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How we fool ourselves. Part III: Social biases

By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | April 25, 2021

“Is the road to scientific hell paved with good intentions?” – political psychologist Philip Tetlock (1994)

Part I in this series addressed logical fallacies. Part II addressed biases associated with a consensus building process. Part II addresses the role of social conflicts and biases.

Additional biases are triggered by social conflict between an individual’s responsibility for responsible conduct of research, and the larger ethical issues associated with the well-being of the public and the environment. Further, social biases are triggered by careerist goals, loyalty to one’s colleagues and institutional loyalties.

Scientists have the responsibility of adhering to the principles of ethical research and professional standards. But what happens when other responsibilities get in the way of these professional standards? These might include responsibilities to their conscience, their colleagues, institutions, the public and/or the environment. One can imagine many different conflicts across this range of responsibilities that that can bias the scientific process. As an example, scientists that have been heavily involved with the IPCC may be concerned with preserving the importance of the IPCC and its consensus, which has become central to their professional success, funding and influence.

Arguably the most important of these are conflicts between the responsible conduct of research and larger ethical issues associated with the well-being of the public and the environment. Fuller and Mosher’s book Climategate: The CruTape Letters argued that ‘noble cause corruption’ was a primary motivation behind the Climategate deceits. Noble cause corruption is when the ends of protecting the climate (noble) justify the means of sabotaging your scientific opponents (ignoble).

Psychologist Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia claims that the most common and problematic bias in science is ‘motivated reasoning’. People that have a ‘dog in the fight’ (reputational, financial, ideological, political) interpret observations to fit a particular idea that supports their particular ‘dog.’ The term ‘motivated reasoning’ is usually reserved for political motivations, but preserving their reputation or funding is also a strong motivator among scientists.

The embedding of political values into science occurs when value statements or ideological claims are wrongly treated as objective truth. Scientists have a range of attitudes about the environment; the problem occurs because there is the presumption that one set of attitudes is right and those who disagree are in denial. This results in conversion of a widely shared political ideology about climate change into ‘reality.’

Confirmation bias can become even stronger when people confront questions that trigger moral emotions and concerns about group identity. People’s beliefs become more extreme when they’re surrounded by like-minded colleagues. They come to assume that their opinions are not only the norm but also the truth – creating what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls a ‘tribal-moral community’ with its own sacred values about what’s worth studying and what’s taboo. Such biases can lead to widely-accepted claims that reflect the scientific community’s blind spots more than they reflect justified scientific conclusions.

Psychologists Cusiman and Lombrozo found that people facing a dilemma between believing an impartial assessment of the evidence and believing what would better fulfill a moral obligation, people often believe in line with the latter. Cuisman and Lombrozo found that morally good beliefs demand less evidence than morally bad beliefs. They also found that people sometimes treat the moral value of a belief as an independent justification for belief.

Motivated biases become particularly problematic once these biases are institutionalized, with advocacy statements made by professional societies, editorials written by journal editors, and public statements by the IPCC leadership.

April 25, 2021 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | IPCC | Leave a comment

The Covidian Cult (Part II)

By CJ Hopkins | Consent Factory, Inc | April 21, 2021

Back in October of 2020, I wrote an essay called The Covidian Cult, in which I described the so-called “New Normal” as a global totalitarian ideological movement. Developments over the last six months have borne out the accuracy of that analogy.

A full year after the initial roll-out of the utterly horrifying and completely fictional photos of people dropping dead in the streets, the projected 3.4% death rate, and all the rest of the official propaganda, despite the absence of any actual scientific evidence of an apocalyptic plague (and the abundance of evidence to the contrary), millions of people continue to behave like members of an enormous death cult, walking around in public with medical-looking masks, robotically repeating vacuous platitudes, torturing children, the elderly, the disabled, demanding that everyone submit to being injected with dangerous experimental “vaccines,” and just generally acting delusional and psychotic.

How did we ever get to this point … to the point where, as I put it in The Covidian Cult, “instead of the cult existing as an island within the dominant culture, the cult has become the dominant culture, and those of us who have not joined the cult have become the isolated islands within it?”

To understand this, one needs to understand how cults control the minds of their members, because totalitarian ideological movements operate more or less the same way, just on a much larger, societal scale. There is a wealth of research and knowledge on this subject (I mentioned Robert J. Lifton in my earlier essay), but, to keep things simple, I’ll just use Margaret Singer’s “Six Conditions of Mind Control” from her 1995 book, Cults in Our Midst, as a lens to view the Covidian Cult through. (The italics are Singer. The commentary is mine.)

Six Conditions of Mind Control

1. Keep the person unaware of what is going on and how she or he is being changed a step at a time. Potential new members are led, step by step, through a behavioral-change program without being aware of the final agenda or full content of the group.

Looking back, it is easy to see how people were conditioned, step by step, to accept the “New Normal” ideology. They were bombarded with terrifying propaganda, locked down, stripped of their civil rights, forced to wear medical-looking masks in public, to act out absurd “social-distancing” rituals, submit to constant “testing,” and all the rest of it. Anyone not complying with this behavioral-change program or challenging the veracity and rationality of the new ideology was demonized as a “conspiracy theorist,” a “Covid denier,” an “anti-vaxxer,” in essence, an enemy of the cult, like a “suppresive person” in the Church of Scientology.

2. Control the person’s social and/or physical environment; especially control the person’s time.

For over a year now, the “New Normal” authorities have controlled the social/physical environment, and how New Normals spend their time, with lockdowns, social-distancing rituals, closure of “non-essential” businesses, omnipresent propaganda, isolation of the elderly, travel restrictions, mandatory mask-rules, protest bans, and now the segregation of the “Unvaccinated.” Basically, society has been transformed into something resembling an infectious disease ward, or an enormous hospital from which there is no escape. You’ve seen the photos of the happy New Normals dining out at restaurants, relaxing at the beach, jogging, attending school, and so on, going about their “normal” lives with their medical-looking masks and prophylactic face shields. What you’re looking at is the pathologization of society, the pathologization of everyday life, the physical (social) manifestation of a morbid obsession with disease and death.

3. Systematically create a sense of powerlessness in the person.

What kind of person could feel more powerless than an obedient New Normal sitting at home, obsessively logging the “Covid death” count, sharing photos of his medical-looking mask and post-“vaccination” bandage on Facebook, as he waits for permission from the authorities to go outdoors, visit his family, kiss his lover, or shake hands with a colleague? The fact that in the Covidian Cult the traditional charismatic cult leader has been replaced by a menagerie of medical experts and government officials does not change the utter dependency and abject powerlessness of its members, who have been reduced to a state approaching infancy. This abject powerlessness is not experienced as a negative; on the contrary, it is proudly celebrated. Thus the mantra-like repetition of the “New Normal” platitude “Trust the Science!” by people who, if you try to show them the science, melt down completely and start jabbering aggressive nonsense at you to shut you up.

4. Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments and experiences in such a way as to inhibit behavior that reflects the person’s former social identity.

The point here is the transformation of the formerly basically rational person into an entirely different cult-approved person, in our case, an obedient “New Normal” person. Singer gets into this in greater detail, but her discussion applies mostly to subcultural cults, not to large-scale totalitarian movements. For our purposes, we can fold this into Condition 5.

5. Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments, and experiences in order to promote learning the group’s ideology or belief system and group-approved behaviors. Good behavior, demonstrating an understanding and acceptance of the group’s beliefs, and compliance are rewarded, while questioning, expressing doubts or criticizing are met with disapproval, redress and possible rejection. If one expresses a question, they are made to feel that there is something inherently wrong with them to be questioning.

OK, I’m going to tell you a little story. It’s a story about a personal experience, which I’m pretty sure you’ve also experienced. It’s a story about a certain New Normal who has been harassing me for several months. I’ll call him Brian Parks, because, well, that’s his name, and I no longer feel any compunction about sharing it.

Brian is a former friend/colleague from the theater world who has gone full “New Normal” and is absolutely furious that I have not. So outraged is Brian that I have not joined the cult that he has been going around on the Internet referring to me as a “conspiracy theorist” and suggesting that I’ve had some kind of nervous breakdown and require immediate psychiatric treatment because I do not believe the official “New Normal” narrative. Now, this would not be a very big deal, except that Brian is impugning my character and attempting to damage my reputation on the Facebook pages of other theater colleagues, which Brian feels entitled to do, given that I am a “Covid denier,” a “conspiracy theorist,” and an “anti-vaxxer,” or whatever, and given the fact that he has the power of the state, the media, etc., on his side.

