the
women and the natural world, and that their rise is 'natural'?
FOR ME, the painting has always suggested the stirrings of worker-rights movements, of
female emancipation and human rights initiatives that were beginning to
coalesce in the mid-nineteenth century. Anyway, that's my take on it, comrade!
[And I'll let the reader decide what to make of the third woman's headscarf which is the same colour of the
stacks of wheat. Additionally, her dress is
blue and matches the owner's coat. It's all in the details. Ed.]
OR I COULD WRITE ABOUT:
Julian Assange/Steven Donziger
Yemen/Syria/Iraq/Iran/Afghanistan, etc... Nuclear war/war
Climate change/pollution
Billionaire a-holes
Walking in the woods
"Surveillance capitalism"/social credit scores/digital
IDs/etc.
Growing old
The colour red
Corona-virus/lockdowns/mandates/vaccine passports
Doodles
Bob Dylan
Poems for trivial occasions
Nifty and nutty observations on daily life and such
Etc.
SO MUCH TO WRITE ABOUT, SO LITTLE TIME.
Cheers, Jake.
_____________________________
COVID-19: The “nineteen” stands
for “2019”, the year when the virus was first identified in Wuhan Province.
Covid stands for “corona virus disease”. Its full name is:
“Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)”. It is in the
same family of viruses as the common cold, but one which also includes the
“SARS-CoV” virus, reported in Guangdong Province, China in 2003, which causes
the slow-spreading SARS (“Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome”) disease that has
a mortality rate of around 11%. Also in the same virus family is MERS, the “Middle
East Respiratory Syndrome Corona Virus (MERS-CoV)”, first discovered in Saudi
Arabia in 2012. This virus kills about 30% of those who contract the disease
but is not easily transmissible.
*INTERESTING SIDE NOTE: The
Iconic Café in Ottawa is being evicted because trucker protesters used it as a
“staging area” last month according to a CBC news report. I
guess the reporter means that people went to one of the few restaurants
open during the protests and had something to eat while they were there. So,
the café owner is being evicted for feeding people. Nice. Fallout from the
crackdown continues.
1. GLEN also provides an
fascinating review of the 2001 "anthrax scare" that had Americans on
the eastern seaboard concerned about terrorist attacks using what was diagnosed
as a weaponized version of the naturally occurring pathogen. It was
determined that the letters containing anthrax spores were sent by a disgruntled
government scientist operating out of the army base at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
[Glen points out there is some debate over Patrick Lehey's guilt. He committed suicide before he could be arrested.] Five people
died and a number were injured in the attacks.
2. Here’s a link to a fun Black
Mirror sci-fi video, “Nosedive”, about an absolutely insane
social credit system! And the scary thing is that it’s not actually that
far-fetched. (You may have to refresh the screen a few times before it plays
properly.)
Joffe, Ari R. “COVID-19:
Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink.” Frontiers in public health vol. 9.
Web. Feb. 2021. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33718322/
Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of
the Plague Year. Oxford University Press, Inc. New York. 2010. Print.
 |
SPACE JUNK
|
No comments:
Post a Comment