Economics « Aletho News

Is this the end of progressive America?

BY JOEL KOTKIN | UNHERD | JANUARY 4, 2022

Over the past several decades, the progressive Left has successfully fulfilled Antonio Gramsci’s famed admonition of a “long march through the institutions”. In almost every Western country, its adherents now dominate the education system, media, cultural institutions, and financial behemoths.

But what do they have to show for it? Not as much as they might have expected. Rather than a Bolshevik-style assumption of power, there’s every chance this institutional triumph will not produce an enduring political victory, let alone substantially change public opinion.

Even before Biden’s botched Build Back Better initiative, American progressives faced opposition to their wildly impractical claims about achieving “zero Covid” and “zero emissions”, confronting “systemic racism” by defunding the police, regulating speech, and redefining two biological sexes into a multiplicity.

Increasingly, the “march” has started to falter. Like the French generals in 1940 who thought they could defeat the Germans by perfecting World War One tactics, the progressive establishment has built its own impressive Maginot Line which may be difficult to breach, but can still be flanked.

That is not to deny the progressives’ limited successes. It has certainly developed a remarkable ability to besmirch even the most respected institutions, including the US military. But that is where its achievements stop.

While the Pentagon’s top brass focused on “domestic terrorists” and a progressive social agenda, it calamitously bungled its withdrawal from Afghanistan and appears utterly unprepared for Chinese or Russian competitors. And the effect of this progressive march is plain to see: the percentage of Americans who feel “a great deal of trust and confidence in the military” has dropped in just three years to 45% from 70%.

This decline in trust in major institutions, so evident in America, is also rife across Europe and Australia. In Europe, for example, young people express less pride in their cultural and religious heritage, and are almost three times as likely as their elders to believe that democracy is failing.

The great paradox of progressivism is that nowhere are its shortcomings more evident than in its geographic heartland: the dense urban centre. Conventional wisdom has dictated that America’s high-tech economic future will be shaped in dense urban areas, where superstar companies stand the best chance of recruiting superstar employees.

But while the upper crust of the labour force continue to head to the dense urban cores, on the ground people are moving in the other direction. Across the high-income world, not only in America but Europe as well, the vast preponderance of growth has taken place in suburbs and exurbs. In the last decade over 90% of all US metropolitan population growth and 80% of job growth took place on the periphery. On the ground, then, the progressive dream is withering.

The pandemic has greatly enhanced these trends, with downtown neighbourhoods recovering far less quickly than suburban, exurban, and small towns. But even if these changes are not permanent, at least not entirely, city residents will still have to contend with another pitfall of the progressive agenda: rising crime. Twelve American cities have experienced record homicides this year; all are ruled by Democratic, often progressive, leaders, many of whom explain away crime and excused, even praised, the looting and mayhem caused by protestors in the summer of 2020.

Yet despite this visceral impact on urban neighbourhoods, it is in education that our new hegemony could have its most long-lasting impact. The West’s new educational mandarins, increasingly strident and increasingly influential, have no use for our liberal inheritance, which they consider little more than a screen for racists and misogynists.

In Canada, we have seen an instance of “flame purification” for everything from old encyclopaedias and maps to Depression-era cartoons. In America, the disconnect between the professoriate and the people also keeps growing, as conservatives head towards extinction on many campuses: on some well-regarded campuses such as Williams, Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans reaches between 70 and 132 to 1.

These trends have long been evident in the fading humanities and social sciences, but now even the sciences are becoming politicised. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that universities are losing credibility even among some traditional Leftists, who marvel at how they burnish their progressive credentials while making huge profits off their endowments and seriously underpaying most of their employees.

And just as with the growing disaffection for the military, teachers, students and parents are starting to push back. A number of teachers who have been “cancelled” or otherwise threatened for dissenting are now fighting back in the courts. There’s also considerable criticism from parents and alumni, some of whom are now pledging not to contribute to their schools, and instead support well-publicised and well-funded efforts to start new initiatives, such as the recently announced University of Austin. Even more importantly, would-be students are also voting with their feet: after decades of rapid expansion, the number of college students enrolments fell by 5% last decade, and dropped an additional 6.5% since 2019.

Likewise, only one in three Americans have confidence in their public schools, where the education establishment’s goal seems to be to obliterate merit. In my adopted home state of California, this “post-colonial” approach includes deemphasising the importance of tests, excusing bad behaviour, and imposing ideology on often ill-educated students. The San Diego Unified School District, meanwhile, is busily getting rid of mandates for such things as knowing course material, taking tests, handing in work on time, or even showing up; all these, the district insists, are inherently “racist”. This in a state that ranked 49th in the performance of poor, largely minority students. (Still, the situation could be worse: neighbouring Oregon no longer requires any demonstrable proof of competence to graduate.)

In the past year, this blindness has incited considerable public outrage. Criticism of Critical Race Theory buoyed the Republican win in Virginia in November, and has become a rallying principle for parents around the country, including a recall drive against San Francisco school board members.

Other parents are trying to opt out of the public system altogether. The pandemic saw the departure of more than one million American students from public schools, while 1.2 million families switched to home-schooling last academic year, bringing the total number of home-schooled students to 3.1 million, roughly 11% of the total. According to the Census Bureau, Black and Hispanic families now have the highest estimated rates of home-schooling, at 16% and 12%, respectively.

Meanwhile, the mass media, particularly its legacy outlets, constitute another progressive bastion losing credibility. One recent survey found that barely one in three Americans trusts the media, including a majority of Democrats, while only 15% of Americans have confidence in newspapers. Part of this surely stems from their bias: although there remain some powerful conservative voices, notably on talk radio and Newscorp properties, the vast majority of journalistic power lies with the Left. It’s the same story with social media, which increasingly dominates news access and is also widely distrusted.

But the media’s Maginot Line may prove more vulnerable than expected, and this breach is certainly a far better prospect than those that came with the German flanking. There is a definite challenge not just from the traditional Right but a plethora of new publications which offer intelligent analysis outside the establishmentarian party line, as well as from Substack. Unless the media oligarchs find ways to repress these elements, a resurgence of free thinking may rescue journalism from progressive editors and journalism schools.

The shift in the media parallels that in mass culture. As late as the Fifties, mass culture was seen as largely neutral. But in recent decades, it shifted towards a more monochromatic look — one which a significant portion of the public are fed up with. Gender flipping may excite progressive creatives, but politically correct remakes of household favourites have proved box offices disasters. Indeed, it’s striking that openly conservative presenters, such as Fox’s Greg Gutfeld, now do better in ratings than their more established network rivals like Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon.

Yet perhaps nothing is more ironic, and potentially dangerous, than the takeover of the corporate suite by progressive ideology. Traditionally, the dispersion of ownership and the conflicting views of entrepreneurs and inheritors fuelled the dynamism of democracy: you had far-Left businessmen like George Soros and doctrinaire Right-wingers like the Kochs in competition. They fought it out, and sometimes even aligned. But they came from diverse viewpoints.

Today this diversity of viewpoints is being obliterated by design, with corporate behaviour now married closely to the notion of the “great reset” and “de-growth”: an economy where improving conditions for the masses is replaced with lowering carbon emissions and diversity tokenism. Such standards, of course, do not apply to snotty private schools attended by their offspring, or areas that are home to their mansions.

The oligarchs may feel they deserve dispensation from the masses by their “good deeds”, but people are not as stupid or malleable as the ruling elites believe. Trust in major corporations, never too robust, is below 20%, less than one third that for small businesses. It is slowly becoming apparent that ‘woke capitalism’ will never solve divisions which are essentially economic. The key, notes Richard Parsons, former President of Citigroup, lies not with racial quotas or hiring transgender workers but the economic growth and opportunity. There will never be “unity”, he suggests, until people “feel it in their pockets”.

The question now is whether there will be sufficient pushback to turn the tide. Unlike local school boards, online magazines, and even alternative colleges, it’s difficult to replace or challenge an Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, or Morgan Stanley. Yet fortunately these institutions do not yet control all wealth. Big companies may have shamed themselves out of oil and gas, but investors are ramping up due to the soaring price of these assets.

So, here’s the good news. On what sometimes seems the inexorable course towards progressive capture, we can see multiple fronts of resistance, and the early congealing of independent-minded forces, from the rational Right to the traditional liberal-left. Our society may never regain the feistiness of previous eras, and our new elites might continue marching through our institutions. But as they become increasingly discredited, they would be unwise to forget that all long marches one day come to an end.

Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. His new book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, is now out from Encounter.

January 5, 2022 Posted by aletho | Economics, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Build Back Better, Great Reset, United States | Leave a comment

Bring Back the Boycott: Say ‘No’ to Big Pharma, Big Banks and Totalitarian Control

The Defender | January 4, 2022

Nearly two years into the phenomenon labeled COVID-19, more and more people recognize that a global coup d’état is underway — a push by central bankers and technocrats for “totalitarian control of your transportation, your bank account, your movement, every aspect of your life,” said Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in a speech he delivered in November 2021 in Milan.

Now, a year’s worth of vaccine injury data (however imperfect) is telling “a very frightening story” about the dangers of the experimental COVID shots, and is exposing the immorality of administering them to children.

As Kennedy recently argued, “Forcing an entire population to accept an arbitrary and risky medical intervention is the most intrusive and demeaning action ever imposed by the U.S. government, and perhaps any government.”

Concerned about a rapidly advancing bio-surveillance state that would like to make participation in society dependent on vaccine passports and repeat injections, many people are wondering what they can do to resist.

Kennedy described one action that is obvious, if not necessarily easy: Say no “to buying products from the companies bankrupting and seeking to control us.”

In this instance, saying “no” requires casting a wide net, boycotting not just Big Pharma offenders like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson (J&J) — whose products fill most Americans’ medicine cabinets — but also felonious big banks angling in the shadows for complete digital control over private resources.

Boycotts are not easy, and market analysts sometimes dispute their effectiveness. On the other hand, argues Catholic writer Dusty Gates, “When we complain about something with our lips, but continue to participate in it with our pocketbooks, our complaint loses its volume and clarity.”

