Opinion
V: Remember Remember the 3rd of November
The power of speculative fiction is amazing.
Consider the examples of Brave New World, Animal Farm, 1984 and V. Their dystopian visions of our collective future was shocking, yet it was only recently that the power of the fiction was evident. Everything that was previously written is passing before our eyes.
Last year, V, was merely a brilliant film that is becoming a classic dystopian classic. This year, its power to predict the abuse of power, the misuse of the power of truth, and the power of the written and spoken word coming to fruition.
Comic book writer Alan Moore was THE brightest, most brilliant, creative writers in our modern comic book era (1980 onward). His work on Swamp thing turned what was a mediocre book and character into a must-read gothic horror.
His exploration of a country ruled by a malevolent, all powerful evil chancellor with conspiracy undertones, with absolute control over thoughts, censorship and information is becoming all too familiar. Near the end of the film, the government (under guise), has released an Avian pandemic, an airborne virus and civil war continues stoked by secret research. While V is telling his story near the middle of the film, he notes two important things; Fear is the weapon of the government AND a politician is elected who is a devil incarnate with absolute power with no empathy.
The Chancellor and his advisors also exhibit the use of government spin over a long series of events. In the film, the first bombing by V is claimed by the government to be the unscheduled Bailey demolition and the 1812 Overture just a bonus. During the narrative, the airborne virus is blamed on a Catholic Institution allegedly researching with bio warfare. Their use of government spin to divert the public from the true activities of V is a common tool in the kit of propaganda and image publicity, a practise that has descended into Virtue Signalling today and has given rise to a negative view of ‘conspiracy,’ or views that run counter to the ‘official’ story released by the powers that be to justify their responses.
The overwhelming visual in the film is that of the Guy Fawkes Mask and its symbolism. Now, we can consider that masks in our society today represent safety to some, and unwarranted governmental control to others. Complying with mask ‘regulations’ without belief in their effectiveness or complying because of a belief in their effectiveness requires both deception and faith, two sides of a coin. Another aspect of the Guy Fawkes visage is that of anonymity. In the film, thousands and thousands of masks are distributed guaranteeing wearers the ability to hide behind the truth or behind a great lie.
Let us move from fiction to ‘reality,’ and consider the situation that our world faces in 2020.
In 2019, the worlds financial and political organizations had been signalling that the economic health of the world had been decreasing and a long-term recession was possible. In early 2020, the situation was not better.
Depending on which side of the Covid 19 coin you fall on, this dreaded virus was active in mid 2019 in Wuhan and actually had been in development by the NIH and several US Universities and laboratories prior to defunding and moved to China OR it was a real virus the Chinese government released. The global players in the virus ‘fight,’ the W.H.O., The C.D.C., pharmaceuticals, investors and government health professionals laid out a ‘pandemic’ policy that included economic shut down, lockdowns, mandatory masks and a future vaccine that would save the world, even if these measures cause more damage than they are supposed to cure.
It is incredibly fascinating that after early Covid 19 mis-steps, the original scripts remain for responses despite evidence to the contrary gathered by even the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. which suggests a reversal of their earlier stances are ignored by the masses and even called ‘conspiracy’ by the main stream media that gobbled up their extreme measures. An example of this is the revised infection and mortality rates released by the C.D.C. that shows their new creation (patented by the C.D.C.) is less dangerous than a regular flu. Even the W.H.O has deemed that lockdowns and masks are not effective and has stated that, yet government policy has not reflected this voice of ‘authority.’ If we add in the growing evidence that shows increased rates of bacteriological infections and deaths in healthy individuals due to mask usage, a clear pattern has emerged, the treatment and ‘protection’ may be worse than the disease.
Meanwhile, as I have written previously, doctors and health professionals around the world including Canada have initiated legal action against governments to defend their patients from ineffective treatments. The Great Barrington Declaration signed now by more than 54,000 professionals takes issue with government response that places politics and profit before research and fact.
