Alternate Sources of Information

Our modern culture is informed by mass media and as a result we have been conditioned to accept a certain standard. We take our cues from award shows and are taught what is good, bad, or ugly by the ratings and what is renewed or cancelled at the end of each season. I was never a big TV watcher but I was always one who would enjoy watching the news at least once a day. When you get used to the bright lights of a fancy studio, well groomed anchors, slickly edited video, and high quality audio, you begin to take it for granted and when a piece comes on with less than stellar quality you grimace and almost wonder if it is trust worthy.

And that is the problem with alternative sources of information. In order to hear something about COVID that did not follow the standard narrative, one had to resort to podcasts, smart phone videos, and interviews taking place in someone's home or in a doctor's office between patients. Upstart news services did not have the big dollars and big sponsors to compete with the mainstream so they often looked hokey, home made, and slapped together. But did that make any of the information untrue? And so, one had to sort through the various sources and try to make a determination as to who was trustworthy and who was not. Of course, anyone addicted to the mainstream immediately would say, "that is an unreliable source. If it was true I would have seen it on CNN or CBC or ....." (fill in the blank). 

 

It would eventually get to the point where a piece from some obscure journalist would quote statistics and data from a very reliable source and because the reporting was not from mainstream media, the piece would be debunked. Had the very same information been presented on the mainstream, people everywhere would have sat up and taken notice. 

And then, to protect the masses from false information, the censorship and fact checking started in earnest. The first time I was aware of censorship on the internet was when Prager U put out a series of videos on the 10 commandments. Prager U is a conservative organization that is dedicated to espousing traditional, conservative views in an age of socialism and deteriorating social mores. What was censored? The video on the commandment "Thou shalt not kill". Apparently it incited violence. Yes, that is how silly censorship and fact checking became, and that was in the early days. 

I recall another example where a blogger claimed that the NIH got more than 50% of its funding from  big pharma. He was fact checked and then taken off his internet platform. I mean, this is pretty big news and would explain why the vaccine was given a green light before proper testing. The fact checker stated unequivocally that only 40% of the funding of NIH came from big pharma. Still a problem, no? So the blogger struck back and fact checked the fact checker and it was true that the arm of the NIH which gives approval to drugs, whether final approval or emergency use approval, did indeed get most of its funding from big pharma. Was there a retraction from the fact checkers? Not to my knowledge. 

All this to say that an information war was beginning to take shape and blatant lies, misinformation, and withholding information was taking place on both sides, and it was becoming confusing. Those who watched only mainstream were getting only one side of the story while those who were digging for truth were getting the missing pieces that would fill in the story. And what we were discovering was shocking to say the least.

Made in China

 I will not review the events of late 2019 to early 2020 except to say that it was the beginning of a most unprecedented time in the history of our world. From the first video of body bags, and health care workers in PPE's (one of the first of many new medical terms we learned) in Wuhan China, to the daily pronouncements by the WHO on the state and progression of the virus, we were bracing ourselves for some bad news, hoping it was all a big exaggeration. Looking back on it, there was a lot of exaggeration going on, and also the beginning of many lies, like arrows shooting  fear into the global population.

The USA was in a transition of leadership with Trump  still president but on his way out. Despite the Democrats winning the election, they still could not leave Trump alone and tried at every opportunity to discredit him, even impeach him for a second time. When he labeled  the newly minted COVID 19 virus "The Wuhan Flu" he was called a racist, even though the virus did originate in China and was even later proven to come from one of their labs where 'gain of function' research was being carried out. Even today, Dr. Tony Fauci is lying about it even though it has been proven that he knew about America's involvement and funding by his own NIH of such research. 

And then something interesting happened. Suddenly, out of the blue, along comes a vaccine created under the auspices of  'Operation Warp Speed'. An untried and untested vaccine was about to arrive on the scene but needed approval. A new drug or vaccine cannot get FDA approval without proper testing, which includes long term time trials to determine long term safety. In fact, the current vaccine trials are not over until 2023. However, if there is a dire need,  an emergency, and THERE IS NO TREATMENT FOR THE DISEASE, temporary approval can be given. 

