This will be my personal take away from what I have had a chance to watch, so far, from the World Economic Forum 2023 events. I have not had a chance to watch all of the events yet, and likely won’t see them all, but will be watching more of them when I have the time to do so There’s a lot and many ran simultaneously. In this post I intend to cover a few of the important things I noted during the live streams, a couple of quotes and their care to keep themselves healthy that many of them have told us were unnecessary for the rest of us

The Precautions

   To start with my first noted quote, which was said about the battery passports but applies more to how they have treated the many virus outbreaks during the last 3+ years now.

 “Once you give people a choice, they will make choices” – Benedikt Sobotka

   This brings me to the less appealing topic for most people right at the start, as i do. The extra precautions they are taking. How our elites haven’t given people a choice, they have instead lied to the general population to support the possibility to save a few dollars today even if that means many people will pay for that mistake later on. If most people knew the actual dangers and how easy it is to prevent them I don’t imagine they would have been so willing to be infected.

   I will only cover the 5 measures that were blatantly visible to those watching the interviews and live streams, I won’t bother trying to speculate on what was done to the building ventilation and so fourth.

  For those who don’t know, the battery passports are about being able to identify where the parts of these battery packs, we use in things like vehicles, come from. So we can pick companies based on where they source their materials and the labour condition relating to them. Although realistically most people won’t care, even the elites who are implementing this system. It’s a neat idea on paper but will prove to mostly be useless in the grand scheme of things given many of these materials are limited and we need more than we can produce. This means we won’t have a choice to be able to care where it comes from. There are many reasons I say personal cars are not the future and this is only one of them.

Measures

1) For starters they have a mandatory test and trace program in place, something that was deemed too expensive and annoying to implement on the public. They have PCR tests on arrival and special badges that change from green to red if their test comes back positive or if they refuse to be tested to block them from potentially spreading it to other attendees. Rapid tests are also provided, to be used at the attendees discretion. This simple measure would significantly reduce the spread.

2) Air filtration units, I would presume HEPA filters are installed, are visible in scenes even where some people are wearing winter jackets to deal with how cold having the windows open can make the indoors at this time of year in that climate, yet an air purifier is also running as well. It’s generally accepted knowledge, even among the ‘expert’ anti-mask crew, that air filtration in an environment is one of the best ways we have for making the indoor air safe again that would also result in many other airborne pathogens to practically vanish over night, such as the flu. The part that hurts my head is when those same people then think that strapping a filter around the air holes in your face won’t produce the same, if not better, results. This is why I put quotation marks around expert when referring to them.

3) As the previous point mentioned, they obviously have the windows open since multiple interviewers are in outdoor winter clothing. This is also a simple measure that can be used in most environments to try to keep airflow up. Although the hard truth is that because we have infected other mammalian wildlife across the surface of the planet (the virus only seems to care that we are a mammal, nothing more) outdoor air is no longer as safe as we would like to pretend. It’s spreading through deer populations, mice, outbreaks in zoos with other mammals like the apes and big cats. This means many pets are also vulnerable.

4) They are also providing masks to the attendees. From what I saw, they were KN95 and up masks. We never actually provided masks that will work, we provided surgical masks that sometimes work instead. KN95 and N95 are really the bare minimum people should be using in disposable or more preferred elastomeric half mask with filters you can swap out.

5) I think this one is the most important one that we saw come out of there, as there has been quite the push to look into testing the safety and implementing it. They are using UVGI (Upper-Room Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation) in places. The lights were visible on stands during some of the indoor gatherings. Simply put it’s a UV light above people shining across the ceiling instead of at the people. We have had UV systems for cleaning the air and surfaces for a long time so it makes sense to look at them for disinfecting rooms while in use.

  All of these are relatively basic measures to implement, and the only reason they haven’t been is because we have been lied to about what measures we should be using so now the people who need to implement them don’t want to because it makes them liable for what they did the last three years now. Even I knew in early 2020 that surgical masks weren’t going to cut it… By the end of January I was already aware that our leaders were picking the economy over public health and I tried to find ways to get more vocal. If I knew then the people in charge clearly did as I don’t have the teams of people they do.

António Guterres

   Next I would like to cover a couple of my impressions of António Guterres’ address and interview. He seems to have his head on his shoulders regarding the state of the world, which given he is the Secretary-General of the United Nations is nice to see. So many other leaders, as he calls out, are not thinking to the future but instead thinking of now regarding the own reelections. This is leaving most of our major issues untouched. Ultimately these things all cost us more in the end compared to if we had just made the changes early on when we detected the issue. Eventually we will cross a point where fixing those issues isn’t possible anymore.

