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COVID-19

In a world ruled by fear, where do we turn?

Published

5 years ago

9 minute read

It has been said that there are no atheists in fox holes.

During any time of armed conflict, that adage is true, whether it was WWI, WWII, the Vietnamese Conflict, the Boer War, Afghanistan, the Gulf War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Peloponnesian Wars or the Crusades.

After studying history, I believe that our modern age is not the first to use disinformation and media spin to control and direct populations.

Umberto Eco, in his novel the Prague Cemetery, writes of a late 19th Century spin doctor/document forger who reimagines historic documents to either support or discredit governments and individuals for personal gain.  The ‘writer’ is without loyalty, morals and scruples and is a master manipulator who counts human lives and friendship as the cost of business.  Under his master hand, his employers direct him to sabotage, murder and ruin men of good character and intent.

I had thought that my re-reading of this tome was coincidental, but the more I dig into the 400 plus page novel I realized that Eco could be writing about the world of today, not the 1870s or 1890s.

While I have not read the Art of War, I can imagine that the tactics recommended in that classic work are also topical.

The conclusion that is obvious and easy to reach is that the games that the politicians have been playing  are not new, nor are their techniques modern.  It is only the method that we handle the misinformation and sleight of hand that is different.  The internet with Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have merely accelerated the pace and penetration of deception.

That said, I will not discuss the minutiae of the Covid 19 narrative, but only to say that those behind the scenes will either be seen as guilty of government over reach and medical over reaction, or the architects of a new tomorrow.

Either way, the consequences of decisions made by governments and medical organizations does not change one immutable fact.

I will re-state my original theses.

There are no atheists in our pandemic present.

I believe that God is in control, and that he does not allow anything out of His will to occur to allow those created in His image to turn to Him in humility for redemption.

If we accept the basic tenet that we have  been created by an omniscient God, and that our days are indeed numbered no matter what circumstance we find ourselves in, then we can logically and faithfully state a few things.

  1. If our days are numbered, then it does not matter what we do.  He knows when we will be called home, pandemic or not.
  2. All authority is God given, to governments, presidents, prime ministers, premiers and mayors, so IF our rulers are God fearing, they will act reverently and responsibly. IF they do not and are not God fearing, then they will be removed and the results of their sinful decisions will come to them on the day of their judgement.  It is not the role of any leader to BE God to their country, but to SERVE God…if we presume to act as God and see ourselves as all powerful and all wise, we will be shown to be fools and earn the reward for our arrogance.
  3. We are told numerous times in the Bible that we as sinners (no matter what circumstance led us there) can call on the Lord and he will redeem us according to His everlasting love. (Psalm 107)  So, in the midst of pandemic, floods, war or conflict, God will save us in his wisdom according to His great will.
  4. Free will gets us in trouble. As King David found with Bathsheba, yet David was redeemed by God and through that, his lineage was honored.  Those medical researchers who have developed those venomous viruses we have been threatened by will face judgement at the throne of God.  If we make good choices, then our world will benefit from our knowledge, not reel in death.
  5. God is in control. He has the victory (see the last chapter of Revelation).  We are to live IN victory and give Him the glory and honor of a well lived life.

 

That all said, if we do not accept the tenet that we have been created by an omniscient God, then our present state could be one of depression, anger, violence and fear.  Any one of these negative outcomes lead to extremism movements and an incredibly unhealthy mental and moral state.   That is what we have seen over the last year with riots in the US and Canada, with demonstrations we once thought impossible, with historic monuments being defaced and destroyed and even professional sports bowing to social movements rooted in Communism.

 

While all these scenarios carry on, those who see beyond the headlines and conflicts, it is obvious that we are in the midst of a major spiritual battle.  Our world view tells us that we are to fear, to hide, to mask up and physical distance and to remember that ‘we are in this together,’ and that ‘we will get through this together.’

 

ON the other side of the theological coin, God is in control and we are not to stop living and love as we have been taught to.  We are not to live in fear but rather live knowing that it is only through faith, hope and love that mankind has any future.

 

In short:  Fear and sin leads to death and Faith leads to life everlasting.

Jesus taking the hand of Peter in the middle of the lake.

When we are faced with uncertainty, we need to realize that that we are powerless without God.  Covid19, heart attack, cancer, emphysema and other potentially fatal ailments along with sin and the results of sin will not take us away from the Love of God.  His grace for forgiveness is eternal.

