3 Crises – TikTok, Dengue And Bugs In The System

A timely infection – governments have a solution

• U.S. Congress backs unprecedented censorship of social media

• Govs acts with a novel, viral conformity since the Covid response

• Bills would prescribe what people know and infect their vote

• Definition of ‘extremism’ expands after the Oct 7 Hamas attacks

• Police focus on thought crime; scrutinize social media posts

• Propaganda is the left hand, surveillance is the right

• Brazil suffers sudden outbreak of dengue fever as coincidences take flight

• Cases jump 400 per cent; eight states declare public health emergencies

• Guess who just released modified mosquitoes and a new vaccine

See also:
Malaria Scarier Than The Other Bug - Or how finance capital and colonial history entwine with Shakespeare’s swallows (MC Jul 5, 2023)

Escaping The Smartphone Prison - Google builds digital vaccine card into its Android phone (Jul 2, 2021)

(2,200 words or about 10 moments of your company.)

Mar 18, 2024

“It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids, without the knowledge of the individual, certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.”
— Brig Gen Jack D. Ripper, in Dr Strangelove (1964).

Your data is safe with the government — with its needle-wielding medical mercenaries in league with public-private profiteers; the meme police once known as law enforcement; education boards hiding the books and cross-dressing costumes from parents who are declared terrorists, about to be cancelled by banks on political grounds.

The new normal is infectious. Get bitten or take the shot, it’s equal and equity — all for the greater good.

Your data is safe with a busy beadle but think before you fire up a foreign-made app on your PC or phone, or use hardware from a company that the government deems an enemy.

That’s the TikTok bill (H.R. 7521) and the RESTRICT Act (S. 686), two fists in velvet gloves that have passed their first readings in the U.S. Congress.

TikTok is a platform for short videos owned by China-based company ByteDance. Neither bill targets the app directly and that’s what makes them dangerous.

The TikTok bill’s sponsors claim the video-sharing app is siphoning data that could harm national security and, worst of all, sap and impurify the youth.

Stanley Kubrick, in his 1964 satire Dr Strangelove, suggested a government solution which seems less alien to us now: the nuclear option.

The bill won’t do anything to protect your data, which is already sold on the open market where any foreign company or government agency can buy it. The only way to protect user data is to forbid any company to sell it, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) insists — which Congress will never do, because that is how big tech makes its money and pays its political contributions.

Governments are, right now, deregulating the exchange of DNA and medical records on the pretext of efficiency, boosting innovation and modernising government. That is what The Great Reset is all about. The World Economic Forum calls it agile governance, where companies are free to innovate and regulators get out of the way.

Such a reversal of humankind’s progress in liberty and property rights, including the supreme property right of one’s own bodily integrity, requires a crisis. And a crisis requires a bogeyman.

Enemies there are, both foreign and domestic. They manipulate our minds, our bodily integrity and, as we have seen these past four years, seek to reduce us to human resources, whose DNA and data is trafficked, along with children.

Fig leaves

Congress does not care about privacy. It cares about profit and propaganda.

The Anti Defamation League has singled out TikTok because it is mostly used by young people. Israel has been pushing for a ban on TikTok because, as ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt says, the divide on Israel is no longer left-right but old-young.

“A poll in January found younger Americans are less favourable to Israel. Some 54 per cent of respondents aged 18-24 said the Hamas attacks were not justified, compared to 78 per cent among participants aged 45-54, 87 per cent of those aged 54-65, and 92 per cent of those aged over 65.” [1]

Many of the videos on Twitter/X that expose the horrors of war in Gaza originate on TikTok. And even though Israel Defence Force soldiers upload their daily exploits to TikTok and Instagram, the IDF approves in advance anything CNN broadcasts from the front. That is the type of control that the ADL wants for TikTok.

Ironically president Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign joined TikTok in February to try to connect with younger voters.