OPINION. Christmas beckons, and Euro Grinches, ready to steal the splendor and glory of the season abound. In this Christian calendar we are in “Advent” for a few days yet, waiting, awaiting…and not for the recent panic porn stats or what they might foretell re the lapsed state of our civil liberties.
By Omar S. Khan, Uncommonwisdom.online
Fear and anxiety have become default settings, and they are destroying people’s souls, their wits, their very sense of self. It is heartbreaking to see people pining for the simplicity of being able to move about, be with friends, celebrate eking out a survival, affirming togetherness, singing however imperfectly those yuletide songs of joy.
Contrasted with this are the constant threats of lockdowns, the “15 million jabs to freedom” that curdled into mocking nothingness, this recurringly sad, silly, perverted psychological shell game, dangling freedom, and pulling it away. Abnormal and anti-life, and we wait for the next “dispensation” from these ghouls and scavengers.
Want to end the pandemic as someone said? If feeling ill, get some Vitamin D and Zinc, some chicken soup, rest for several days, do not take a frigging test, and keep the television “porn” off. In 99.6% of cases, you’ll rebound, and have robust natural immunity thereafter.
Brendan O’Neill Is Spot On
Writing in Spiked, Mr. O’Neill declares “the death of Europe.” Not much hyperbole there alas. A minor “strain” is reported out of Botswana and South Africa. Weeks later deaths there are plummeting. The “scariant” is already on global tour and so you can’t lock it in, and its lethality is so resoundingly mild, it may serve as an inadvertent vaccine. Europe rushes to fascistic shutdown on reflex, confessing its pronounced detachment from data or prevailing reality.
The march towards tyranny can brook little interruption there it seems, as long as the bogey man has a brand name. Austria teeters close to making it “criminal” to refuse the vaccine, a crime to refuse to have untested gene therapies pumped into your body. In a lucid moment can anyone explain how that even vaguely passes Nuremberg standards? And why the deafening quiet from all these “human rights” bloviators, forever disdaining other countries, and now revealing themselves to be a sad shell of a parody of civil liberty themselves?
Has a new Testament been released in which “doubting Covid” and the Commissar of Covidstan, Ursula von der Leyen, is against the law? Free speech can be trammeled, experts shunned, but chasing people with spike protein injections, switching between ice creams and internment camps as incentives, is fine, as we veer between Kafka and Kubrick.
Currently in Italy, no vaccine and you can’t work. But these same “vaccines” do not stop you spreading or getting infected, so how is it even plausible to say they are “protective” in terms of interactions with anyone else? Having immiserated Greek pensioners under the bureaucratic caress of Brussels for some years, the Greek government will now fine people for each month they commit the sin of exercising physical personal autonomy.
The Netherlands after shooting at protestors (ah the civilized heirs of Erasmus at their best), has had a renewed collapse of imagination, and are shut down again, “at least until mid-January” over a C-19 strain that in South Africa has slumped to a 0.5% case fatality rate. Decimated Dutch businesses watch as shoppers trot across borders for their shopping.
Vienna, Mozart’s city, invites a fresh opera to chronicle batons and crazed police brutality, while water cannons gush in the heartland of the post-war modern European project, Brussels. “Human rights” and respecting the individual are revealed as bluster, as some Asian autocrats role modeling this, rush to lockdown and to penalize their populace, lest they be outdone in thuggery and the contempt for human rights.
Not Just Emergency Measures
Let’s again reiterate, there is no “emergency.” There hasn’t been in terms of global excess deaths from the outset. It is a coronavirus with 90-99% cross-reactive immunity even among vulnerable populations, as the Diamond Princess cruise ship demonstrated way back in February 2020 and numerous global seroprevalence studies by Professor Ioannidis of Stanford and others have confirmed.
None of this is “emerging” except insofar as our having variants. And that is fully expected, particularly when in the midst of a “pandemic” we mass-vaccinate people, including large swathes not at risk, thereby “stressing” the virus to evade our protections. We keep postponing endemicity, and call that an “emergency.”
Given the sheer predictability of the Omicron type outbreak, we are witnessing instead a tragic rebooting of the relationship between the State and individuals. The State now “orders” you what to put into your body, empowering itself to strip literal sovereignty from the very individuals who voted to endow the State with any legitimacy to lead whatsoever. Surely our body and minds might remain ours, encroaching upon them is not a political privilege. So European liberalism is a chimera now, and deep, intrusive totalitarianism can just be asserted.
