Sage Hana and I sometimes go back and forth on what’s going on with social media which I still obviously play on. On the one hand I agree with her: all of these sites (Google, Facebook, Twitter) have been infiltrated by spook (FBI, CIA) nudge teams who are scooping up data to move public opinion in directions that they deem appropriate. They fancy that if they just perfect the messaging, the coercion, the branding or something they can get EVERYONE to say “how high” when they say “Jump!” I have to wonder about such people’s primary questions regarding their real life purpose. But it is clear as day if you read any white papers that the message is consistently how to decrease vaccine hesitancy, say. Nobody bothers to ask why some people might be vaccine hesitant. The direction is always the same: How do we sell more of this product. Spook teams think the same way as regards how to get 100% compliance with some directive.
So I suppose I have good news and bad news. After days of trending results on Twitter that were very anti narrative, I opened my page this morning to some pretty boring trending stuff. Most of it was in Thai language, and some of it I clicked on. A lot sounded like promotions, even if it was passed off as an organic result. Then #IStandWithTrudeau was trending. WTF? I’m not even Canadian. Unlike #TrudeauMustGo, it didn’t sound remotely in the wheelhouse of anti establishment interest tailored just for me. So I had to click on it. Are there actually nitwits left in Canada who still want this WEF empty suit? And more importantly , why?
It is remarkably easy to buy a bot operation. I have a painful and very expensive experience from 2021 on this front that I will share some day. It’s helpful to understand first that buying labor at very very cheap prices is still very easy. If you give a guy in India on Fiverr $5 to prove himself by illustrating his first ever children’s book series, you may well end up getting a full suite of illustrations that took him 5 weeks and 200 hours, for $5. He will tell himself that he did it because you were his first ever customer and he needed to make some sacrifices early on to prove himself, which is not a lot different from how I was paid a stipend of less than $10 an hour to teach classes for university professors when I was in graduate school. If some of these enterprising individuals decide to use the power of AI to boost results in whatever the intended direction is, they can do so for amazingly cheap prices. Suddenly everybody loves Trudeau or Biden or #thevaccine. It’s the thing, whatever the thing is.
The thing is, they are usually pretty easy to spot. For one thing they don’t seem to be interested in much else except the subject at hand, whatever it is. So I found one regular tweeter on #IStandWithTrudeau who didn’t seem to stand for anything else whatsoever. This is funny because it goes against human norms.
I say this because in my time in psychology, sociology and market research most people are motivated by THEIR PERSONAL PROBLEMS. Genuine expressions of gratitude for a writer, an artist, a politician, or an entertainer are rare. When they do occur they are almost always in the context of a specific incident which triggered deeper feelings about what happened in terms of their personal problems. So it becomes a type of yeah I love you so much for talking about your background thing of having no money and then becoming a millionaire, so I want to talk about my experience of having no money. Whole courses are built and packaged around making unpalatable human experiences palatable. Most get very mixed results.
In short most people really don’t give a shit who is in power. They do care whether they are making money, what the gas prices are and if their lights turn on at night and whether there is food on the shelves for them to buy. They also do care a great deal about their own health problems. But these incredible observations can only be hidden by ArriveCan when entering Canada by any means!
You know that fun new app. “Use ArriveCAN to submit mandatory health information to the Government of Canada” It doesn’t sound dystopian at all. I mean obviously many people say #IStandWithTrudeau. I have yet to figure out a logical reason for this app, since conjabs do not prevent anything. But the wording “mandatory health information to the government of Canada” says all you need.
I’m thankful that I’ve been to Ontario a few times, and being that Canada is cold, I never had much interest in exploring it. My lawyer uncle mentioned a Tidal Bore thing he saw in New Brunswick once with great reverence. A friend in Montreal has certainly invited us to her house. I did have a fantasy of making Alaska the last state for me by doing it properly by driving through many Canadian provinces on the way there.
Nothing is compelling enough for me to go through ArriveCan. That is not my fight. Though it did make me think of an interesting anecdote. In early 2017 or so I flew to Detroit Metro with my family. My brother Andy graciously loaned me his then dead wife Tiona’s car to drive around. It was a little stick shift Honda and nobody was using it.
We drove it to Michigan to pick up my daughter who was staying with her father and then had the brilliant idea to cross the US Canada border at the Ambassador Bridge. I figured my Thai husband Oh hadn’t ever been to Canada or whatever.
Now Oh had a US 10 year green card, and everyone else was US citizens with passports, so at the time there was nothing wrong legally with our odd family. Hell yeah we got pulled into secondary inspection anyways.
“What are they doing?” Oh asked loudly as they inspected the tires on our car.
“They look for drugs.” I said loudly as I watched them taking apart the carburetor. It occurred to me then that it had been a very bad idea to drive a car owned by a woman who literally died from a heroin/fentanyl overdose over an international border. It hadn’t occurred to me to think of it in that way before. What the hell was in this car? How would I know?
I noticed at some point that the inspectors were paying close attention to our tires. “Look before you slash our tires.” I yelled out loud to them. “Who is paying for that! Do we really look like we’d be hiding kilos of drugs in there?” Some idiot inspector mumbled something back about drug mules being in the worst places. I guess with my then 4 and 10 year old daughter with me I looked into that. “If we had those kinds of drugs why would we be bringing them into Canada?” I asked him.
“If we have drugs why we come here?” Oh questioned. It was relevant.
After two hours they couldn’t find anything wrong with us and let us into lovely Windsor, Ontario, Canada. I sometimes wonder how much of me and my husband Oh’s direct mocking of the fine folks at secondary inspection affected their mood. We made our complaints loud, clear and visible. We engaged with the people doing it directly. Coming back into America also on the Ambassador Bridge it felt like they’d already heard of us. The US immigration dude barely glanced at our stuff and just waved us in. Welcome back to America, you fine folks. Now leave us alone.
Of course I went to the CanArrive website. I am not eligible under the current dystopian regime to go to Canada. It wasn’t really my bag anyways. But for those fighting, please fight. Fight with exemptions or noncompliance or whatever your situation affords you.
I say that because CanArrive is trending, though not on my twitter. Some of the folks on #IStandWithTrudeau mentioned it. Most of it sounded like a nightmare on top of the nightmare. No, this is not about your health. This is all about control and compliance.
I’m still looking for real people who see it otherwise. Sure your scout trip got derailed over it. Sure the elderly might get locked out because they don’t use smart phones, but who really cares about them. Sure this stuff doesn’t work as well with blackouts, brownouts, no internet, low internet, and hacking, not to mention lost or stolen phones, but that’s not important! Use the app, aye!
The fight is still on, and those that don’t see it haven’t bothered with international borders or visas or immigration people much. There’s reason for hope. There’s also a lot of reasons to fight…
I have been through the tunnel between Detroit and Windsor about 100 times; one funny story about that is how my Dad would always buy whiskey and cigarettes for my Canadian uncles and smuggle them to Canada. One trip when I was say 10, I saw him assembling the trunk, which would always take him a good hour, to hide the stuff. But I was only 10 and didn't really get it. So when we were at the border crossing, after the guard asked the question, Sir, do you have anything to declare?, my Dad said No and began to move forward. It was then that I asked loudly, But Daddy, what about the whisky and tobacco? ....I think one of my brothers literally covered my mouth, and I guess the guard did not really hear me, because we were not caught. Fun times, kid honesty knows no bounds....best Amy!
That was it — Sage just reminded me #Chinada was trending when you posted this and then I got distracted trying to find it. There is some dynamic tag team game going on between dissident posters getting banned and coming back… Hashtags seem to change (likely necessarily) over time as well.