Taking moral responsibility “for our personal exercise of purchasing power” and withdrawing support from entities that “degrade the common good” may not be sufficient to halt tyranny in the short term, but history shows such actions can pay long-term dividends.

Remembering the boycott’s origins

It is uncertain how many people know or remember the boycott’s 19th-century Irish origins, but the 1880 tale — one of resolute determination in desperate times — offers powerful lessons that are far from outdated.

At the time, Irish tenant farmers were in the throes of a severe famine and had hit a wall in attempting to renegotiate rents with English land agent Charles Cunningham Boycott.

When Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell encouraged tenants, laborers and local shopkeepers to cut the intransigent Englishman off “from all economic and social relations with the rest of the population,” the nonviolent effort was so successful — and so devastating to Boycott’s day-to-day existence — that the man ended up fleeing Ireland in disgrace.

In his 2015 essay on “why we need boycotts,” Dusty Gates noted there is a difference between what a boycott “most often is” and what a boycott “ought to be.”

Referring to the 1880 events, Gates emphasized that the reason for the Irish tenant farmers’ actions and for the boycott’s resounding success “was specifically that people were being treated unfairly” and were losing their livelihood.

With so much at stake, the boycott was “for people, not publicity.”

Reasons to boycott Pfizer

From all appearances, few of the Americans who last year accepted novel coronavirus injections paid much attention to the corporations making the jabs, instead naively accepting the companies’ “frontrunner” status as a guarantee of trustworthiness.

But while Americans might be forgiven for knowing little about secretive upstart Moderna, the public’s willingness to overlook the known and published offenses of behemoths like Pfizer and J&J is a bit more surprising.

As law firm Matthews & Associates observed in November 2020, just prior to the rollout of Pfizer’s experimental injection, “it would seem reasonable to share all the information available on a company millions of people are expected to trust with their health, perhaps their very lives.”

The firm then outlined key elements of Pfizer’s checkered history, describing it as “rife with … subterfuge and under-the-table dealing.”

In 2010, in a published paper, Canadian health economist and policy analyst Robert G. Evans summarized Pfizer’s record as one of “persistent criminal behavior.”

In a similar assessment, a Pfizer whistleblower stated, “The whole culture of Pfizer is driven by sales, and if you didn’t sell drugs illegally, you were not seen as a team player.”

A small sampling of Pfizer’s unsavory track record includes:

A settlement of $2.3 billion for fraudulent marketing practices in 2009 — at the time, “the largest health care fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice.”
A lengthy history of dangerous products, including Zantac, Lipitor and many others.
Additional settlements that reveal alleged patterns of racketeering and hiding important information about drug risks, sometimes for decades.
An “illegal trial of an unregistered drug” in infants and children in Nigeria that killed 11 children and left others with brain damage and paralysis, ultimately resulting in a $75 million settlement; Pfizer tested the drug on the children without the parents’ informed consent.
Recurrent problems with contamination and quality control, including disturbing reports from whistleblowers working in the plants manufacturing COVID shots.

Four years ago, Pfizer ranked dead last in a reputational rating of pharmaceutical companies and was considered one of the companies “most associated with arrogance and greed.”

But COVID shots have been very good for business. In 2020, before the Emergency Use Authorization of Pfizer’s vaccine, two products (the blood thinner Eliquis and the Prevnar-13 vaccine) accounted for more than one-fourth of the company’s total revenue.

In 2021, not only did Pfizer’s COVID injections become the year’s top-selling drug worldwide, but top executive Albert Bourla snagged CNN’s honorific of CEO of the Year.

Agreeing with Forbes “there is money to be made and influence to be gained by having people think positively of you,” Bourla gleefully told CNN, “we are enjoying high levels of corporate reputation right now. People like us.”

To keep it that way, Pfizer is now leading the charge to block legislation that would strengthen whistleblowers’ ability to expose corporate fraud. Pharmaphorum rates Pfizer as the sixth largest lobbying presence in Washington.

As recounted in The Intercept, if the whistleblower legislation were to pass, it would strengthen anti-retaliation protections “and make it more difficult for companies charged with fraud to dismiss cases on procedural grounds.”

Buttressed by a fleet of high-powered lawyers and lobbyists, Pfizer and other Big Pharma felons such as Merck, AstraZeneca, Amgen and Genentech — all of whom have a history of paying large settlements for healthcare fraud — are working to make sure the bill does not pass.

They may well succeed, given Pfizer stock is one of the most popular holdings of U.S. lawmakers.

Reasons to boycott J&J

By revenue, J&J was, as of 2020, the world’s largest healthcare company. The company’s combined consumer, pharmaceutical and medical devices groups have displayed steady growth since the mid-2000s, with 55% higher annual revenue in 2020 compared to 2006.

J&J, along with Pfizer, is one of U.S. lawmakers’ top stock holdings.

J&J’s growth occurred against the backdrop of an offensive history (outlined on numerous occasions by The Defender ) of civil and criminal fines and settlements related to Risperdal, opioids, surgical mesh products, asbestos-tainted baby powder as well as numerous other scandals that, pre-COVID, had finally begun to make a dent in the company’s brand and reputation.

In October 2021, eager to offload its talc liabilities, J&J created a subsidiary and then promptly filed for its bankruptcy protection. In November, meanwhile, J&J announced plans — billed by Reuters as “the biggest shake-up in the U.S. company’s 135-year history — to spin off its consumer health division to focus on the pharmaceutical and medical device division.

J&J is also betting big on “novel solutions” and technologies like robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Back in 2015, J&J announced a partnership with Google to develop AI surgical robots.

Prior to COVID, J&J had virtually no experience developing vaccines, but COVID shots have been just as good for J&J’s bottom line as for Pfizer’s.

Despite the spate of negative publicity about vaccine-related blood clots and other adverse events, which plagued J&J throughout 2021, for the 12 months ending Sep. 30, 2021, the company reported a 13.1% year-over-year increase in revenue as well as a steadily climbing stock value.

The financial outlook for J&J’s COVID shot may change in 2022, however. In mid-December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told the public it “preferentially recommends” getting a Pfizer or Moderna injection rather than J&J’s, despite all three jabs carrying similarly worrisome risks of blood-clotting disorders.

CDC continues to endorse J&J’s shot for vulnerable prison and homeless populations (or when the other two are unavailable), but one of CDC’s advisors told the press she “wouldn’t recommend [her] own family take the J&J shot.”

In addition to adverse events, J&J’s COVID shots have attracted attention for “deficiencies” at its Baltimore production plant, where its notoriously subpar contractor “accidentally” mixed up ingredients and ruined doses.

J&J’s manufacturing woes are neither new nor unique to vaccine production, however. Back in 2013, describing “poppy-seed sized bits of plastic” in infant Motrin and injectable medications marred by mold, a reporter criticized J&J’s hypocritical “warm and fuzzy” marketing, concluding that the “out of control” company had “too many subsidiaries and outsourcing of products to third-party manufacturers for responsible oversight.”

Reasons to boycott felonious banks

In CHD.TV’s new weekly series, “Financial Rebellion,’ former investment banker and Solari Inc. President Catherine Austin Fitts explained the importance of reclaiming financial independence from the “monopolizing grip of the central banks and digital currency titans.”

Fitts argued central banks are using the pandemic to engineer an all-digital control system “that will allow them to extract tax without representation” while exerting 24/7 control over our ability to transact.

Fitts explained how members of the public have a powerful tool at their disposal to disrupt the central bankers’ plans: People can stop banking with the juggernauts that are the largest shareowners of the New York Fed — for example, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of New York Mellon (as well as other megabanks such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo and State Street) — and instead reward well-managed local banks and credit unions with their business.

The New York Fed is part of the Federal Reserve System, one of 12 Federal Reserve Banks established by Congress under the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

It is the largest of the 12 “in terms of assets and volume of activity” and, unlike the other Reserve Banks, has “unique responsibilities” that include buying and selling U.S. Treasury securities on the open market to regulate the supply of money and intervening in foreign exchange markets.

The New York Fed has exercised “unprecedented powers” since the 2008 financial crisis and has used the cover story of the pandemic to steadily broaden those powers.

The New York Fed’s ringleader bank, JPMorgan Chase, is the largest U.S. bank (when ranked by total assets), owns 62% of all stock derivatives (valued at $3.3 trillion) held at federally-insured U.S. banks and is one of the top 10 stock holdings of U.S. lawmakers.

But, like Pfizer and J&J, JPMorgan Chase is a “criminal recidivist.” The five-count felon bank facilitated “the largest Ponzi scheme in history” (the Madoff scheme) and racked up $42 billion in civil and criminal penalties between 2002 and 2019. Recent whistleblower allegations describe a culture of fraud.

Nor is JPMorgan Chase alone as an admitted felon among New York Fed member banks. In 2015, Citigroup joined JPMorgan Chase in pleading guilty to rigging foreign exchange markets. In 2020, Goldman Sachs was charged with two felony counts.

Every action counts

Academic studies show the impact of boycotts is most significant when the companies in question already have a bad reputation and a history of frequent past scandals.

This suggests that boycotting Big Pharma, which before COVID had a long-standing reputation as “the most loathed industry in the country,” ought to be an easy sell.

Although companies like Pfizer and J&J may be benefiting from a short-lived “vaccine-led reputation boost,” their COVID injections’ nontrivial dangers are becoming so evident that even the complacent may have trouble discounting the risks.

Dr. Peter McCullough described the shots as the “most dangerous biological medicinal product rollout in human history.”

For some members of the public, connecting the dots to private central banks represents a more challenging conceptual leap.

However, it is vital to recognize the unfolding global coup as an effort coordinated across multiple sectors, not least of which is the financial sector. And — as central bankers step out of their financial silos and brazenly lecture the world about getting vaccinated — their role in the engineering of tyranny is becoming ever more obvious.

Ending tyranny will require action from each of us, beginning with saying “no” to the disastrous COVID shots.