This is how it works in cults, and in larger totalitarian societies. It isn’t usually the Gestapo that comes for you. It’s usually your friends and colleagues. What Brian is doing is working that system of rewards and punishments to enforce his ideology, because he knows that most of my other colleagues in the theater world have also gone full “New Normal,” or at least are looking the other way and staying silent while it is being implemented.

This tactic, obviously, has backfired on Brian, primarily because I do not give a fuck what any New Normals think of me, whether they work in the theater world or anywhere else, but I am in a rather privileged position, because I have accomplished what I wanted to accomplish in the theater, and would rather stick my hand in a blender than submit my novels to corporate publishers for review by “sensitivity readers,” so there isn’t much to threaten me with. That, and I have no children to support, or administrations to answer to (unlike, for example, Mark Crispin Miller, who is currently being persecuted by the “New Normal” administration at NYU).

The point is, this kind of ideological conditioning is happening everywhere, every day, on the job, among friends, even among families. The pressure to conform is intense, because nothing is more threatening to devoted cultists, or members of totalitarian ideological movements, than those who challenge their fundamental beliefs, confront them with facts, or otherwise demonstrate that their “reality” isn’t reality at all, but, rather, a delusional, paranoid fiction.

The key difference between how this works in cults and totalitarian ideological movements is that, usually, a cult is a subcultural group, and thus non-cult-members have the power of the ideology of the dominant society to draw on when resisting the mind-control tactics of the cult, and attempting to deprogram its members … whereas, in our case, this balance of power is inverted. Totalitarian ideological movements have the power of governments, the media, the police, the culture industry, academia, and the compliant masses on their side. And, thus, they do not need to persuade anyone. They have the power to dictate “reality.” Only cults operating in total isolation, like Jim Jones’ People’s Temple in Guyana, enjoy this level of control over their members.

This pressure to conform, this ideological conditioning, must be fiercely resisted, regardless of the consequences, both publicly and in our private lives, or the “New Normal” will certainly become our “reality.” Despite the fact that we “Covid deniers” are currently outnumbered by the Covidian cultists, we need to behave as if we are not, and hold to reality, facts, and real science, and treat the New Normals as exactly what they are, members of a new totalitarian movement, delusional cultists run amok. If we do not, we will get to Singer’s Condition 6 …

6. Put forth a closed system of logic and an authoritarian structure that permits no feedback and refuses to be modified except by leadership approval or executive order. The group has a top-down, pyramid structure. The leaders must have verbal ways of never losing.

We’re not there yet, but that is where we’re headed … global pathologized totalitarianism. So, please, speak up. Call things what they are. Confront the Brians in your life. Despite the fact that they tell themselves that they’re trying to help you “come to your senses” or “see the truth,” or “trust the Science,” they are not. They are cultists, desperately trying to get you to conform to their paranoid beliefs, pressuring you, manipulating you, bullying you, threatening you. Do not engage them on their terms, or let them goad you into accepting their premises. (Once they’ve sucked you into their narrative, they’ve won.) Expose them, confront them with their tactics and their motives. You will probably not change their minds in the least, but your example might help other New Normals whose faith is slipping to begin to recognize what has been done to their minds and break with the cult.

April 21, 2021 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19 | Leave a comment

How Bellingcat Launders National Security State Talking Points into the Press

By Alan Macleod | MintPress News | April 9, 2021

AMSTERDAM — Investigative site Bellingcat is the toast of the popular press. In the past month alone, it has been described as “an intelligence agency for the people” (ABC Australia ), a “transparent” and “innovative” (New Yorker ) “independent news collective,” “transforming investigative journalism” (Big Think ), and an unequivocal “force for good” (South China Morning Post ). Indeed, outside of a few alternative news sites, it is very hard to hear a negative word against Bellingcat, such is the gushing praise for the outlet founded in 2014.

This is troubling, because the evidence compiled in this investigation suggests Bellingcat is far from independent and neutral, as it is funded by Western governments, staffed with former military and state intelligence officers, repeats official narratives against enemy states, and serves as a key part in what could be called a “spook to Bellingcat to corporate media propaganda pipeline,” presenting Western government narratives as independent research.

Citizen journalism staffed with spies and soldiers

An alarming number of Bellingcat’s staff and contributors come from highly suspect backgrounds. Senior Investigator Nick Waters, for example, spent three years as an officer in the British Army, including a tour in Afghanistan, where he furthered the British state’s objectives in the region. Shortly after leaving the service, he was hired by Bellingcat to provide supposedly bias-free investigations into the Middle East.

Former contributor Cameron Colquhoun’s past is even more suspect. Colquhoun spent a decade in a senior position in GCHQ (Britain’s version of the NSA), where he ran cyber and Middle Eastern terror operations. The Scot specializes in Middle Eastern security and also holds a qualification from the U.S. State Department. None of this, however, is disclosed by Bellingcat, which merely describes him as the managing director of a private intelligence company that “conduct[s] ethical investigations” for clients around the world — thus depriving readers of key information they need to make informed judgments on what they are reading.

Bellingcat fails to inform its readers of even the most glaring conflicts of interest

There are plenty of former American spooks on Bellingcat’s roster as well. Former contributor Chris Biggers, who penned more than 60 articles for the site between 2014 and 2017, previously worked for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — a combat support unit that works under the Department of Defense and the broader Intelligence Community. Biggers is now the director of an intelligence company headquartered in Virginia, on the outskirts of Washington (close to other semi-private contractor groups like Booz Allen Hamilton), that boasts of having retired Army and Air Force generals on its board. Again, none of this is disclosed by Bellingcat, where Biggers’s bio states only that he is a “public and private sector consultant based in Washington, D.C.”

For six years, Dan Kaszeta was a U.S. Secret Service agent specializing in chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and for six more he worked as program manager for the White House Military Office. At Bellingcat, he would provide some of the intellectual ammunition for Western accusations about chemical weapons use in Syria and Russia’s alleged poisoning of Sergei Skripal.

Kaszeta is also a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank funded by a host of Western governments as well as weapons contractors such as Airbus, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Its president is a British field marshal (the highest attainable military rank) and its senior vice president is retired American General David Petraeus. Its chairman is Lord Hague, the U.K.’s secretary of state between 2010 and 2015.

A Bellingcat article covering the alleged poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a story covered heavily by the organization. Alexander Zemlianichenko | AP

All of this matters if a group is presenting itself as independent when, in reality, their views align almost perfectly with the governments funding them. But yet again, Bellingcat fails to follow basic journalism ethics and inform readers of these glaring conflict of interests, describing Kaszeta as merely the managing director of a security company and someone with 27 years of experience in security and antiterrorism. This means that unless readers are willing to do a research project they will be none the wiser.

Other Bellingcat contributors have similar pasts. Nour Bakr previously worked for the British government’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office while Karl Morand proudly served two separate tours in Iraq with the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division.

Government and intelligence officials are the opposite of journalists. The former exist to promote the interests of power (often against those of the public) while the latter are supposed to hold the powerful to account on behalf of the people. That is why it is so inappropriate that Bellingcat has had so many former spooks on their books. It could be said that ex-officials who have renounced their past or blown the whistle, such as Daniel Ellsberg or John Kiriakou, have utility as journalists. But those who have simply made the transition into media without any change in positions usually serve only the powerful.

Who pays the piper?

Just as startling as its spooky staff is Bellingcat’s source of funding. In 2016 its founder, Eliot Higgins, dismissed the idea that his organization got money from the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) as a ludicrous conspiracy theory. Yet, by the next year, he openly admitted the thing he had laughed off for so long was, in fact, true (Bellingcat’s latest available financial report confirms that they continue to receive financial assistance from the NED). As many MintPress readers will know, the NED was explicitly set up by the Reagan administration as a front for the CIA’s regime-change operations. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” said the organization’s co-founder Allen Weinstein, proudly.

Higgins himself was a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, NATO’s quasi-official think tank, from 2016 to 2019. The Atlantic Council’s board of directors is a who’s who of state power, from war planners like Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell to retired generals such as James “Mad Dog” Mattis and H.R. McMaster. It also features no fewer than seven former CIA directors. How Higgins could possibly see taking a paid position at an organization like this while he was still the face of a supposedly open and independent intelligence collective as being at all consistent is unclear.

