I guess you remember how a few years ago, the media called everyone who refused to wear a mask or get vaccinated a ‘grandma killer’. To protect the elderly, to save every minute of their lives – that was all what mattered.
Here is something to think about: Last week, I stumbled upon an article in a Dutch mainstream newspaper which declared in a technical and deliberate way that the ‘mysteriously persisting excess death’ has certain advantages: it saves the state hundreds of millions of costs of taking care for old people. I checked my calendar. An April fools’ joke maybe? No – it was no joke.
One could argue, of course, that this is just one article. What am I making a fuss about? Let me give you another example. A few weeks ago, the director of a government health insurance fund stated in an article published on the website of Belgian national television that euthanasia should be considered as a solution for the rapid ageing of the population. Exactly. Old people cost too much money. Let’s kill them.
These too are the words of only one man. Yet such words are not printed in the newspapers in such a guileless way if there is not a certain tolerance for such messages in society.
Let’s face it: some people want to get rid of the elderly. And these people look suspiciously a lot like those who blamed you for being a heartless criminal when you suggested that the corona measures would do the elderly more harm than good.
Upon a closer examination, the sentimental ‘protection of the elderly’ during the corona crisis was rather cruel and absurd. For instance: why were the elderly dying in hospitals not allowed to see their children and grandchildren? Because the virus could kill them while they were dying?
Beneath the surface of the state’s concern about the elderly lurks exactly the opposite: the state wants to get rid of the elderly. Soon there might be a consensus: everyone who wants to live beyond the age of seventy-five is irresponsible and egoistic – a grandson killer. At least these old bastards must pay a carbon tax.
And in the end, not only old people have to die. Humans cause climate change – they are a detrimental virus proliferating on the surface of the earth. The planet would be better off without humans.
How did we come to this point? Is there an elite who used propaganda to make us think like this? There is much more than that.
Jacques Ellul taught us that, for propaganda to be successful, it must always resonate with a deep desire in the population. Here is what I think: society is suicidal. That’s why it is more and more open to propaganda suggesting death is the best solution to our problems. That’s why so many people sleepwalk into war with Russia; that’s why so many people don’t really care about the ‘mysteriously persisting excess death’ or even think ‘it has certain advantages’.
And think about the corona measures: They wrecked the economy, destroyed the psychological well-being of people, ruined the health and wealth of children and adults, stripped us of our democratic rights. And all this without any reasonable degree of certainty that the measures would protect us from anything at all. Many people even participated in a quasi-ecstatic way in the corona measures.
That’s exactly what characterizes ritualistic behavior: it has no pragmatic meaning, it demands a sacrifice of the individual, and it leads to a certain ecstasy.
The ritualization of death manifests in its most pure form in the global advance of the practice of state-controlled euthanasia or ‘medically assisted dying’. More and more people wish to die, but they are not allowed to take the decision themselves or do it in their own way. Psychiatrists and psychotherapists are under increasing pressure to report every patient who expresses suicidal wishes. Subsequently, these patients can apply for euthanasia.
Should you want to die, you first have to go through a bureaucratic procedure which will determine whether they have the right to die; should this procedure decide you are eligible for dying, the state will kill you using the ‘right’ procedure.
The leaders of society, whether they know it or not, always have the function to orchestrate rituals. Man is a symbolic being, and society, in the first place, is a shared symbolic system and a shared symbolic-ritualistic practice.
Why do people participate in these state rituals of death? Through participating in rituals, an individual shows that its individual existence is less important than the collective existence. Rituals, in the end, are symbolic behaviors through which an individual transcends its individual existence.
Human beings need rituals. In particular when they feel disconnected and isolated. And that’s exactly what most people feel in this era of the mechanist worldview: disconnected and isolated. Here’s a quote of Aldous Huxley:
‘During the past century the successive advances in technology have been accompanied by corresponding advances in organization. Complicated machinery has had to be matched by complicated social arrangements, designed to work as smoothly and efficiently as the new instruments of production. In order to fit into these organizations, individuals have had to deindividualize themselves, have had to deny their native diversity and conform to a standard pattern, have had to do their best to become automata. […] People are related to one another, not as total personalities, but as the embodiments of economic functions or, when they are not at work, as irresponsible seekers of entertainment. Subjected to this kind of life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence ceases to have any point or meaning.’ – (Brave New World – Revisited).
The mechanist worldview pulverized society, it fragmented it into elementary particles, lonely like a reed that does no longer sing in the wind. Never before has humanity been so much in need of rituals. And never before has it ignored the importance of rituals as much as it does now. In a mechanist-materialist worldview, rituals are completely meaningless.
