Let’s fasten our wits

 The new “religion” in public health is to ignore data in favour of ideology – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara

It is hard to wean ourselves off trusting governments and other bodies or professionals like doctors or even journalists. We believe what we are told by “experts” (even though in the US as per the Johns Hopkins findings, also reported in the British Medical Journal, close to one third of all deaths in the US are precipitated if not “caused” by medical error or misdiagnosis)

There is so much to deal with in Sri Lanka, from the “road to India” North/East dynamics, to the needed but difficult IMF “stabilisation” that exacerbates poverty for so many while others evade responsibility, to all kinds of necessary and needed initiatives that have to be rescued from hollow grand proclamations and converted into decisive action. Our follow through is sadly appalling in too many areas, though intentions are lavish, and we hear the right buzz words regarding education, tourism and competitiveness.

And so, we can’t get seduced or side-tracked with more alarmism, whether on the climate front, or Woke diversions, or fall prey to the censorship industrial complex that has been thriving and choking off debate and dissent, or get sucked into unending wars of uncertain intent, and certainly not by sheer pandemic distortion and hype.

Alarm bells

We have perpetual COVID hystericist, Isabella Eckerle out of Germany, who has been publicly donning a “virus suit” and claiming, “The virus is not yet finished with us.” 

She refers not even to the floundering non-event of “Eris” but BA.2.86. She is extrapolating wildly as about ten sequences of this are known as of this writing. Could it “blow up” to become the dominant variant? Yes. Could it simply disappear along with its cousins into the dustbin of alarmist history? Even more likely. 

BA2.86 is infecting virtually no one, but she says, “cases are up”. How do we know? Those false positive riddled PCR tests of course and doubtless the zealous conflating of anything respiratory with COVID.

The addled wits are dizzying. We have a scary new mutation hardly infecting anyone, and there is a shiny new virus juice on the way because XBB-descended Eris is on the rise, though this same high priestess of panic, Eckerle tells us in another breath that Eris is not a “scary new mutation” and therefore not much to worry about. 

She even confesses the “vaccines” won’t be able to target BA.2.86 at all, but also confesses antibodies aren’t the only thing. There is also cellular immunity. Nice of her to remember at last the cellular immunity everyone has from multiple virus exposures to this point.

So, without knowing what the new “vaccines” are actually for, other than some mumbling about “protection from severe disease”, we should line up to merrily infuse our system with more experimental gene therapy despite the plethora of adverse effects all around us, and despite the utterly nominal risk to virtually everyone not old, infirm or already afflicted with multiple comorbidities.

The nonsense is not gaining much traction, and we mustn’t let it do so here. Even the proponents can’t articulate what the jabs are for, what the threat actually is, or much of anything else, but they keep “jabbering” on.

The masking lunatics

No one in public health circles in the Western world recommended masking until 2019. Then suddenly everyone seemed to “awaken” to the need.

We now have further years of data and evidence confirming the ineffectiveness of masks, but there are “experts” wanting to bring them back, to reassert the panic narrative.

A new study in JAMA has examined 10 school districts in Massachusetts using a cohort study design following both students and staff members.

The data covers children ranging from kindergarten through 12th grade, from 10 school districts in two different time periods, Fall 2020 to Spring 2021 and again Fall 2021. 

These were periods of “alleged” high community transmission in Massachusetts and so it was opportune to examine the impact of policy interventions on secondary attack rates of COVID across a variety of age groups. 

Guess what? Researchers found that schools, despite “expert” and media fear mongering that was relentless, had virtually no secondary COVID transmission, in both time periods.

“The secondary attack rate of SARS-CoV-2 in schools was 2.2% during the 2020-2021 school year and 2.8% in the fall of 2021.”

That should strike terror…in no one! Hard to get much lower than that, and this showcases again that school closures were a silly, self-destructive and indefensible policy. 

As a result, children have been subjected to mushrooming mental health concerns, stunted emotional and social development, catastrophic learning loss due to the embrace of extremism by Fauci, the CDC and the teacher’s union – an unholy trinity if ever there was one on this front.