Bana Alabed, an outsoken anti-Assad child activist, promotes Bellingcat at an Atlantic Council event. Photo | Twitter

Other questionable sources of income include the Human Rights Foundation, an international organization set up by Venezuelan activist Thor Halvorssen Mendoza. Halvorssen is the son of a former government official accused of being a CIA informant and a gunrunner for the agency’s dirty wars in Central America in the 1980s and the cousin of convicted terrorist Leopoldo Lopez. Lopez in turn was a leader in a U.S.-backed coup in 2002 and a wave of political terror in 2014 that killed at least 43 people and caused an estimated $15 billion worth of property damage. A major figure on the right-wing of Venezuelan politics, Lopez told journalists that he wants the United States to formally rule the country once President Nicolas Maduro is overthrown. With the help of the Spanish government, Lopez escaped from jail and fled to Spain last year.

Imagine, for one second, the opposite scenario: an “independent” Russian investigative website staffed partially with ex-KGB officials, funded by the Kremlin, with most of their research focused on the nefarious deeds of the U.S., U.K. and NATO. Would anyone take it seriously? And yet Bellingcat is consistently presented in corporate media as a liberatory organization; the Information Age’s gift to the people.

The Bellingcat to journalism pipeline

The corporate press itself already has a disturbingly close relationship with the national security state, as does social media. In 2019, a senior Twitter executive was unmasked as an active duty officer in the British Army’s online psychological operations unit. Coming at a time when foreign interference in politics and society was the primary issue in U.S. politics, the story was, astoundingly, almost completely ignored in the mainstream press. Only one U.S. outlet of any note picked it up, and that journalist was forced out of the profession weeks later.

Increasingly, it seems, Bellingcat is serving as a training ground for those looking for a job in the West’s most prestigious media outlets. For instance, former Bellingcat contributor Brenna Smith — who was recently the subject of a media storm after she successfully pressured a number of online payment companies to stop allowing the crowdfunding of the Capitol Building insurrectionists — announced last month she would be leaving USA Today and joining The New York Times. There she will meet up with former Bellingcat senior investigator Christiaan Triebert, who joined the Times’ visual investigations team in 2019.

The Times, commonly thought of as the United States’ most influential media outlet, has also collaborated with Bellingcat writers for individual pieces before. In 2018, it commissioned Giancarlo Fiorella and Aliaume Leroy to publish an op-ed strongly insinuating that the Venezuelan state murdered Oscar Perez. After he stole a military helicopter and used it to bomb government buildings in downtown Caracas while trying to ignite a civil war, Perez became the darling of the Western press, being described as a “patriot” (The Guardian ), a “rebel” (Miami Herald ), an “action hero” (The Times of London ), and a “liberator” (Task and Purpose ).

Until 2020, Fiorella ran an opposition blog called In Venezuela despite living in Canada. Leroy is now a full-time producer and investigator for the U.K.-government network, the BBC.

Bad news from Bellingcat

What we are uncovering here is a network of military, state, think-tank and media units all working together, of which Bellingcat is a central fixture. This would be bad enough, but much of its own research is extremely poor. It strongly pushed the now increasingly discredited idea of a chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria, attacking the members of the OPCW who came forward to expose the coverup and making some bizarre claims along the way. For years, Higgins and other members of the Bellingcat team also signal-boosted a Twitter account purporting to be an ISIS official, only for an investigation to expose the account as belonging to a young Indian troll in Bangalore. A leaked U.K. Foreign Office document lamented that “Bellingcat was somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself, and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay.”

Ultimately, however, the organization still provides utility as an attack dog for the West, publishing research that the media can cite, supposedly as “independent,” rather than rely directly on intelligence officials, whose credibility with the public is automatically far lower.

Oliver Boyd-Barrett, professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University and an expert in the connections between the deep state and the fourth estate, told MintPress that “the role of Bellingcat is to provide spurious legitimacy to U.S./NATO pretexts for war and conflict.” In far more positive words, the CIA actually appears to agree with him.

“I don’t want to be too dramatic, but we love [Bellingcat],” said Marc Polymeropoulos, the agency’s former deputy chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia. “Whenever we had to talk to our liaison partners about it, instead of trying to have things cleared or worry about classification issues, you could just reference [Bellingcat’s] work.” Polymeropoulos recently attempted to blame his headache problems on a heretofore unknown Russian microwave weapon, a claim that remarkably became an international scandal. “The greatest value of Bellingcat is that we can then go to the Russians and say ‘there you go’ [when they ask for evidence],” added former CIA Chief of Station Daniel Hoffman.

Bellingcat certainly seems to pay particular attention to the crimes of official enemies. As investigative journalist Matt Kennard noted, it has only published five stories on the United Kingdom, 17 on Saudi Arabia, 19 on the U.S. (most of which are about foreign interference in American society or far-right/QAnon cults). Yet it has 144 on Russia and 244 under its Syria tag.

In his new book “We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People,” the outlet’s boss Higgins writes: “We have no agenda but we do have a credo: evidence exists and falsehoods exist, and people still care about the difference.” Yet exploring the backgrounds of its journalists and its sources of funding quickly reveals this to be a badly spun piece of PR.

Bellingcat looks far more like a bunch of spooks masquerading as citizen journalists than a people-centered organization taking on power and lies wherever it sees them. Unfortunately, with many of its proteges travelling through the pipeline into influential media outlets, it seems that there might be quite a few masquerading as reporters as well.

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles.

April 15, 2021 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Atlantic Council, CIA, NATO, New York Times, Twitter, UK | Leave a comment

Former minister blasts pro-Israel lobby over ‘disgusting interference’ in British politics

MEMO | April 9, 2021

Former Foreign Office Minister Sir Alan Duncan has accused pro-Israel lobbyists of “the most disgusting interference” in British politics, and of negatively influencing the country’s foreign policy in the Middle East. The veteran politician has also claimed that Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) went “ballistic” and blocked him from taking on a new post covering the region’s affairs.

Duncan, a former Conservative MP and government minister, makes the sensational claims in his newly published memoir, In The Thick of It: The private diaries of a minister (published by William Collins, 2021). Speaking to journalist Michael Crick about his book for the MailPlus website, the 64 year-old blasted CFI and its undue influence in British politics.

Conservative Friends of Israel, he said, had injected a “Netanyahu-type view of Israeli politics into our foreign policy,” referring to Israel’s right-wing prime minister. He claimed that it had applied pressure on Theresa May’s government to prevent him becoming Middle East minister at the Foreign Office.

In his book, Duncan claims that his new role was agreed until the then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson alerted him to the fact that CFI “are going ballistic”. He insists that he was blocked from taking the post because he believes in the rights of the Palestinians.

In one diary entry Duncan is scathing about Conservative MPs’ fawning over Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to Britain. He was “ashamed” of the British government, accusing officials of allowing Netanyahu to “peddle pro-settlement propaganda”.

Duncan described to Crick the culture of fear created by CFI. “A lot of things do not happen in foreign policy or in government for fear of offending them because that’s the way it’s put to them by the CFI.”

He warned: “It’s a sort of buried scandal that has to stop… they will interfere at a high level in British politics in the interests of Israel on the back of donor power in the UK.” Ultimately, he pointed out, the influence of the pro-Israel lobby group came at the expense of the Palestinians.

Duncan has been a major target for the pro-Israel lobby. In 2017, an Al Jazeera documentary sensationally exposed the operations of pro-Israel lobbyists working with the Israeli Embassy in London to “take down” a minister of the Crown. Duncan, fellow Conservative MP Crispin Blunt and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn were marked out as targets. Writing for Al Jazeera at the time, Robert Grenier, a retired, 27-year veteran of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, warned against what he called the “insidious threats” of the pro-Israel lobby.

April 10, 2021 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, UK, Zionism | Leave a comment

A book on COVID by Sebastian Rushworth

Dr. Malcolm Kendrick | April 8, 2021

Early on in the COVID19 saga I came in contact with Sebastian Rushworth. He was, and is, working as an emergency care doctor in Sweden. It seemed we shared very similar ideas about what was going on. It was fascinating as he was working in Sweden, which has been attacked from all sides, for following WHO advice on the best actions to take in a pandemic.

Sweden did not fully lockdown, most schools remained open, as did bars and restaurants etc. As a result of this everyone died… Start again. As a result of this Sweden suffered around the average number of deaths (per head of population) in Europe.