The Great Barrington Declaration states that:
“Covid-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza. As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable…”
Yet, if world-wide professionals have enough confidence to call upon world leaders to change their policies and treatments, why do the naysayers such as Dr. Faucci have such power to dismiss a global, scientific and research based position?
With the US election rising to a crescendo this month, a factor has arisen that shows the effectiveness of yet one more tool in the tool belt of the most powerful organizations in the world: censorship. Facebook, twitter, google and other groups routinely use ‘fact checkers’ to vet posts not inline with the approved storyline. Health related stories that question Covid 19 stats, treatments and causes are routinely buried or deleted giving rise to alternate sites that have been labeled ‘conspiracy.’
In the dystopian novels by Orwell and Huxley, censorship is used extensively to control populations and films like the Matrix explore that concept. ‘Drinking the Kool aid,’ or ‘taking the blue pill,’ are phrases used to describe those who buy the accepted storylines as fact.
As an aside, the Canadian government has posted an ad looking for a ‘Story teller.’
Censorship is not merely relegated to social media and news organizations but rather it has been entrenched in constitutions around the world now by practise.
The Canadian government has Islamophobia laws in place. Some countries have anti-covid 19 ‘news’ laws proposed. Justin Trudeau, in his response to the French attack recently noted that ‘Free speech has its limits.’ I wonder who decides those limits and on what topics.
With the sheer volume of distraction news in the media today, and the ability of search engines and platforms to rank breaking stories REAL news is lost. In the US, the various broadcast news organizations have biases, and regularly practise those. Fox, CNN, TNN, ABC, the CBC, CTV and other networks routinely present half truths and ignore pressing issues and movements that test democracy and free speech.
In the film near the end, Evey and Finch, the detective are standing beside the train loaded with explosives. V is dead in the train covered with roses.
In a scene loaded with symbolism and decisiveness, she pulls the lever and sends the train towards destruction on Guy Fawkes Day.
“This country needs more than a building right now, it needs hope,” she says and the strains of the 1812 Overture rise as the flames consume the Parliament.
Theatrical, yes.
True, yes.
Today, in every country around the world we need Hope.
US Citizens need hope that the ‘building’ of political corruption is decimated. Canadian citizens need hope that our Liberal government will take control of our raging debt before we have to mortgage the Canadian Rockies to the Chinese. Western Canadians want hope that the federal government will recognize the value of our mineral resources and allow us to develop them for economic stability. Our citizens, North American, need hope to believe that we will be allowed to shop, live, worship and raise our families without onerous regulations and penalties.
There is an image of the man known as V esca
ping from the burning St. Mary’s that encapsulates the genesis of his journey and his mission. It symbolizes our present truth vs Lie, God vs Satan, Good vs evil, freedom vs control battle struggle.
V states through narration in the film, “Beneath this mask is an idea and ideas are bulletproof.”
Cut to the 1812 Overture….
From the Fraser Institute
Recently, popular American comedian and talk show host, Bill Maher, took aim at some of Canada’s public policy failings in one of his monologues. In entertaining fashion, Maher highlighted our high housing costs, unemployment rates and “vaunted” health-care system.
Indeed, citing work published by the Fraser Institute, he explained that after adjusting for age, Canada spends 13.3 per cent of our economy on health care (2020), the highest level of spending by a developed country with universal coverage that year. And that Canada has some of the poorest access to timely appointments with family doctors when compared to our peers.
Unfortunately, while that’s where his segment on health care ended, the bad news for the Canadian system doesn’t stop there.
On top of Canada continuing to be one of the most expensive universal health-care systems in the world, we get little in return when it comes to both available medical resources and wait times. For example, among high-income countries with universal health care, Canada has some of the lowest numbers of physicians, hospital beds, MRI machines and CT scanners.
And in Canada, only 38 per cent of patients report seeing a specialist within four weeks (compared to 69 per cent in the Netherlands) and only 62 per cent report receiving non-emergency surgery within four months (compared to 99 per cent in Germany).