 

The difficulty that we, as modern day citizens struggle with is the battle between media messages that lead us to believe that a vaccine and more governmental intervention (regulations) will save us.  Their economic policies will save our businesses and livelihood.

 

That is the lie, only God CAN (and will) deliver us from evil and bless those who honour and revere Him.  We have to choose to live in the promises of God, not the lies of man.

As men and women of God, we need to rest and trust underneath the pinion feathers of our mighty Eagle and see the world through the eyes of Jesus, not through eyes tainted by fear and faithlessness.

 

Related Topics:

Tim Lasiuta is a Red Deer writer, entrepreneur and communicator. He has interests in history and the future for our country.

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International

Pentagon agency to simulate lockdowns, mass vaccinations, public compliance messaging

Published on June 12, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

DARPA is getting into the business of simulating disease outbreaks, including modeling interventions such as mass vaccination campaigns, lockdowns, and communication strategies.

At the end of May, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) put out a Request for Information (RFI) seeking information regarding “state-of-the-art capabilities in the simulation of disease outbreaks.”

The Pentagon’s research and development funding arm wants to hear from academic, industry, commercial, and startup communities on how to develop “advanced capabilities that drive technical innovation and identify critical gaps in bio-surveillance, diagnostics, and medical countermeasures” in order to “improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.”

As if masks, social distancing, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates under the unscientific guise of slowing the spread and preventing the transmission of COVID weren’t harmful enough, the U.S. military wants to model the effects of these exact same countermeasures for future outbreaks.

The RFI also asks participants “Fatality Rate & Immune Status: How are fatality rates and varying levels of population immunity (natural or vaccine-induced) incorporated into your simulations?“

Does “natural or vaccine-induced” relate to “population immunity” or “fatality rates” or both?

Moving on, the RFI gets into modeling lockdowns, social distancing, and mass vaccination campaigns, along with communication strategies:

Intervention Strategies: Detail the range of intervention strategies that can be modeled, including (but not limited to) vaccination campaigns, social distancing measures, quarantine protocols, treatments, and public health communication strategies. Specifically, describe the ability to model early intervention and its impact on outbreak trajectory.

The fact that DARPA wants to model these so-called intervention strategies just after the entire world experienced them suggests that these exact same measures will most likely be used again in the future:

“We are committed to developing advanced modeling capabilities to optimize response strategies and inform the next generation of (bio)technology innovations to protect the population from biological threats. We are particularly focused on understanding the complex interplay of factors that drive outbreak spread and evaluating the effectiveness of potential interventions.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

“Identification of optimal timelines and capabilities to detect, identify, attribute, and respond to disease outbreaks, including but not limited to biosensor density deployment achieving optimal detection timelines, are of interest.” ­— DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

For future innovation, the DARPA RFI asks applicants to: “Please describe any novel technical approaches – or applications of diverse technical fields (e.g., machine learning, artificial intelligence, complex systems theory, behavioral science) – that you believe would significantly enhance the state-of-the-art capabilities in this field or simulation of biological systems wholistically.”

Instead of putting a Dr. Fauci, a Dr. Birx, a replaceable CDC director, a TV doctor, a big pharma CEO, or a Cuomo brother out there to lie to your face about how they were all just following The ScienceTM, why not use AI and ML and combine them with behavioral sciences in order to concoct your “public health communications strategies?”

When you look at recently announced DARPA programs like Kallisti and MAGICS, which are aimed at creating an algorithmic Theory of Mind to model, predict, and influence collective human behavior, you start to get a sense of how all these programs can interweave:

“The MAGICS ARC calls for paradigm-shifting approaches for modeling complex, dynamic systems for predicting collective human behaviour.” — DARPA, MAGICS ARC, April 2025

On April 8, DARPA issued an Advanced Research Concepts (ARC) opportunity for a new program called “Methodological Advancements for Generalizable Insights into Complex Systems (MAGICS)” that seeks “new methods and paradigms for modeling collective human behavior.”

Nowhere in the MAGICS description does it mention modeling or predicting the behavior of “adversaries,” as is DARPA’s custom.

Instead, it talks at length about “modeling human systems,” along with anticipating, predicting, understanding, and forecasting “collective human behavior” and “complex social phenomena” derived from “sociotechnical data sets.”