The entire madness of totalitarianism, with its limitless proliferation of bureaucratic rules, which in the end suffocates the entire society and proves extremely lethal, exactly boils down to this: it represents the return, in an excessive way, of a repressed Truth: the human being is a symbolic being, a being which needs rituals.
Seasoned veterinarians and livestock producers alike have been scratching their heads trying to understand the media’s response to the avian flu. Headlines across every major news outlet warn of humans becoming infected with the “deadly” bird flu after one reported case of pink-eye in a human.
The entire narrative is predicated upon a long-disputed claim that Covid-19 was the result of a zoonotic jump—the famed Wuhan bat wet-market theory.
While the source of Covid is hotly contested within the scientific community, the policy vehicle at the center of this dialectic began years prior to Sars-CoV-2 and is quite resolute in force and effect.
In 2016, the Gates Foundation donated to the World Health Organization to create the OneHealth Initiative. Since 2020, the CDC has adopted and implemented the OneHealth Initiative to build a “collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach—working at the local, regional, national, and global levels—with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment.”
In the aftermath of Covid-19, the OneHealth Initiative began taking shape, due largely in part to millions of tax dollars appropriated through ARP (American Rescue Plan) funding.
Through its APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Investigation System) the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) was given $300 million in 2021 to begin implementing “a risk-based, comprehensive, integrated disease monitoring and surveillance system domestically…to build additional capacity for zoonotic disease surveillance and prevention,” globally.
“The One Health concept recognizes that the health of people, animals, and the environment are all linked,” said USDA Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs Jenny Lester Moffitt.
According to the USDA’s press release, the Biden-Harris administration’s OneHealth approach will also help to ensure “new markets and streams of income for farmers and producers using climate smart food and forestry practices,” by “making historic investments in infrastructure and clean energy capabilities in rural America.”
In other words, the federal government is using regulatory enforcement to intervene in the marketplace, in addition to subsidizing corporations with tax dollars to direct a planned economic outcome—ending meat consumption.
Climate-Smart Commodities – Planning the Economy through Subsidized Intervention
Under the recently announced Climate-Smart Commodities program, the USDA has appropriated $3.1 billion in tax subsidies to one hundred and forty-one new private Climate-Smart projects, ranging from carbon sequestration to Climate-Smart meat and forestry practices.
Private investors such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – who just committed $1 billion to the development of lab cultured meat-like molds, and meat grown in petri dishes, to
Ballpark, formerly known for its hot dogs but is now harvesting python meat, is rushing to cash in on this new industry, and the OneHealth/USDA certification program.
Culling The Herd – Regulatory Intervention in the Marketplace
Meanwhile, the last vestiges of America’s food freedom and decentralized food sources are quietly being targeted by the full force of the federal government.
The once voluntary APHIS System is poised to become the mandatory APHIS-15, which among many other changes, “the system will be renamed Animal Health, Disease, and Pest Surveillance and Management System, USDA/APHIS-15. This system is used by APHIS to collect, manage, and evaluate animal health data for disease and pest control and surveillance programs.”
Among those “many changes” that APHIS-15 is undergoing, one should be of particular interest to the public—the removal of all references to the voluntary* Bovine Johne’s Disease Control Program.
“Updating the authority for maintenance of the system to remove reference to the Bovine Johne’s Disease Control Program.”
According to the USDA/APHIS-15, expanded authority places disease tracing in their jurisdiction and the radio frequency ear tags are necessary for the “rapid and accurate recordkeeping for this volume of animals and movement,” which they say “is not achievable without electronic systems.”
The notice clearly spells out that RFID tags “may be read without restraint as the animal goes past an electronic reader.”
“Once the reader scans the tag, the electronically collected tag number can be rapidly and accurately transmitted from the reader to a connected electronic database.”
However, industry leaders and lawmakers alike have said the database will be used to track vaccination history and movement, and that this data may be used to impact the market rate of cattle and bison at the time of processing.
Centralized Control of Processing/Production via Public-Private Partnership Agreements
In addition to the vast new authority of the USDA funded through the OneHealth Initiative, and the ARP, the EPA has also created its own unique set of regulatory burdens upon the entire meat industry.
On March 25, 2024, the EPA finalized a new set of Clean Water Act rule changes to limit nitrogen and phosphorus “pollutants” in downstream water treatment facilities from processing facilities. While the EPA’s interpretation of authority and jurisdiction over wastewater is concerning long-term, the broader context of consolidated processing under four multinational meat-packing companies is of much greater concern for the immediate future.