European countries, above a certain size, that have done worse than Sweden, so far, include:

Czechia
Hungary
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bulgaria
Belgium
North Macedonia
Slovenia
Slovakia
Italy
UK
Portugal
Spain
Peru
Croatia
Poland
France
Lithuania
(NB: I left out micro-countries’ such as Gibraltar, San Marino, Andorra etc.)

You would think, from the howls of anguish that Sweden was now a smoking ruin, with hospitals full of the dead and dying. Which serves them bloody well right. They should have done what every other country did.

Anyway, it was interesting to link up with Sebastian to get a first-hand account of what was going on. You hear so much rubbish from the mainstream media, that it is difficult to know what is really going on. We live in a scary, censored world. Patrolled by self-appointed fact-checking dementors.

Sebastian has his own website at https://sebastianrushworth.com/ which I recommend as a good place for sensible thinking.

Now he has written a book. I should know, because he asked me to write the foreword for it, which I gladly did. It isn’t long, it is very readable, and you will learn a lot if you read it. It covers:

How Dangerous is COVID
Are the tests effective?
Does lockdown work?
Why did Sweden have more deaths than Norway?
Do face masks stop the virus?
Are the vaccines safe and effective?
I recommend it to everyone, and you can find a link to it on his website.

April 9, 2021 Posted by aletho | Book Review | Covid-19 | Leave a comment

Another Climate Scientist With Impeccable Credentials Breaks Ranks

“Our models are MICKEY-MOUSE mockeries of the real world”

By Cap Allon | Electroverse | October 25, 2020

Dr. Mototaka Nakamura received a Doctorate of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and for nearly 25 years specialized in abnormal weather and climate change at prestigious institutions that included MIT, Georgia Institute of Technology, NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, JAMSTEC and Duke University.

In his book The Global Warming Hypothesis is an Unproven Hypothesis, Dr. Nakamura explains why the data foundation underpinning global warming science is “untrustworthy” and cannot be relied on:

“Global mean temperatures before 1980 are based on untrustworthy data,” writes Nakamura. “Before full planet surface observation by satellite began in 1980, only a small part of the Earth had been observed for temperatures with only a certain amount of accuracy and frequency. Across the globe, only North America and Western Europe have trustworthy temperature data dating back to the 19th century.”

From 1990 to 2014, Nakamura worked on cloud dynamics and forces mixing atmospheric and ocean flows on medium to planetary scales. His bases were MIT (for a Doctor of Science in meteorology), Georgia Institute of Technology, Goddard Space Flight Center, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Duke and Hawaii Universities and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.

He’s published 20+ climate papers on fluid dynamics.

There is no questioning his credibility or knowledge.

Today’s ‘global warming science’ is akin to an upside down pyramid which is built on the work of a few climate modelers. These AGW pioneers claim to have demonstrated human-derived CO2 emissions as the cause of recently rising temperatures and have then simply projected that warming forward. Every climate researcher thereafter has taken the results of these original models as a given, and we’re even at the stage now where merely testing their validity is regarded as heresy.

Here in Nakamura, we have a highly qualified and experienced climate modeler with impeccable credentials rejecting the unscientific bases of the climate crisis claims. But he’s up against it — activists are winning at the moment, and they’re fronted by scared, crying children; an unstoppable combination, one that’s tricky to discredit without looking like a heartless bastard (I’ve tried).

Climate scientist Dr. Mototaka Nakamura’s recent book blasts global warming data as “untrustworthy” and “falsified”.

DATA FALSIFICATION

When arguing against global warming, the hardest thing I find is convincing people of data falsification, namely temperature fudging. If you don’t pick your words carefully, forget some of the facts, or get your tone wrong then it’s very easy to sound like a conspiracy crank (I’ve been there, too).

But now we have Nakamura.

The good doctor has accused the orthodox scientists of “data falsification” in the form adjusting historical temperature data down to inflate today’s subtle warming trend — something Tony Heller has been proving for years on his website realclimatescience.com.

Nakamura writes: “The global surface mean temperature-change data no longer have any scientific value and are nothing except a propaganda tool to the public.”

The climate models are useful tools for academic studies, he admits. However: “The models just become useless pieces of junk or worse (as they can produce gravely misleading output) when they are used for climate forecasting.”

Climate forecasting is simply not possible, Nakamura concludes, and the impacts of human-caused CO2 can’t be judged with the knowledge and technology we currently possess.

The models grossly simplify the way the climate works.

As well as ignoring the sun, they also drastically simplify large and small-scale ocean dynamics, aerosol changes that generate clouds (cloud cover is one of the key factors determining whether we have global warming or global cooling), the drivers of ice-albedo: “Without a reasonably accurate representation, it is impossible to make any meaningful predictions of climate variations and changes in the middle and high latitudes and thus the entire planet,” and water vapor.

The climate forecasts also suffer from arbitrary “tunings” of key parameters that are simply not understood.

NAKAMURA ON CO2

He writes: “The real or realistically-simulated climate system is far more complex than an absurdly simple system simulated by the toys that have been used for climate predictions to date, and will be insurmountably difficult for those naive climate researchers who have zero or very limited understanding of geophysical fluid dynamics. The dynamics of the atmosphere and oceans are absolutely critical facets of the climate system if one hopes to ever make any meaningful prediction of climate variation.”

Solar input is modeled as a “never changing quantity,” which is absurd.

“It has only been several decades since we acquired an ability to accurately monitor the incoming solar energy. In these several decades only, it has varied by one to two watts per square meter. Is it reasonable to assume that it will not vary any more than that in the next hundred years or longer for forecasting purposes? I would say, No.”

You can read Mototaka Nakamura’s book for free on Kindle. Arm yourself with the facts, and then spread them — facts such as those highlighted below (all lifted from the book):

“[The models have] no understanding of cloud formation/forcing.”

“Assumptions are made, then adjustments are made to support a narrative.”

“Our models are mickey-mouse mockeries of the real world.”

SOLAR FORCING

Solar output isn’t constant, IPCC. And the modulation of cloud nucleation is a key consequence. During solar minima, like the one we’re entering now, the sun’s magnetic field weakens and the outward pressure of the solar wind decreases. This allows more Cosmic Rays from deep space to penetrate our planet’s atmosphere. These CRs have been found to nucleate clouds (Svensmark et al). And clouds are a crucial player earth’s climate.

As Roy Spencer, PhD. eloquently writes:

“Clouds are the Earth’s sunshade, and if cloud cover changes for any reason, you have global warming — or global cooling.”

The COLD TIMES are returning, the mid-latitudes are REFREEZING in line with historically low solar activity, cloud-nucleating Cosmic Rays, and a meridional jet stream flow.

Both NOAA and NASA appear to agree, if you read between the lines, with NOAA saying we’re entering a ‘full-blown’ Grand Solar Minimum in the late-2020s, and NASA seeing this upcoming solar cycle (25) as “the weakest of the past 200 years”, with the agency correlating previous solar shutdowns to prolonged periods of global cooling here.

Furthermore, we can’t ignore the slew of new scientific papers stating the immense impact The Beaufort Gyre could have on the Gulf Stream, and therefore the climate overall.

March 29, 2021 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

THE BENEFITS OF DÉTENTE

BY PAUL ROBINSON | IRRUSSIANALITY | MARCH 26, 2021

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that I intended to read Robert English’s book Russia and the Idea of the West, which examines how Westernizing ideas gradually took hold of an element of the Soviet intelligentsia from the 1950s onwards. I’m now about halfway through, and on page 125 I came across a passage that I thought was very appropriate for today. Here English writes the following:

The steady growth of reformist, anti-isolationist thought [in the USSR] was also aided by two other developments. The first was a sharp deterioration in relations with China, to the point of armed conflict; this forced a deeper rethinking of the two-camp outlook … Second, and more important, was the rise of détente with the West; though accompanied by a tightening of ideological orthodoxy at home, détente provided specialists their broadest access to the West in 50 years… [As a result] the early-mid 1970s saw many calling not just for expanded intercourse with the West, but also for more radical changes that would move their country toward broader integration with the liberal international community.

Détente was a brief effort in the 1960s and 70s to lessen East-West tensions by negotiating arms control settlements, increasing trade, and carrying out cultural exchanges. Eventually it was abandoned by the United States once Ronald Reagan became president, on the grounds that it had emboldened Soviet aggression. But English argues that rather than promote aggression, détente had a positive effect (from a Western perspective) by encouraging pro-Western sentiment in the Soviet foreign policy community.

