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https://brownstone.org/articles/end-travel-restrictions-now/

End These Travel Restrictions Now

Once again, the US government has extended the vaccination-only policy for foreign travelers, this time to April and probably later. It’s a devastating announcement for millions of people without US passports who want to come to the US to visit friends and family or otherwise engage in professional and educational activities the way they used to. Potentially some 3 billion people are affected. 

The US government says, once again, only the jabbed may visit. 

Unless you are on “diplomatic or official foreign government travel.” So of course government exempts itself. Only the elites – among whom those who do not fly commercial – get a pass, just like in totalitarian dystopia. The enforcement takes place when the tickets and boarding passes are issued, so if you can bypass that, you are good to go.

And I’ll say what you are already thinking: of course this policy does not apply to the Southern border. But it does apply to everywhere else in the world and travelers who buy plane or train tickets. They must get the shot or will be denied entry. 

This is very personal to me and the rest of us at Brownstone because it means that our 2023 Fellow, Professor Julie Ponesse, cannot even cross the US-Canada border to engage in an academic colloquium we have scheduled. 

It also affects a friend of mine in the UK, who is a highly specialized expert in Renaissance choral music who wants to come to conduct choirs in the US. There are probably thousands of institutions and companies that could tell similar stories of exclusion. Meanwhile, it’s not even clear that most US citizens know about this rule at all. The US is one of the few countries in the world that maintains them. 

It should go without saying that the restrictions are pointless. It’s not a news flash that Covid is already here and fast making its way toward endemicity. Even if people arrived sick as dogs, there is enough immunity in the population for Covid to be treated like the flu or a cold. It is also incredibly clear, and has been for 18 months at least, that the shots protect against neither infection nor spread, nor do they meet the safety stands of traditional vaccines. 

That some people in the world declined them is a credit to their decision-making fortitude, and exactly the kind of visitors we need. 

This is a grave embarrassment to the US of course. But there is even more at stake. This one rule represents a repudiation of a policy of permission that built the modern world as we know it. It symbolizes a return to isolation, parochialism, detachment, and feudalistic fear, and ignorance and narrow mindedness along with it. Before modernity dawned, this was the default: knowing only what is around us: language, religion, and custom. What made the world great – and what vastly improved our immune systems – was fearless exposure to the broader world. 

This is the 150th anniversary of Jules Verne’s mighty classic Around the World in 80 Days, written at the height of the Belle Epoch in 1872. Several amazing innovations dawned at once: the Suez Canal, the US transcontinental railroad, and the linking of the Indian railway through the subcontinent. This made it possible to circumnavigate the world in two and a half months. Maybe. A high-born English aristocrat (Phileas Fogg) and a wiley French assistant (Jean Passepartout) set out on the great journey based on a wager made with a friend. 

In each telling of the story in movies, the rendering takes on a different cast. In the earliest, the English gentleman encounters every manner of deeply regrettable traditions and practices and variously rescues situations by way of his high English morals, manners, and principles. You get the impression of England going out to civilize the world, as was the attitude of the time. More modern filmmakers flip the script and have gentle and fascinating foreign people school the Englishman in other ways of the world. The book has come to be this type of template. 

Whichever view you hold, the point remains: exposure to foreign cultures and peoples is good for everyone. This gets us out of our isolation and lets us see the world in a different way. It broadens our minds, makes us curious about languages and history, and generally increases familiarity and thus humane treatment of others. In other words, travel promotes human understanding and human rights. This is the idea, beautifully embodied in this literary classic. 

It’s heartbreaking to read this book today and understand the broadness of the great dream of a world connected. There were no restraints other than technology and weather in their travels. The world had no passports. Those came during and after the Great War. There certainly were not vaccination mandates for travelers. Even for new US immigrants in those days, there were some tests for disease before the granting of citizenship but travelers could come and go. And so it has been for a very long time. Without question. 

Jules Verne was right: the world was getting better, more connected, and with no end in sight. 

And then March 12, 2020 arrived, when Trump was talked into slamming shut the right to travel for people from Europe, UK, and Australia. This was following his January closure of travel from China. Nothing like this had ever happened, especially not on the edict from one man without any vote from Congress. When it became obvious that this was a pointless exercise, people in the Trump administration tried to get it reversed but there was no one really in charge of making the decision. Everyone just passed the buck to everyone else, and thus did the Biden administration inherit and extend them, now for two more years. 

