Tag Archives: Lockdowns

Ground Control to Planet Lockdown: This Is Only a Test, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on April 3, 2020 | 4 comments

How long does lock down go on? Could it go on forever? From Pepe Escobar at strategic-culture.org:

As much as Covid-19 is a circuit breaker, a time bomb and an actual weapon of mass destruction (WMD), a fierce debate is raging worldwide on the wisdom of mass quarantine applied to entire cities, states and nations.

Those against it argue Planet Lockdown not only is not stopping the spread of Covid-19 but also has landed the global economy into a cryogenic state – with unforeseen, dire consequences. Thus quarantine should apply essentially to the population with the greatest risk of death: the elderly.

With Planet Lockdown transfixed by heart-breaking reports from the Covid-19 frontline, there’s no question this is an incendiary assertion.

In parallel, a total corporate media takeover is implying that if the numbers do not substantially go down, Planet Lockdown – an euphemism for house arrest – remains, indefinitely.

Michael Levitt, 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry and Stanford biophysicist, was spot on when he calculated that China would get through the worst of Covid-19 way before throngs of health experts believed, and that “What we need is to control the panic”.

Let’s cross this over with some facts and dissident opinion, in the interest of fostering an informed debate.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Economy, Governments, Medicine, Politics, Privacy, Propaganda, Psychology, Surveillance

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What Are “Essential Services?” by David Hathaway

Posted on April 3, 2020 | 3 comments

In an economy as inextricably interlinked as ours, decided which jobs and services are “essential” is virtually impossible. They all are in one way or the other, certainly to the people who hold them. If they weren’t essential to the employer, they wouldn’t exist in a market economy. From David Hathaway at lewrockwell.com:

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey recently issued an Executive Order requiring residents to “stay home.” The Governor said that only businesses providing “essential services” could remain open. When hit with a barrage of questions, he told Arizonans to not worry because “grocery stores and pharmacies” would remain open and their employees would be allowed to leave their homes and go to work. As I considered what an “essential service” is in the free market, I was reminded of Leonard Read’s brilliant essay “I, Pencil.”

As Mr. Read pointed out, even the production of a “simple” pencil is beyond the capabilities of one person or one firm to plan and implement. It requires an incredibly complex market coordination of land, labor, and capital. A pencil requires graphite and iron miners, trucks, rubber for the tires for the trucks, rubber plantations, workers at the rubber plantations, paint producers, lumberjacks, sawmills, employees for the operation of the sawmills and for all the associated factories, tool manufactures to make the tools used in the various associated industries, and maintenance personnel to keep all the facilities running. There is also a myriad of ancillary industries that produce and provide a huge number of items used in the various businesses that produce components in the higher orders of production to make the pencil; things like ink, paper, clothing for the workers, and oil pumping and refinery equipment to keep fuel flowing to all the associated vehicles and industries. The interconnected web of cooperating firms and individuals is almost infinite.

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Posted in Collapse, Economy, Government, Medicine

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Coronavirus Crackdown – Beware “The New Normal”, by Kit Knightly

Posted on March 23, 2020 | Leave a comment

What the coronavirus panic is doing to our freedoms will not go away when the coronavirus does. From Kit Knightly at off-guardian.org:

So this is how Liberty dies… with thunderous applause.

A few days ago James Corbett posted a video titled “Is this THE big event?” the answer to that increasingly looks to be “yes”.

Not the virus itself, you understand, which official statistics still show to be minor compared to annual flu outbreaks. But rather, what it’s being used for. The West’s vestigial democratic forms, and slowly atrophying civil liberties are facing a final assault from draconian authoritarians sensing (or creating) their big moment.

Spain is enjoying “martial law in all but name”, while Italy is likewise bringing in the army.

In France, Macron has “declared war” on the coronavirus, essentially locking the entire country up inside their homes unless they have “a good reason” to leave. A reason which must be submitted in writing to the police.

Public gatherings are of course strictly forbidden. Elections are halted.

No word yet on what the Gilets Jaunes plan to do. There is a march – Act 71 – planned for today. Will it go head? If so, will they be met with more violence? Maybe. Only now instead of being ignored by the media they will be branded “selfish” for putting “members of the public at risk”.

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From Boston to Ferguson to Charlottesville: The Evolution of a Police State Lockdown, by John W. Whitehead

Posted on August 19, 2018 | Leave a comment

People have to come to accept lockdowns as routine and normal police procedure. They’re an affront to the Constitution. From John W. Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“It takes a remarkable force to keep nearly a million people quietly indoors for an entire day, home from work and school, from neighborhood errands and out-of-town travel. It takes a remarkable force to keep businesses closed and cars off the road, to keep playgrounds empty and porches unused across a densely populated place 125 square miles in size. This happened … not because armed officers went door-to-door, or imposed a curfew, or threatened martial law. All around the region, for 13 hours, people locked up their businesses and ‘sheltered in place’ out of a kind of collective will. The force that kept them there wasn’t external – there was virtually no active enforcement across the city of the governor’s plea that people stay indoors. Rather, the pressure was an internal one – expressed as concern, or helpfulness, or in some cases, fear – felt in thousands of individual homes.”—Journalist Emily Badger, “The Psychology of a Citywide Lockdown”

It has become way too easy to lockdown this nation.

Five years ago, the city of Boston was locked down while police carried out a military-style manhunt for suspects in the 2013 Boston Marathon explosion.

Four years ago, the city of Ferguson, Missouri, was locked down, with government officials deploying a massive SWAT team, an armored personnel carrier, men in camouflage pointing heavy artillery at the crowd, smoke bombs and tear gas to quell citizen unrest over a police shooting of a young, unarmed black man.

Three years ago, the city of Baltimore was put under a military-enforced lockdown after civil unrest over police brutality erupted into rioting. More than 1,500 national guard troops were deployed while residents were ordered to stay inside their homes and put under a 10 pm curfew.

This year, it was my hometown of Charlottesville, Va., population 50,000, that was locked down while government officials declared a state of emergency and enacted heightened security measures tantamount to martial law, despite the absence of any publicized information about credible threats to public safety.

To continue reading: From Boston to Ferguson to Charlottesville: The Evolution of a Police State Lockdown

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