Out of 435 index cases, or initial students and staff testing positive in Fall 2020/Spring 2021, there were 1771 total contacts as per the study, of which 1327 were tested. 

Just 29 potential in-school transmission cases were reported – out of 1771 potential contacts and 1327 tests! And even of the 29, only 14 were considered “probable.”

The rates in 2021 were virtually identical despite the “dire” Delta variant and the omnipresent Omicron which successfully “vaccinated” virtually everyone (high transmission, extremely mild). 

So, why did we close schools? Because adults demonstrating that “education” sometimes doesn’t take hold or evaporates, were terrified of a virtually nonexistent risk of transmission. And this was true even after being “vaccinated.”

In fact, during the Fall of 2021 when transmission was at its highest and mask mandates in non-classroom settings had been relaxed, the secondary attack rate was higher when both the index case and close contact were masked versus when neither “the index case or close contact wore masks.” 

Even then it was low, but for those masked it was 2.3% versus 1.7% for the unmasked as per the study’s findings (JAMA Health Forum, “Prevalence and Risk Factors for School-Associated Transmission of SARS-CoV-2”).

CDC’s own data confirms masks in school are ineffective, but this has no impact on policy, or the guidance being doled out. Even the researchers of this study show an immunity to the clear implications of their own data. They still say masking “may be an important tool” when the “effectiveness of vaccines against circulating variants and their effectiveness over time since vaccination are diminished.” 

All the pseudo progressives claiming they are wanting to control everything “for our own sake” have gone into a media meltdown. After all, they thought they could just merrily have our children genuflect to gender extremism, continue to ravage economic growth with data-free climate hysteria and declare like a potentate of old, what is or is not sayable in the public sphere. Think again folks, the human spirit can still be kindled

Not one shred of data to bolster that. And the “vaccines” are not designed for emerging variants so it’s doubly nonsensical. But the new “religion” in public health is to ignore data in favour of ideology. When overwhelming data is just inconvenient to the shoddy narrative being peddled, why not just ignore the facts and reassert (stridently) the evangel?

There are now massive data sets, compilations, evidence reviews, cohort studies, endless research and everyday evidence from public settings to show masks don’t work. However, where there is an enormous, vested interest and multiple incentives to deny reality, facts will always play second fiddle.

Further implications

From this study we also learn 35% of index cases had no symptoms. So, we spent untold dollars testing the asymptomatic for an endemic virus. Close to 20% of the so-called “cases” were “vaccinated”. While the level of “vaccination” is unclear, the absurdity of the idea of “passports” is revealed yet again as it was when it was abundantly obvious “vaccinated” folks were readily contracting COVID. 

Then came the belated admission that these therapeutics in “vaccine” disguise don’t stop transmission.

However, data and reality are faint substitutes for the money fuelled activism on display by corrupt organisations, politicians, public health officials, journalists, “researchers” and more. 

And so, we have not only a “censorship complex” but a “distortion” complex and again Sri Lanka must insist on remaining resolutely moored to verifiable realities and not get swept away by these ideological currents. 

Reality wars

Reality isn’t what it used to be. Perhaps it never was more than distortion echoed passionately and repeatedly, but that’s another story. This one isn’t about reality per se. The “War on Reality” came parading into our lives as soon as the “War on Terror” lost its bloom. 

This “war” is on the Internet, in people’s workplaces, homes, among friends and families, and in people’s heads. And the “war” is rampant here in Sri Lanka too.

This is an uncivil, civil war. It is asymmetrical, an ontological free-for-all. Alliances among factions and power brokers seem to shift from day to day. 

The war, waged as it is against modest realities like balancing budgets, investing in enterprise, enabling talent, leveraging education, ensuring the rule of law, and more, is pernicious. 

It is continual, and completely unwinnable. It is unwinnable because eventually we pay the piper for ignoring the fundamentals of economic and social sanity. 

We have to work to ensure somehow, if the fates are with us, that something regenerative, phoenix-like, will come out of these ashes. That we will come, however belatedly, to our much-abused senses.