For almost three years now, many wonderful artists, intellectuals, students, business professionals, and musicians have been locked out of US borders, even just to tour around and see this great land and meet up with friends. It’s simply barbaric and yet there it is. 

Why does this persist? Maybe the US government wants to leave in place the remnants of at least some kind of precedent on which to build a health-passport system on the way to constructing a China-style social credit system. Certainly we are being surveilled and tracked as never before, and the shot is part of that. Or maybe it is to perpetuate the legalities of emergency rule under which the shots can continue to be authorized under emergency use. Or some combination. 

Also, there is a broader ideological orientation that should concern us, best embodied by the policy papers of the World Economic Forum and the writings of Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, and others. It’s a new ideology I’ve called lockdownism but it might also be called techno-primitivism. It’s a combination of digital technology plus a rollback into previous ages of existence to a time without fossil fuels and meat plus geographical isolation and limited choices for average people. In other words, it’s a step back to feudalism: the lords of the manor are digital titans and the rest of us are peasants toiling in the fields and eating bugs when the food runs out. 

You could say that such speculation is delirium but, these days, I don’t think so. Three years ago, no one could have imagined that an academic from Canada or a conductor from Britain would not be allowed to enter the US because they refused an experimental shot to ward off a disease that is no threat to them and which doesn’t accomplish the goal anyway. No one would have imagined closed churches, schools, and businesses. We have seen and experienced horrible things and are told to be grateful for the freedoms we have. 

We are turning back the clock: away from high civilization to a much lower form without a solid guarantee of even the freedom to travel, while giving up the dream of universal human rights. The confidence that Phileas Fogg had in a better world with more human connection is being replaced by isolation, fear, and compliance as guiding principles. The price will be very high. In the end, what we are losing is human connection and hence the core of civility itself. The price paid will not be apparent this year or next but over the long term as the idealism that birthed the old modern ideal recedes into the past. 

Verne says this at the end of his book:

Phileas Fogg had won his wager, and had made his journey around the world in eighty days. To do this he had employed every means of conveyance—steamers, railways, carriages, yachts, trading-vessels, sledges, elephants. The eccentric gentleman had throughout displayed all his marvelous qualities of coolness and exactitude. But what then? What had he really gained by all this trouble? What had he brought back from this long and weary journey?

Nothing, say you? Perhaps so; nothing but a charming woman, who, strange as it may appear, made him the happiest of men!

Truly, would you not for less than that make the tour around the world?

[Coda: Several people have written me that at no time coming and going from the US has the TSA or Customs or Passports asked for the vaccine status. Indeed. Most agents are unaware that this is even an issue. The reason is that last year, the responsibility for enforcement was passed on to the airlines themselves who will not issue a boarding pass on a US-board flight without proof of vaccinated status. This develops a digital footprint and works as an enforcement tool, seemingly without involving border agents at all. So fair warning if you have heard that you can get in without it: there will be checks, and enforcement, and you will be barred entry, just not in the usual way. 

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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/what_to_expect_from_the_government_in_2023_more_of_the_same

What to Expect from the Government in 2023? More of the Same

“There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.”—Montesquieu, Enlightenment philosopher

For those wondering what to expect from the government in 2023, it looks like we’re going to be in for more of the same in terms of the government’s brand of madness, mayhem, corruption and brutality.

Digital prisons. Unceasingly, the government and its corporate partners are pushing for a national digital ID system. Local police agencies have already been given access to facial recognition software and databases containing 20 billion images, the precursor to a digital ID. Eventually, a digital ID will be required to gain access to all aspects of life: government, work, travel, healthcare, financial services, shopping, etc. Before long, biometrics (iris scans, face print, voice, DNA, etc.), will become the de facto digital ID.

Precrime. Under the pretext of helping overwhelmed government agencies work more efficiently, AI predictive and surveillance technologies are being used to classify, segregate and flag the populace with little concern for privacy rights or due process. All of this sorting, sifting and calculating is being done swiftly, secretly and incessantly with the help of AI technology and a surveillance state that monitors your every move. AI predictive tools are being deployed in almost every area of life.

Mandatory quarantines. Building on precedents established during the COVID-19 pandemic, government agents may be empowered to indefinitely detain anyone they suspect of posing a medical risk to others without providing an explanation, subject them to medical tests without their consent, and carry out such detentions and quarantines without any kind of due process or judicial review.

Mental health assessments by non-medical personnel. As a result of a nationwide push to train a broad spectrum of so-called gatekeepers in mental health first-aid training, more Americans are going to run the risk of being reported by non-medical personnel and detained for having mental health issues.