You see how readily we can then segue to make it a criminal offence to refuse any orthodoxy foisted upon us by our host states? This is the very legal horror of the “slippery slope” my Stanford Law professors were so adamant we avoid. If you ignore a few upcoming summons in Austria, if the proposed law goes into effect in February, fines can rise to 7,200 euros. These can be life ruining. They are economically sacrilegious insofar as wasted resources. If you fail to make your case to enroll the populace, you enforce it through police and legal sanctions?
The “vaccine” narrative is a total fraud insofar as being justified for mass treatment when virtually no one is at mortal risk, safety trials are far from concluded, data was rigged, the placebo control group is no more, hospitals are not over-run, and the new “scariant” is going so far as to overwhelmingly target the “vaccinated” and “boosted” (see below as to why this may be the case).
Being propelled into house arrest, destitution, denied a voice, this is what we find flowing from a global cradle of liberty and rights? Germany has already attempted a “lock down” of the “unvaccinated” and as surely as the night follows the day, upcoming now are restrictions on the “vaxxed” over the holidays too, as none of the silliness, the face nappies, nor the attempt to corral an airborne virus, nor jabbing people with antiquated “therapeutics” (designed for Alpha, already flailing with Delta), achieve anything. So, a Teutonic temper tantrum by the state doesn’t produce anything other than noxious human rights violations.
As Brendan writes,
“…this supposed bastion of human rights, the political union we were told was necessary to preserve the dignity and freedom of modern Europeans…”,
is now a rotting edifice, giving aid and comfort to totalitarians and fascists-in-training worldwide. For now, bless the Swedes, deep honor to the Japanese (no mandatory vaccinations, early treatments welcome), and rejoice in those truly free states in the US, with Governor de Santis of Florida showing in word and deed how bracing liberty really is.
And This Over Omy…of All “Scariants”?
The Danes are meticulously stockpiling data, demonstrating graphically the “surge” in “positive tests” posing as “cases” and the declining death rate as “Omy” supplants Delta. But as we delve into this and other related data, it becomes quite clear there is more than meets the eye or even the bleating tongue.
First, no immediate progenitors are known. Lineage seems to go back to the viruses of the early to mid-2020s. So where has it been hiding since? The technical whitewash for this awkward fact is that it has been sequestered
“in a geography with poor genomic surveillance…or…in a chronically infected individual.”
Really, people actually write this. The simplest explanation is it seeped out from a lab.
From Danish and other well-sifted data, Omicron preferentially infiltrates the “vaccinated.” If a result of gain-of-function shenanigans, it may have passed repeatedly through convalescent or vaccinated plasma, to coax it to evade acquired immunity. The reason for this speculation is the series of highly suspicious mutations in the spike protein. It is hard to imagine a natural process by which they came into being, as all but one of them are indicated to be “nonsynonymous”.
In everyday parlance, they are coded for different amino acid sequences. Natural selection incited variants would have some more mischief in the mix, meaningless synonymous mutations as well. This also seems selected to replicate in the bronchial tract. Deeper in the human lungs, it is far less efficient than Delta or even the first Wuhanese strains. This is likely why it causes more mild distress (“actually reminiscent of techniques to make live attenuated influenza vaccines safer for use in humans” reports Substack stalwart “Eugyppius”). This makes eminent sense, meaning such viruses are well adapted for circulation in the relatively cooler upper respiratory tract, rather than the warmer environs of our more vulnerable lungs.
But we can say: these “vaccines”, including boosters are showing strong negative efficacy vs “Omy”, and this would be consistent with the hypothesis of it being an OAS enabled escape variant, and yes, it is consistently milder.
Again, most new cases in Denmark have been either vaccinated or “boosted”, which holds true both for Omicron and earlier variants.
More than 76% of non-Omy infections are in vaxxed folks and 90% of Omicron itself. For perspective, as of December 18th, only 25 of the 561 people then hospitalized in Denmark had the “Omy” pedigree. Fewer than 5 of those in intensive care. And even there, we don’t know “with” or “from.”
This keeps pace with a marked slowdown in the growth of Danish hospitalizations and intensive care patients. This had risen five-fold in pace with their mass “vaccination” push between mid-October and late November, and then moved more discreetly, about 20% (still predating Omicron). Consistent with South African reporting (they’ve never gone above initially limited restrictions and have now ditched “contact tracing” as a waste of time, which clearly it is), those with Omy are far less likely to be hospitalized and far quicker to be released, the majority being released overnight.
Thus, has gibberish been spouted, thus has it been buzz fed through the airwaves, thus tidal waves of fact-free inanity have been lavished on sparking terror from nothing, and we shamelessly, on cue, flee from our plans, demand no “time out” from this stupidity, dutifully curtail our children’s lives and fasten those face nappies on, and imagine what the world would have been like if “cower on cue” had been our national philosophy and fixation before.
