An appeal to Better Builders everywhere

We still hear optimistic souls saying that, out of the wreckage of the totally unexpected (but extensively patented) COVID, a brighter future will emerge. And some of them, and most of the politicians, are still using the slogan “Build Back Better,” the notable recent example being Boris Johnson’s gobbledegook statement at the G7, where (perhaps rightly) most of the attention was focused instead on how he thought the improved society could be more feminine and more gender-neutral at the same time.

It’s still hard to be sure whether Johnson is a conspirator or a useful idiot – or perhaps something in between. But whatever it is, he and all the others got the phrase from the WEF’s Great Reset rhetoric. In other words, it has always been a catchphrase for a planned “New Normal,” a phrase actually dating back a decade or more that was either from one of the elite clubs or the UN: I’ve forgotten which. That “Normal” is all about being greener, more sustainable, more democratic, more diverse and all those other Schwabian turns of phrase, and particularly that of “Stakeholder Capitalism.”

Now remember that these ideas have been forged over many years in meetings at Davos and elsewhere, to which are invited only high-level politicians and ex-politicians such as Henry Kissinger and Tony Blair, bankers and the capitalist leaders of the world. And Bono, of course. It is they (alone!) who really understand stakeholder capitalism, in which the bottom line for shareholders is no longer the be all and end all of business, but instead the interests of the “stakeholders” – the employees, the customers and I’m not sure who else: the people polluted by the Lithium waste or spied on by other people’s Alexas perhaps?Or maybe just oppressed protected minorities, to judge from the corporate advertising nowadays.

Well, nearly eighteen months on from the crisis that was to trigger the building back better of the world, what in fact do we have so far?

The first thing is the now-familiar combination of loss of civil rights and fear (for most fear of a virus, for the rest fear of encroaching totalitarianism). This is well-entrenched, from the removal of the right to gather or protest, to masks and house arrest. It is also carefully fostered, as is shown by the recent, though little noticed, statement of Boris at his press conference that “We are going to change the way we control human behaviour.” What did he mean, do you think?

He means promising freedom and then threatening it will have to be taken again within weeks if people don’t go on doing the same masking, jabbing, distancing and testing they were obliged to do legally before – and probably even if they do. This is clearly intentional, but I’m honestly not sure whether the intention is to keep the public psychologically adrift and controllable, to see to what extent the former indoctrination has conditioned the public for future reference – or maybe even just as a short experiment to see what does happen.

So far, the results prove the second, at least, is true as public venues, pubs, restaurants and shops rush to maintain lockdown conditions for a nominal disease prevalence of around 0.2-0.3% and scarcely any deaths (all probably skewed by an astonishingly high false positive rate). My wife’s hairdresser will keep masks, and the Baptist Union tells us (having said they were discontinuing recommendations in favour of “questions”) that we perhaps should allow singing if people stay masked. There’s an interesting scientific illiteracy in that – the singing ban was imposed to prevent aerosols from all that fervour, whilst masks only prevent large droplets, and cloth masks not even those. Even the churches are ruled by fear and virtue signalling. And the majority is crying out for more, “just to be on the safe side.” Who said the vaccines would work, anyway?

A second aspect of building back better is the slow imposition of compulsory vaccination and vaccine passports, the first riding roughshod over the long established Nuremberg Code of medical ethics, and the second over the fundamental human right to privacy. These things were part of the bad old order – a bit like the culture of secrecy Matt Hancock legislated to remove around personal medical records.

Meanwhile, the epidemiologically-useless track and trace app and rules are set to put millions off work and school and confined to home within another week or two, losing those so confined their wages, and employers without staff to make things. But vaccine passports do pave the way for the fundamental human right of an implanted digital identity, as in the ID2020 plan whose website says that digital identity is being defined even now, in order to develop “interoperable digital health pass systems that will “help restore global travel and restart the world economy.”

What, a government minister said that vaccine passports will not happen? Whatever gave him that idea, when Microsoft, Accenture, GAVI (with heavy investment from both Bill Gates and the UK government) and the idealistic Rockefeller foundation are all partners? Isn’t it wonderful that they had last year’s conference planned even before COVID provided the need? The constant clamour of the world’s poor and working folk for digital ID cannot be ignored any longer, and although you don’t ever see ID2020 mentioned in the press, they’re on to it on our behalf! God bless philanthropic big business!

