Green fuck 100x70 cm.

In 2020 there was a great dying in Italy.
We almost missed Bettino Craxi;
it was like being on the Achille Lauro (the cruise).
Tins topped with pears and no-entry skittles everywhere.
Marx (Groucho) and Sputnik, Bic Gates (Bic, the ballpoint pen) and Pfizer's well-endowed elephant
played for months with the abacus, while we dreamed of sleeping.
And all I wanted was for the memory of all this to remain,
for life here can be more surreal than a painting.
To the everlasting memory of the endless game we shall play forever.

PANDEMONIUM GIROTONDO SCIENTISTA
(A song for Sanremo 2021, rejected by the timid, popular, pathetic performer whose name we shall not mention, who did not know that real life is the one lived by the brave, while he pottered along playing the coward at length but to very little purpose)

[The song below is left in Italian: it is built entirely on puns with the surnames of the Italian virologists and politicians who dominated the pandemic news - Burioni, Crisanti, Pregliasco, Bassetti, Speranza ("hope"), Mattarella (which also sounds like "rolling pin") - and on the bedding brand Bassetti. Any literal translation would destroy it.]

Mandrie di Burioni scintillanti
sulle strade deserte
Ad asciugare nei carruggi
copripiumini Bassetti strappati
Il due Novembre la notte di Tutti i Crisanti
i fedeli pregavano a Pregliasco
Nessuna Speranza
per quei poveri gnocchi
pestati con il Mattarella

Green pass, Green grass, Green ass
E domani a tutti il bypass
(Chorus)

UPDATES 2025 (five years on)
The government has issued a new pandemic plan which recognises the use of vaccines but not as the only instrument of response, and which provides for restrictions on personal liberty in certain cases only in the face of a "pandemic of exceptional character", and without recourse to Prime Ministerial decrees (DPCM).
"Excluded", it states, "is the use of administrative acts for the adoption of any measure that may be coercive of personal liberty or restrictive of civil and social rights. Only by laws or acts having force of law, and in compliance with constitutional principles, may temporary, extraordinary and exceptional measures be provided for."
For all that it is written in political jargon, and represents a compromise between the various souls of the present government, the new pandemic plan recognises, at least in words, freedom of medical treatment and the personal freedoms enshrined in our constitution, even in the event of occurrences such as those of 2020.
Implicitly, therefore, it admits that in the course of the Covid crisis those freedoms were unjustly violated.
The new plan shows how the definitions of right and left, which had a precise meaning throughout the twentieth century, are no longer applicable in the new millennium.
https://www.rainews.it/articoli/2025/02/il-nuovo-piano-pandemico-restrizioni-alla-liberta-solo-con-le-leggi-no-dpcm-891efdb2-3a89-458e-b81d-14cf5d1301ad.html

Information about the potential harms of vaccines, opinions differing from those of the government, and the real data of the pandemic were censored in the United States by the Democratic administration.
The CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, stated that he had been "put under pressure" by the United States government to censor content relating to the coronavirus during the pandemic.
https://www.corriere.it/tecnologia/24_agosto_27/l-ammissione-di-zuckerberg-pressioni-dall-amministrazione-biden-per-censurare-i-contenuti-sul-covid-su-facebook-e-instagram-8b136adb-9de1-4977-9e7f-cf39212bdxlk.shtml

Despite the new evidence, none of those responsible for the management of the pandemic in 2020 has been prosecuted or has felt any duty to apologise: no politician, no scientist, no intellectual - nor indeed any ordinary person who turned into a gendarme of power by conforming to absurd rules and letting themselves be treated as a guinea pig.
The Italian media continue to spread obtuse disinformation and fake news about the causes of the pandemic, the number of the dead, and the usefulness and adverse effects of the vaccine.
The world's population was compelled to be vaccinated with an experimental vaccine that did not prevent the vaccinated from falling ill, that caused adverse effects - some of them serious - in certain people, and whose long-term effects we cannot know.
L. Motolese