There was one little glitch however. There WERE treatments. Trump contracted COVID and was treated with Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, and amazingly, recovered in a few days when his age and physical condition were not in his favor. The press and the US health authorities dismissed the treatments as unproven and even unsafe. At first I thought this was just another attempt to embarrass or make Trump look bad. But now I realize that as long as there was no treatment the vaccines could go to market. It was not about Trump, but about the fantastic opportunity for the drug companies to make literally billions of dollars. The strategy was so successful that even today, in Dec. of 2021, those proven treatments are still being put down so the vaccines do not lose their emergency approval permission. And the money rolls in.

To make matters worse, the new Pfizer drug to treat COVID disease has received emergency approval just recently and again, only because there is 'no known effective treatment available'.  This is blatant corruption at the highest level. As each day went by I saw the scene unfolding and I became more suspicious of the media who seemed to be the mouthpiece for the Pfizers and Modernas of the world. I asked myself, 'If they are lying about the treatments, are they lying about the vaccines too. And so I started finding alternate sources of information so I could make an informed decision when the vaccines arrived in Canada, in BC, and in my hometown. Something told me that accepting or not accepting the vaccine was going to be a rather important decision. 

Media Bias

 American politics never really interested me until I began to see the polarization that began to take place when Donald Trump got the nod from the Republicans to run for President. It fascinated me to see how the two parties, who were similar in so many ways, would suddenly take on different personas and lay out two entirely different visions for the country. 

I realized from the beginning that Trump was not a career politician and that could work either for or against him in the presidential race. It became apparent that he was going to upset the apple cart and I soon realized that there was a systemic problem in the Washington DC world and Trump was not coming to play by the rules. Feathers would be ruffled and it would not be business as usual. 

Of course, this made him a lot of enemies and the way the press would cover his campaign as compared to Hillary Clinton's was going to make a difference. There has always been immense power in the press. Who would they side with? The media's hand was played early and if there was ever any doubt as to who they were backing, it was made so very evident on election night when beyond all odds and against the pollster's predictions, Trump won and the talking heads were on the verge of nervous breakdowns realizing that Hillary had actually lost the election.  

The world of politics in the USA was upset forever and the efforts to take the presidency away from the outsider was unprecedented.  Obama and Clinton cooked up a scheme to discredit Trump with the big Russian collusion accusations, which lasted for three years, and ended up in an impeachment, but in the end was proven to be a hoax. The media played a huge roll in the deception, and the coverup when the deception was being discredited. Trump was being bashed on the nightly news, relentlessly, all the while, doing some good things for the country and gaining a solid following. 

Then, for me, what was the ultimate dirty trick by the mainstream media, began to play out. A laptop belonging to Joe Biden's son, Hunter, was discovered, and contained some pretty damning evidence that Joe and son were up to no good. After the FBI sat on this evidence for almost a year, Rudy Giuliani, Trump's lawyer,  finally went public with it but there was not a word of it in the mainstream media. Basically, millions of Americans went to the polls in 2020 not knowing. A few weeks later, polls were taken and fully 30% of those who had voted for Biden would not have done so had they known about the laptop. Meaning that whether by election fraud, or withholding information, the election had more or less been stolen. 

By now, I was disgusted by the media and knew they could not be trusted. The bias was not limited to the USA media. Here in Canada, the Liberals set up a fund of more than $500 million for "trusted media". It is called buying the media. Who would bite the hand that feeds them? According to some sources, more than 95% of journalist in Canada and the US are 'left leaning' so it only stands to reason that they would support Liberals in Canada and Democrats in the USA. The media has always been biased but being so blatantly obvious about it is unprecedented. 

All of this forced my hand to begin searching for alternative news and viewpoints because I certainly was not getting them from any of my TV channels, newspapers, or radio stations. 

And then came the "pandemic". 

Attacked by My Own Government

 If I was ever under the illusion that the government of my country was for me and had my best interests at heart, I would get a rude awakening in the mid 80's. 