Tracking chips for citizens. Momentum is building for corporations and the government alike to be able to track the populace, whether through the use of RFID chips embedded in a national ID card, microscopic chips embedded in one’s skin, or tags in retail products.

Military involvement domestically. The future, according to a Pentagon training video, will be militaristic, dystopian and far from friendly to freedom. Indeed, all signs point to the battlefield of the future being the American home front. Anticipating this, the government plans to have the military work in conjunction with local police to quell civil unrest domestically.

Government censorship of anything it classifies as disinformation. In the government’s ongoing assault on those who criticize the government—whether that criticism manifests itself in word, deed or thought—government and corporate censors claiming to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns are, in fact, laying the groundwork now to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Threat assessments. The government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state. Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score. It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

War on cash. The government and its corporate partners are engaged in a concerted campaign to shift consumers towards a digital mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient. This push for a digital currency dovetails with the government’s war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for some time now. In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal.

Expansive surveillance. AI surveillance harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and widespread surveillance technology to do what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude. Everything that was once private is now up for grabs to the right buyer. With every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.

Militarized police. Having transformed local law enforcement into extensions of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are moving into the next phase of the transformation, turning the nation’s police officers into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone extraction software, Stingray devices and so much more.

Police shootings of unarmed citizens. Owing in large part to the militarization of local law enforcement agencies, not a week goes by without more reports of hair-raising incidents by police imbued with a take-no-prisoners attitude and a battlefield approach to the communities in which they serve. Police brutality and the use of excessive force continues unabated.

False flags and terrorist attacks. Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government. This has become the shadow government’s modus operandi regardless of which party is in power: the government creates a menace—knowing full well the ramifications such a danger might pose to the public—then without ever owning up to the part it played in unleashing that particular menace on an unsuspecting populace, it demands additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threat.

Endless wars to keep America’s military’s empire employed. The military and security industrial complexes that have advocated that the U.S. remain at war, year after year, are the very entities that will continue to profit the most from America’s expanding military empire abroad and here at home.

Erosions of private property. Private property means little at a time when SWAT teams and other government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, wound or kill you, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family. Likewise, if government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.

Overcriminalization. The government has increasingly adopted the authoritarian notion that it knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives. Overregulation and overcriminalization have been pushed to such outrageous limits that federal and state governments now require on penalty of a fine that individuals apply for permission before they can grow exotic orchids, host elaborate dinner parties, gather friends in one’s home for Bible studies, give coffee to the homeless, let their kids manage a lemonade stand, keep chickens as pets, or braid someone’s hair.

Strip searches and the denigration of bodily integrity. Court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, forcibly take our DNA, strip search us, and probe us intimately. Individuals—men and women alike—continue to be subjected to what is essentially government-sanctioned rape by police in the course of “routine” traffic stops.

Censorship. First Amendment activities are being pummeled, punched, kicked, choked, chained and generally gagged all across the country. Free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors have conspired to corrode our core freedoms. The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remains the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”

Taxation Without Any Real Representation. As a Princeton University survey indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation’s capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen. We are no longer a representative republic. With Big Business and Big Government having fused into a corporate state, the president and his state counterparts—the governors—have become little more than CEOs of the Corporate State, which day by day is assuming more government control over our lives. Never before have average Americans had so little say in the workings of their government and even less access to their so-called representatives.

Year after year, the government remains the greatest threat to our freedoms, and yet year after year, “we the people” allow ourselves to be suckered into believing that politics will fix what’s wrong with the country.

Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the very definition of insanity.

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http://endoftheamericandream.com/even-the-mainstream-media-is-now-admitting-that-the-earth-is-suffering-a-crisis-of-mass-extinction/

Even The Mainstream Media Is Now Admitting That “The Earth Is Suffering A Crisis Of Mass Extinction”

Scientists are telling us that we are in the midst of the worst mass extinction that our planet has seen since the days of the dinosaurs.  So why aren’t more people alarmed by this?  Have we become so “dumbed down” that we don’t even have the intellectual capacity to care about our own future any longer?  As I discuss in my latest book, plankton are being wiped out at a staggering rate and that means that all of the food chains in our oceans are in peril.  Meanwhile, insects are disappearing so rapidly that experts are warning that they may be almost totally gone about a hundred years from now.  Of course countless other species are steadily going extinct as well.  In fact, a recent study that included “data from 32,000 populations of more than 5,000 species of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish” discovered that on average those populations have “plummeted nearly 70 percent in the last 50 years”. 