Job losses have been increasing since the beginning of the pandemic, but as has been pointed out, the low-paid workers who were not furloughed are those who have been most exposed to risk keeping the country going for everyone else. Abroad, the casual workers have simply been left to starve by our lockdown policies. This is more sustainable for them, of course, than the bad old days of letting them electrify their economies using their own fossil fuel.

Then there has been the loss of education for our children. Klaus Schwarb is a huge fan of virtual learning as the future. What a shame that actual children have failed to learn even when they had access to it – and millions didn’t have Zoom. Yes, the compulsory face-masks addle their brains, and the vaccines are all loss and no gain for them. But face-masks, too, are the future if we are to learn the lessons of 2020 and avoid even seasonal flu.

We must not forget how health services have been built back better by being diverted exclusively to COVID, so everything else from teeth to terminal cancer will have to wait for, perhaps, years. We should be grateful, I suppose, that our country is rich enough to keep the health service operating at all after lockdown. I myself have a probable small skin cancer being referred “routinely,” which means that the NHS has efficiently sent me two letters this last month saying I may or may not get an appointment one day. As a doctor I know about the condition, and have the wherewithal to get some private treatment if necessary – but it is not an improvement for many, and it is a sheer insult for the untreated sick when they keep seeing signs thanking “the NHS” (or demanding we save it, when it’s doing bugger all for most of us).

Next up is the onset of rampant inflation, which was utterly predictable from the moment they decided to lock down and print Monopoly money, or would have been had they ever done, or taken notice of, a single cost-benefit analysis. Judging from the unconcern shown about trillions of debt, it looks as if inflation was the plan from the start, because it can be used to reduce the debt the government has taken on our behalf. Even so, the world is so indebted that there seems precious little on which to build the new world – unless it was always to be a world of penury for us all.

There are even those in the economics field who say that the reason for initiating the pandemic was the failure of the Fat Cats’ economics, since they have simply repeated the sharp practices that enriched them but led to the collapse of the world economy in 2008. Then taxpayers had to bail them out, but this way they can divert the blame for the loss of savings, increased prices and widespread shortages and unemployment to the virus. But as the similarly destructive 1968 Hong Kong Flu pandemic showed, if governments had not imposed lockdowns and so on there would have been no effect whatsoever on the economy.

And that brings me to the last statistic I learned today, though I’m sure there are many other ways in which “Building Back better” is actually building back worse. Don’t you agree with me that the mob violence when disgraced Presidents are imprisoned in South Africa or demagogic Presidents in France destroy liberté; and individual aggression being seen increasingly after football matches or on planes, has a lot to do both with suppressed rage from lockdowns and economic injustice? I know that even in my idyllic rural sanctuary, I feel a chronic pessimism and irritability that might very well get me into trouble at some stage (I’m likely to be frowned upon for lack of grace rather than arrested for common assault, thankfully).

That statistic is that over the last year, working people across the world lost $3.7 trillion of their wealth. In the same period the oligarchs have gained $3.9 trillion. That is how stakeholder capitalism works out in real life. The workers at Amazon are spied on, denied unions and paid peanuts, whilst the CEO retires on his gains and has a joy-ride into space to celebrate, without social distancing. In fact the billionaires have been in their own private space race, with Richard Branson emerging as Yuri Gagarin, or at least Alan Shepard. And all the peasants cheered their heroism and doffed their caps, for they have democratised space, if you happen to have gained a few million spare from lockdown.

COVID, then, brought the biggest transfer of wealth in 1 year in history, and the people to who it has gone are those making the vaccines, imposing the rules and rabbiting on about stakeholder capitalism. Do I need to say that, in reality, their emerging future is worse in every respect, and nothing in the plan suggests the injustices will diminish?

The next crisis will probably be the Climate Tipping Point, for which the common people are already being asked to pay in escalating fuel bills, in paying for new cars and an entire new electric infrastructure for them, in paying for heat-pumps when their boilers are banned, and no doubt soon in travel restrictions at home and abroad.

Johnson, over here, is also determined that we shall be thin, unlike him, and although he vetoed a tax on fat and sugar yesterday, that was probably only to give time for some more behaviour insights to prepare us.