There is a cabal, globally, seeking to implement a new official ideology, in other words, a new ‘reality.’ To make their private agendas “real,” political power is needed. 

As CJ Hopkins writes, “You need the power of the police, the military, the media, scientific ‘experts,’ academia, the culture industry, the entire ideology-manufacturing machine.” There is nothing subtle about this process. 

It requires brutality and blindness to push aside paradigms that have underwritten progress and swap them for something that enriches and rewards an elite sliver of society and throws everyone else into confusion, crisis and duress. 

Normally, what’s required is a crisis, a war, a state of emergency, or … an allegedly “deadly” global pandemic. Society in so many countries is convulsing, factions are forming, equilibrium is being destabilised. 

And the desperation of a new narrative, no matter how fact-free, was showcased by the power drunk, almost hate-filled, systematic persecution of the “unvaccinated” for having the audacity to hang on to the autonomy of their bodies when the data was clearly and unambiguously on their side…testified to by “case studies” like Israel with COVID spikes despite repeated enforced rounds of “vaccination”, the comparison between the red and blue States in the US, Asia pre-vaccination, and the continent of Africa. 

Hysteria has abated somewhat, at least insofar as we don’t have prominent media enablers shrieking, as one commentator said, like a “meth-addled Goebbels” recurrently. 

So, you are asked to suspend credulity. The agents, assigns, puppets and goons that make up “the establishment” are seeking to enshrine the C-19 “myth” as reality. 

Excess mortality was higher in the year of the “vaccine” than before. And then we had ventilator deaths from crazy modes of addressing a respiratory virus, the classifying as “COVID deaths” of anyone who died of virtually anything who could be tested positive. We had healthy young suddenly dying, the spike in heart attacks, the unprecedented blood clots. Though all this is well documented, of course it cannot be conceded to being linked to these experimental gene therapies people were badgered and coerced into taking. 

Lockdowns were hell for any sentient being, for the healthy, for those with disabilities, for anyone requiring real medical care, for adolescents who were kept away from the salvific benefit of oxygen and exercise and from education, and anyone without significant financial or social security safety nets. 

But apparently that was “acceptable.” But who says so? And who is entitled to?

Meanwhile, cognitively dissonant “New Normal” sycophants are taking to the Internet to claim that no one knew better at the time, and that, “mistakes were made,” but if people had just spoken up… 

Those who did were censored, demonised, and systematically (and sometimes legally) persecuted for years since. Their professional standing was dismantled, and they were made into pariahs. And today, the culprits just seek to slink away from any real accountability. 

And so we need a different dynamic 

 Historically, we humans have not done very well in such psychotic environments. CJ Hopkins once more, “When “reality” is shattered into a thousand little shards, and things fall apart, and the center does not hold, we tend to get rather scared, confused, and agitated. We start to panic.”  

And so, we go hunting for authority, some new authoritarian guidance system. And therefore, the “mass formation” Desmet outlines comes into being and gets reinforced. Or in a wry rephrase of the Buddhist observation, “When the masses are ready, the despot appears.”

Brazilian writer, singer, diplomat and professional flouter of conventions, Vinicius de Moraes celebrates “the art of the encounter.” This refers to an almost prayerful and “sacred” attempt to understand each other, in and through the many tragedies and misunderstandings of life. 

There is, he suggests, an unexplainable beauty present, an enchantment almost, to be fully present in our encounters, the joy filled and the sad, with our fellow travellers.

This animates our humanity, our independence, our creativity. In Sri Lanka, we need to rekindle the “art of the encounter” in our politics, in our attempts at reconciliation, even in our tourism and more.  

It is a sense of openness, of almost expectant “waiting” even in the midst of sordid or challenging realities, for opportunities waiting to be sculpted, ready to emerge. It is never positioning oneself as a barrier to possibility.

Our recurrent ability to “hope” and be open is a signature of our species. It is this that is being attacked. When expressed, it makes us less easy to corral, catalogue, or manipulate, as we are awake and open and exploring. Hence, we have what Aldous Huxley predicted, the debilitating attempt to sedate, distract and numb those who want us to acquiesce and to kowtow. 