Could DARPA’s MAGICS program be applied to simulating collective human behavior when it comes to the next public health emergency, be it real or perceived?

“The goal of an upcoming program will be to develop an algorithmic theory of mind to model adversaries’ situational awareness and predict future behaviour.” — DARPA, Theory of Mind Special Notice, December 2024.

In December 2024, DARPA launched a similar program called Theory of Mind, which was renamed Kallisti a month later.

The goal of Theory of Mind is to develop “new capabilities to enable national security decisionmakers to optimize strategies for deterring or incentivizing actions by adversaries,” according to a very brief special announcement.

DARPA never mentions who those “adversaries” are. In the case of a public health emergency, an adversary could be anyone who questions authoritative messaging.

The Theory of Mind program will also:

… seek to combine algorithms with human expertise to explore, in a modeling and simulation environment, potential courses of action in national security scenarios with far greater breadth and efficiency than is currently possible.

This would provide decisionmakers with more options for incentive frameworks while preventing unwanted escalation.

We are interested in a comprehensive overview of current and emerging technologies for disease outbreak simulation, how simulation approaches could be extended beyond standard modeling methods, and to understand how diseases spread within and between individuals including population level dynamics.

They say that all the modeling and simulating across programs is for “national security,” but that is a very broad term.

DARPA is in the business of research and development for national security purposes, so why is the Pentagon modeling disease outbreaks and intervention strategies while simultaneously looking to predict and manipulate collective human behavior?

If and when the next outbreak occurs, the same draconian and Orwellian measures that governments and corporations deployed in the name of combating COVID are still on the table.

And AI, Machine Learning, and the military will play an even bigger role than the last time around.

From analyzing wastewater to learning about disease spread; from developing pharmaceuticals to measuring the effects of lockdowns and vaccine passports, from modeling and predicting human behavior to coming up with messaging strategies to keep everyone in compliance – “improving preparedness for future public health emergencies” is becoming more militaristically algorithmic by the day.

“We are exploring innovative solutions to enhance our understanding of outbreak dynamics and to improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.

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Business

Audit report reveals Canada’s controversial COVID travel app violated multiple rules

Published on June 11, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Canada’s Auditor General found that government procurement rules were not followed in creating the ArriveCAN app.

Canada’s Auditor General revealed that the former Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau failed multiple times by violating contract procurement rules to create ArriveCAN, its controversial COVID travel app.

In a report released Tuesday, Auditor General Karen Hogan noted that between April 2015 to March 2024, the Trudeau government gave out 106 professional service contracts to GC Strategies Inc. This is the same company that made the ArriveCAN app.

The contracts were worth $92.7 million, with $64.5 million being paid out.

According to Hogan, Canada’s Border Services Agency gave four contracts to GC Strategies valued at $49.9 million. She noted that only 54 percent of the contracts delivered any goods.

“We concluded that professional services contracts awarded and payments made by federal organizations to GC Strategies and other companies incorporated by its co-founders were not in accordance with applicable policy instruments and that value for money for these contracts was not obtained,” Hogan said.

She continued, “Despite this, federal government officials consistently authorized payments.”

The report concluded that “Federal organizations need to ensure that public funds are spent with due regard for value for money, including in decisions about the procurement of professional services contracts.”

Hogan announced an investigation of ArriveCAN in November 2022 after the House of Commons voted 173-149 for a full audit of the controversial app.

Last year, Hogan published an audit of ArriveCAN and on Tuesday published a larger audit of the 106 contracts awarded to GC Strategies by 31 federal organizations under Trudeau’s watch.

‘Massive scandal,’ says Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre said Hogan’s report on the audit exposed multiple improprieties.

“This is a massive scandal,” he told reporters Tuesday.

“The facts are extraordinary. There was no evidence of added value. In a case where you see no added value, why are you paying the bill?”

ArriveCAN was introduced in April 2020 by the Trudeau government and made mandatory in November 2020. The app was used by the federal government to track the COVID jab status of those entering the country and enforce quarantines when deemed necessary.

ArriveCAN was supposed to have cost $80,000, but the number quickly ballooned to $54 million, with the latest figures showing it cost $59.5 million.

As for the app itself, it was riddled with technical glitches along with privacy concerns from users.

LifeSiteNews has published a wide variety of reports related to the ArriveCAN travel app.

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