Look at us. We're the Resistance. We stay on computers (laptops) when everyone else goes tap-tap. We found it bizarre that an auditorium full of Apple fanboys could go apeshit at Steve's presentation in 2007.
We've watched Apple gouge prices, today charging more for a fragile mobile device than a full computer. We watch the fanboys get suckered every time with planned obsolescence. We're watching a company not in control of a market they created still reaping rewards more than anyone.
We've seen the destruction of excellent APIs. Want to see how moribund things are? Wander over to GNUstep, find their blog page, and see when last any of them wrote a word.
We've looked on aghast as fanboys, who once refused to trek up on the slender slope to Objective-C, today go bananas over a new language targeting the mediocre, a language that makes Pascal look like APL.
Programmers can no longer think in the abstract. They need playgrounds. They no longer invent. They stuff sausages. They're anonymous pieces of plumbers pipe.
There are no more gods in the world of computing. There are only Morlocks.
We've seen freedom of speech eroding away. It's not a fight between right and left, although TPTB would like the riffraff to think so. The birthplace of the freedom of speech movement now tries to stifle it.
The November elections in the US raised many eyebrows, but you can't talk about that today. Freedom of assembly is concentrated into a few Silicon Valley companies that have nothing to do with the pioneers who once broke ground there.
You can't share your misgivings about COVID vaccines either. The biggest social media company of them all just imported five experts on censorship from China to their Seattle office. They will throttle you and shadow-ban you and demonetise you if you step out of line. You will not get the word out. The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls.
Good programming was once the key to a better world. Everyone was to appreciate what it meant to have Intel inside. Today most people can't compose a single post of 140 characters or less without a grammatical or spelling error. Science and academia have been pushed into the margins. The great gurus of yesteryear now refer to themselves as 'dinosaurs'.
Big Tech spy on everything. Every character you type on Google, even if it's backspaced away, is recorded for all posterity where tomorrow's search algorithms can uncover dirty secrets about you.
The NSA recruited Microsoft to their new PRISM project, and finally Apple as their last. Microsoft gave the NSA a back door under the encryption layer into Skype so everyone's most private communications were decipherable for the very few.
Bill Gates apologised to the world twenty years ago for all the 'misery and suffering' his products had caused. This unexpected move instead morphed into a project to cripple computer peripherals so that the audio and video quality were reduced satisfactorily, prompting Peter Gutmann to speculate that his next computer hardware may come from China.
Li-meng Yan flees Hong Kong and declares that COVID is man-made, its escape from a Wuhan laboratory the result of a project financed in part by Tony Fauci's people and a curious group known as 'Eco Alliance'. Li-meng Yan appears on chat shows in the UK and news shows in the US but anyone linking to video clips of these appearances is driven from Big Tech's media platforms.
News of the impending pandemic boosts the market cap of Foster City's Gilead Sciences immeasurably, then a few short weeks later news emerges of a treatment based on 'HCQ' and that market cap plummets by $21 billion. A stockholder for Gilead complains in a conference call that their proposed market price for the now panned remdesivir is too low, saying 'why can't we profit from a pandemic'. The war against repurposed drugs has begun.
This war gets so intense that the YouTube channels of respected scientists get demonetised for merely saying the expansion of the acronym 'HCQ', leading one channel to create yet another acronym and hold up signs for viewers instead.
The Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care (FLCCC) Alliance is formed in March 2020 by frontline doctors the world over who are looking for ways to save the lives of their patients. They are the only such organisation on the planet. No governmental agency anywhere is the least bit concerned, it seems.
By September 2020 the FLCCC know they've found the way out. In December 2020 they testify before the US Senate committee on Homeland Security. Their words resonate. Speaking of IVM, the wonder drug that won the Nobel Prize in 2015, their Dr Pierre Kory says:
'If you take this you won't get sick.'
By Thanksgiving 2020 a photo of the FLCCC's Joseph Varon, cradling the head of a COVID patient, spreads to news sites around the planet.
Oscar-winning actor Louis Gossett Jr (Drill Sgt Emil Foley in An Officer and a Gentleman, now 85 years old) tells his story of how IVM saved his life.
An Atlanta-based doctor tells of how she was forced to fly her ailing doctor husband to Houston to get a single 12 mg pill from Joseph Varon to save his life - as even in the face of such dire straits the staff in Atlanta refused to administer the drug.
A man tells of how he was forced to get a court to order the hospital taking care of his eighty-year-old mother to provide the same 12 mg pill. (Yes and she's now recovering - it takes longer to get healthy than to stay healthy.)
And then we come to Sweden. You've heard of the 'perfect storm'? It was made for Sweden. Sweden is today the Muppet Show on bad acid.