   Aside from the expected comments about how we need to learn to work together better or else we’re all boned. He also stopped Børge Brende (the interviewer and Former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Norway) from just pointing the finger at social media being a problem as so many people older than myself do. I will just provide their words in text:

Børge Brende: “Social media is maybe not helping when it comes to incentivize long term thinking”

António Guterres: “We have in social media, all kinds of things. We have fantastic contributions to social media for the most noble causes of human kind and we have also the problems, in my opinion, of the business model of social media, in which of course the interest is to have as much interactions as possible and to reach as much people as possible. And as we know from traditional media what is news is not when a dog bites a man, what is news is whether a man bites a dog. The algorithms and the business model of social media are constructed in such a way that they tend to expand the informations, the positions, the ideas that are more extreme that are more controversial that create more trouble. And it’s not a question of censorship that will solve the problem; the question is the business model needs to be redesigned, the algorithms need to be redesigned in order not to be based on evil to make profit”

   I agree with that stance for the most part. The issue isn’t social media itself, it’s not that we use algorithms to make it so people don’t need to live on the platform to experience it by spreading posts out through times outside of when they were posted.. The algorithm is like having an air compressor instead of hand tools, then even someone without the physical strength to remove a tire suddenly can. The problem is that capitalism is trying to profit off of it through control and pushing ads down people’s throats. They limit communication and knowledge trying to profit off of the accomplishments of many others. An example would be how social media advanced the LGBT and racial equality movements but then all of the corporations try to jump on that to get attention and profits, snuffing out the very people that need to be heard during those times, we don’t need to hear from the companies who did nothing but uphold the status quo initially.* Without that I would argue social media is exactly what we need to solve our issues given the level of communication it gives us and the scale of our problems being the entire globe, not these pretend AIs they are making that just mimic what we have done instead of advancing it.

   I think a lot of people don’t understand what social media is and what the algorithms do so they just fear it and blame it for everything. Much as a simpleton blames immigrants for a housing crisis actually created by the wealthy buying up the properties and using them as investments, instead of people using them as housing. Something I grew up hearing from most of white people around me, almost every one of them… meanwhile part of it was the “my home is my retirement” thing where the idea of letting investors make housing unaffordable was advantageous to the people who held the voting power rather than the generations to come.

Open Forum: Pack Up and Go – Climate Migration

   Second last I have Agnes Callamard (Secretary General of Amnesty International) at the end of the event this section of my post is titled. She goes on a 3-minute and 15-second closing speech which ends with “It’s everyone’s job! Not just our job, the little people”. She talks about how we have leaders who are focused on not changing, which is exactly what brought us here. She notes the major point many seem to be looking past which is the fact they are all looking a a 1.5 degree Celsius maximum increase temperature target, what we are aiming to limit it to. But the truth is we are currently on target for 2.5 degrees which makes for vastly different outcomes to which we honestly have little idea on how bad it will get. This makes many of our already lack-lustre plans look pathetic, and useless to be honest. The amount of people being displaced will mean we need to plan for what to do with them in advance.

   As she says, we need to hold our leaders to account for their actions, much as I say we need to regarding how poorly they handled COVID. Both COVID and climate change bare a striking resemblance to each other regarding how our most wealthy view them as problems. They tried to cover up the problems and are hoping that people just don’t turn on them and start protesting. This is not the world we want, we shouldn’t need it to get there to have the people in charge implement fixes that are for the greater good, including themselves and their own children.

   The sum of the problem is basically we need to stop burning things for energy, this requires us to reduce our usage. Capitalism can’t do this because it requires constant growth, including in energy usage. So the life we knew cannot be the life we carry forward as it’s what brought us to this very point. This isn’t good enough and we must demand more actions rather than just accepting this and becoming complacent in the outcome. ALL of our futures demand it.

The Guy I Don’t Remember

   This situation is one of the moments I realised how in trouble we actually are with these people. That many of them are not protecting themselves from COVID but instead they are being protected from COVID by the people running the event space. Unfortunately I can’t remember which event had come up that I heard this from as the list was auto-loading, so I don’t have the speaker name or the event up to quote more of it directly. But the part I do remember was the speaker saying how the January 6th 2021 insurrection in the USA and Russia attacking the Ukraine were both complete surprises. My issue with that statement is that it’s completely false and meant to cover up the fact those who didn’t know didn’t pay attention. The January 6th attack was promoted on social media and fuelled by elected members who wanted President Trump to remain in power after his loss, President Trump now facing issues because he also helped support it verbally. As for Ukraine there is little surprise to them being attacked after it was very apparent that the US economy was shot and they were unable to even hold the Taliban at bay anymore. The world watched the US be chased out of a country they had referred to as savages for a couple of decades. I’m not saying Russia is doing well, but neither is the EU or USA on that front either… and frankly it’s more pathetic that most of the world is struggling to keep Russia at bay, it shows how weak they have become. But even without that there have been decades of buildup with the US and NATO pretend like they haven’t been edging towards Russia and China this entire time or playing with world governments like they accuse Russia and China of doing.

   The future looks rather bleak on that front at the moment and I wouldn’t even begin to try to predict what will happen now, I can only hope we can come to an agreement… but it seems unlikely. I don’t see either side just walking away from it. In my opinion, the answer would be to hold a vote with the people of Ukraine on what they want to do, Join NATO or join Russia. But doing that after all of this risks the chance that many people who wanted to join NATO may not be alive anymore. It’s the same as the COVID issue, the people that the capitalist leaders are culling currently are mostly supporters of capitalism. Which is why after 3 years of trying to educate people when I could I now mostly just block them when they annoy me instead. COVID will take care of them if they don’t want to listen and instead want to abuse others. Dark, but so is me taking constant abuse by people who won’t listen especially when they came to me just to argue haha.

– Anthony