Admittedly, it may be harder to have as immediate an impact on today’s mega-corporations and billionaire tyrants as was achieved when laundresses, postal messengers and blacksmiths so effectively shunned Charles Cunningham Boycott in the 19th century.

But severing our financial — and energetic — ties with the pharma and banking entities that are harming us is still a powerful place to begin.

Boycotts, if driven by a strong “moral impetus,” can have clout.

Products and subsidiaries you can boycott

For boycotting purposes, we include below a partial list of products manufactured by Pfizer and J&J, and a selected list of their numerous acquisitions and subsidiaries.

Leading Pfizer brands:

Advil, Bextra, Celebrex, Chantix, Depo-Testosterone, Diflucan, Effexor, Eliquis, EpiPen, Ibrance, Lipitor, Lyrica, Nexium, Norvasc, Prempro, Prevnar 13, Protonix, Viagra, Xanax, Xeljanz, Xtandi, Zithromax, Zoloft

Selected Pfizer acquisitions and subsidiaries:

1968: Quigley Company

2000: Warner-Lambert

2003: Pharmacia & Upjohn

2008: Serenex

2009: ViiV Healthcare (joint venture with GSK), Wyeth

2010: King Pharmaceuticals, Meridian Medical Technologies (sold to Altaris in Nov. 2021)

2014: InnoPharma, Redvax GmbH (controlling interest)

2015: Hospira

2016: Anacor, Medivation, Treerly

2018: GSK Consumer Healthcare (joint venture with GSK)

2019: Array Biopharma, Viatris (merger of Upjohn and Mylan)

2021: Amplyx Pharmaceuticals, Arena Pharmaceuticals, Trillium Therapeutics

Leading Johnson & Johnson brands:

Aveeno, Band-Aids, Concerta, Darzalex, devices for hip and knee replacements, Elmiron, Erleada, Imbruvica, Immodium, Invega, Invokana, Levaquin, Listerine, Opsumit, Pepcid, Remicaid, Reminyl, Risperdal, Stelara, surgical mesh products, Symtuza, Topamax, Tremfya, Tylenol, Uptravi, vision care products, Xarelto, Zyrtec, Zytiga

Selected J&J acquisitions and subsidiaries:

1947: Ethicon

1959: Cilag, McNeil

1961: Janssen Pharmaceuticals

1994: Neutrogena

1996: Cordis

1997: Biosense

1998: DePuy

2006: Animas Corporation, Pfizer Consumer Healthcare

2009: Acclarent

2010: Crucell, Micrus Endovascular

2012: Synthes

2017: Abbott Medical Optics, Actelion, TearScience

2019: Auris Health

2020: Momenta Pharmaceuticals, Verb Surgical

© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

January 4, 2022 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Solidarity and Activism | Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase, Pfizer | Leave a comment

Russia not deliberately choking gas supplies to West – Bloomberg

RT | December 24, 2021

Russian energy giant Gazprom has already fulfilled its contractual obligations and is not manipulating European prices, Bloomberg has claimed.

Recent slumps in Russian gas deliveries to Europe are not because of price manipulation for political gain, the New York based finance bible reported on Wednesday.

Earlier this week, the Yamal-Europe pipeline, which brings gas from Russia to Germany through Poland and Belarus, halted shipments. As European energy prices soared, some officials in the West accused Moscow of playing politics with the gas supply, in order to push Germany towards approval of the new Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which has been completed for months but has yet to be officially approved.

However, Bloomberg reported that anonymous sources familiar with the matter had confided that the real cause of the halt in gas transit was that Western buyers under long-term deals had already hit their contractual limits for 2021.

Typically, Gazprom and its customers agree to an arrangement whereby the company will supply a certain volume of gas at a pre-set rate, which this year was less than market price. Beyond that volume, energy buyers would need to pay the market rate, and when several of them reached their volume cap this week, they elected not to purchase more gas.

The Russian state-owned energy giant and its clients, including Uniper SE and RWE AG, confirmed that the company had fulfilled its agreements this year, with the Russian firm stating that it delivers gas to Europe “fully in compliance with the current contract obligations.”

Gas prices in Europe rose about 20% this week, sparking fears of a winter energy crisis, and leading to heated rhetoric surrounding energy security and the role of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will bring Russian gas to Germany through the Baltic Sea, bypassing transit countries such as Ukraine and Poland.

The controversial project, which was fully constructed in September, has met with staunch opposition from Kiev, Warsaw, and Washington, and Ukrainian officials have taken credit for working to delay its certification. However, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has insisted that it should not be used as political leverage against Moscow, saying, “The German authorities will decide this completely independent of politics. The process is moving along.”

At a press conference on Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Western leaders of lying to make Moscow out to be responsible for the rising gas prices. “Gazprom is delivering the volume requested by its partners in full, in accordance with existing contracts,” he said.

December 24, 2021 Posted by aletho | Economics, Russophobia | European Union, Russia | Leave a comment

The US is Gaining a Foothold in Uzbekistan

By Valery Kulikov – New Eastern Outlook – 22.12.2021

To create sustainable groundwork for further expansion into Central Asia, Washington has recently placed particular emphasis on developing relations and cooperation with Uzbekistan.

One of such work areas in this country has been the active opening of “American Corners” in Uzbekistan. It is a US government-supported global network of more than 600 open-access educational centers, already implanted in more than 140 countries, seemingly dedicated to “spreading American culture and American values to every country in the world.” However, created in modern libraries, they are one of the main elements of American soft power. The US Embassy opened an “American Corner” in Qarshi in March 2021; the US Embassy plans to open at least six more such facilities throughout Uzbekistan. It has already allocated over $860,000.

Another area of US expansion in Uzbekistan is USAID’s aspirations to take control of the country’s pharmaceutical industry. To this end, USAID has opened a so-called “Quality Club” in Uzbekistan, which, it says, will promote the development of the pharmaceutical industry and local pharmaceutical manufacturers. According to a US Embassy release, the assistance will consist of discussions on updates, problems, and solutions related to regulating drugs and medical devices in Uzbekistan. US representatives present at the “Quality Club” opening discussed the current state of the Uzbek pharmaceutical industry, the contribution of local medicine producers to the common market, and achievements, obstacles, and development directions in the pharmaceutical industry. The advertising declarations of the US Embassy sounded, as always, noble, unless, of course, one keeps in mind that American charities do not do anything for nothing.

For the sake of objectivity in assessing this event, it should be recalled that there is a rigorous certification in the field of pharmaceutical products. And this, in particular, is clearly illustrated by the pharmaceutical war on vaccines against coronavirus. The United States has done quite a lot to keep the Russian Sputnik V vaccine out of that market. Therefore, it is easy to assume that the result of USAID activities will not be the promotion of Uzbek pharmaceutical products on the American and European markets, but the imposition of imports of American drugs to Uzbekistan and the capture of the Uzbek pharmaceutical market. As for the Uzbek industry, which has shown significant growth in recent years, it is unlikely to survive under pressure from USAID and Western corporations, as multinational corporations do not need competitors.

However, in addition to gaining complete control of Uzbekistan’s pharmaceutical industry, USAID has another goal. And it lies in the expansion through Uzbekistan to the entire EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union ) pharmaceutical industry, given that this Central Asian state has obtained observer status in the Eurasian Union and has already begun to adapt its national standards to EAEU requirements. And, given the importance of the EAEU market, USAID expects to take appropriate positions in the EAEU market through the mediation of Uzbekistan and gain access to the latest pharmaceutical developments in the EAEU.

However, the recently intensified “outreach to Uzbekistan” is being carried out by Washington not only in these directions. For example, recently, in Uzbekistan, there have been active discussions of political and economic partnership between the two countries with the participation of Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu. The most promising directions of further expansion of the bilateral economic partnership, including mining, chemical, agriculture, textile, and other industries, have been outlined during the meeting held on December 13 in Tashkent. The US side emphasized that in the eleven months of 2021, trade turnover between the two countries increased by 48.5% compared to the same period in 2020. In addition, the number of enterprises with American capital in Uzbekistan has doubled over the past few years. The sides expressed readiness to hold in the first half of 2022 a business forum for representatives of American and Uzbek business communities jointly with the American-Uzbekistan Chamber of Commerce (AUCC).

The US representatives also stressed the importance of strengthening security cooperation by deepening ties between defense, law enforcement, border, and customs agencies. The United States expressed gratitude for the assistance provided by Uzbekistan to humanitarian aid providers at the Termez Cargo Center and welcomed Uzbekistan’s initiative to establish a regional logistics hub in Termez under the auspices of the UN to provide urgent humanitarian aid to the people of Afghanistan.

In the conditions mentioned above, the intensification of military cooperation with Uzbekistan remains on the active agenda of Washington. Uzbekistan remains the most convenient Central Asian country to locate a US Air Force base or counterterrorism center, targeting Afghanistan. Hence, discussions of American and NATO partners with Tashkent continue. Like many post-Soviet republics, Uzbekistan has partnered with NATO for peace since the 1990s, participating in consultations, delegation exchanges, and even joint troop maneuvers on US soil. And yet, for the past 20 years, Uzbek servicemen have not helped the Pentagon in Afghanistan with weapons in their hands like Georgians, Ukrainians and others. On the contrary, closer to the finish line of the infamous US mission in Afghanistan, Tashkent began to successfully establish constructive relations with the Taliban’s “political office” and promote Uzbek-Afghan economic cooperation projects.

Nevertheless, Washington has not given up hope of strengthening the strategic partnership with Uzbekistan in military projects or facilities. The regional choices are too limited. Therefore, representatives of CENTCOM will appear more than once in Tashkent, but the influence of Americans on the situation in the hot region will steadily diminish.

December 22, 2021 Posted by aletho | Deception, Economics | Afghanistan, NATO, United States, USAID, Uzbekistan | Leave a comment

Norway’s Power Surplus Disappearing Rapidly

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | December 13, 2021

This small note appeared on the Energy Market Price website today:

Southern Norway seen tipping into power deficit by 2026

Norway’s power production surplus is expected to fall significantly by 2026, with the south of the country moving into deficit owing to rapidly increasing demand, power grid operator Statnett said on Friday.