Today, it seems to me, we’re moving, or perhaps have already irrevocably moved, in the opposite direction. Russia-China relations have never been stronger, and we have entered an era of anti-détente. In this, the West is cutting relations with Russia via sanctions, and is also shredding what remains of the old arms control system. Somehow, this is meant to induce Russia to change in what the West considers a positive direction, i.e. to make it more ‘liberal’ and more friendly. Yet, if English is right, then one might expect it to have the opposite result.

Of course, historical parallels are never 100% valid. Circumstances are very different now compared to 1970s. Back then, opening up the West to the Soviets enabled the West to flex its soft power, by exposing Soviet intellectuals to Western ideas as well as to the obvious superiority of the capitalist economic system in terms of wealth production. This is a strategy that can’t be repeated today because Russians are already very well acquainted with the West. As I’ve pointed out before, cultural exchanges don’t have the ‘wow’ factor they once did.

That said, English points out other ways in which détente encouraged liberal, pro-Western thinking in sections of the Soviet elite. Arms control created strong personal ties between Soviet and US diplomats. After months of working together and then reaching agreement, the former came to respect and admire the later, and with it also came to reject ideas of the necessity of East-West conflict. In the process, détente created its own bureaucratic momentum. This is the way of things; to do something, you have to create institutions and cadres dedicated to it, who in due course become committed to doing more of it, in part out of genuine belief but in part because out of bureaucratic interest and inertia.

And so it was within the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, elements of which became decidedly more ‘liberal’, if that is an appropriate word, than the regime as a whole. English thus describes how liberal-minded diplomats, notably Lev Mendelevich and Anatoly Kovalev, slipped the Helsinki Final Act, with its commitments to human rights, past Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who ‘signed the Final Act “without really reading it through”.’ The diplomats hoped, thereby, ‘to encourage domestic reforms, a gradual liberalization of the Communist system, and a humanization of Soviet society.’

One might wonder why diplomats thought that such domestic issues were their concern, but that’s by the by. The point is that détente helped to develop a liberally-inclined, pro-Western element within the Soviet diplomatic service, which used its position to, let’s put it somewhat crudely, undermine the Soviet Union from within. (I’m sure that wasn’t that element’s intent, but it was the effect.)

English describes the intellectual process that took place in the Soviet Union as a gradual abandonment of the isolationist outlook. Compare this to today: the Western policy of endlessly piling up the pressure on Russia, with what seems like a new round of sanctions every month, is having the opposite effect. I can’t say that I follow the readings of the Russian foreign policy community in huge detail, but insofar as I do, I get the strong impression that it’s becoming more and more inclined to the view that it’s pointless to make any concessions to the West because the latter is incapable of responding in kind.

One can see this even among what I call ‘establishment Westernizers’, such as, say, Dmitry Trenin. Particularly striking are some recent articles by one of Russia’s leading foreign policy experts Fyodor Lukyanov, who is now arguing that Russia and the West need to go their own ways and have as little to do with each other as possible. ‘External interactions’ with the USA should be reduced to the ‘absolutely essential’, writes Lukyanov. The two countries should ‘keep out of each others’ way’, he adds. It’s quite a contrast to the kind of thinking that English describes as having developed in the Soviet Union in the era of détente.

I suspect that the more the West tries to isolate Russia, the stronger this tendency in Russian thinking is likely to become. If nothing else, there will be subtle shifts within the Russian foreign policy bureaucracy. Fewer and fewer people will be involved in arms control, trade and other negotiations with Western partners. Meanwhile, more and more will be dealing with China and other parts of the world. With that, the power that the West exerts on Russian foreign policy thinking will inevitably diminish.

As far as the West is concerned, this is very much a self-inflicted wound. The way you influence people is by having contact with them, and reaching agreements with them. It is something that we once at least partially understood. I fear that we do so no longer.

March 27, 2021 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Timeless or most popular | China, Russia, United States | Leave a comment

Ron Unz’ SoundCloud and Downloadable EBooks

Audio Files, now available on SoundCloud

By Ron Unz | Unz Review | March 11, 2021

I’ve been quite pleased with the positive response to the audio versions of my articles which I produced and made freely available on this website, now totaling more than 100 in number, and including multipart versions of a half dozen of the longest ones. This collection represents the spoken form of more than 500,000 words of text, and in less than two weeks, the audio files seem to have been clicked more than 17,000 times, demonstrating that many people do indeed prefer listening to reading. It’s also possible that a few of those visitors have begun redistributing a some of them across other websites and discussion forums, which is another intended use.

Aside from being available as links or playable podcasts at the top of each associated article, a complete listing is also provided in the standard Sidebar, along with a few of my recent interviews:

https://www.unz.com/page/audio-files-podcasts/

I’ve now also established a SoundCloud page as an additional distribution channel, making all of them available in that system as well, grouped by category, while the longest, multipart podcasts also shown separately. These latter also tend to be the most significant and controversial, and they are effectively highlighted by that system:

Since SoundCloud suggests the inclusion of a user-image, I made the somewhat aggrandizing decision to provide my rather flattering July 1999 New Republic cover, which represented the absolute media peak of my political career and was naturally soon followed by the crushing defeat of my 2000 Campaign Finance Reform initiative.

Given the exceptionally controversial nature of many of my articles, especially those in the American Pravda series, I regard my past mainstream credibility as a crucial asset, and TNR, which was then at the absolute height of its national influence, surely helps to provide it.

In addition, I’m also establishing a YouTube channel, which will soon make these audio files available there as well.

Downloadable EBooks in ePub and Mobi/Kindle formats

Meanwhile, I’ve now made available some fifteen freely downloadable eBooks, all in both the ePub and Mobi/Kindle formats. These include two large collections, each running over 300,000 words, and more than a dozen smaller eBooks, mostly containing one of my longer and more significant articles. All of them, together with a complete listing of the contents, are permanently available in the standard Sidebar:

https://www.unz.com/page/downloadable-ebooks/

Over the last few weeks, they’ve already been downloaded nearly 5,000 times, and just as with the audio files, please feel free to redistribute them across other websites and discussion forums.

Major Collections

EPub Format • Mobi/Kindle Format

Smaller EBooks

EPub Format • Mobi/Kindle

← Audio Versions, More EBooks, and Gab Bu…

March 23, 2021 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

UN Food Summit Boycotted Over Gates Influence

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | March 19, 2021

Hundreds of farmers and human rights groups are boycotting the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit because they believe it favors agribusiness interests, elite foundations and the exploitation of African food systems.

The Summit claims it is convening to “launch bold new actions to transform the way the world produces and consumes food,”² but critics say it is biased toward industrial, corporate farming while leaving out those in regenerative agriculture and the knowledge of indigenous people.³

The controversy began right from the start, when U.N. secretary general António Guterres appointed Agnes Kalibata as the event’s head. Kalibata is the former Rwandan agriculture minister who is now the president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), an organization funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.⁴

AGRA is essentially a Gates Foundation subsidiary, and while some of its projects appear to be beneficial, most of its goals are centered on promoting biotechnology and chemical fertilizers.

Corporate Interests Dominating Food Summit

After Kalibata was appointed special envoy to the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit in December 2019, 176 civil society organizations and farmer groups from 83 countries urged Guterres to withdraw the appointment due to Kalibata’s clear conflicts of interest with corporate interests.

A second statement, signed by more than 500 academics and organizations, also opposed Kalibata’s appointment to, and her organization of, the Summit.⁵ AGRA is known to promote the interests of agribusiness, leading civil society organizations to argue that Kalibata’s appointment was a clear conflict of interest.

“This concern over Kalibata’s nomination has been largely borne-out by Kalibata’s top-down approach to organizing the Summit and her exclusion of those most affected by food insecurity and malnutrition in the planning process,” according to an August 2020 report by AGRA Watch.⁶

A dozen individuals representing development banks, academic institutions and the private sector came forward in support of Kalibata, but “11 had past or current connections to the Gates Foundation,” AGRA Watch reported, adding:⁷

“These findings illustrate the influence of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) on global food and agricultural policy. AGRA Watch has continually documented the role of the BMGF in influencing agricultural development, which has grown immensely in recent years.

That Gates Foundation seeks to exercise influence not only through its funding of projects and shaping of expertise, but also in funding the governance platforms that determine food and agricultural policy. This role of the BMGF in driving policy decisions based on its proprietary and technological model of agricultural development is often overlooked.”