"An obligatory preamble. I am a university professor. I teach philology in Bologna, at the oldest university in the Western world. I am the coordinator of a doctoral programme at the same University. I direct three international scientific journals classified in class A by ANVUR (the National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research System of the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research).
I have served and continue to serve on ministerial evaluation committees. I am responsible for four international inter-university projects - one under UNESCO patronage - involving, besides my own University, those of Bonn, London, Los Angeles, Toronto, Calgary, Valencia, Istanbul, Cairo, Brest (Brittany), Blida (Algeria), Shahid Beheshti (Tehran) and Rabat (Morocco).
Together with other colleagues I coordinate international research centres and cooperation projects between universities and the world outside them. I have taken part by invitation in some 300 international scientific conferences, and have been keynote speaker at fifteen of them. I direct several academic series, including one linked to the Medical Humanities centre of the University of Bologna, of which I am a member.
I sit on the editorial board of various scientific journals and series in Italy and abroad. I have some 700 scientific publications to my name. In short: when I speak of the university I do not do so as a journalist who has more or less informed himself about the facts. I speak of it from within, knowing what I am talking about.
In March 2020, when everything we are now living through began, I publicly expressed certain misgivings about the univocal narrative of the pandemic, and received in consequence - besides several expressions of thanks and solidarity - insults, threats and warnings from more powerful colleagues. At more or less regular intervals over the past months I have continued to say what I think about the scientocratic dictatorship under way, defending - knowingly - an idea of science as the art of doubt and of debate.
The political authoritarianism that has grown up within the pandemic narrative has meanwhile, as predicted, worsened, with a situation that has collapsed in defiance of every constitutional guarantee, with the total complicity of every residual form of opposition in the crumbling post-democracies of the West, and with a by now generalised lobotomisation of citizens, who have meanwhile also become aggressive, intolerant and judgemental.
Generally, in such situations, it is the so-called "intellectuals", or the forces of creative thought, who try to salvage something by embodying an alternative point of view. Nothing of the kind: even the ex-rebels who made their fortune by announcing that they would break the world open to defend liberty (here at home I think of my fellow Apennine native Vasco Rossi, while among the lesser figures stand out ex-rebels such as the omnipresent Cisco - real name Stefano Bellotti - and the whole host of those who, less well known than he is, go on singing against the system stuffed with second-hand notions of partisanship and Resistance) have shown themselves helpless, incapable, crude.
Domesticated and definitively squalid figures who have even lent themselves to government advertisements on how to wear masks and how to save the country through virtuous behaviour: Fedez, other more underground rappers who were supposed to lead the revolt, and the epigones of the epigones (the one exception I have come across: the ever-lucid and subversive Giorgio Canali).
(I gladly cite here the monumental Eric Clapton, under media attack at this very hour for the anti-lockdown track Stand and Deliver, written by Van Morrison: a piece released online just as this article of mine was already going to press.)
The others? More zealous than zeal itself, more doormat than the very concept of a doormat. I do not even remember their names (apart from the usual ones, among the thousands of the fashionable who elbow their way forward in their contests of national-popular preciousness: Michele Serra, Severgnini, Gramellini, Daria Bignardi).
But let me come to the University - where, given the expectations one might have had, the crucial point of the decay is to be recorded. The Departments of the Alma Mater/University of Bologna, where I work, today look like isolated wings of Alcatraz or San Quentin. All the chairs removed. Follow the flow indicated by the arrows. Disinfect yourself. Always wear a mask. No talking. Libraries inaccessible. Monitoring of good behaviour. Invitations to report inappropriate behaviour. A QR code on every door you pass through. I am talking about the University, the seat of free thought.
I read Agamben carefully, some months ago, when he compared those of us in the university who accept these disproportionate limitations to those (99 per cent of them) who did not refuse to join Fascism a hundred years ago. I read him and it threw me into crisis. I think as he does. I spoke with some colleagues about the possibility of resigning; I set out the reasons for refusing to take part in this outrage. They dissuaded me, essentially out of friendship. I spoke about it to my students in the first semester of the 2020-2021 academic year. I told them, in no uncertain terms and from the very first lesson, that the person speaking to them in front of that screen was a coward (all my lessons are recorded and accessible).
I confess that I am a coward. I think that anyone with any vague awareness of the disproportion of the measures adopted ought to refuse to be part of this outrage. I say my piece in the Department and Degree Course Councils. I have always said what I think. Some colleagues, male and female, write to me privately to confess that they think as I do. But when it comes to deciding (blended teaching, distance teaching, measures of this or that kind) they never speak up. As if to say that expressing an opinion, exercising the first right that ought to govern university thought - the right to conscious dissent - must always be left to somebody else.
Am I spitting in the plate I eat from? Yes. That is exactly it, because I have not had the strength to resign. This year I have come to know my true cowardice. I have discovered that I have no other strength than the ineffective one of restating principles, giving interviews, writing on the subject, expressing my point of view to my students. Of never telling them what I am told to tell them. I am disappointed in myself. And I am disappointed in the Rectors, in the Heads of Department, in my colleagues, who had a historic opportunity to restate the principles of the autonomy of critical thought. Or at least to discuss them. And who are instead all complicit. All traitors. I more than they, because I feel differently from them and fatally fall into line with whatever is decided.
In Bologna, and elsewhere too, we were out in the square shouting in front of the cameras "Freedom! Freedom!" for our student Patrick Zaki - may some god protect you, brave young man! - and in those same days we were all silent and complicit before the mono-narrative horror of the pandemic. Those who organised and promoted, at the top levels, our academic demonstrations to make us the spokesmen for the defence of freedom of thought are the same people who censored my words on sites supposedly open to University debate, refusing to let my freedom of thought express itself.
The University will not recover from this disaster. In the short and medium term, the pseudo-emergency strategies put in place (from the millions of euros spent on the pathetic film sets now installed in our lecture halls, which naturally will not be dismantled after the supposed emergency, to the strengthening of technology for distance teaching) will remain as a feather in the cap of academic and institutional efficiency - including the sham in-person teaching which in the end looks disturbingly like a mere device to avoid reducing students' fees. But in the long term, the judgement on this uncritical supineness before ministerial and health-authority dictates will weigh as a judgement without appeal.
In my own small way I have failed, and I feel a failure. I have betrayed myself and my principles. And I have betrayed the students to whom, instead of explaining what I think and opening debates during my lessons to discuss these matters critically, I should more simply have given the concrete and unmistakable example of a person who walks away.
This confession of cowardice of mine is addressed especially to them. I have not been what I taught; I am not what I teach. I have lost any right to address them with the words of Henry V at Agincourt: "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers". I managed to trade nothing away, my friends. I did not urge anyone to battle on Saint Crispin's day. Be better than I have seemed to you, and than I seem to you in these months.
Who knows - perhaps one day I shall manage to surprise you in other ways. But it will only be a small redemption for what I have not been capable of being today."
Francesco Benozzo
https://comedonchisciotte.org/il-tradimento-degli-intellettuali-2/