Miss Piggy's in the cabinet. She's the one who unilaterally burned up 7.5 million face masks right before the pandemic because who needs them anymore? There are no further crises now that the Cold War is over, right?
They'd been discussing this since 1991. For over twenty years. They'd more or less made up their minds that they didn't need those emergency supplies. Then, a year before this started happening, the other government looked at the deplorable state of affairs and introduced a bill to replenish rather than destroy. Then they got voted out of government and Miss Piggy got voted in.
All through the pandemic she's been saying, and instructing her subordinates to be saying, that PPE wasn't needed to take care of the frail and elderly in nursing homes. She also famously said 'face masks aren't in our culture'. Not in your culture because you fucked up and burned all the reserves, bitch.
Nurses couldn't even get hand sanitiser.
Sweden has a state epidemiologist. That job used to sort under the State Bacteriological Laboratory. Miss Piggy changed that. The State Bacteriological Laboratory was a wholly sovereign scientific agency but Miss Piggy moved the 'Public Health Authority', as they call themselves now, to her own social department, making them political instead, so when Spotify CEO Daniel Ek told everyone to work from home, Miss Piggy's epidemiologist was ordered to come out and condemn it - on the grounds that it wasn't in the spirit of 'equality', because not all people could work from home (and stay healthy).
Yes you read that right.
So whilst Andrew Cuomo was forcing those sick with COVID back into the nursing homes so the hospitals would have profitable beds to sell, Sweden was decimating their elderly.
But that still wasn't the end of it. For the social department needed a new head of healthcare administration. And Miss Piggy's people picked an unemployed but loyal member of the party who immediately instituted new guidelines for COVID healthcare.
Care of the frail and elderly had changed. In an effort to make nursing homes 'more like home', vestiges of hospital care - including oxygen - were removed.
Except now the frail and elderly needed oxygen. So what does the party apparatchik do? He issues an edict that those in need of oxygen be given MORPHINE instead. Which of course kills them.
Several thousand perished. Estimates are that it was as much as six thousand (6,000).
Two people objected. Two. All the rest - nursing staff, doctors, ALL OF THEM - went along with it. THEY WERE ONLY FOLLOWING ORDERS.
The two people who objected were the nurse Latifa Löfvenberg and the doctor Jon Tallinger. Tallinger had to move to Denmark to continue practicing medicine and Löfvenberg lost her job.
The callous idiot who quite literally murdered six thousand Swedes still has his job and has not been reprimanded.
Now the epidemiology. The current epidemiologist is Anders Tegnell. He was appointed by a former holder of the office, Johan Giesecke. Both these individuals are either clearly out of their minds, irretrievably stupid and unfit for such a position, or both. Neither of them have a clue what they're doing but are 'winging it'.
'Winging it' is another way of saying 'bluffing'. Anders Tegnell sure bluffs a lot.
A word about crises of this type. When it comes to crises of this type, nobody really knows anything. That's the nature of the beast. And in situations like that, it's important that people pool their resources. That they take input from everyone imaginable.
And that's where Johan Carlson comes in.
Johan Carlson fits in between Miss Piggy and Anders Tegnell. He's actually Tegnell's boss and answers to Miss Piggy. He's irretrievably stupid too.
Johan Carlson was tasked - this before the pandemic - with cleaning out the roster of expert advisers at Miss Piggy's beck and call. People you could count on for their 'expert opinion', precisely the type of people you need when faced with an unknown foe.
But Johan Carlson was told to clean them out. So clean them out he did. And then the pandemic hit. And the Public Health Authority had no one to turn to.
Anders Tegnell wasn't much of an epidemiologist. He'd only taken one course in epidemiology - remotely from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It was a one-year course, but Anders isn't the sharpest tool in the shed and the course took him four years to complete. Oh well.
Tegnell had his predecessor to turn to - Johan Giesecke. Giesecke is more than a madman. There's something seriously wrong with him. Tegnell immediately hired him back on for a salary of £100,000 per month. No specific duties - just be available.
So Giesecke used his time in a peculiar manner. Giesecke started turning up on the chat shows to downplay the urgency of the pandemic. Nobody knew anything about the pandemic but Giesecke downplayed it anyway. These kinds of things happen all the time, he told people. This won't be worse than a heavy head cold. This was in the first three months of 2020.
And in private Giesecke started flirting with the prospect of herd immunity. Tegnell latched on as well. They kept denying they were actually trying for herd immunity and recently changed the wording of their official policy online but people caught it. They weren't trying to stop the spread of COVID - they WANTED it to spread! But not so much that the healthcare system lost control. However that's supposed to be done.