Precision Agriculture, Genetic Engineering Take Center Stage

Concerns that the Summit was dominated by corporate industry heightened when its concept paper included precision agriculture, data collection and genetic engineering as pillars for addressing food security while leaving out regenerative agriculture.

As reported by The Guardian, Michael Fakhri, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, wrote to Kalibata stating that the Summit was focused on “science and technology, money and markets” while leaving fundamental questions about inequality, accountability and governance unaddressed:⁸

“It [appears] heavily skewed in favor of one type of approach to food systems, namely market-based solutions … it leaves out experimental/traditional knowledge that has the acute effect of excluding indigenous peoples and their knowledge. The business sector has been part of the problem of food systems and has not been held accountable.”

The 300 million-member Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism announced plans to boycott the Summit and set up a meeting of their own, while others, including Sofía Monsalve Suárez, head of nutrition rights group Fian International, questioned the Summit’s legitimacy:⁹

“We cannot jump on a train that is heading in the wrong direction … We sent a letter last year to the secretary general about our concerns. It was not answered. We sent another last month, which has also not been answered. The summit appears extremely biased in favor of the same actors who have been responsible for the food crisis.”

Other nutrition experts also expressed the need for the Summit to be more inclusive of initiatives such as agro-ecology and food sovereignty.

Food Group Calls On UN To Sever Ties With WEF

A group of 148 organizations from 28 countries also called on the U.N. to revoke their 2019 strategic partnership formed with the World Economic Forum (WEF). WEF’s involvement with the Summit has been called a form of “corporate hijacking” that would infringe on people’s rights to food and food production. According to the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty:¹⁰

“The WEF will exploit the Summit to streamline neoliberal globalization, which it has espoused for the past 50 years. It is the perfect venue to push for the role of ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies’ to transform food systems, which the WEF has been championing since 2017.

A corporate-led FSS [Food Systems Summit] would be a great advantage to the political elites and corporate billionaires, enabling them to pose hypocritically as responsible entities that promote healthier diets and climate action.

… The sidelined and marginalized sectors in society — the poor farmers, workers, Indigenous Peoples, herders, pastoralists, fisherfolks, urban poor, women, Dalits, and youth — should replace these corporate moguls in shaping the Summit’s proceedings and reforms.”

Beyond the Summit, WEF’s takeover of the U.N. has been denounced by more than 400 civil society organizations and 40 international networks, which claim it will only accelerate the move toward a privatized, undemocratic global takeover. Monsalve Suárez stated:¹¹

“Corporations in the global industrial food chain alone destroy 75 billion tons of topsoil annually and are responsible for the annual loss of 7.5 million hectares of forest. This destruction, along with other factors, leaves 3.9 billion underfed or malnourished people. The WEF represents the interests of those who destroy the environment and abuse our human rights. It cannot be considered a strategic partner in solving the world’s crises.”

Africa’s Traditional Food Systems Under Attack

Planning documents for the Summit also reveal plans for a “radical transformation shift” in Africa, away from traditional farming practices and toward industrial farming — even describing the potential as the “new oil.”¹² The African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB), which released the documents, said the plans recycle the “same false solutions … with the same narrow benefits accruing to a limited number of actors.”¹³

For instance, one section of the documents is titled “the promise of digital and biotechnologies and the transformation of food systems,” and describes “the significant potential for capturing large economic, social and environmental payoffs from the use of biotechnology products … In West Africa, for instance, farmers can benefit significantly from the adoption of Bt cotton.”¹⁴

Technology and development take center stage, along with “strengthening the use of big data” for decisions on things like fertilizer use, genetically engineered crops and “accessing markets.” As noted by U.S. Right to Know:¹⁵

“This agenda aligns perfectly with the plans of the agrichemical industry, the Gates Foundation and its main agricultural development program, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which encourages African countries to pass business-friendly policies and scale up markets for patented seeds, fossil-fuel based fertilizers and other industrial inputs they say are necessary to boost food production.”

“The main problem with AGRA,” Global Justice Now explains, “is that it is laying the groundwork for the deeper penetration of African agriculture by agribusiness corporations,” and:

“The BMGF, through AGRA, is one of the world’s largest promoters of chemical fertiliser. Some grants given by the BMGF to AGRA have been specifically intended to ‘help AGRA build the fertiliser supply chain’ in Africa. One of the largest of AGRA’s own grants, worth $25 million, was to help establish the African Fertiliser Agribusiness Partnership (AFAP) in 2012 whose very goal is to ‘at least double total fertiliser use’ in Africa.”¹⁶

Bill Gates Is The Biggest Owner Of US Farmland

The BMGF’s involvement in the Summit is also self-serving, as Bill Gates owns more farmland in the U.S. than any other private farmer, having purchased a total of 242,000 acres — much of it considered some of the richest soil in the U.S. — at a frenzied pace over the past few years.¹⁷

Gates, however, isn’t interested in regenerative agriculture but instead is furthering an agricultural agenda that supports agrochemicals, patented seeds, fake meat and corporate control — interests that undermine regenerative, sustainable, small-scale farming. One of the key players in this agenda is the widespread adoption of synthetic meat.

Gates has made it clear that he believes switching to synthetic beef is the solution to reducing methane emissions that come from animals raised on concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).¹⁸

The strong recommendation to replace beef with fake meat is made in Gates’ book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need,” which was released in February 2021.¹⁹ In an interview with MIT Technology Review, he goes so far as to say that people’s behaviors should be changed to learn to like fake meat and, if that doesn’t work, regulations could do the trick.²⁰

What many aren’t aware of, however, is that Gates is either personally invested in, or invested in via Breakthrough Energy Ventures, fake meat companies like Beyond Meats, Impossible Foods, Memphis Meats and other companies he actively promotes.²¹

When asked whether he thinks plant-based and lab-grown meats could “be the full solution to the protein problem globally,” he says that, in middle- to above-income countries, yes, and that people can “get used to it.”²²

Small Farmers, Regenerative Agriculture Are The Answer

The U.N. Food Summit is poised to bow down to corporate ideology instead of embracing the small farmers and regenerative practices that have true potential to feed the world and heal the planet. If you’re new to this discussion, you can find the top six reasons to support regenerative agriculture here. As Timothy Wise, senior adviser at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, told The Guardian :²³

“A growing number of farmers, scientists and development experts now advocate a shift from high-input chemical-intensive agriculture to low-input ecological farming. They are supported by an array of new research documenting both the risks of continuing to follow our current practices and the potential benefits of a transition to more sustainable farming.”

Sources and References

^1, ^12, ^13, ^14, ¹⁵ U.S. Right to Know March 9, 2021
² U.N. 2021 Food Systems Summit
^3, ^4, ^8, ^9, ²³ Archive Today, The Guardian March 4, 2021
^5, ^6, ⁷ The Man Behind the Curtain: The Gates Foundation’s Influence on the UN Food Systems Summit (PDF)
¹⁰ People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty April 24, 2020
¹¹ Fian International January 16, 2020
¹⁶ Global Justice Now: ‘Gated Development – Is the Gates Foundation always a force for good?’
¹⁷ Land Report, January 11, 2021
^18, ¹⁹ Market Watch February 16, 2021
^20, ^21, ²² MIT Technology Review February 14, 2021

March 21, 2021 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Economics, Environmentalism | Africa, Gates Foundation, WEF | Leave a comment

Magic Hour for Gates

By Gary Jordan | Wake The F*** UP | March 15, 2021

Bill Gates wants to know everything about you.

He wants to control every aspect of your life.

His insatiable thirst for the supervision and scrutiny of every human being alive has sparked a US$1 billion investment that will blanket the earth in video surveillance satellites, providing real-time feedback with a mere one-second delay. He advocates for Orwellian digital tools to track your every move and has bankrolled US$1.7 billion to provide artificial intelligence that will be used to scan each and every visitor to major event venues worldwide. He wants to do away with end-to-end encryption, so he can snoop on your private conversations. He wants to know when and where you travel and who you travel with. He wants you to eat whatever he says you should eat, drink whatever he says you should drink, think how he wants you to think and know only what he wants you to know. Plus he wants to dictate what goes inside your body.

But he doesn’t want you to know a lot about him.