After months of war bulletins, let us look at some figures on Covid-19 that are at last detailed and set side by side.
On 22 October 2020 ISTAT published the data on deaths from all causes for the period January-August 2020 (https://www.istat.it/it/files//2020/03/nota-decessi-22-ottobre2020.pdf).
Table 3 gives the percentage variations with respect to the 2015-2019 average, broken down by region and by month.
It shows that in Italy deaths in the January-August period rose by 8.6% - a figure which in itself is well below what one would expect from a pandemic…
Only by disaggregating the data by region and month does one begin to understand what really happened. In the regions of the North the increase was 19.5%, while in the Centre and the South there was actually a decrease, of -0.2% and -1.1% respectively, which explains the national average of 8.6%.
Disaggregating the northern figure for the month of March, the increase was 93.9% - twice as many people died as in the preceding four years; and in Lombardy the increase was 191.2%. Obviously in Bergamo and other municipalities the peak was certainly higher.
I shall stop here with the numbers. So, in substance, this coronavirus influenza, named SARS-covid19, was certainly more virulent than those - nameless, but influenzas all the same - of the 2015-2019 period, but it is not the Black Death, or the Spanish flu.
The media terrorism unleashed and still sustained is therefore not supported by real data, but is certainly functional to a political class, national and regional, with no distinction of party, which over the last thirty years has literally wrecked the local health system, where family doctors spend most of their time uploading data onto computers.
And it is they who could and should have treated their patients at home - patients they know individually - which would have made it possible not to clog the hospitals and would have further reduced the deaths. Never in the history of humanity has it happened that doctors were invited, and in practice almost obliged, to keep away from patients, so much so that those who disobeyed did so at their own risk. So this emergency is indeed a health emergency, but not one of coronavirus: it stems from far more remediable causes and from very precise political responsibilities that people tend to obscure.
Now, after more than six months, we discover that nothing has been done to remedy this situation, either for community medicine or for transport. The Government churns out almost daily the notorious administrative decrees that ought to shame a self-styled democratic state, with measures largely useless and also absurd and harmful, stripping Parliament of its powers - a Parliament which, moreover, willingly lets itself be stripped of them.
No one answers the reasonable questions raised by that ISTAT table alone: why in the North? Why in Lombardy, where the health service was, according to their lordships, "a centre of excellence"? Perhaps because in those very areas environmental and technological pollution is also "excellent"? And why do we go on destroying schooling when it is well known that children and young people do not fall ill?
If teachers want to protect themselves they can do so, but why keep children and young people apart? Perhaps to give a push to the long-awaited distance learning: everyone distanced and wearing headphones, following perfect algorithms?
And so the real aims come to the surface, and the great "reset", now spoken of openly and shamelessly, will hand us a country and a world in which fear, control, poverty, uniformity of behaviour and of thought, the virtual in place of the real, and more besides, will become the norm.
Just as since 2001 a world with millions of cameras and sensors, fortified airports and soldiers in the streets has come to seem normal to us - and it should not - so it is meant to seem normal to us to go out masked and distanced, virtually connected; a world in which a President of the Council of Ministers (there are no Premiers in our legal order) turns from a lawyer into a spiritual father and health assistant to the citizen-subject, so much in need of being guided, and the Presidents of the Regions (there are no Governors) turn into sheriffs with a star. Well: we could happily do without these hypocritical and pitiful paternalisms, at least.
Sergio Motolese
http://www.altritasti.it/index.php/archivio/diritti-sociali/4565-covid-19-numeri-e-realta