Power demand in Norway is expected to grow to 158 terawatt hours (TWh) by 2026, up by 19 TWh from current levels, driven by demand from offshore oil and gas platforms and new onshore consumers, such as data centres, Statnett said in its latest market analysis.

The biggest increase is expected in the southern part of the country, where the most of Norway’s power-intensive industries are located, along with new projects such as electrification of the Johan Sverdrup and surrounding offshore fields.

It is surprisingly understated for something with huge ramifications for the stability of the European power grid.

We know of course that Denmark is already heavily reliant on Norway for balancing its grid, taking surplus power when wind power is abundant, and returning it when it is short.

Germany too is becoming increasingly dependent on Norway, for similar reasons.

However, as coal and nuclear power is increasingly shut down, many countries are looking at Norway to fill the gap when renewable power is not performing.

Virtually all of Norway’s electricity comes from hydro, and last year total generation amounted to 154 TWh. According to this latest report, demand in Norway will rise from 139 to 158 TWh by 2026.

In other words, the surplus that Norway has traditionally had in the past is going to disappear.

The report mentions increasing demand from industry and oil production, but as Bloomberg reported earlier this year, demand is also rising rapidly because of electric cars and heat pumps, both of which will continue to grow:

And when southern Norway is short of power, will the country carry on exporting electricity to the rest of Europe ?

Don’t hold your breath!

December 13, 2021 Posted by aletho | Economics | Denmark, Germany | Leave a comment

Biden’s New “Regressive” Methane Tax Will Raise Average American’s Gas Bill By 17%

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | December 12, 2021

At a time when the Biden administration is panicking in an attempt to keep energy prices down, the House has slapped a “fee” on methane that is being called a “stealth tax” on natural gas and everyone who uses it.

The House bill results in an “escalating tax on methane emissions by oil and gas producers,” a new op-ed in the Wall Street Journal points out. The tax will hit $1,500 per ton by 2025 and the fee is supposed to be a contribution to recent promises made in Glasgow to curb methane emissions.

The cost of the fee will obviously get passed along to the consumer, which will then result in even higher energy prices than consumers are already struggling with. 180 million Americans use natural gas to hear their homes, the report says.

In the meantime, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) has come out and stated that half of U.S. households that heat with natural gas will pay 30% more than winter than they did last year. This methane tax could add another 17% to an average bill, the WSJ editorial board writes.

The WSJ op-ed board calls it a “regressive tax” and says that “Department of Energy notes the average energy burden for low-income families is three times higher than for more affluent households”.

The methane tax “exposes the contradiction at the heart of Democratic climate policy” and clearly violates President Biden’s promise not to raise taxes on those making less than $400,000 per year, the op-ed argues.

The op-ed concludes by arguing that once the methane tax is in place, it’ll be easy to raise over time. Combined with new methane regulations, it’ll continue to raise costs and introduce inefficiencies for producers.

The methane tax is “targeted, punitive and can be linked to higher consumer energy bills,” the op-ed concludes.

December 12, 2021 Posted by aletho | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite | United States | Leave a comment

The Real Climate And Health Crisis

Anti-fossil-fuel climate policies increase energy prices, blackouts and death tolls

By Paul Driessen | Watts Up With That? | December 12, 2021

Climate policies promoted and imposed by Team Biden and Democrats are based on junk science, headline-grabbing scare stories, and computer models that create far-fetched “scenarios” asserting that fossil fuel use and emissions will cause Earth to warm by 4 degrees C (7 F)over the next 80 years, and cause Arctic warming that will bring colder winters.

Those dire predictions are used to justify more taxpayer-funded “research,” like a recent Columbia University “mortality cost of carbon” study that claims 83 million people (the population of Germany) “could be killed” this century by those rising planetary temperatures. Therefore we must take “immediate action” to “transform” our energy and economic systems, and replace oil, gas and coal with (millions of) wind turbines and (billions of) solar panels and backup batteries.

These policies are lethal for people and planet They would require mining on scales unprecedented in human history, much of it by slave and child laborers, and nearly all using fossil fuels – bringing massive habitat and wildlife losses, air and water pollution, and horrific human health and safety problems.

But since most of the mining, ore processing and manufacturing will occur in other countries, far from the USA, politicians and climateers can say this “alternative energy” is “clean and green.”

Worse, climate policies cause widespread “energy poverty” – energy prices rising above families’ ability to stay adequately warm (or cool) at reasonable cost, given their incomes. That means people die.

Modern housing and energy systems enable people to adapt to and survive even extreme heat and cold – even in Antarctica, which recently had the coldest winter temperatures ever recorded: -61ᵒ C (-78ᵒ F). However, adaptation and survival become nigh impossible when government policies make it hard to heat or cool homes properly amid joblessness, inflation and soaring oil, natural gas, coal and electricity prices.

Indeed, it is often on the coldest and hottest days and nights, when heating or cooling are most essential, that winds blow at inadequate speeds to turn turbine blades and/or the sun shines with inadequate intensity on solar panels, to generate electricity. This (and wind and solar variability in general) results in recurrent blackouts and necessitates “backup” energy: coal, natural gas, diesel, hydroelectric or expensive battery systems, which significantly increase energy costs and worsen energy poverty, illness and death.

Proposed Biden/Democrat Green New Deal policies would require that still perfectly good natural gas furnaces, water heaters, ovens and stoves be replaced with costly heat pumps and electric appliances, powered by expensive, unreliable, weather-dependent wind and solar systems. They would necessitate installing charging stations for electric cars, upgrading home and neighborhood electrical systems to 220 volts, and having pricey battery “power walls” for backup power during increasingly frequent blackouts.

All this would cost trillions of dollars, with families and small businesses bearing the brunt.

Contrary to faulty global warming “research,” far more people die in cold weather than in hot summers. In the United States and Canada, cold causes 45 times more deaths per year than heat: 113,000 from cold versus 2,500 from heat. Worldwide, with air conditioning far less available in already hot countries than in the United States, some 1,700,000 people die annually from cold versus 300,000 from heat.

A 2014 Public Health England University College of London Institute of Health Equity report underscores how energy poverty severely, disproportionately and inequitably affects poor, elderly, fixed-income and minority families – resulting in numerous, needless illnesses, health problems and deaths.

Cold homes cause or exacerbate risks of asthma, bronchitis, flu, cardiovascular disease and other adverse health conditions. Cold temperatures also increase depression, anxiety and other mental health problems, intensifying medical and physical issues. Young children, older people, those with preexisting health conditions and other vulnerable groups are especially susceptible to hypothermia, illness and death.

The Health Equity Institute calculated that one-tenth of all “excess winter deaths” in England and Wales are directly attributable to fuel poverty, and 21% of excess winter deaths are attributable to the coldest 25% of homes. Between 1990 and 2014, researchers estimated, 30,000 to 40,000 people died each year who would not have perished if their homes hadn’t been so cold. US studies reach similar conclusions.

Adjusting for population, but not for colder winter temperatures in much of the USA (versus England and Wales), this is equivalent to some 170,000 to 230,000 excess winter deaths per year in the United States.

In 2019, 344,000 German families had their electricity cut off because they couldn’t pay their power bills.

Still worse, coal, oil, natural gas, electricity and home heating costs have skyrocketed since those English, US and German reports were prepared – because of stupid, climate-obsessed, callous policies.

Global demand for gas and coal surged as the world recovered from Covid – but Britain and Europe banned fracking for gas in their enormous shale deposits, Germany is shutting down its nuclear plants, Russia is playing politics with gas deliveries, and UK and EU wind turbines generated far less electricity in 2021 (way below their supposed, “nameplate capacity”) due to unfavorable winds.

No wonder 65% of United Kingdom renters are struggling this year to pay their energy bills, 25% of Scots live in energy poverty, and 400,000 more UK households are on the brink of losing their gas and electricity provider before Christmas. Europe’s energy costs hit new records, and millions of UK households face 70% rise in energy bills. Excess winter death tolls will also likely set new records.

That’s happening in America too, as the Biden Administration stymies leasing, drilling, fracking and pipelines, sends gasoline prices rocketing upward, and launches the highest inflation rate in 39 years.

Climate policies will also exacerbate health risks in hospitals. At 13¢ per kilowatt-hour (average US business rate today) a 650,000-square-foot hospital building would pay about $2.5 million annually for electricity. At 27¢ per kWh (Britain’s earlier average), the annual cost jumps to $5.2 million; at 39¢ per kWh (Germany’s earlier average), to $7.5 million! Those soaring costs would bring chillier conditions, employee layoffs, higher medical bills, reduced patient care, and more deaths.

Consider too that one-third of American families already had difficulty six years ago adequately heating and cooling their homes, and one-fifth of U.S. households had to reduce or forego food, medicine and other necessities to pay their energy bills. Even before COVID, low-income, Black, Hispanic and Native American families were spending a greater portion of their incomes on energy than average households.

Impacts on all hard-pressed working families and people on fixed incomes would be just as harmful and disproportionate, as they too spend a greater portion of their limited incomes on energy.

Job destruction, energy poverty, illness and deaths would increase dramatically under anti-fossil-fuel policies mandated and imposed by the Biden Administration and fellow Democrats – in the name of fairness, equity and “climate justice.”

Those policies would also make America’s energy, economy, national security and foreign policy increasingly dependent on China – already the world’s biggest coal user and greenhouse gas emitter – in an increasingly dangerous world. That’s because China controls most of the metals and minerals required by “green” energy and modern transportation, communication and defense technologies.

This is The Real Climate Crisis. The ecological destruction and human death tolls should shock all of us.

They aren’t due to climate changes that are mostly natural, weather events that are no more frequent or extreme than over the previous century, or manmade global warming that exists almost solely in computer models that rely on junk-science greenhouse-gas hypotheses. The real climate crisis is due to policies that are being rammed through on the basis of false premises, fear-mongering and intolerance for fossil fuels.