With few exceptions, in the United States it is illegal to sell meat without a USDA certification. Currently, the only way to access USDA certification is through a USDA-certified processing facility.
According to the EPA, the new rules will impact up to 845 processing facilities nationwide, unless facilities drastically limit the amount of meat they process each year.
With processing capabilities being the number one barrier to market for livestock producers, and billions of dollars in grants being awarded to Climate-Smart food substitutes, the amount of government intervention into the marketplace becomes very clear.
The Rise of Authoritarianism and Economic Fascism – Control the Supply
The United States, once a consumer-demand free market society, is currently witnessing the use of government force, and intervention tactics to steer and manipulate the marketplace. Similar to 1930’s Italy, this is being achieved by the state within the state, through the use of selectionism, protectionism, and economic planning between public-private partnership agreements.
The long-term and unavoidable problem with economic fascism is that it leads to authoritarian and centralized control, from which escape is impossible.
As each industry becomes centralized and consolidated under the few, consumer choice simultaneously disappears. As choice disappears, so does the ability of the individual to meet their specific and unique needs.
Eventually, the individual no longer serves a role outside of its usefulness to the state—the final exhale before the last python squeeze.
Every new-build home in Poland must be net-zero compliant on carbon emissions from 2030 onwards, thanks to a new law from Brussels.
All other buildings are expected to achieve this status by 2050; by 2040, there will also be a ban on heating homes with coal and gas, and in just three years these fuels will become more expensive to use in homes.
Deputy Minister of Finance Paweł Karbownik, representing Poland at the Council of the European Union, abstained from voting. Last week, the Council adopted the directive on the energy efficiency of buildings, imposing the obligation to renovate and universally install solar panels, as well the removal of coal and gas furnaces.
Four others also abstained, including those from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, while ministers from Italy and Hungary expressed their opposition. The regulations were supported by 20 countries in all.
Now, Donald Tusk’s government has two years to develop detailed legislation that will implement one of the most controversial and expensive EU directives.
It’s not only a problem of the huge cost of the renovations for old houses, apartment blocks, and public buildings, but also about the stringent deadlines for implementing the regulations and the requirements to install heat pumps and solar panels.
Former Minister of Climate and Environment Anna Łukaszewska-Trzeciakowska noted that the former conservative government in Warsaw led by Mateusz Morawiecki appealed against the draft directive to the European Court of Justice. But the left-liberal Tusk government’s representative did not dare to vote against it, so the question arises whether the government is even aware of what is happening and what the consequences of implementing all these measures will be for the economy and society.
These regulations are unenforceable, unrealistic, and very expensive. I am only afraid that before we realize that it is impossible to implement them, we will have spent hundreds of billions of zlotys anyway.
The implications are that Poland only has nine years to renovate its oldest and most emissive housing. The challenge is enormous, since even in Polish metropolises there are entire estates of uninsulated houses, and in smaller towns and villages, many houses date back to the 1950s and 1960s and are heated by coal.
A similar scale of challenges and the requirement to reduce energy consumption apply to non-residential buildings, such as offices and schools, cinemas and theaters, but also health centers.
Taking into account the rising costs of building materials, thoroughly modernizing a house or block of flats will be expensive. Installing a heat pump in a single-family house, depending on its type, costs at least 40-70,000 zlotys (approximately €9,300-16,300), and solar panels at least 20-30,000 zlotys (approximately €4,600-7000). Therefore, the owners of a house now heated with coal or gas will have to spend well over 100,000 zlotys (over €23,200) to comply with the directive.
On April 17, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban spoke at this year’s National Conservatism (NatCon) conference, a gathering of conservative political parties in the European Union, as the name aptly suggests. Dubbed the “gathering of Europe’s far right” by the mainstream propaganda machine, NatCon is indeed opposed to the ultra-liberal ideology and policies of the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. Thus, it’s hardly surprising that Orban was quite critical of the troubled bloc’s numerous failures, as he openly urged voters to reject mainstream political parties in the upcoming EU elections. Orban even called on the political leadership in Brussels to resign, pointing out that all of their major projects and policies, such as the so-called “green transition”, sustainable development, migration, military and sanctions, etc. failed.
“The sense of this European election is: change the leadership,” he stated, adding: “If the leadership proves to be bad, it must be replaced. That’s so simple.”