Too many once inspiring Western democracies seem to be flailing, with elites seeking to barricade themselves inside a propaganda edifice and threaten and cajole (situationally) their homeborn population. 

It is hard to wean ourselves off trusting governments and other bodies or professionals like doctors or even journalists. We believe what we are told by “experts” (even though in the US as per the Johns Hopkins findings, also reported in the British Medical Journal, close to one third of all deaths in the US are precipitated if not “caused” by medical error or misdiagnosis).  

While we grapple with our attempt to offer the benefit of the doubt, in order to cling to obscene privilege for whatever period of time they can, these entities and elites, if unchecked, will continue their deranged antics.

Those who have uncovered this, perhaps because they are less insulated from the consequences, are still being written off as racists, extremists or conspiracy theorists. These days, it’s pretty good company to be in. 

Seeking to anesthetise our desire for grander outcomes, and a more vibrant, autonomous life is part of the corrupt game. The puppet masters hate it if we connect, look deeply into each other’s eyes, forge bonds of empathy or catalyse new social and political networks and institutions that could generate a more dignified and stimulating life for more of the community. 

Hence, “contact free” restaurants, work at home strictures, online apps and bots rather than human beings (you have to be in some upper tier to ever access one). Most often, your particular issues get dumped into the morass of “frequently asked questions.” 

So, time for all of us to wake up and campaign for contact-rich interactions and engagements. There is immense generative power there.  

Haven’t we all found full frontal engagement with each other and life’s adventures and misadventures, when we were floundering youngsters, to have been a pathway to growth and ripening adulthood, however painful the navigation at times was? As that’s missing more and more today. And so we have arrested development in epidemic proportions as a result. 

So, our hubristic social engineers want kids tucked away, rendered germaphobes, with garbage flooding their omnipresent screens to mesmerise them with.  

They must not sit still or be out in a garden simply listening to the birds, or be at a dinner table actually conversing, or immersing in the complexity, variety and even the occasional wry folly of multi-faceted, perhaps multi-generational, human relations.

As someone said “diversity” (a nice concept) is being invited to the party, but “inclusion” is being asked to dance. We all need that togetherness today.

And this perhaps also suggests why the unprecedented success of Country music crooner Oliver Anthony has so inflamed the media elites. If you haven’t yet listened to “Rich Men north of Richmond,” you really must. It has a harrowing, yet homespun, apocalyptic timbre, pulled from working man roots.  

And all the pseudo progressives claiming they are wanting to control everything “for our own sake” have gone into a media meltdown. After all, they thought they could just merrily have our children genuflect to gender extremism, continue to ravage economic growth with data-free climate hysteria and declare like a potentate of old, what is or is not sayable in the public sphere. Think again folks, the human spirit can still be kindled. 

And here comes this man living in a camper in the woods, giving voice to popular outrage and anguish with a rebellious ballad, as someone said “Nashville with a touch of Nietzsche.” The song is now Number one in the US, he’s been on Joe Rogan’s show reaching literal millions, and in a marvellous example of the “art of the encounter” he has given us a powerful, resonant, visceral protest against the disdain for real people that permeates this attempted take-over of human culture. 

History must be studied before it is rewritten and stripped away from us. As Santayana told us, those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. 

We need a revived culture, rich in crucial conversations where we interrogate reality, embrace connection, mentor and coach each other, celebrate things we care about, and listen deeply and reverently to our respective dreams. And yes, we need art and music to channel this. We need honest emotion and real exchange.  

And we a need a culture where we Socratically cross-examine any initiatives that limit our ability to adapt or to experience, to learn or to choose. And we have to show up to make our commitment known and felt, at the ballot box, and otherwise.  

A humanised planet will find ways of forging ahead in creative collaboration, it will immunise itself against manipulation through common sense which needs to become so much more common. And therefore, such a planet will not lend itself to being quite so readily subjugated. Therein lies our only real hope. 

(The writer is the founder and CEO of EPL Global and founder of Sensei Lanka, a global consultant with over 30 years strategic leadership experience and now, since March 2020, a globally recognised COVID researcher and commentator.)