Lifestyle Roundup: NZ War On Woke; Canada Unspecified Causes Death; Cities Imploding

Kiwis lead the way! The new center - right government (don’t ask me to explain) has launched a “War on Woke”, and they’ve taken a big step in the right direction:

New Zealand gov’t to remove LGBT indoctrination from schools in declared ‘war on woke’

WELLINGTON (LifeSiteNews) — New Zealand’s new government, a coalition between the centre-right National party, the libertarian ACT party, and the populist NZ First party, has signalled that it will remove the gender, sexuality, and relationship-based education guidelines in schools.

It is part of what the new government is describing as its “war on woke.” The replacement guidelines are yet to be outlined but, according to NZ First leader Winston Peters, the intention is to make them more transparent. He said parents have a right to know what their child is being taught “before, not after, the event.”

Whoa! Radical!

According to the New Zealand charity Family First, the previous curriculum sought to “inject sexuality education into the rest of curriculum,” putting “schools at risk of becoming ideological and indoctrinatory spaces.” Primary age children were to “be addressed by their preferred name and pronouns.” Access to toilets had to “align with their gender identification.” Trans students were not required to use a gender-neutral toilet but could choose the male or female toilets of their choice. The old curriculum even extended to the teaching of science, with students being asked to consider how biological sex is “constructed.”

DNA? Or am I missing something?

There has been a hostile response to the government’s position,

Brace yourselves for this …

especially from proponents of the previous guidelines. Katie Fitzpatrick, professor of education at the University of Auckland, a lead writer on the previous guide for sexuality education, described the government’s policy as an “attack on young people,” adding that the move was “repressive” and “backwards.”

What could go wrong by turning governance over to professors of education? Yeah, well, look at our schools, and parents bailing to home schooling and private schools. Anyway, there’s lots more discussion at the link for those who are interested.

More troubling news from Canada—because this spike coincides with a remarkable decline in life expectancy:

Canada reports 300% increase in ‘unspecified causes’ of death, sparking calls for investigation

A new Canadian government report reveals a 300% rise in ‘unspecified causes’ of death from 2019-2022 as unknown causes climbed to the fifth leading cause of death in Canada. Some health experts said the stark increase should trigger an investigation into whether the deaths are linked to COVID-19 vaccines.

(Children’s Health Defense) — As life expectancy plummets in Canada, a new government report claims “unspecified causes” have become the fifth leading cause of death in the country after cancer, heart disease, COVID-19, and accidents.

According to the Statistics Canada report, “unspecified causes” in 2022 passed strokes, aneurysms, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, asthma, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, Alzheimer’s, and suicide as causes of death.

…

Andre Picard, health columnist at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, Canada’s newspaper of record, called the life expectancy drop – to 81.3 years in 2022 from 82.3 years in 2019 – “a big deal.”

“It’s only the second time this sharp a drop has happened in Canada in the past century,” Picard said. …

…

COVID-19 deaths can’t account for Canada’s 7.3 percent increase in total deaths in 2022 compared with 2021 – or for the country’s 17 percent increase in total deaths over the historic norm of 2019, or the historic drop in life expectancy in Canada and worldwide, Picard said.

…

“Prior to the pandemic, death in Western countries was well understood,” McCullough said, with 40% due to known cardiovascular, 40% due to terminal neoplastic disease (cancer) and 20% due to other known causes such as homicide, suicide, drug overdoses and accidents.”

“Since the roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccines, we have witnessed unprecedented deaths without antecedent disease. A large autopsy series published by Hulscher et al., found that 73.9% of the deaths after COVID-19 vaccination were due to problems caused by the shots.”

McCullough cited the hundreds of studies examining post-vaccine, spike-protein-related injuries and deaths and the millions of deaths and injuries reported by citizens in the U.S. and Europe to their governments following mRNA vaccination.

“All deaths should be categorized according to the doses and dates of COVID-19 vaccination,” McCullough said. “Unless proven otherwise, ‘unspecified death’ should be attributed to a fatal COVID-19 vaccine injury syndrome,” McCullough said.

Kory, the former University of Wisconsin professor of medicine and president of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, told The Defender the evidence is overwhelming that the COVID-19 mRNA shots caused more deaths and injuries across the Western world than any prior drug or vaccine in history.

“The answer as to why ‘unspecified causes’ are now a leading cause of death is plain and simple,” Kory said. “That cause is the one medical intervention that the world’s governments and media have championed since the start [of the pandemic]… The mRNA platform technology is and has been a colossal failure in both efficacy and safety.”

It also appears that these “unspecified causes” don’t include euthanasia:

Statistics Canada admits to not identifying euthanasia as cause of death in official reports

Statistics Canada explained that if a Canadian struggling with cancer, for example, chooses to be euthanized, their death will be attributed to cancer in official reports, not euthanasia.

Jeffrey Tucker has a thoughtful article at Brownstone Institute today:

What Will Become of Cities?