To complete the joy of the better world, everything that the working man might value and work for – his culture, history, traditions and moral framework, is being dismantled in the name of the new “more diverse, more feminine, and more gender-neutral” building that G7 has promised us.

Wowie-zowie – life is looking rosy in the sustainable future! But we have to survive the austere aftermath of Freedom Day first. Maybe see you there? Stay Safe, and keep away from Conspiracy Theories, at least until they come true.

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About Jon Garvey

Training in medicine (which was my career), social psychology and theology. Interests in most things, but especially the science-faith interface. The rest of my time, though, is spent writing, playing and recording music.
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3 Responses to An appeal to Better Builders everywhere

  1. Elizabeth B. says:

    Jon,

    It is very strange that Britain and the Commonwealth countries have had some of the most strict lockdown measures throughout this past year. It seemed that with the Brexit vote that the British people had a bit of a rebellious spirit, not so yielding. But then came covid…

    It seems that Boris Johnson is some sort of counter-agent, though that is probably giving him far, far, far too much credit. He is more of a Seussian-looking tool, perhaps. He came and took advantage of the Brexit sentiment, got himself elected while promising to get you all out from under the rule of the EU, and pouf, he is the new tyrant king.

    For Britain, the past year looks like a punishment for Brexit. Johnson looks like some sort of ‘double-agent.’ Maybe this rambling makes no sense, so you will have to pardon me. Not a lot makes sense these days.

    I once wanted to move to England. I thought the American colonists made a drastic mistake with 1776. Now, as imperfect as the U.S. is, and it is EVER SO imperfect, I am glad to not be a part of the it or the Commonwealth, glad for that seemingly misguided revolt. Certainly, there are some states here that have been just as restrictive as the British lockdowns. Those states lost a lot of population to more free states.

    The Brexit punishment notion doesn’t explain Australia and Canada, however. The only thing that can explain such widespread tyranny is the Reset idea.

    I hope you get your appointment you need. Speaking of appointments, it was in the news this week that children are lagging far behind their vaccine schedules for all the Other Vaccines. The ones that prevent really serious things, like, oh, polio, the pox, tuberculosis, etc. Yet, I don’t see anyone here across the Atlantic saying they will go door to door to tell parents to take care of the matter. Yet, we have rumours of covid vaccine checkers. So bizarre.

    Someone I know who works for the U.S. Department of Defence was confronted by a coworker who told him that he is obligated to get the vaccine because the confronter’s daughter’s life depends on it. I wonder if this same person is going to everyone he meets and demanding proof of Serious Diseases vaccinations.

    Really, where are the demands that everyone get the polio and pox vaccines? Where are they? Haven’t we been hearing for years that these old dusty diseases are rising again in parts of the world and that if everyone doesn’t get their children vaccinated that we could end up with the return of these diseases, resistant to current vaccines, even????

    I am much more scared of this possibility than this covid19. So, where are the defenders of lives on this? Where are the Covid warriors and nags when it comes to these diseases that could turn into a real pandemic that would warrant some healthy fear?

    Bizarre times.

    • Elizabeth B. says:

      “I am glad to not be a part of the it or the Commonwealth,”

      This should read, I am glad to not be a part of Britain or the Commonwealth.

    • Avatar photo Jon Garvey says:

      Well, one gets tired of saying that things look more dystopian every day, but duty calls, even in the mouth of hell.

      My own despair moment was a couple of days ago when I realised that someone quite close to me had taken absolutely nothing on board from the warnings I’ve been sharing for the last 2 1/2 years – fortunately someone else close to me proved a great encouragement on the phone. And I must, of course, wave the flag for my wife’s support too. We all need fellowship wherever we can find it now.

      In the end it matters little the extent to which Boris is complicit or deluded: the real powers will sweep him away just before they themselves find they were expendable. More worrying is that everyone who allows themselves to believe the lie is equally complicit: every evil plan depends on useful idiots. A shame when most of the population and most of the church seem to think this all just a bump in the road.

      I agree with you that the “Commonwealth dominions” like Australia, NZ and Canada are the most mystifying cases. We always thought of them as obstinate colonials, so what turned them into neutered sheep? How has the whole political class of the world become crassly totalitarian? Oh the power of fear!

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