Too Busy To Stay Free?

I get it. Life gets hectic and sometimes it's all you can do to just get through the daily grind of earning a living to pay the bills. Then there's raising children, meeting family commitments, maintaining friendships and just generally dealing with the joys and tragedies that is life. It's understandable that some of the bigger issues that face society go out of focus.

But, if we don't pay attention when there are clear red flags telling us we need to, well, one day we may awake from our busy lives to find ourselves in one awful predicament. It's a predicament that our forebears faced and fought, giving their lives to safeguard us from the tyranny of authoritarianism. It's a predicament that the Hong Kong people fought, peacefully at first, for they knew what was in store.

I'm talking about freedom and its foundations, which are being quietly chipped away at. Bit-by-bit the pieces of the authoritarian puzzle are being assembled, the tools of oppression implemented softly, so that most people won't notice until it's too late. The people who are noticing are those who have fled authoritarian regimes and are sensitive to the unfolding process. They're horrified we're just going along with it and don't see the significance of warning signs.

Think it can't happen here? Think again. Take for example those vaccine passes you all thought were temporary and all went along with just so you could get on with life or go out to dinner. They're about to become permanent.

Hipkins said the new system could be useful for people who might want to verify vaccination status to a potential employer. "They're not going to be used in the foreseeable future in the way that they were previously, for hospitality and all those sorts of things. The new vaccine pass-type system will have to take into account whether people were eligible for three or four doses. Hipkins said there were no plans to extend the vaccine passes to diseases other than Covid-19.

And we believe him don't we? This is the same Government who first said they wouldn't mandate vaccination, then promptly mandated about 3 weeks later. This is the Government who looked gleeful at creating two classes of citizens to punish dissent. They said they were undoing the mandates (having lost a court case for police and defence) but then said they would leave it to employers to carry on the discrimination at will. Apply for a job with a recruitment agency or larger company and they'll ask you to upload your vaccination status.  You don't even get to interview stage without it!

No choice but to do what you're told?

This is for a 'vaccine' that was designed for the first strain of COVID. The jab does NOT stop you getting later strains of COVID. Does NOT stop you transmitting the virus. It doesn't even stop double/triple vaxxed people from ending up in hospital or from dying, which is what they said it would do once they finally admitted lack of efficacy on the first two criteria of effectiveness.

Openly discussing waning efficacy of the jab (remember, it was supposed to be one and done) was something they labelled 'misinformation' not too long ago. They can label anything they like as 'misinformation'. It can simply mean thought and speech the current Government doesn't like or facts they find inconvenient. That's the point and where it all starts.

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but trust in this Labour Government isn't high for a growing number of people. This is not even considering the Three Waters and other Co-governance initiatives underway (with clear implications for our democracy), that is being done without proper consultation with the people of New Zealand. The issue of trust is important.

As to Hipkins new pass system? We're now in the endemic phase (meaning everyone will get this like they get the common cold), so why are they implementing a new pass system now? Is this the start of a permanent digital ID that could be expanded? Hipkins says not, but as mentioned already, this Government mandated a novel medical procedure (violating our Bill of Rights) when they had said they wouldn't.

If it is actually the start of a digital ID, then they'll need you to accept the concept first before they introduce the next phase - the proverbial boiling frog approach. That may be to link it to a social credit style system. If they were to go full-on (CCP style) immediately, it would alert the population and inevitably result in pushback and guaranteed loss at the next election... before the system is in place and difficult to unwind.

China uses the ID pass system to control its people, complete with facial recognition. Say something out of line here in NZ about the CCP regime, and family back in China get punished. It is insidious and inescapable. No doubt the people of Hong Kong can expect such joys to to be rolled out there. Italy too is now going down this track.

Italy will be the first in the EU, and the West, to implement a government-sponsored social credit system with the rollout of its new rewards-based program that aims to modify people’s climate change behaviour by assigning a score based on their compliance.

Enrolees will be given a “smart citizen wallet” where their rewards can be accessed. The higher one’s score, correlating with good behavioural changes, will allow them access to more benefits.

At first, enrolment into the social credit score will be optional, however, there are justified concerns that the program will become mandatory in the future, not unlike the dystopian vaccine passport which has become a staple of everyday life in the EU.

As the article above notes, social scores are about compliance to a regime and acceptance of the approved narrative. In China, an authoritarian dictatorship, it is used coercively because there is  "no such thing as individual rights or free speech." I'm sure the people of Bologna in Italy are thrilled at the prospect of being treated like children with a Super Nanny style, digital gold star system. Is it off to the naughty corner if they're not suitably obedient? It's a system that can eventually be used to chill people into compliance and that's the unspoken point.

Governments across the western world are exploring using this tool, especially in the wake of the Covid “pandemic,” which proved that governments can obtain almost limitless power in a crisis and set the stage for the next phase of the World Economic Forum’s plan – “you will own nothing and be happy.”