For instance, in spite of the countless hours he spends babbling on mainstream media, as he preaches to the masses – letting them know what’s good for them – with the aid of obsequious hosts and fawning presstitutes, he consistently fails to mention (or be questioned) of his links to predatory paedophiles. He doesn’t want you to know about any of that. He still believes in personal privacy after all it would seem – especially when it’s to his advantage.

Gates hasn’t, for example, revealed very much about his links to Jeffrey Epstein and the Lolita Express. He also keeps mum concerning his connections with a collector of child pornography and a suspicious video production business, based out of Seattle, known as Magic Hour.

Not a word. Deafening silence.

Joining a long list of fellow filthy rich and filthy minded miscreants such as former US President Bill Clinton, former Israeli President Ehud Barak, Hollywood stars Alec Baldwin and Kevin Spacey and celebrity lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, Bill Gates has indeed boarded the Paedo Plane and spent considerable periods of time in the company of Jeffrey Epstein. Although you would never have thought so, given the lack of media attention it receives, the flight manifests do indeed show that the world’s number one vaccine vendor was a passenger. On top of this, we know that Gates also donated US$2 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which the University described as a ‘gift’ from The Gates Foundation, ‘directed’ by Jeffery Epstein.

What’s more is that Bill Gates knew, throughout several of their meetings, what Jeffrey Epstein truly was – a paedophile and a trafficker of children for the rich and famous. He knew of the crimes Epstein was guilty of committing. Regardless, Gates continued to meet him and continued to conduct business with him.

Another curious link between Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein is Boris Nikolic. This is something else that Gates has not been so quick to discuss live on air. Nikolic is a former science and technology advisor to Bill Gates and the two men were involved in a biotech venture capital firm in which Gates invested money. On the death of Epstein, it was discovered that Nikolic was named in his will as a successor executor and would be responsible for taking care of his estate, in the event that the first two named executors were unwilling or unable to do so.

There were also the Transhumanist and Depopulation Agendas that clearly existed between the deviant physics teacher-cum-hedge fund manager and Bill Gates, which raised an eyebrow or two. Gates, who comes from a family renowned for their active involvement in eugenics, and Epstein, who once expressed a wish to seed a race by impregnating women at a ranch in New Mexico, seemed suitably joined at the hip in their bizarre and disturbing world views. Epstein was a generous donor to the World Transhumanist Association and was reported to have lashed out at scientists from Harvard University, who he criticized for attempting to eliminate poverty and hunger, stating that they were contributing to the overpopulation of the planet by doing so. Gates himself has never shied away from openly declaring his burning desire to eliminate this perceived issue, and has even suggested that the use of vaccines may be the way forward in solving it.

Birds of a feather flock together? The softball media approach to Gates fails to enlighten us on these topics.

Lack of journalistic attention, deliberate or otherwise, was evident when arrests at the Gates’ mansion in 2013 in Washington State went unreported for over nine months after they had taken place. These arrests would link Gates to yet another paedophile. A criminal court trial was opened after engineer, Rick Allen Jones, was found to be in possession of child pornography. It was discovered, after a tip-off from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, (NCMEC), that Jones had traded over 6000 graphic images of child abuse and rape with other perverts. One of these images had been traced back to the Gates household, where Jones worked and where he was arrested. Others were labelled by him to signal that they were images containing scenes of bestiality and urophilia. Intriguingly, a couple of them were even given the label ‘Melinda’. Several of them contained photographs of missing children who were known to the NCMEC.

The arrest of the engineer was later followed by an admission and a conviction. A 3000 page Seattle Police Department report gave further details that were absent from the press reports and indicated that the paedophilia extended to a much broader network. For starters, part of the report mentions a man by the name of ‘Brett’ who, according to police, referred to Rick Allen Jones in email correspondence as ‘Uncle RJ’. Brett’s email domain is from a company called Magic Hour, who claim to create ‘video magic at your fingertips’ and there is evidence in the police report that emails were exchanged between him and the engineer. Whether they were of a pornographic nature or not is uncertain, however we do know that part of the reference to Brett from Magic Hour is redacted and coded, which suggests that it is a description of child sexual abuse.

What is notable is that Magic Hour has a long list of big-name clients listed on their website. These include AT&T, McDonalds, Hewlett Packard, Holland America and, of course, Microsoft. I have reached out directly to them (so have others I researched this case with) and asked about Brett and their relationship with ‘Uncle RJ’. To date, I have not received a response. Nor has anybody else to the best of my knowledge.

Most frustrating of all is the fact that the warped engineer is a free man today and has not done any jail time for his crimes. Magic Hour continues to operate, still boasting of their celebrated customers, with their link to Rick Allen Jones and his child pornography stash remaining a mystery.

Bill Gates, of course, is never quizzed about these subjects. When you can afford to spend millions of dollars bribing the media, you ensure that you are exempt from such analysis. The subject matter discussed in this article will not be aired on CNN or BBC. We cannot expect, anytime soon, to hear Anderson Cooper or Don Lemon broach these facts. In the meantime, we are expected to ignore the elephant in the room and acquiesce to Bill Gates’ demands. We must stay tight-lipped and heed his advice. Depressingly, many do.

In the meantime we drift further into our Brave New World; one that sees innocent people locked up for not wearing a mask or for invoking their right to protest, as immoral, degenerate, child-abusing individuals like Rick Allen Jones walk with impunity on our streets. Bill Gates, the man who employed this reprobate and who wined and dined serial child abuser, Epstein, is held up as a saintly saviour, destined to protect us all from whatever danger he can conjure up for us – with no accountability and no attempt from the CIA agents masquerading as journalists in the mainstream media to get to the truth.

Undoubtedly, the plandemic has served as a great diversion for Gates, taking attention away from his affiliations with the most depraved in our society. But, it is high time now that he started to answer some very basic questions. Such as, why was a known distributor of child pornography, one he employed, sending emails to a man who was directly involved in a video production business which lists an organization that Gates founded as a client? Why were some of the pornographic images discovered in his employee’s trove of exploitation and abuse marked in the name of Bill Gates’ wife? Why did Gates continue to associate with Jeffrey Epstein, despite the knowledge of his abuse of underage girls? Why did he use the private plane of a child molester, when he has a plane of his own? Why didn’t Gates make his donation to MIT directly? Why did he pay it through Epstein? Why was a business associate named as an executor to Epstein’s will?

As verifiable, hard evidence exists in the form of police reports, court documents and bank statements, Gates cannot pull off his usual ploy – dismissing facts as wild conspiracy theories. He cannot gaslight the public any longer.

As a man who feels he has the right to know the ins and outs of everyone’s business and who inserts himself into the spotlight of every major world crisis, the least he can do is answer for the aforementioned connections. If it was you or I who was associated with an infamous child trafficker, or who had employed a trader of child pornography in our homes, you can be sure we would be asked to explain ourselves. There is no reason why Gates shouldn’t have to do the same.

In my book, The COVID-19 Illusion; A Cacophony of Lies, many of the characters at the forefront of the Coronavirus pandemic are placed under the microscope. They all have skeletons in the closet. This includes Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (a man who has connections to terrorism and genocide), Dr. Anthony Fauci (a man who championed the poisonous and deadly AZT drug and approved its use on AIDS victims) and Professor Neil Ferguson (a man with a knack for getting it wrong via his erroneous computer-simulated projections). By far though, the person who is most shrouded in controversy is Bill Gates.

On top of the aforementioned connections with paedophilia, Gates has also been implicated in the suffering of children in Third World nations, as a direct result of his medical interventions – namely vaccination campaigns. His insertion into public health protocol arises even though he is not a doctor and does not have a medical degree. A report from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health showed how his polio vaccines were responsible for 491,000 cases of paralysis in children in the state of Utter Pradesh, India. He has been accused of unethical practices and his experimental HPV vaccine drive was criticized for being deliberately misleading to vulnerable village girls. His team of vaccinators were also discovered to have bullied parents and forged documents. In Africa, his meningitis vaccine campaign alone caused the paralysis of 50 children and the Gates Foundation-funded GSK malaria vaccine is known to have killed 151 infants.

Again, if it was you or I practicing medicine without appropriate qualifications, how do you think we would be treated by authorities?

There can be no further evasion for Bill Gates. His silence on these matters must end. The public wants to know about the effects of his vaccines on children in Africa and India. They want to know about his connections to child abusers in the West. They have a right to ask and a right to know.

The farting cows and fake breast milk lectures can wait.