Congress, courts, states and voters must act now, to reverse the damage that climate and “green” energy policies are having on our economy, jobs, health, well-being, wildlife and environment.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.

December 12, 2021 Posted by aletho | Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Fossil Fuel Restriction Dam Starting To Break

By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | December 4, 2021

Somewhere a couple of decades or so ago, the rich parts of the world embarked on a program of replacing energy from fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) with energy from intermittent “renewables” (mainly wind and solar). In trendy academic, journalistic, and otherwise progressive circles, the idea took hold that this was the way to “save the planet.” This program was undertaken without any detailed engineering study of how or whether it might actually work, or how much it might cost to fully implement. In the trendy circles, there took hold a blind faith in the complete ability of the government, by dispensing taxpayer funds, to order up whatever innovation might be needed to move us forward to this energy utopia.

The latest UN-orchestrated effort to implement the renewable energy program, known as COP 26, has just broken up. To read the verbiage emanating from the affair, all is on track, if a bit slower than one might have hoped.

But I have long predicted that this program would come to an end when (absent some miraculous innovation that nobody has yet conceived) the usage of the renewables got to a sufficient level that their costs and unworkability could not be covered up any longer. Until very recently the pressure of elite groupthink has been able to maintain a united front of lip service to the cause. But consider a few developments from the past few weeks, just since the end of COP 26:

Japan

Japan tends to keep its head down in international affairs, and at COP 26 signed on to the happy talk group communiqués without raising any particular issues. But there is no getting around that Japan has the third largest economy in the world — after the U.S. and China, and larger than any European country — so its actions in energy policy are inherently significant. Also, Japan has relatively little energy production of its own, is heavily dependent on imports, has harsh winters, and has a growing Chinese military and economic threat right on its doorstep. Is Japan really going to trust its fate to intermittent wind and solar energy?

On December 1 Bloomberg reported: “Japan Is Backing Oil and Gas Even After COP26 Climate Talks.” It seems that this rather significant country may be seriously re-thinking the move away from fossil fuels. Excerpt:

Government officials have been quietly urging trading houses, refiners and utilities to slow down their move away from fossil fuels, and even encouraging new investments in oil-and-gas projects, according to people within the Japanese government and industry, who requested anonymity as the talks are private.

What is motivating Japan to break from the world groupthink? According to the Bloomberg piece, the main motivator is security of energy supply — which wind and solar obviously cannot provide:

The officials are concerned about the long-term supply of traditional fuels as the world doubles down on renewable energy, the people said. The import-dependent nation wants to avoid a potential shortage of fuel this winter, as well as during future cold spells, after a deficit last year sparked fears of nationwide blackouts. . . . Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry declined to comment directly on whether it is encouraging industries to boost investment in upstream energy supply, and instead pointed to a strategic energy plan approved by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s cabinet on October 22. That plan says “no compromise is acceptable to ensure energy security, and it is the obligation of a nation to continue securing necessary resources.”

(Emphasis added.). Well, if “no compromise is acceptable” on “energy security,” that pretty much rules out principal reliance on wind and solar for powering the Japanese economy, at least until some magical new inventions come along.

United States

In the U.S., Republicans have only very gradually caught on to the idea that fossil fuel restrictions in the name of “climate” are becoming a political liability for the Democrats. Up to now, there have been some politicians willing to speak out in opposition to such restrictions, but little in the way of concrete steps taken in opposition. Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to move forward with initiatives at the SEC, Treasury Department and Federal Reserve to pressure banks and other financial institutions to reduce their participation in the fossil fuel industries.

So this is a big development: On November 22, a coalition of state treasurers sent a letter to large financial institutions threatening to end relationships, including the deposit of state and pension funds, with institutions that cut off financing for the coal, oil and natural gas industries. National Review reports in a November 22 piece headlined “Fifteen States Respond to ‘Woke Capitalism,’ Threaten to Cut Off Banks That Refuse to Service Coal, Oil Industries.” Excerpt:

A coalition of financial officers from 15 states sent a letter to the U.S. banking industry on Monday warning they plan to take “collective action” against banks that adopt corporate policies to cut off financing for the coal, oil, and natural gas industries. . . . The letter puts the financial institutions that have “adopted policies aimed at diminishing a large portion of our states’ revenue” on notice, saying the banks have “a major conflict of interest against holding, maintaining, or managing those funds.”

According to the NR piece, the state treasurers signing on to the letter include those from West Virginia, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, Alabama, Texas and Kentucky. Recipients of the letter included JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs. Between the states’ own accounts and their pension funds, the amounts at issue would be well into the multiple hundreds of billions of dollars, if not approaching a trillion.

Meanwhile, over in Europe . . .

Another Bloomberg piece, this one from November 28, describes the sense of impending doom hanging over Europe with the combination of low natural gas supplies, price spikes, and complete inability to coax more production out of proliferating and essentially useless wind and solar generators. The headline is “Europe’s energy crisis is about to get worse as winter arrives.” Excerpt:

The situation is already so dire this early in the winter season because of a blistering rally in natural gas prices. Stores of the fuel, used to heat homes and to generate electricity, are lower than usual and are being depleted quickly. Analysts have warned that gas stores could drop to zero this winter if cold weather boosts demand. Rolling blackouts are a possibility, warned Jeremy Weir, chief executive officer of Trafigura Group, a Swiss commodity trading house on Nov. 16.

And then there’s this comment:

“If the weather gets cold in Europe there’s not going to be an easy supply solution, it’s going to need a demand solution,” said Adam Lewis, partner at trading house Hartree Partners LP.

I think that a “demand solution” means some combination of either blackouts or intentionally cutting people off and, I guess, leaving them to freeze. The “supply solution” mentioned by Lewis would be allowing fracking in the extensive shale formations underlying Western Europe. Such fracking is currently banned. Even if those bans were lifted today, it would be way too late for this winter. … Full article

December 6, 2021 Posted by aletho | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | European Union, Japan, United States | Leave a comment

More Than 400 Studies on the Failure of Compulsory Covid Interventions

BY PAUL ELIAS ALEXANDER | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | NOVEMBER 30, 2021

The great body of evidence (comparative research studies and high-quality pieces of evidence and reporting judged to be relevant to this analysis) shows that COVID-19 lockdowns, shelter-in-place policies, masks, school closures, and mask mandates have failed in their purpose of curbing transmission or reducing deaths. These restrictive policies were ineffective and devastating failures, causing immense harm especially to the poorer and vulnerable within societies.

Nearly all governments have attempted compulsory measures to control the virus, but no government can claim success. The research indicates that mask mandates, lockdowns, and school closures have had no discernible impact of virus trajectories.

Bendavid reported “in the framework of this analysis, there is no evidence that more restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (‘lockdowns’) contributed substantially to bending the curve of new cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, or the United States in early 2020.” We’ve known this for a very long time now but governments continue to double down, causing misery upon people with ramifications that will likely take decades or more to repair.

The benefits of the societal lockdowns and restrictions have been totally exaggerated and the harms to our societies and children have been severe: the harms to children, the undiagnosed illness that will result in excess mortality in years to come, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation in our young people, drug overdoses and suicides due to the lockdown policies, the crushing isolation due to the lockdowns, psychological harms, domestic and child abuse, sexual abuse of children, loss of jobs and businesses and the devastating impact, and the massive numbers of deaths resulting from the lockdowns that will impact heavily on women and minorities.

Now we have whispers again for the new lockdowns in response to the Omicron variant that, by my estimations, will be likely infectious but not more lethal.

How did we get here? We knew that we could never eradicate this mutable virus (that has an animal reservoir) with lockdowns and that it would likely become endemic like other circulating common cold coronaviruses. When we knew an age-risk stratified approach was optimal (focused protection as outlined in the Great Barrington Declaration) and not carte blanche policies when we had evidence of a 1,000-fold differential in risk of death between a child and an elderly person. We knew of the potency and success of early ambulatory outpatient treatment in reducing the risk of hospitalization and death in the vulnerable.

It was clear very early on that Task Forces and medical advisors and decision-makers were not reading the evidence, were not up to speed with the science or data, did not understand the evidence, did not ‘get’ the evidence, and were blinded to the science, often driven by their own prejudices, biases, arrogance, and ego. They remain ensconced in sheer academic sloppiness and laziness. It was clear that the response was not a public health one. It was a political one from day one and continues today.

A recent study (pre-print) captures the essence and catastrophe of a lockdown society and the hollowing out of our children by looking at how children learn (3 months to 3 years old) and finding across all measures that “children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic.” Researchers also reported that “males and children in lower socioeconomic families have been most affected. Results highlight that even in the absence of direct SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 illness, the environmental changes associated with the COVID-19 pandemic is significantly and negatively affecting infant and child development.”

Perhaps Donald Luskin of the Wall Street Journal best captures what we have stably witnessed since the start of these unscientific lockdowns and school closures: “Six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. has now carried out two large-scale experiments in public health—first, in March and April, the lockdown of the economy to arrest the spread of the virus, and second, since mid-April, the reopening of the economy. The results are in. Counterintuitive though it may be, statistical analysis shows that locking down the economy didn’t contain the disease’s spread and reopening it didn’t unleash a second wave of infections.”

The British Columbia Center for Disease Control (BCCDC) issued a full report in September 2020 on the impact of school closures on children and found para “that i) children comprise a small proportion of diagnosed COVID-19 cases, have less severe illness, and mortality is rare ii) children do not appear to be a major source of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in households or schools, a finding which has been consistent globally iii) there are important differences between how influenza and SARS-CoV-2 are transmitted. School closures may be less effective as a prevention measure for COVID-19 iv) school closures can have severe and unintended consequences for children and youth v) school closures contribute to greater family stress, especially for female caregivers, while families balance child care and home learning with employment demands vi) family violence may be on the rise during the COVID pandemic, while the closure of schools and childcare centres may create a gap in the safety net for children who are at risk of abuse and neglect.”