By late spring they were dancing with the prospect that they'd achieve herd immunity in another month.
Of course they were nowhere close. And they coldly sacrificed thousands of lives for this stupid goal.
Whistleblowing parliamentarians have come forward, telling how other politicians were drooling at the prospect of being able to show up the entire world, of outwitting everyone, by achieving herd immunity without ever revealing their secret plan to anyone.
That thousands of people would perish in the process didn't bother them at all.
Welcome to Sweden. Turn around now and run for it.
The daily pressers are no more. Tegnell gets tired easily. He commutes from a different part of the country, has his own reserved first class train seat, and he refuses to wear a face mask.
The questions are all softball anyway. Somehow a German reporter snuck in once and asked a question the sissy Swedes didn't dare ask, so the following morning the newspapers attacked him - shameless and typical racism. Welcome to Sweden.
Tegnell kills more Swedes per day than all of India where they have 140 times the population.
Then there's the thugs Dan Eliasson and Ann Linde. Dan Eliasson is the government 'director' that never goes away. They never sack him even though he keeps screwing up. The suspicion is that he has dirt on them all so they don't dare. First he ran the NHS and ruined that, so they put him in charge of the police and he ruined them. Then they moved him to the Civil Contingencies Agency and he was caught sunning himself on a beach in Las Palmas so now they're hiding him in the prime minister's offices.
Ann Linde is foreign secretary and she looks like Spiro Agnew. She was on DW, interviewed by the charming Sarah Kelly who couldn't believe her eyes or ears.
Then there's the prime minister, the final puzzle piece in Sweden's nightmarish perfect storm.
Sweden's prime minister is Stefan Löfven. He's such an embarrassment that his party superiors forbade him from making unnecessary appearances. Every time he turns up on camera, their ratings plummet. And they're already at their all-time historical low, the lowest in one hundred years.
Stefan Löfven is not a leader. He's a deer in the headlights. The country's leader should have yanked out Tegnell long ago. But the party fear that Stefan Löfven will get the blame and they'll lose the next 2022 election.
There will always be political idiots. It's the nature of the game. Stupid lazy people are drawn to politics and, if they're not stupid when they set out, they will be in a while, don't worry.
One of Sweden's think tanks opined that the only reason bookstores aren't full of scholarly works on the idiot Stefan Löfven is that there's a language barrier.
Stefan Löfven never finished high school. He tried twice and failed both times. Mostly he got kicked out for not attending classes. He tried to get a job as a welder but couldn't. That's when he discovered politics. He hasn't worked a day since.
Stefan Löfven's betrayal of his own people is legendary. Parliamentary salaries have gone up by £3000 per month in ten years. During the same time pensions have gone up by £19. Nineteen. Sweden has at least 350,000 pensioners living under the poverty line. There are soup kitchens all over, with poor octogenarians freezing on park benches all night.
Their emaciated pensions don't leave them enough to pay their rent, so they get evicted.
Prime minister Stefan Löfven.
And it's not that he's poor or the country's hurting. He recently gave a billion or two to India in a nebulous project to develop courses in gender equality.
Octogenarian pensioners freeze all night long on park benches.
Stefan Löfven just gave himself another pay rise. And he remains the highest paid statesman in the western world. People objected to how politicians kept raising their own salaries and letting their fellow citizens starve, so the politicians created a new sovereign agency and office to oversee their salaries, which of course means nothing changes save the fact that there are additional greedy horses at the same trough. And Ann Linde spends millions in taxes lying to the world around not so much to preserve the country's tattered image as to cover up the crimes she and her fellow crooks are perpetrating.
Octogenarian pensioners freeze all night long on park benches.
Stefan Löfven's latest pay rise - the rise only - represents half of the country's base pension.
In a better world, Stefan Löfven and the rest of the crooks - all of them, the entire power elite, almost everyone in parliament - would be strung up on piano wire from the roof of Stockholm City Hall.
So where are we today? Check Worldometers. Swedes are up north skiing despite the pandemic. Hospitals are crushed under the onslaught. They keep partying. Soon several hundred thousand will be off on holiday somewhere and spread more of the new mutations around.
The FLCCC continue to plead with people to please listen but the Swedes will never listen. Right now they're super-excited that a nasal spray for asthma that Swedes invented has proven successful in trials with 146 COVID patients. Tell them all you can about the FLCCC and they won't listen. Second best in the EU in English and they won't read. But they'll sob at personal interest stories published for page impressions. There are those who say they're getting what they deserve and they have a point.
Until we defeat this pandemic we need to use every available resource to mobilise people to fight it. Today it's not so much the virus killing people as it's people killing other people - with the help of the virus.