Bill Gates needs to start speaking about his crimes. It’s well past time he was held accountable for them.

thecovid19illusion@protonmail.com

March 17, 2021 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Timeless or most popular | 1 Comment

SKY News Pressures Waterstones & Amazon To Ban Anti-vaccine Books

By Richie Allen | March 5, 2021

SKY News is pressuring booksellers to stop selling books written by medical experts. In a segment running hourly today, SKY claims that Waterstones, Amazon and Foyles are selling books which contain anti-vaccine medical misinformation.

The report references a book written by Dr. Vernon Coleman entitled; Anyone Who Tells You Vaccines Are Safe And Effective Is Lying.

The book has received hundreds of 5-star reviews on Amazon’s website. Dr. Vernon Coleman is a medical expert.

His books have topped best-seller lists around the world and he was a national newspaper columnist for many years. SKY asked the booksellers to explain why they were not “providing annotations” to suggest that Vernon’s book contains disputed claims.

SKY’s report doesn’t provide a single example of a “disputed claim” in Dr. Vernon Coleman’s book.

Labour’s shadow health minister Alex Norris appears in the segment. He says that “getting the population vaccinated is a massive priority” and that he hopes “retailers would act responsibly and have a look at whether they want to be associated with such products.”

The reporter doesn’t ask Norris if he even read Vernon Coleman’s book, even though he is calling for a so-called “health warning” to be slapped on it.

This is propaganda, not news. SKY doesn’t report the news anymore, it manufactures it. It’s important to understand this. SKY is not following up concerns by parents, teachers or other doctors. SKY created this story.

A reporter at SKY News, took screenshots of the covers of books written by Dr. Vernon Coleman and Dr Joseph Mercola. He/she then forwarded the screenshots to Alex Norris in an email and asked him to respond. Norris has not read any of the books, but that doesn’t matter. He says that something must be done about them and the reporter has a story.

Look at how it appears on the SKY News website. The opening paragraph reads:

Anti-vaccination books are being sold on Amazon and the websites of Waterstones and Foyles – amid calls for warnings on items to combat the spread of misinformation.

That’s disingenuous in the extreme. The “calls for warnings” were manufactured by SKY’s reporter. It’s wretched and it’s anti-journalism, but sadly it’s all too common.

Every claim made by Dr. Vernon Coleman in his book Anyone Who Tells You Vaccines Are Safe And Effective Is Lying is backed up by hard evidence. I can say that because I’ve actually read it. I can’t speak for Mercola’s book or the others mentioned in SKY’s hit-piece because I haven’t read them.

A national news channel is promoting book burning and dressing it up as news. It’s seeking to discredit medical experts by throwing around terms like misinformation and disputed claims, without referencing a single paragraph from the books in question.

SKY is banking on it’s viewers being too lazy to ask for the evidence or to know the difference between news reporting and news manufacturing.

For more on Dr. Vernon Coleman visit http://www.vernoncoleman.com

March 7, 2021 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Amazon | Leave a comment

When Ben Bradlee and James Angleton Obstructed Justice

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | March 5, 2021

On October 12, 1964, a woman named Mary Pinchot Meyer was brutally shot and killed while walking along the C&O Canal Trail near the Georgetown area of Washington, D.C. The police charged a black man named Ray Crump, Jr., with the crime. Since the murder took place in the nation’s capital, the trial was in a federal district court.

Meyer had been married for 13 years to a high CIA official named Cord Meyer. In 1958, they divorced.

Crump vehemently professed his innocence of the crime. Convinced of his innocence, a renowned Washington, D.C., criminal-defense attorney named Dovey Roundtree agreed to represent him for free.

At Crump’s trial, the federal prosecutor summoned a man named Ben Bradlee to the witness stand as the prosecution’s first witness. At the time, Bradlee was serving as the Washington bureau chief for Newsweek. He would later go on to become executive editor of the Washington Post. Bradlee’s wife was Mary Meyer’s sister.

After Bradlee took the witness stand, the prosecutor, Alfred Hantman, asked him the following question: “Now besides the usual articles of Mrs. Meyer’s avocation, did you find there any other articles of her personal property?” Bradlee replied, “There was a pocketbook there,” adding that it contained “keys, a wallet, cosmetics, and pencils.”

It was lie, or, more precisely, it was what is called a “half-truth,” which is actually worse than a lie because it uses the truth as a way to deceive. What Bradlee failed to reveal in response to the prosecutor’s question was a secret that he was determined to protect: that he had also found the personal diary of Mary Meyer.

Unbeknownst to the prosecutor or to Crump’s defense attorney was that on the night of the murder, Bradlee had gone to Meyer’s home to retrieve her diary. When he arrived there, he encountered a man named James Jesus Angleton burglarizing the home in his own attempt to retrieve Meyer’s diary.

Angleton was head of counter-intelligence for the CIA. His wife and Meyer had been good friends. Bradlee found the diary and turned it over to Angleton, who then proceeded to destroy it.

Both Bradlee and Angleton had to have known that they were obstructing justice and destroying evidence in a criminal case. They both had a legal and a moral duty to immediately turn that diary over to the police. After all, the diary could very well have contained clues as to who the real murderer was.

Suppose, for example, that Meyer had seen someone following her and had put that information and the description of the stalker into her diary. That would have been important information that the police could have followed up on.

As it turned out, Meyer had been having a secret affair with President John F. Kennedy in the months prior to his assassination. By all accounts it was an extremely intimate affair, one in which Kennedy appears to have actually fallen in love with Meyer, who had been a longtime peace activist. Given that Kennedy had thrown down the gauntlet before the U.S. national-security establishment with his famous Peace Speech at American University in June 1963 in which he declared an end to the Cold War, it is entirely possible, even likely, that Kennedy was talking to Meyer about the vicious war in which he was engaged with the U.S. national-security establishment. Meyer might well have included Kennedy’s sentiments in her diary.

In fact, Meyer alluded to this possibility in a telephone call after the Kennedy assassination to LSD guru Timothy Leary, with whom she was friends, in which she sobbingly and fearfully stated, “They couldn’t control him any more. He was changing too fast… They’ve covered everything up.”

As Peter Janney detailed in Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace, an excellent book that I highly recommend, Mary’s murder had all the characteristics of a highly professional hit job along with a very sophisticated frame-up of an innocent man.

By the time the secrets surrounding the discovery and the destruction of Meyer’s diary were disclosed, the statute of limitations had presumably run on such crimes as obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, perjury, and conspiracies to commit these crimes.

Prosecutor Hantman later stated that he had been “totally unaware of who Mary Meyer was or what her connections were,” and that having that knowledge “could have changed everything.”

D.C. Police Detective Bernie Crooke later stated, “I’d have been very upset at the time if I’d known that the deceased’s diary had been destroyed.”

Wikipedia states, “In her 2009 autobiography, Justice Older than the Law (reissued in 2019 as Mighty Justice), defense counsel Dovey Roundtree expressed shock at learning of the diary’s significance from Bradlee’s book. ‘How differently my line of cross-examination would have run had I been aware, on July 20, 1965, of the story Mr. Bradlee told thirty years later in his autobiography… James Angleton’s awareness of the diary’s existence and his interest in finding it, reading it, and destroying it – all of that unsettled me deeply when I read Mr. Bradlee’s 1995 account, as did his insistence that the diary was a private document… Had I been aware of it, I would have felt compelled to pursue it.’”

On July 29, 1965, the jury found Ray Crump, Jr., not guilty.

In a deathbed interview in February 2001, Cord Meyer was asked who he believed had murdered his ex-wife. Recanting an earlier statement that he had made in a 1980 book he had written that pointed to a “sexually motivated assault by a single individual,” Meyer responded, “The same sons of bitches that killed John F. Kennedy.”

March 6, 2021 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Deception, Timeless or most popular | United States | Leave a comment

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UK Researchers: Tax Food to Reduce Climate Change

I doubt these professors have anything to fear from a food tax

By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | November 19, 2016

A group of researchers in Oxford University, England have suggested that imposing a massive tax on carbon intensive foods – specifically protein rich foods like meat and dairy – could help combat climate change. […]

This proposal, from a group of people who have probably never missed a meal in their lives, is totally obscene. High income countries often have a lot of poor people who would be hard hit by increases in the price of food.

Needlessly exacerbating the risk poor people don’t get enough to eat, especially children and pregnant mothers, who are especially vulnerable to adverse health impacts from lack of protein in their diet – if this ghastly proposal is ever implemented, future generations will look upon it as a crime against humanity. – Read full article

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