Now places like Austria (November 2021) have re-entered the world of lockdown lunacy only to be outmatched by Australia. Indeed, an illustration of the spurious need for these ill-informed actions is that they are being done in the face of clear scientific evidence showing that during strict prior societal lockdowns, school lockdowns, mask mandates, and additional societal restrictions, the number of positive cases went up!

The pandemic response today remains a purely political one.

What follows is the current totality of the body of evidence (available comparative studies and high-level pieces of evidence, reporting, and discussion) on COVID-19 lockdowns, masks, school closures, and mask mandates. There is no conclusive evidence supporting claims that any of these restrictive measures worked to reduce viral transmission or deaths. Lockdowns were ineffective, school closures were ineffective, mask mandates were ineffective, and masks themselves were and are ineffective and harmful. … continue reading

December 2, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights | Leave a comment

A President Betrayed by Bureaucrats: Scott Atlas’s Masterpiece on the Covid Disaster

BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | NOVEMBER 27, 2021

I’m a voracious reader of Covid books but nothing could have prepared me for Scott Atlas’s A Plague Upon Our House, a full and mind-blowing account of the famed scientist’s personal experience with the Covid era and a luridly detailed account of his time at the White House. The book is hot fire, from page one to the last, and will permanently affect your view of not only this pandemic and the policy response but also the workings of public health in general.

Atlas’s book has exposed a scandal for the ages. It is enormously valuable because it fully blows up what seems to be an emerging fake story involving a supposedly Covid-denying president who did nothing vs. heroic scientists in the White House who urged compulsory mitigating measures consistent with prevailing scientific opinion. Not one word of that is true. Atlas’s book, I hope, makes it impossible to tell such tall tales without embarrassment.

Anyone who tells you this fictional story (including Deborah Birx) deserves to have this highly credible treatise tossed in his direction. The book is about the war between real science (and genuine public health), with Atlas as the voice for reason both before and during his time in the White House, vs. the enactment of brutal policies that never stood any chance of controlling the virus while causing tremendous damage to the people, to human liberty, to children in particular, but also to billions of people around the world.

For the reader, the author is our proxy, a reasonable and blunt man trapped in a world of lies, duplicity, backstabbing, opportunism, and fake science. He did his best but could not prevail against a powerful machine that cares nothing for facts, much less outcomes.

If you have heretofore believed that science drives pandemic public policy, this book will shock you. Atlas’s recounting of the unbearably poor thinking on the part of government-based “infectious disease experts” will make your jaw drop (thinking, for example, of Birx’s off-the-cuff theorizing about the relationship between masking and controlling case spreads).

Throughout the book, Atlas points to the enormous cost of the machinery of lockdowns, the preferred method of Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx: missed cancer screenings, missed surgeries, nearly two years of educational losses, bankrupted small business, depression and drug overdoses, overall citizen demoralization, violations of religious freedom, all while public health massively neglected the actual at-risk population in long-term care facilities. Essentially, they were willing to dismantle everything we called civilization in the name of bludgeoning one pathogen without regard to the consequences.

The fake science of population-wide “models” drove policy instead of following the known information about risk profiles. “The one unusual feature of this virus was the fact that children had an extraordinarily low risk,” writes Atlas. “Yet this positive and reassuring news was never emphasized. Instead, with total disregard of the evidence of selective risk consistent with other respiratory viruses, public health officials recommended draconian isolation of everyone.”

“Restrictions on liberty were also destructive by inflaming class distinctions with their differential impact,” he writes, “exposing essential workers, sacrificing low-income families and kids, destroying single-parent homes, and eviscerating small businesses, while at the same time large companies were bailed out, elites worked from home with barely an interruption, and the ultra-rich got richer, leveraging their bully pulpit to demonize and cancel those who challenged their preferred policy options.”

In the midst of continued chaos, in August 2020, Atlas was called by Trump to help, not as a political appointee, not as a PR man for Trump, not as a DC fixer but as the only person who in nearly a year of unfolding catastrophe had a health-policy focus. He made it clear from the outset that he would only tell what he believed to be true; Trump agreed that this was precisely what he wanted and needed. Trump got an earful and gradually came around to a more rational view than that which caused him to wreck the American economy and society with his own hands and against his own instincts.

In Task Force meetings, Atlas was the only person who showed up with studies and on-the-ground information as opposed to mere charts of infections easily downloadable from popular websites. “A bigger surprise was that Fauci did not present scientific research on the pandemic to the group that I witnessed. Likewise, I never heard him speak about his own critical analysis of any published research studies. This was stunning to me. Aside from intermittent status updates about clinical trial enrollments, Fauci served the Task Force by offering an occasional comment or update on vaccine trial participant totals, mostly when the VP would turn to him and ask.”

When Atlas spoke up, it was almost always to contradict Fauci/Birx but he received no backing during meetings, only to have many people in attendance later congratulate him for speaking out. Still, he did have a convert in Trump himself, but by then it was too late: not even Trump could prevail against the wicked machine he had permissioned into operation.

It’s a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington story but applied to matters of public health. From the outset of this disease panic, policy came to be dictated by two government bureaucrats (Fauci and Birx) who, for some reason, were confident in their control over media, bureaucracies, and White House messaging, despite every attempt by the president, Atlas, and a few others to get them to pay attention to the actual science about which Fauci/Birx knew and care little.

Fortunately, we now have this book to set the record straight. It gives every reader an inside look at the workings of a system that wrecked our lives. If the book finally declines to offer an explanation for the hell that was visited upon us – every day we still ask the question why? – it does provide an accounting of the who, when, where, and what. Tragically, too many scientists, media figures, and intellectuals in general went along. Atlas’s account shows exactly what they signed up to defend, and it’s not pretty.

The cliche that kept coming to mind as I read is “breath of fresh air.” That metaphor describes the book perfectly: blessed relief from relentless propaganda. Imagine yourself trapped in an elevator with stultifying air in a building that is on fire and the smoke gradually seeps in from above. Someone is in there with you and he keeps assuring you that everything is fine, when it is obviously not.

That’s a pretty good description of how I felt from March 12, 2020 and onward. That was the day that President Trump spoke to the nation and announced that there would be no more travel from Europe. The tone in his voice was spooky. It was obvious that more was coming. He had clearly fallen sway to extremely bad advice, perhaps he was willing to push lockdowns as a plan to deal with a respiratory virus that was already widespread in the US from perhaps 5 to 6 months earlier.

It was the day that the darkness descended. A day later (March 13), the HHS distributed its lockdown plans for the nation. That weekend, Trump met for many hours with Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and only a few others. He came around to the idea of shutting down the American economy for two weeks. He presided over the calamitous March 16, 2020, press conference, at which Trump promised to beat the virus through general lockdowns.

Of course he had no power to do that directly but he could urge it to happen, all under the completely delusional promise that doing so would solve the virus problem. Two weeks later, the same gang persuaded him to extend the lockdowns.

Trump went along with the advice because it was the only advice he was fed at the time. They made it appear that the only choice that Trump had – if he wanted to beat the virus – was to wage war on his own policies that were pushing for a stronger, healthier economy. After surviving two impeachment attempts, and beating back years of hate from a nearly united media afflicted by severe derangement syndrome, Trump was finally hornswoggled.

Atlas writes: “On this highly important criterion of presidential management—taking responsibility to fully take charge of policy coming from the White House—I believe the president made a massive error in judgment. Against his own gut feeling, he delegated authority to medical bureaucrats, and then he failed to correct that mistake.”

The truly tragic fact that both Republicans and Democrats do not want spoken about is that this whole calamity did indeed begin with Trump’s decision. On this point, Atlas writes:

Yes, the president initially had gone along with the lockdowns proposed by Fauci and Birx, the “fifteen days to slow the spread,” even though he had serious misgivings. But I still believe the reason that he kept repeating his one question—“Do you agree with the initial shutdown?”—whenever he asked questions about the pandemic was precisely because he still had misgivings about it.

Large parts of the narrative are devoted to explaining precisely how and to what extent Trump had been betrayed. “They had convinced him to do exactly the opposite of what he would naturally do in any other circumstance,” Atlas writes, that is

“to disregard his own common sense and allow grossly incorrect policy advice to prevail… This president, widely known for his signature “You’re fired!” declaration, was misled by his closest political intimates. All for fear of what was inevitable anyway—skewering from an already hostile media. And on top of that tragic misjudgment, the election was lost anyway. So much for political strategists.”

There are so many valuable parts to the story that I cannot possibly recount them all. The language is brilliant, e.g. he calls the media “the most despicable group of unprincipled liars one could ever imagine.” He proves that assertion in page after page of shocking lies and distortions, mostly driven by political goals.

I was particularly struck by his chapter on testing, mainly because that whole racket mystified me throughout. From the outset, the CDC bungled the testing part of the pandemic story, attempting to keep the tests and process centralized in DC at the very time when the entire nation was in panic. Once that was finally fixed, months too late, mass and indiscriminate PCR testing became the desiderata of success within the White House. The problem was not just with the testing method:

“Fragments of dead virus hang around and can generate a positive test for many weeks or months, even though one is not generally contagious after two weeks. Moreover, PCR is extremely sensitive. It detects minute quantities of virus that do not transmit infection… Even the New York Times wrote in August that 90 percent or more of positive PCR tests falsely implied that someone was contagious. Sadly, during my entire time at the White House, this crucial fact would never even be addressed by anyone other than me at the Task Force meetings, let alone because for any public recommendation, even after I distributed data proving this critical point.”

The other problem is the wide assumption that more testing (however inaccurate) of whomever, whenever was always better. This model of maximizing tests seemed like a leftover from the HIV/AIDS crisis in which tracing was mostly useless in practice but at least made some sense in theory. For a widespread and mostly wild respiratory disease transmitted the way a cold virus is transmitted, this method was hopeless from the beginning. It became nothing but make work for tracing bureaucrats and testing enterprises that in the end only provided a fake metric of “success” that served to spread public panic.