Unfortunately, wait times in Canada aren’t simply long compared to other countries, they’re the longest they’ve ever been. Last year the median wait for a Canadian patient seeking non-emergency care reached 27.7 weeks—nearly three times longer than the 9.3 week-wait Canadians experienced three decades ago.
This raises the obvious question. How do other countries outperform Canada’s health-care system while also often spending less as a share of their economies? In short, their approach to universal health care, and in particular their relationship with the private sector, departs drastically from the approach here at home.
Australia, for example, partners with private hospitals to deliver the majority (58.6 per cent) of all non-emergency surgeries within its universal health-care system. Australia also spends less of its total economy (i.e. GDP) on health care but outperforms Canada on every measure of timely care.
Even with restrictions on the private sector, Canada has some limited experience that should encourage policymakers to embrace greater private-sector involvement. Saskatchewan, for example, contracted with private surgical clinics starting in 2010 to deliver publicly-funded services as part of a four-year initiative to reduce wait times, which were among the longest in the country. Between 2010 and 2014, wait times in the province fell from 26.5 weeks to 14.2 weeks. After the initiative ended, the province’s wait times began to grow.
More recently, Quebec, which has some of the shortest wait times for medical services in the country, contracts out one out of every six day-surgeries to private clinics within the publicly-funded health-care system.
Maher’s monologue, which was viewed by millions online, highlighted the key failings of Canada’s health-care system. If policymakers in Ottawa and the provinces want to fix Canadian health care, they must learn from other countries that deliver universal health-care at the same or even lower cost, often with better access and results for patients.
Author:
From the Brownstone Institute
The powers that be are leading us from the Declaration of Internet Freedom from simpler times (2012), to the Declaration on the Future of the Internet. Do we need to say more than the word “freedom” has been left out of the future?
They are wearing us down with shocking headlines and opinions. They come daily these days, with increasingly implausible claims that leave your jaw on the floor. The rest of the text is perfunctory. The headline is the takeaway, and the part designed to demoralize, deconstruct, and disorient.
A few weeks ago, the New York Times told us that “As It Turns Out, the Deep State Is Pretty Awesome.” These are the same people who claim that Trump is trying to get rid of democracy. The Deep State is the opposite of democracy, unelected and unaccountable in every way, impervious to elections and the will of the people. Now we have the NYT celebrating this.
And the latest bears notice too: “Government Surveillance Keeps Us Safe.” The authors are classic Deep Staters associated with Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush. They assure us that having an Orwellian state is good for us. You can trust them, promise. The rest of the content of the article doesn’t matter much. The message is in the headline.
Amazing isn’t it? You have to check your memory and your sanity. These are the people who have rightly warned about government infringements on privacy and free speech for many decades dating way back.
And now we have aggressive and open advocacy of exactly that, mainly because the Biden administration is in charge and has only months to put the final touches on the revolution in law and liberty that has come to America. They want to make it all permanent and are working furiously to make it so.
Along with routine warrantless surveillance, not only of possible bad guys but everyone, comes of course censorship. A few years ago, this seemed to be intermittent, like the biased and arbitrary actions of rogue executives. We objected and denounced but generally assumed that it was aberrant and going away over time.
Back then, we had no idea of the scale and the ambition of the censors. The more information that is coming out, the more the full goal is coming into view. The power elite want the Internet to operate like the controlled media of the 1970s. Any opinion that runs contrary to regime priorities will be blocked. Websites that distribute alternative outlooks will be lucky to survive at all.
To understand what’s going on, see the White House document called Declaration on the Future of the Internet. Freedom is barely a footnote, and free speech is not part of it. Instead it is to be a “rules-based digital economy” governed “through the multistakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.”
This whole document is an Orwellian replacement of the Declaration of Internet Freedom from 2012, which was signed by Amnesty International, the ACLU, and major corporations and banks. The first principle of this Declaration was free speech: don’t censor the Internet. That was 12 years ago and the principle is long forgotten. Even the original website has been dead since 2018. It is now replaced with one word: “Forbidden.”