Our Amway business was going really well, and I was envisioning going full time and not having to worry about money for the foreseeable future. We had won trips and awards and our organization was growing, as was our business volume and our profits. A local aspiring Conservative politician approached me about being on his election committee for his attempt to gain the Conservative nomination for our Fraser Valley riding in the upcoming federal election.  

I was flattered and certainly my interest and love of politics was a factor in me accepting the position. One of the reasons I was chosen was because the candidate thought I could deliver the 'Amway vote'. We would stack the meeting with our free enterprise loving business partners and vote as a block. We did get a block together but our opponent  had a huge 'church block' and won the nomination handily. In the process I learned a lot. I began to understand how the Amway vote in the USA was electing people at all levels of government. There were literally millions of Amway distributors across the USA and they were certainly conservative (Republican) in their political leanings.  

Our Prime Minister at the time, PET, was not blind to this fact and he eventually got wind that the same thing could happen in Canada. So, he developed a plan and was able to put it into place rather quickly. We had a prominent Conservative MP attending our weekly meetings in Surrey and he and I had a discussion about what was going on in Ottawa. 

Apparently the CRA (Canadian  Revenue Agency) does audit projects, which is actually a very efficient and effective way to catch misdemeanors in the area of income taxes. The teams of auditors will educate themselves in all things to do with fishing, for example, learning all the ins and outs and the little tricks that fishermen will employ in order to avoid taxes. Then they will go out and audit only fishermen for the next month or so. 

PET called an Amway Project. We were taught in our Saturday morning seminars, how to run a small business, keep accurate paperwork, and file taxes for self-employed business. We were 'above board'. So the devious Prime Minister had to make this audit work. How he did it was by creating retroactive rules. For example, instead of saying that all expenses relating to sales convention outside of our sales territories were no longer tax deductible, he said that those conventions were not eligible for tax writ-offs as of three years ago. You, reader, may find this hard to believe, but this is what he did. Then, every distributor making more than $500.00 a month was audited. Those are the same ones who would go on the conventions to Hawaii, LA, and Phoenix. They were expensive but were made more affordable because of the write-offs. Previously, there were specific instruction from CRA as to how to make sure the conventions would qualify as a business write-off, which we followed to the 'T'. It suddenly made no difference. 

So all the expenses of all those audited partners of ours were disallowed, making their income greater, and taxes payable higher. The taxes payable for the expenses from the previous years were in arrears so there was penalty and interest to pay. Interest rates at that time were in high teens. The audit happened over the next few months and our business literally fell apart due to discouragement and financial hardship. We went from close to $1 million in gross revenue the prior three years to mere thousands. We too quit after all our hard work went up in flames and discouragement. The Amway business in Canada was never a force ever again. The prime ministerial objective was achieved. 

I would be suspicious of all government from that day forward, realizing that they do what they have to do for the sake of power and keeping their position, for status and a big pension payoff at the end of their tenure. 

If I have been long winded, it is so you can understand the mindset of someone who, especially today, with mounting evidence, will never trust the government. 

In the next post, I will fast forward to the 2016 - 2020 term of the US president. Things will start to warm up. 

Manipulation by Media

 My mistrust of media grew into a mistrust of government and its institutions. Under the guise of saving jobs and helping people, Ocean Falls was purchased by the NDP in 1972 (It had been privately owned and operated by Crown Zellerbach since its inception in the early1900's) but they soon discovered that it was a lost cause. While spinning the production numbers, they were losing money by the truckloads, until, finally, even they knew it was a lost cause. The town was abandoned and instead of exploiting the existing town and its infrastructure for some other purpose (tourism for example), it was demolished. 

We moved on in our lives and when I returned to civilization, I was having difficulty finding work. I had paid into what was known at that time as UI, unemployment insurance. After 6 months of jumping through hoops and filing job seeking reports etc., I was still stonewalled and never did receive a dime. At that point I decided that I would strike out on my own with anything that I thought I was capable of doing. I was done with unions and unemployment insurance. 