What if instead of running into burning buildings to rescue people, and towards bomb blasts to support neighbors, or dutifully dusting off the debris stoically as we took a stand against genocidal fascism, we had just buckled, and cringed and disintegrated? At least it would have been in the face of terrorism and war, not aghast at a pathogen of threat to less than 1%, inflicting its alleged blitzkrieg on those above 80 with multiple chronic illnesses, and even there with early treatments abounding that could ameliorate its impact if we only demanded the right to be treated.
Being undone by “Omi-cuckoo” is probably some form of poetic justice to our craven modern culture.
This Christmas the Barricades Beckon
So, back to Europe. How can we conceive of the gravity of this assault on our humanity and personhood? Justice Secretary Raab of the UK squeaking “I don’t think it will happen here”, by comparison to the Continent’s feckless fascists sounds positively Churchillian.
And yes, I’ll say “Churchillian” and the wokesters can be hysteric. I remember my Oxford history don, saying wistfully one beautiful evening when we met over dinner with our former Vice Master and Chaplain (ah these quaint, marvelous designations worn with dignity by accomplished, wonderful people with gumption and gravitas),
“Ah Winnie (referring to Churchill, not Pooh), take him all in all, the anachronisms, the Empire, the imperiousness, being so wrong in some ways about India… but when it mattered, when it was all on the line, he told us who we were, and we believed him. And that meant everything.”
Yes, then as now. We need to endow a better narrative. But the UK Justice Secretary, and that whole batch of WHO appeasing political sycophants, who finally and justly faced a tidal wave of internal dissent over their “Plan B” proclamations, should be saying, “It will not happen.” Not the time for equivocation.
And it is not just Nuremberg, as Mr. O’Neill pointed out, we can harken back to John Locke who demarcated the line between the individual and officialdom. Locke also helped ignite the American revolutionary bonfire. And then Mr. Jefferson and his peers took us from the conviction in the property being unassailable to “the pursuit of happiness” being self-evidently “unalienable.”
Well, both versions are under assault. We are ordered into or out of the property (into our homes versus out of our businesses), we are told whether we can avail of our premises or not, or offer its welcome to others or not, and where we can travel, who we can be with, how we may be treated and for what. All this becomes a matter of the ineptitude of some central bureaucracy, clearly funded by vested interests, not accountable to anyone. Everything rankles as the FDA entertains holding off release of critical Pfizer clinical data for over 75 years? And courts consider this an even plausible request? Thank God for whistleblowers.
So, God or evolutionary grace grants us autonomy, gives us free will, or so the basis of moral accountability argues, but the EU will not. The seat of judgment must have passed to them. And we are now free to make idols of our bureaucracies, and idiots of ourselves when we’ve clearly been had and are being hoodwinked as I write. Our ancestors fought for our self-government over generations, we planted the flag of bodily autonomy knowing how dangerous it is to allow for exemptions there, hence Nuremberg post the Nazis. And we cannot now abdicate all of that, just calling it “medical intervention” when medically the “vaccines” don’t work, the pathogen for most people is no more dangerous than median influenza, and when so many early treatments abound, some listed as “essential drugs” by the WHO, with billions of doses over multiple decades and clearly no safety issues.
If you stepped on a rusty nail tomorrow, would anyone need to “mandate” a Tetanus shot or put you away in an internment camp until you got attention? Given that, as we still spread C-19 and get infected, jabbed or not, we are surely just shrieking punitive insanity when we demand “compliance” or claim we have any right to suspend your rights on this basis. How is that argument, not provoking the largest legal trial in the world today? Why are there not thousands of major cases about the legal basis to order someone about, of no material risk to anyone else (or else let’s burn all the masks, throw out all the social distancing, and provide weekly boosters to all the EU leaders while supplies last, because they clearly don’t help), and be told how and where to live, and what to do or not to do?
So, essentially, any freedom is somehow contingent on state favor. Take a certain mode of medical treatment, whether you agree with it or not, whether we will openly let it be debated or not, whether we will fully publish all facts or not, irrespective of mushrooming adverse effects, and we “may” let you have a few spoonfuls of freedom?
Even the “vaxxed” are not free, but recipients of contingent “favors” from this suddenly life-determining state, granting a license for a modicum of human normalcy which it can revoke at any time! C’mon folks, it’s enough, we need to flood the world’s communication channels with the sheer lunacy of having our range of freedom throttled by some pharmaceutical cartel’s profit motive to which we must succumb.
This Must Be the Time
So, we await the chorus from these human rights groups. Where are the green garrison relative to all the masks and plastic polluting oceans over sham, unneeded and clearly ineffective “protections?” Was the EU not to be the champion of individual and collective rights? And now all the humanitarians are as meek as mice as the Strangelovian lunacy of the arms race turns pharmaceutical and as per the COVID theology the whole world is to become Jonestown?