Early on, Fauci had clearly said that there was no reason to get tested if you had no symptoms. Later, that common-sense outlook was thrown out the window and replaced with an agenda to test as many people as possible regardless of risk and regardless of symptoms. The resulting data enabled Fauci/Birx to keep everyone in a constant state of alarm. More test positivity to them implied only one thing: more lockdowns. Businesses needed to close harder, we all needed to mask harder, schools needed to stay closed longer, and travel needed to be ever more restricted. That assumption became so entrenched that not even the president’s own wishes (which had changed from Spring to Summer) made any difference.

Atlas’s first job, then, was to challenge this whole indiscriminate testing agenda. To his mind, testing needed to be about more than accumulating endless amounts of data, much of it without meaning; instead, testing should be directed toward a public-health goal. The people who needed tests were the vulnerable populations, particularly those in nursing homes, with the goal of saving lives among those who were actually threatened with severe outcomes. This push to test, contact trace, and quarantine anyone and everyone regardless of known risk was a huge distraction, and also caused huge disruption in schooling and enterprise.

To fix it meant changing the CDC guidelines. Atlas’s story of attempting to do that is eye-opening. He wrestled with every manner of bureaucrat and managed to get new guidelines written, only to find that they had been mysteriously reverted to the old guidelines one week later. He caught the “error” and insisted that his version prevail. Once they were issued by the CDC, the national press was all over it, with the story that the White House was pressuring the scientists at the CDC in terrible ways. After a week-long media storm, the guidelines changed yet again. All of Atlas’s work was made null.

Talk about discouraging! It was also Atlas’s first full experience in dealing with deep-state machinations. It was this way throughout the lockdown period, a machinery in place to implement, encourage, and enforce endless restrictions but no one person in particular was there to take responsibility for the policies or the outcomes, even as the ostensible head of state (Trump) was on record both publicly and privately opposing the policies that no one could seem to stop.

As an example of this, Atlas tells the story of bringing some massively important scientists to the White House to speak with Trump: Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, Joseph Ladapo, and Cody Meissner. People around the president thought the idea was great. But somehow the meeting kept being delayed. Again and again. When it finally went ahead, the schedulers only allowed for 5 minutes. But once they met with Trump himself, the president had other ideas and prolonged the meeting for an hour and a half, asking the scientists all kinds of questions about viruses, policy, the initial lockdowns, the risks to individuals, and so on.

The president was so impressed with their views and knowledge – what a dramatic change that must have been for him – that he invited filming to be done plus pictures to be taken. He wanted to make it a big public splash. It never happened. Literally. White House press somehow got the message that this meeting never happened. The first anyone will have known about it other than White House employees is from Atlas’s book.

Two months later, Atlas was instrumental in bringing in not only two of those scientists but also the famed Sunetra Gupta of Oxford. They met with the HHS secretary but this meeting too was buried in the press. No dissent was allowed. The bureaucrats were in charge, regardless of the wishes of the president.

Another case in point was during Trump’s own bout with Covid in early October. Atlas was nearly sure that he would be fine but he was forbidden from talking to the press. The entire White House communications office was frozen for four days, with no one speaking to the press. This was against Trump’s own wishes. This left the media to speculate that he was on his deathbed, so when he came back to the White House and announced that Covid is not to be feared, it was a shock to the nation. From my own point of view, this was truly Trump’s finest moment. To learn of the internal machinations happening behind the scenes is pretty shocking.

I can’t possibly cover the wealth of material in this book, and I expect this brief review to be one of several that I write. I do have a few disagreements. First, I think the author is too uncritical toward Operation Warp Speed and doesn’t really address how the vaccines were wildly oversold, to say nothing of growing concerns about safety, which were not addressed in the trials. Second, he seems to approve of Trump’s March 12th travel restrictions, which struck me as brutal and pointless, and the real beginning of the unfolding disaster. Third, Atlas inadvertently seems to perpetuate the distortion that Trump recommended ingesting bleach during a press conference. I know that this was all over the papers. But I’ve read the transcript of that press conference several times and find nothing like this. Trump actually makes clear that he was speaking about cleaning surfaces. This might be yet another case of outright media lies.

All that aside, this book reveals everything about the insanity of 2020 and 2021, years in which good sense, good science, historical precedent, human rights, and concerns for human liberty were all thrown into the trash, not just in the US but all over the world.

Atlas summarizes the big picture:

“in considering all the surprising events that unfolded in this past year, two in particular stand out. I have been shocked at the enormous power of government officials to unilaterally decree a sudden and severe shutdown of society—to simply close businesses and schools by edict, restrict personal movements, mandate behavior, regulate interactions with our family members, and eliminate our most basic freedoms, without any defined end and with little accountability.”

Atlas is correct that “the management of this pandemic has left a stain on many of America’s once noble institutions, including our elite universities, research institutes and journals, and public health agencies. Earning it back will not be easy.”

Internationally, we have Sweden as an example of a country that (mostly) kept its sanity. Domestically, we have South Dakota as an example of a place that stayed open, preserving freedom throughout. And thanks in large part to Atlas’s behind-the-scenes work, we have the example of Florida, whose governor did care about the actual science and ended up preserving freedom in the state even as the elderly population there experienced the greatest possible protection from the virus.

We all owe Atlas an enormous debt of gratitude, for it was he who persuaded the Florida governor to choose the path of focussed protection as advocated by the Great Barrington Declaration, which Atlas cites as the “single document that will go down as one of the most important publications in the pandemic, as it lent undeniable credibility to focused protection and provided courage to thousands of additional medical scientists and public health leaders to come forward.”

Atlas experienced the worst of the slings, arrows, and worse. The media and the bureaucrats tried to shut him up, shut him down, and body bag him professionally and personally. Cancelled, meaning removed from the roster of functional, dignified human beings. Even colleagues at Stanford University joined in the lynch mob, much to their disgrace. And yet this book is that of a man who has prevailed against them.

In that sense, it is easily the most crucial first-person account we have so far. It is gripping, revealing, devastating for the lockdowners and their vaccine-mandating successors, and a true classic that will stand the test of time. It’s simply not possible to write the history of this disaster without a close examination of this erudite first-hand account.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.

November 28, 2021 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Florida, Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

Whitney Webb Exposes How Green Finance is Monopolizing the Planet

Corbett • 11/24/2021

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Whitney Webb returns to the program to discuss her recent work on the “green” transformation of the global financial system. From NACs to GFANZ, Webb and Corbett break down the latest attempt to monopolize the world’s natural resources and how this financial scam represents the next step along the path to the Great Reset, Agenda 2030 and the 4th Industrial Revolution.

Watch on Archive / BitChute / Minds / Odysee or Download the mp4

SHOW NOTES:
Wall Street’s Takeover of Nature Advances with Launch of New Asset Class

UN-Backed Banker Alliance Announces “Green” Plan to Transform the Global Financial System

And Now For The 100 Trillion Dollar Bankster Climate Swindle…

Who Wants To Be A Carbon Trillionaire?

The (Second) Most Important Bank You’ve Never Heard Of

How & Why Big Oil Conquered The World

Pay Up or the Earth Gets It! – #PropagandaWatch

What is the Future of (Bankster) Finance? – Questions For Corbett #049

IEG – “The Solution”

The Secret Diary of a ‘Sustainable Investor’ — Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3

Episode 322 – What Is Sustainable Development?

The man who’s buying up South America

John Kerry speaks at Bloomberg New Economy Forum

The Climate Finance Leadership Initiative

Welcome to the New Economy

Tanzania Ministry cancels GMO seed trials

Tanzania and Kabanga Nickel strike deal to develop nickel project

Bolivian Coup Comes Less Than a Week After Morales Stopped Lithium Deal

Jeff Bezos: Forget Mars, humans will live in these free-floating space pod colonies

Absolute Zero: The Global Agenda Revealed

Moderna: A Company “In Need Of A Hail Mary”

COVID-19: Moderna Gets Its Miracle

B.C. doctor clinically diagnoses patient as suffering from ‘climate change’

WHO’s 10 calls for climate action to assure sustained recovery from COVID-19

Pastor of Gospel Light Baptist Church in Amherst Fined Under Health Protection Act

November 27, 2021 Posted by aletho | Deception, Economics, Environmentalism, Timeless or most popular, Video | Africa, Latin America | Leave a comment

Davos Billionaires Want to Save the Planet… Why Don’t Developing Countries Trust Them?

By Matthew Ehret | Strategic Culture Foundation | November 17, 2021

A miracle appears to be happening, as the multibillionaires of the World Economic Forum (WEF) appear to have grown consciences.

As if by magic, it appears that these gold collar elites no longer yearn for profit and power as they once had. As COP26 closes up its 12 day annual ceremonies, leading WEF-connected figures like Prince Charles, Jeff Bezos, Mario Draghi, Mark Carney and Klaus Schwab have announced a new system of economics that is based on virtue over profit!

According to the COP26 website, “95 high profile companies from a range of sectors commit to being ‘Nature Positive,’ agreeing to work towards halting and reversing the decline of nature by 2030.”

Prince Charles has boasted that he has coordinated 300 companies representing over $60 trillion to get on board with a global green transition, and after meeting with the Prince on November 2, Jeff Bezos announced his new $2 billion Earth Fund to protect nature’s ecosystems with a focus on Africa. Even Prime Minister Mario Draghi has joined Mark Carney on this new green path, as both men have moved beyond their old Goldman Sachs money worshipping days and embraced a better destiny. At the Nov 1 G20 Summit, Draghi embraced Prince Charles’ Green Markets Initiative and threw Italy’s full support behind the de-carbonization initiative.

The Prince himself (who also happens to be the nominal creator of the Great Reset Agenda launched in 2020), spoke as an enlightened statesman saying to the world’s leaders “as the enormity of the climate challenge dominates peoples’ conversations, from news rooms to living rooms, and as the future of humanity and Nature herself are at stake, it is surely time to set aside our differences and grasp this unique opportunity to launch a substantial green recovery by putting the global economy on a confident, sustainable trajectory and, thus, save our planet.”