So, us small folk are to own noffink and we vill be happy according to Klaus Schwab, Head of the unelected World Economic Forum (WEF). As The Outsiders, Rowan Dean quips, no doubt the rich will own everything and be even happier. Prince Charles, for example, can you see him owning nothing and being happy? Exactly! Even repeating what these WEF acolytes, like Prince Charles, have in store for us will gain you funny looks and accusations of tin foil hat and conspiracy theorist.

It is nutty! They're radical socialist nuts... but that doesn't mean they're not dangerous. The ideology of Communism and Socialism has been behind the death, deprivation and misery of countless millions in history, and to this day. It's easy to dismiss Schwab as some kind of James Bond or Mike Myers comic-style villain minus the fluffy white cat; a megalomaniac to be ignored. Only, our Governments aren't ignoring him, nor his dystopian proselytising.

While NZ was distracted with COVID, the Ardern Government signed up to a WEF pilot to Reimagine Regulation for the Age of AI. The June 2020 paper talks about The Fourth Industrial Revolution and a lot about developing frameworks to guide the ethical use of AI by Government. They address the issue of "trust" with the potential for misuse of data, which the authors acknowledge may be a stumbling block in addition to privacy concerns. They're right on that at least. We have a Human Rights Framework, an actual Act called The Bill of Rights, and our Government disregarded it when it suited them!

The WEF are open about their aims in what they call The Great Reset (globally coordinated Socialism to deal with 'climate') and The Fourth Industrial Revolution - that's the close intertwining of Big Government, Big Business and Big Digital Tech.

If you want to see how this can be abused look at what Trudeau did to truckers who disagreed with him and protested his mandates. He used hacked info and then demanded banks freeze privately held accounts. On its face, isn't hacking illegal? Who did it and how did Justin Trudeau get this information that he used with emergency powers to punish people disagreeing with him? He shut down people's means to purchase food to silence them! That left me with a slightly sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. This is what is possible. Trudeau also considered accessing smart phone data (without the consent of Canadians) to track compliance with Government COVID policy.

In an article on Vice, Joseph Cox discusses newly released documents gained via FOIA process, showing that the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in America purchased mobile phone data to indeed track if Americans were following COVID lockdown orders. It wasn't just COVID they were interested in, so the data had other surveillance potential. While it might have been aggregate data, experts quoted in Cox's article maintain it could be "deanonymized" and used to target individuals.

What the CDC did and what happened in Canada is what I would expect from the authoritarian CCP, with its scant regard for human rights and principles such as free speech, the right to disagree and privacy. But this happened in so called Western democracies in the name of an 'emergency'. Is mass surveillance, social credit systems, Universal Basic Income (UBI) in exchange for autonomy and the end of private ownership (a Marxist principle) where we're headed? What is the digital architecture needed to achieve the steady creep of socialist authoritarianism?

Both Trudeau and Ardern are WEF leadership training program alumni. In 2014, Ardern was "named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader." Also mentioned in the screenshot below it says simply that she was "elected president of the largest international political youth organisation in the world (IUSY)". To be clear, that's President of the International Union of Socialist Youth, and for which the WEF were no doubt recognising her with their award. Here she is speaking in her capacity as President, using the Marxist term "comrade" 15 times in 7 minutes. This was only a few years before becoming Prime Minister of New Zealand.

Surely the pandemic is over so the Government will relinquish its emergency powers? With recent headlines reading 'Climate Change Deadlier than COVID, don't count on it! As the COVID scare winds down with more of us getting it and recovering, the climate scare is winding up again. The Government maintains it needs to keep its COVID systems in place, just in case.

I suspect they'll attempt to trade one 'emergency' for another, maintaining that power they like so much and using 'tools' they've put in place to demand obedience and silence dissent. Don't count on the opposition parties being opposition either. 'Climate' has become a doctrine not be questioned, along with the need to diminish our (capitalist) economy in its name.

Here's the good news

There are people who are figuratively fighting the battle while we're all distracted. They're alert to the chess moves being made, which is just as well. This is why the article written by Karl du Fresne is important and I wanted to share it with you. He writes:

...in the past 10 years or so – and that’s how quickly it has happened – all our comfortable convictions about the unassailability of free speech have been turned on their heads. Suddenly we find ourselves fighting again for rights we assumed were settled.

We must raise our heads from the daily distraction of living. du Fresne's article is well written and will take 10 minutes from your day.That's a small price for understanding where we're headed and what's at stake. In du Fresne's view:

what’s at stake here is nothing less than the survival of liberal democracy, which depends on the contest of ideas and the free and open discussion of issues.

Few would willingly give up their autonomy, freedom, for digitally enforced socialist serfdom. We must pay attention to what's going on in the background, before it's too late!