So the fountain of liberalism becomes a citadel of authoritarianism, paving the way, and emboldening autocrats everywhere.
Thomas Aquinas, well ahead of Hannah Arendt, proclaimed that perpetrating evil is a form of banality. There aren’t enough outright psychopaths or monsters. So, we render the act of infiltrating liberty and undermining our human bedrock as something we can “bureaucratize” and which can be soullessly carried out by people who don’t question, who go along, who conform, who want public plaudits, and who just acquiesce.
The antidote is to believe we are all agents of history (not hysteria), and how we live matters, as well as how we communicate, what we stand up for, the accountability we demand of leaders.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
What enables hell is a mass culture of lack of attention, a failure to face and challenge dogmas, an unwillingness to embrace accountability ourselves, and a lack of an appetite for affirming life by immersing in it and celebrating it. Someone once wrote,
“Hell? It’s the weekly color supplement of the Sunday paper.”
We have “reality shows” bereft of reality, and talk shows we seem besotted by, where eminences share which day of the week they wash their hair.
Whether Christian, spiritual in another way, or just devoutly human in your own way, we can all thrill to the sentiment expressed by St. Irenaeus of Lyons,
“The glory of God is man fully alive.”
Alternatively, a caricature and pestilential counterfeit is our being “told” to suspend our critical faculties and ordered to act as if one source of harm, towers above all others. And moreover, wrecking lives and economic and social ecosystems is nothing, beyond my grasping for a few more years of biological survival, “non-death” (not really life) beyond normal mortality. What an epitaph!
“I held on for another year, physically decrepit as I may have been, and helped destroy the world while doing so.”
So, we have to pay attention. And we have to decide if Europe is having another of its periodic “dark nights of the soul” and will emerge aglow with its real heritage or just opt to sink in the mire. We have to concentrate our creative focus, we have to come fully alive to this moment, with all our wits, and all our compassion and all our perspicacity and all our courage and vision. If we do that, hell’s banality won’t touch us, and perhaps just perhaps, we will rally our civilization to its better angels.
By Omar S. Khan, Uncommonwisdom.online
Omar S. Khan Biography
Omar is a true global citizen. Born in Cairo, a US citizen, having lived in Germany, the US, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, the UK, Japan, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Singapore, and Dubai.
His consulting firms, EPL Global and Sensei International, focusing on organizational and individual growth and development and converting strategy into decisive action, have served clients in the US, UK, Argentina, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Dubai, Bahrain, Oman, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Japan, China, and Australia.
Clients have included Unilever, Maersk, Johnson & Johnson, 3M, American Express, DBS Bank, Singapore Airlines, Emirates Airlines, KLM, Raffles International, The Ritz-Carlton, Hilton International, DIIF, Emirates Bank, Suntory, Novartis, Motorola, FMC, the Shui On Group, and many others.
In 2010, Consulting Magazine, recognized Omar as one of the top 20 consultants in the world, the first time in the history of the award that acknowledgment went to someone leading a boutique global firm.
Crisis work included developing leaders for the Catholic Church in Pakistan, helping companies manage and rebound in the ’90s during Sri Lanka’s Civil War (KLM and Ceylinco after the Central Bank Bombing, The World Trade Center, and more), in the US working with the State Department and then the Foundation for Community Encouragement post 9/11 to create healthier responses and with various global clients during the 2008-9 Financial crisis creating the concept of “ROC” or “Return on Crisis”.
Since March 2020, he has been immersed as a COVID researcher, writing incessantly on various aspects of the “technical” and “adaptive” crises. His site, Uncommonwisdom.online contains articles and podcasts with leading researchers and clinicians and COVID response thought leaders like Dr. Peter McCullough, Steve Kirsch, Dr. Tess Lawrie, Dr. Pierre Kory, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Nick Hudson of PANDA, Dr. Shankara Chetty, and Dr. Harvey Risch. Omar has contributed to Think Tanks, podcasts and symposia worldwide on this topic. He is launching a new initiative with Dr. Shankara Chetty to make people aware of Dr. Chetty’s breakthrough “8th Day Protocol” and the need to sieve COVID claims, keeping “models” and actual “data” distinct. He has also been instrumental in bringing the early treatment paradigm to Sri Lanka, having had leading researchers, doctors, and clinicians presenting to policymakers there. Early outpatient therapy is now officially endorsed there.
Omar is the author of 5 books, and his business writings have been featured in the FT, The Conference Board, Leaders and Business, and many others.