Yes, that’s chilling but it is also perfectly descriptive. In all mainline Internet venues, from search to shopping to social, freedom is no longer the practice. Censorship has been normalized. And it is taking place with the direct involvement of the federal government and third-party organizations and research centers paid for by tax dollars. This is very clearly a violation of the First Amendment but the new orthodoxy in elite circles is that the First Amendment simply does not apply to the Internet.
This issue is making its way through litigation. There was a time when the decision would not be in question. No more. Several or more Supreme Court Justices do not seem to understand even the meaning of free speech.
The Prime Minister of Australia made the new view clear in his statement in defense of fining Elon Musk. He said that social media has a “social responsibility.” In today’s parlance, this means they must obey the government, which is the only proper interpreter of the public interest. In this view, you simply cannot allow people to post and say things that are contrary to regime priorities.
If the regime cannot manage public culture, and manipulate the public mind, what’s it there for? If it cannot control the Internet, its managers believe, it will lose control of the whole of society.
The crackdown is intensifying by the day. Representative Thomas Massie shot a video after the Ukraine vote for a total foreign aid package of an astonishing $95 billion. Vast numbers of Democrats on the House floor waved Ukrainian flags, which you might suppose smacks of treason. The Sergeant-at-Arms wrote Massey directly to tell him to take down the video or get a $500 fine.
Instead of fining democrats for waving flags, the House Sergeant at Arms just called and said I will be fined $500 if I don’t delete this video post.
Mike Johnson really wants to memory hole this betrayal of America. https://t.co/5DPWoo4cLw
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) April 23, 2024
True, the rules say you cannot film in a way that “impairs decorum,” but he simply took out his phone. The decorum was disturbed by masses of lawmakers waving a foreign flag. So Massie refused. After all, the entire disgraceful scene was on C-SPAN but the presumption is that no one watches that but everyone reads X, which is probably true.
Clearly, GOP speaker Mike Johnson doesn’t want his perfidy this well-advertised. After all, it was he who shepherded the authorization of spying on the American people using Section 702 of FISA, which 99 percent of GOP voters opposed. Just who do these people think they are there to represent?
It’s actually astonishing to do a conjectural history in which Elon did not buy Twitter. The regime monopoly on social media today would be 99.5 percent. Then the handful of alternative venues could be shut down one by one, just as with Parler a few years ago. Under this scenario, closing the social end of the Internet would not be that difficult. The domains are another matter but those could be banned gradually over time.
But with X rising in a meteoric way since Elon’s takeover, that is now far more difficult. He has made it his mission to remind the world of core principles. This is why he told the boycotting advertisers to jump in a lake and why he refused to comply with every dictate by the despotic head of the Brazilian Supreme Court. Daily he is showing what it means to stand up for principle in extremely hard times.
Glenn Beck puts it well: “What Elon Musk is doing in both Brazil and Australia is this: He is simply standing where the Free world used to stand. They have moved, not him. They are the radicals not him. HAVE THE COURAGE to remain standing, unmovable in the truth that can never change and you will be targeted and eventually change the world.”
Censorship is not an end unto itself. The purpose is control of the people. That is also the purpose of surveillance. It is not, rather obviously, to protect the public. It is to protect the state and its industrial partners against the people. Of course, just as in every dystopian film, they always pretend otherwise.
Somehow – call me naive – I just didn’t expect the New York Times to be all-in on the immediate establishment of the surveillance state and universal censorship by the “awesome” Deep State. But think of this. If the NYT can be fully captured by this ideology, and probably captured by the money that goes with it, so can any other institution. You have probably noticed a similar editorial line being pushed by Wired, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, Salon, Slate, and other venues, including the entire suite of publications owned by Conde Nast including Vogue and GQ magazine.
“Don’t bother me with your crazed conspiracy theory, Tucker.”
I get the point. What is your explanation?
Author
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