The paint contracting business I started was slow getting off the ground so we started another business, as a supplement to our income, that involved sales of a product line and recruitment of other sales associates. It was known as multi-level marketing and the company was Amway. There was a lot of inflation and unemployment at that time and people were looking for additional streams of income, and although it was not easy, the business grew into a modest success. 

I began to notice that multi-level marketing, and Amway in particular, was getting some bad press. I was puzzled by this as it was a positive thing and those who joined the ranks were, as a rule, quite thrilled with the opportunity. The meetings and rallies were happy, positive, and energetic affairs, a bright light in the midst of hard economic times. This type of business was being labeled as a pyramid scheme. A pyramid scheme had a legal definition and Amway in no way fit the description. In fact, MLM, as it was known as, was being taught in business schools and universities as a legitimate business model and indeed, since that time there have been many very successful national and international companies that worked that business model. 

My political interests were being awakened and I began to realize what was happening. I was gradually getting a sense of what was meant by left wing and right wing politics. I was learning that the left is no friend of free enterprise, but rather leans to socialism, which puts people under the care and control of government instead of personal responsibility. So I gathered that the media was 'left' as they supported the left leaning socialist NDP government and as such, would help to discourage people starting their own business. Thus, the bad press for Amway. 

This proclivity to left leaning by the press was particularly evident when the NDP were replaced by the ultimate free enterpriser, Bill VanderZalm as premier of the province, under the Social Credit banner. (Not to be mistaken with the present day social credit system used to control and manipulate people in Communist China). He was pursued relentlessly with trumped up wrongdoings, and although he was great for our province and the economy performed well under him, the pressure got to him. He was good, honest, and a hard working man, and it was not until I read his autobiography that I realized the animosity of the press towards him and how they continuously colluded against him, to discredit him and sully his name.   

In the next post, I show how this left leaning philosophy of government destroyed our business. Literally and deliberately. 

Journey Through a Pandemic

 Everyone has their own journey, and I use the present tense deliberately. And, everyone has their own lens though which to observe, assess, and analyze what has happened and what is happening during this very unique time in History. 

How do we come to the point where we simply submit, cautiously question, or outright buck the system and the narrative? Our journeys have similarities and yet each one is in some way unique. My perspective on COVID actually starts in 1972. 

It began after working in a paper mill in Ocean Falls for three years. To get the full story on the incident that began my journey, refer to my blog post under the tag 'Ocean Falls' with a post titled  'A Bold Move'.

To summarize, I witnessed a government outright lie with the help of the Vancouver Sun and the Vancouver Province, the two major newspapers in our province. It was not hearsay, for I was on the ground and I witnessed the deception. What does this incident out of my formative years have to do with COVID you may ask? 

It began a realization for me that 1. Government is not beyond lying to control the narrative and to hold onto power.  2. When the media is on the side of the ruling party, they hold immense power for that party. 3. Newspaper stories are written with a predetermined focus and never mind that in the process some contrary information might arise. Why make it complicated by telling both sides. It is lazy and unethical on the part of the newspaper editor and his reporters to conduct themselves thusly and call themselves objective. Of course, if it is deliberate because the newspaper has an agenda to aid and abet the ruling party, then it is indeed not lazy, but clever and devious, and of course, still unethical. 

Mind you, this was in a time when there were still real reporters and the objective of news outlets was to report the news and not opinions. That, of course, would mean that all the information is presented and the viewer or listener could then make his or her own conclusions. Fast forward to today, and it is painfully obvious that reporting is biased and almost always seems to come from a main feed somewhere because no matter the talking head, no matter the channel, no matter the network or outlet, the same words come out. If one listens to the reporting carefully, it is easy to detect the editorializing in the script, swaying the listener to one viewpoint or another. 

The incident to which I am referring was not isolated as I will point out. Had it been, I would have forgotten it and moved on, thinking it was a one off, perhaps some enthusiastic reporters just looking for a great story.  In the next post, I will point out how in later years this observation was confirmed, for me,  many times, fostering in me, what I consider a justified skeptical attitude toward the media.