Everywhere around us, life is being wiped out.

That means that we are in danger of being wiped out as well.

But for now, most people don’t seem to care.  As long as they have whatever they personally need, they are just going to keep enjoying their lives as they always have.

Unfortunately, the clock is ticking.  Last Sunday, 60 Minutes ran a segment in which they admitted that “the Earth is suffering a crisis of mass extinction on a scale unseen since the dinosaurs”…

But on this New Year’s Day, the population is 8 billion. Today, wild plants and animals are running out of places to live. The scientists you’re about to meet say the Earth is suffering a crisis of mass extinction on a scale unseen since the dinosaurs.

Yes, this is really happening.

Everywhere you look, life is being wiped out, and it is getting worse with each passing year.

A recent NPR article boldly declared that “animal populations are declining, and we’ve got limited time to try to fix it”.

Sadly, most people don’t seem to understand that humanity will not be able to survive when the animals, fish, birds and insects are gone.

We are being openly warned that if we stay on the path that we are currently on it will “cause modern human society to crumble”…

That grim reality, according to the researchers, means that even if humans manage to survive in some capacity, the wide-reaching impacts of mass extinction — which include habitat destruction, breakdowns in the natural food chain, soil infertility, and more — would cause modern human society to crumble.

If we want to turn things around, we need to take massive action right now.

But the elite don’t seem to have any solutions.

Instead, they keep coming up with absolutely ridiculous ideas that won’t do any good at all.  For example, a New York Times editorial recently suggested that we should all “mate with shorter people” in order to save the world…

A New York Times op-ed suggests that everyone should “mate with shorter people” in order to save the planet.

Yes, really.

Author Mara Altman, claims that “When you mate with shorter people, you’re potentially saving the planet by shrinking the needs of subsequent generations.”

“Lowering the height minimum for prospective partners on your dating profile is a step toward a greener planet,” she adds in the piece.

This was actually published by the New York Times.

Sometimes I think that we are simply too stupid to survive as a species for much longer.

Look, the truth is that one of the biggest problems that we are facing is that we are literally poisoning our entire planet with microplastics.

Trillions upon trillions of microplastic fragments are in our air, our water, our soil and our food.

These tiny particles are systematically destroying the environment, and they have literally been found everywhere that scientists have looked on the entire planet…

Microplastics have infiltrated every part of the planet. They have been found buried in Antarctic sea ice, within the guts of marine animals inhabiting the deepest ocean trenches, and in drinking water around the world. Plastic pollution has been found on beaches of remote, uninhabited islands and it shows up in sea water samples across the planet. One study estimated that there are around 24.4 trillion fragments of microplastics in the upper regions of the world’s oceans.

Microplastics are the primary reason why we now have giant “dead zones” in our oceans.

Given enough time, eventually everything in our oceans will be dead.

Sadly, the amount of plastic that we all use continues to rise at an exponential rate, and so the amount of plastic in our oceans also has been rising at an exponential rate…

The amount of microplastics found at the bottom of oceans has tripled in 20 years, researchers have found.

Tiny pieces of plastic debris – smaller than the human eye can see – have been building up on the sea floor at a depth of more than 100 metres, the study reveals.

Their accumulation mimics the increasing amount of plastic products used by society for things like packaging, bottles and clothing, scientists said.

 Even the rain that falls from the sky is absolutely teeming with microplastics.

As that rain falls on our farmland, our once fertile soil is becoming increasingly saturated with plastic.

Eventually our soil will contain so much plastic that we won’t be able to grow much of anything.

But I guess we’ll just have to cross that bridge once we come to it, right?

Because microplastic particles are so small, most of us never even think about them.  But the truth is that they are everywhere, and that includes the dinners that you enjoyed during the holiday season…

Fay Couceiro, a reader in biochemistry and environmental pollution at the university, conducted the small study by examining two separate roast dinners. Both dinners contained chicken, potatoes, carrots, broccoli, and yorkshire pudding, but one meal was made with ingredients that had been bought wrapped in plastic, while the other was not.

The food made from the plastic-wrapped items contained “seven times more microplastics than the non-plastic wrapped one,” according to the university’spress release about the study’s findings. In total, about 230,000 microplastic particles were found.

Year after year, all of us are consuming increasing amounts of plastic.

And one study actually determined that exposure to microplastics can cause “cell death”.

We are systematically destroying ourselves and everything around us, and most people don’t seem to care.

The clock is ticking for humanity, and there is not much time left....