Among the new array of financial mechanisms which we see being brought online in this war against humanity involve Bezos’ new Earth Fund, and Sir Robert Watson’s Living Planet Index (unveiled in 2018 at the World Economic Forum) and the new Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored Intrinsic Exchange Group (IEG) which seeks to turn global ecosystems worth an estimated $4 quadrillion into financial equity controllable by new private corporations (dubbed “natural asset companies”).

On its website, the IEG stated: “In partnership with the New York Stock Exchange, IEG is providing a word-class platform to list these companies for trading, enabling the conversion of natural assets into financial capital. The NAC’s equity captures the intrinsic and productive value of nature and provides a store of value based on the vital assets that underpin our entire economy and make life on earth possible… In 2021, we began seeking regulatory approval to bring the first natural asset transactions to the capital markets. Our vision is to bring to market hundreds of Natural Asset Companies representing several trillion dollars’ worth of natural assets.”

These new companies will become the stewards of new protected zones across the globe which the UN demands encapsulate 30% of the earth’s surface by 2030 and much more by 2050.

Is this time to rejoice, or is something darker at play?

To answer this question it is worth asking: Does this new virtue-driven order have anything to do with lifting people out of poverty or ending economic injustice?

Sadly, it is designed to do very much the opposite.

As we are coming to see, and as statesmen around the world are beginning to point out, this new order has more in common with oligarchical obsessions with controlling human cattle, and less to do with actually preserving the environment. The thousands of tons of CO2 emitted by private jets at Davos and COP26 represents on small aspect of this disingenuity.

Obrador Calls out the Game

On October 30, Mexico’s President Lopez Obrador called out this new virulent form of colonialism while presiding over a ceremony in celebration of the ongoing construction of the $6.7 billion high-speed Maya Train now being built in the southern regions of Mexico. The project which would dramatically uplift living standards in Mexico by driving the growth of industrial and infrastructure production has fallen far behind schedule due in large part to vast legal battles led by indigenous groups who have been used as proxies by foreign interests to defend Mexico’s ecosystems. In many of the legal cases opposing the project, the argument has been made that since several species of insect, fauna and even some leopards will be affected by the new railways, then the project must be ground to a halt and buried.

In his remarks to a journalist inquiring into the rail project, Obrador said:

“One of the things which they [the neoliberals] promoted in the world, in order to loot at ease, was the creation or promotion of the so-called new rights. So, feminism, ecologism, the defense of human rights, the protection of animals was much promoted, including by them. All these causes are very noble, but the intent was to create or boost all these new causes so that we don’t remedy—so that we don’t turn around and see that they were looting the world, so the subject of economic and social inequality would be kept out of the center of debate… The international agencies which supported the neoliberal model, which is a model of pillage where corporations grab national property, the property of the people—these same corporations financed, and continue to finance, environmentalist groups, defenders of ‘liberty.’ ”

Many people have been confused over these remarks since they cannot conceptualize how neoliberal monetarists that have parasitically driven the new age of pillage under globalization would also support such ‘new rights’ groups outlined by Obrador.

For nations of the global south who feel resentment that their rights to support their people by having their lands and resources kept off limits, they are told not to worry, since streams of money will be showered upon them from on high. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of monopoly money will be sprayed onto the developing sector as rewards for remaining undeveloped. If that isn’t sufficient, then carbon exchange markets will be set up so that poor nations can sell their un-used carbon quotas to private polluting companies (perhaps the same companies controlling the African cobalt mines which seek a monopoly in controlling the renewable energy sector). That is another way they can make money which at least can keep them warm at night as kindling since the world’s poor will not have to worry about having nature-killing hydro electric dams mucking up their pristine environments.

Even in the west where Biden’s 30×30 executive order has been signed into action, farmers will be offered money to stop grazing on soon-to-be protected lands, while a supposedly grassroots-based WWF-connected American Prairie Reserve (with a $160 million endowment) can be seen pushing a program designed to take 5000 square miles of grazing land in Montana out of use and converted into a pure ecosystem.

As President Obrador has alluded to, today’s billionaire-funded conservation movement simply seeks to take earth’s ecosystems out of bounds of any human economic activity under a new global feudal system of controls.

Even the indigenous populations which such billionaires profess to admire as role models for global “good behavior” are being monetized by these new green indices, with monetary values being placed not only on keeping land and water untouched, but also the very cultural ecosystems of indigenous groups around the world receiving dollar values which wealthy green financiers will somehow be able to invest into. To the degree that such immutably fixed patterns of indigenous lifestyles remain unchanged by the toxic pollution of modern technology or infrastructure, the more these eco-assets will be worth for whomever professes to invest in them. This may not be scientific but it is sick.

The term ‘feudal’ is in no way used for hyperbolic purposes, as we can see a stark parallel to the 12^th century Europe, except that today’s aspiring feudal lords manage such companies as Blackrock, Vanguard, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and State Street and seek to punish all serfs from infringing on properties which only the nobility may control. Blackrock alone manages over $9 trillion in assets and $21.6 trillion in technology platforms and along with Vanguard is fast becoming one of the largest real estate owners in the USA with Bill Gates having recently become the largest owner of American farmland.

The Deeper Imperial Roots of Conservationism

With this vast imperial landgrab in mind, one should not be surprised to discover that the modern conservation movement actually finds its origins not in Greenpeace activists fighting poachers as mythmakers have cooked up, but rather in the bowels of the British Empire. It was this empire that innovated “nature conservation” regions in India during the late 19^th century specifically to keep the poor of India under control after having destroyed India’s once powerful textile sector. The practice was applied across India during the greatest density of famines struck southern India in 1876 killing tens of millions. It was amidst this darkness that British Imperial overlords took the opportunity to create “The Imperial Forestry Department’ in 1876 putting two fifths of India’s lands under “protection” and off limits to humans. This ensured no starving subject could use the protected zones which they had relied upon for survival for decades for food, or water.

The Nazi embrace of both Anglo-American funded science of eugenics on the one side and the Reich’s embrace of nature conservationism were also not unconnected. Herman Goring, who served as Minister for German Forests believed in a poisonous worldview that held that: 1) nature is pure and thus good due to its pure unchanging natural order while 2) humanity is impure and thus un-natural due to our aspirations for progress. This dangerous equation resulted in seemingly innocent programs launched by the Fuhrer and Goring to cleanse the German ecosystems of all foreign and thus un-natural fauna and flora in order to return the forests of Germany to their supposedly pure pre-industrial states. The worship of nature was an integral part of the new master race and the weeding out of impurities extended itself to human genetics following racial theories advanced by British eugenicists and anthropologists.

Julian Huxley’s New Eugenics Revolution

Upon Hitler’s defeat, the repackaging of eugenics took the form of British Eugenics Society Vice President Julian Huxley’s outline in the founding Manifesto for UNESCO where he said:

“At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilization is dysgenic instead of eugenic, and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability and disease proneness, which already exist in the human species will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”

Putting this new eugenics into practical action took on many heads of a hydra in the post WWII years. The particular hydra head most relevant to the thrust of this article took the form of another project Julian created in 1948 called the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) followed soon thereafter by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in 1961 which he co-founded alongside two misanthropic princes named Philip Mountbatten and Bernhardt of the Netherlands.

Between 1959 and 1962 Julian had risen to become president of the British Eugenics Society and had put the finishing gloss on a new field of scientific misanthropic theology which he dubbed ‘Transhumanism’ alongside a Jesuit collaborator named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

If you haven’t guessed, Transhumanism was merely another form of re-packaged eugenics serving the spiritual needs of a new priesthood of elitist social engineers that would be expected to manage the gears of a new technocratic feudal machine. This neo-paganism is not intrinsically different from the cultish beliefs of the Nazi Thule society of the past which gave spiritual direction to the members of Hitler’s government.

The neo-Malthusian revival that these eugenicists would spearhead through the end of the 1960s took the form of a new array of international organizations which incorporated systems analysis, and cybernetics, which aimed to control nation states and ecosystems alike. This took the form of the World Economic Forum’s early embrace of the Club of Rome’s computer models outlined by Aurelio Peccei (and incorporated into Schwab’s second official Davos meeting in 1973). These new models aimed to impose fixed immutable limits to humanity’s growth potential beyond which no technology or scientific discovery could ever penetrate. The fact that these same multibillionaires managing the overhaul of the world economy as it transitioned into a neo-liberal looting operation were simultaneously funding the growth of this new array of “new rights” groups led by a growing armada of non-governmental organizations, ecology protection and human rights groups is not a coincidence.

Today’s involvement of both Julian Huxley’s WWF and IUCN (no renamed Conservation International) as partners with the Intrinsic Exchange Group should not make any honest lover of nature in any way comfortable.

Much more obviously remains to be said both about the history of conservationism, and how it is being used once again to conduct a new age of population control, or how it has been used to disrupt large scale infrastructure projects across the world for over 120 years, or how nature reserves across the global south have supported narco terrorist groups.

However, for the time being, it is sufficient to note that the world’s developing sector is generally not going to accept being sacrificed on the altar of a new Gaia cult managed by a priesthood of Davos billionaires. Based on the momentum we see being driven by the Greater Eurasian Partnership, the Belt and Road Initiative and ambitions from Latin American and African leaders to finally break free of centuries of imperial manipulation, it is becoming increasingly obvious that COP26’s utopic computer models are increasingly breaking down when confronted with the reality of humanity’s creative power to leap outside of the fixed rules of imperial games when a true crisis moves us into action.

November 22, 2021 Posted by aletho | Economics, Environmentalism, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Latin America, Mexico, WEF, WWF | Leave a comment

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Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda

Dr. Joseph Mercola | July 9, 2022

“Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda,” is the fourth vaccine-related documentary by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. It tells the story of an intentional infertility vaccine program conducted on African women, without their knowledge or consent.

While it’s been brushed off as a loony conspiracy theory for years, there’s compelling evidence showing it did, in fact, happen, and there’s nothing to prevent it from happening again. … continue

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