In certain respects human life changes over time, but certain underlying nuances remain unaltered even over long periods. In the
Middle Ages, for example, a fear was widespread that today is considered an obscure superstition: the fear of ghosts, of spectres, of elemental beings of every kind. Today it is seen as medieval superstition. The present age [1914!], however, has changed the object, but not the fear: the present age fears spectres
as the Middle Ages did; the ghosts feared today are the so-called bacilli and other beings of that sort. It must be acknowledged, on the other hand, that the ghosts of former
times were more dignified, and one could be afraid of them, compared with the beings we now call bacilli and the like. Only one thing has truly changed: when the mentality of men was more spiritual, they feared spiritual elemental beings; today it is more materialistic, and the ghosts have to be physical. It suits the age
of materialism better.
The medieval fear of ghosts and the modern fear of bacilli
(Rudolf Steiner - 9/5/1914: from O. O. 261)


Offline: COVID-19 is not a pandemic (The Lancet)


Covid vaccines and Big Pharma - Raoult: "We have no defences against financial powers of this kind" (in Italian)


The conformist thinking of the global Imbecile (Marcelloveneziani.com, in Italian)"


The real lessons from Sweden's approach to covid-19 (Economist.com)"


Genetics: "within 10 years man will be immortal" (Essere-informati.it, in Italian)"