In this article Tucker cites a deeply disingenuous article co-authored by Little Tony Fauci. Tucker cites the article as evidence that the Covid Hoax may have had as one of its goals a radical transformation of urban life—pointing to the blame for pandemics being placed by Fauci on the rise of agriculture and the domestication of animals in the Neolithic period. I say the article is “deeply disingenuous” because Fauci uses the article to push several falsehoods—well known to him at the time (Sept, 2020). One of those falsehoods is the claim that Covid is zoonotic—you’ll see that in the excerpt below. Another, not in the excerpt, is that the only strategy for dealing with Covid is lockdowns. I leave it to readers to decide what the primary motivation behind the Fauci article is. Here’s what I’m talking about—keep it in mind as you read the excerpts from Tucker. Tucker himself specifically notes :

Emerging Pandemic Diseases: How We Got to COVID-19

SUMMARY

Infectious diseases prevalent in humans and animals are caused by pathogens that once emerged from other animal hosts. In addition to these established infections, new infectious diseases periodically emerge. In extreme cases they may cause pandemics such as COVID-19; in other cases, dead-end infections or smaller epidemics result. Established diseases may also re-emerge, ...

…

Yet, pandemics such as COVID-19 are not entirely new phenomena. Newly emerging (and re-emerging) infectious diseases have been threatening humans since the neolithic revolution, 12,000 years ago, when human hunter-gatherers settled into villages to domesticate animals and cultivate crops (Dobson and Carper, 1996; Morens et al., 2020b; Morens et al., 2008a). These beginnings of domestication were the earliest steps in man’s systematic, widespread manipulation of nature. Ancient emerging zoonotic diseases (see Box 1) with deadly consequences include smallpox, falciparum malaria, measles, and bubonic/pneumonic plague. Some, e.g., the Justinian plague (541 AD) and the Black Death (1348 AD), killed substantial proportions of humans in the ‘‘known’’ world, i.e., the world known to those whose recordings of it survive, predominantly in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.

So, you see why Tucker wonders whether the Covid Hoax was a first drastic step toward de-urbanization—ironic, in a way, since hyper urbanization, pushing humans in from the suburbs to smaller and smaller living spaces has been the darling of urban planners for a long time. Of course, another aspect of de-urbanization would be the requirement for depopulation. Hmmm.

At any rate, Tucker begins by noting what we’ve all been aware of from numerous articles: The flight of workers from central cities, leading to the radical decline of major metro areas. There’s more, of course. The flight of workers has coincided with radical Woke policies: enabling of crime and criminals, of the mentally ill who live on the streets, of migrants. Sufficient for now are Tucker’s main points, and the implications for the future:

Everyone was supposed to be back at the office by now. It’s not really happening, …

... The impact on the commercial sector is becoming ever more clear. 

Leases are coming up for large office spaces in major cities around the US. ... Occupancy of these offices is dramatically down in most places around the country. The decline is 30 percent on average and much more in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City. That’s for now but many tech companies and others have laid off workers, meaning that even the companies that renew will be looking to downsize dramatically and with shorter-term leases. 

A big part of this problem is that this is all happening on an extremely short timeline, adding to the financial crisis of the cities. Tucker places the blame squarely on the lockdowns and mandates that Fauci defends. Liberal cities brought this upon themselves:

… it would have been far better to happen organically and not by force. … it wasn’t a pathogen that sent millions out of the cities and leaving for the suburbs. It was the forced closures and then vaccine mandates and compulsory segregation by vaccine status. 

For a time, cities like New York City, Boston, Chicago, and New Orleans were using state power to exclude shot refuseniks any normal public accommodations. The unvaccinated could not go to the library, the theater, restaurants and bars, and museums. It’s hard to believe that this actually happened in the land of the free but that is the real history of just two years ago. 

Then once workers got a taste of remote work, and they fully realized just how ridiculously annoying the commute and office culture truly is, they would not and could not be pushed back into a full-time relationship with the office. That has left half and fully empty skyscrapers in multiple cities in the US. 

The signs of doom are everywhere. ... 

…

The next phase will be the fiscal crisis. Dying business districts, declining population, empty office buildings all mean falling tax revenue. The budgets won’t be cut because of pension obligations and school funding. The next place to look is to the capital for bailouts and then of course the federal government. But those will only buy time and certainly won’t address the underlying problem.

This is the point at which Tucker cites Fauci’s calls for “radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”

Piece of cake, right? Radically rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence? But this is the language of the globalist ruling elite—the WEF. Moreover, as Tucker also notes, there seems to be no plan at all in any of these cities to turn things around. On the contrary, the only tactic appears to be pillaging the productive classes—a counterproductive approach. Tucker offers a few examples, but readers will be aware of many more. All contribute to making cities uninhabitable for the middle classes. Tucker offers no real reasons for hope. On the contrary:

All of this speaks to a much bigger problem, which is that the whole political system seems to be engaged in an amazing game of “Let’s pretend” despite the overwhelming evidence of the disaster that has befallen us. No serious efforts are underway to reverse the damage of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates and segregation. ... 

Yes, a complete reversal is possible but it seems ever less likely, especially with the continued efforts to purge from public life those who dissented during the crisis, as well as the intensifying censorship on all mainstream media platforms. 

Once you step back from it, nothing really makes sense. One might suppose that when a whole society – and really globe – embarked on such a crazy experiment and utterly failed in every way, that there would be a major effort to come to terms with it. 

The opposite is happening. ...

We’ve seen utopian attempts at the radical transformation of human existence on a very short timeline in the past. None have ended well. It’s a type of ideological psychosis, the idea that humans can transform reality by the supposed power of their thoughts and words. The sad fact is that people in this “pneumo-pathological” state (Voegelin’s term) can’t be reasoned out of it. Only the bite of the consequences can bring an end to the madness.