For the Associated Press, this was “too much”, as the major mainstream propaganda machine outlet complained about the applause that Orban, a “right-wing populist leader” according to them, got for those words. He also criticized the EU’s suicidal climate policies and agriculture rules that make it impossible for farmers across the EU to stay in business. In addition, Orban warned that the ongoing migration crisis is getting out of hand and that the possible admission of the Kiev regime to the EU or NATO should not be allowed, primarily for economic and security reasons. He also criticized the European Commission, the bloc’s effectively unelected executive body, for using the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to attack his country, slamming the EC for an attempt to “suffocate Hungary financially”.
And indeed, the Brussels bureaucrats illegally denied giving Budapest access to billions of euros in funds over alleged “concerns about democratic backsliding in the country”, as well as the “possible mismanagement of EU money”. In Orban’s view, this is nothing more than an attempt to blackmail the country due to his strong stance on all of the aforementioned policies and ideologies that the political West subscribes to nowadays. He also reiterated that the failures extend to the self-defeating sanctions on Russia. The mainstream propaganda machine usually accuses Orban of being a supposed “staunch ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin” for such a stance, particularly when it comes to his opposition to the change of Ukraine’s status as a potential geopolitical buffer zone between the EU/NATO and Russia.
In addition, Orban called the Neo-Nazi junta “just a protectorate relying on Western money and weapons, not a sovereign state anymore”. Expectedly, this wasn’t met with approval in Brussels, which even tried to prevent this year’s NatCon, citing alleged “security concerns” as the excuse for it. The AP called the conference “a gathering of strident nationalists and fundamentalist Christians”, complaining about the fact that it resumed after winning a legal challenge against Brussels city authorities which tried to prevent it under the pretext that it posed “a threat to public order”. Other prominent EU conservative figures, such as Eric Zemmour from France, were to attend the NatCon. However, Zemmour was held by the police, preventing his address about the EU’s immigration rules that can only be described as suicidal.
And while the mainstream propaganda machine is shrieking at the very idea someone would dare criticize and strongly oppose any (let alone all) of the aforementioned policies, the obvious question arises – is the so-called “far right” in the EU right (no pun intended)? Can anyone really refute Orban’s claim that the political leadership in Brussels is incompetent when they say things like “Russia is losing so badly that its military is forced to take chips out of washing machines“? Such ludicrous propaganda myths clearly indicate that the so-called “EU elites” are far more like flea market salesmen, rather than leaders who could ever be taken seriously. What’s more, Orban is certainly not alone in his criticism, as Prime Minister Robert Fico of the neighboring Slovakia expressed similar concerns, particularly about Ukraine.
However, the conservatives are (rightfully) concerned about the demographic and security consequences of such policies. The extremist ultra-liberal ideology that the political West increasingly subscribes to is incompatible with the more traditional values of both the immigrants and indigenous Europeans. This is already causing a plethora of societal and safety problems across the continent, so encouraging immigration will only exacerbate the situation. The ongoing deindustrialization of the EU’s most powerful economies is certainly not making things better, as the largely unskilled labor force that most immigrants belong to will not be able to contribute economically, which opens a lot of questions about potential security risks in the foreseeable future. However, asking about it is usually deemed too “far right”.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Trigger warning: if your household companions include a cat, dog, canary, goldfish or turtle, this article is not a safe space. I’m writing about Harvard’s distinguished agnatologist Professor Naomi Oreskes (above) and her 2014 warning that global warming would kill your pets in 2023. The warning is in her acclaimed but glum book The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. Given margins of error in climate science, the pet die-off might be this year instead. Oreskes wrote,
The loss of pet cats and dogs garnered particular attention among wealthy Westerners, but what was anomalous in 2023 soon became the new normal . … A shadow of ignorance and denial had fallen over people who considered themselves children of the Enlightenment (p9).
Smarter climate alarmists don’t make short-term predictions. They choose a date like 2050 for when the oceans will boil. They’ll be senile or dead by then and can’t be humiliated if the oceans stay chilly.
Top environmentalist Paul Ehrlich forecast in 1971 that by 2000 the UK “will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”[1]His 1968 book, Population Bomb, predicted starvation would shrink the US population to 23 million by 1999. Strangely, Oreskes in her book hails Ehrlich as a vindicated futurist. (p3-4 and 56).
The only good news from Naomi is that the IPCC becomes [more] discredited and is disbanded. She replaces it with such alphabet soups as the UNCCEP’s ICCEP which launches IAICEP, which she says is pronounced “ay-yi-yi-sep” (p27).The mission of ay-yi-yi-sep is to sprinkle enough fairy dust aka sulphates in the air to make an anti-sun umbrella and save the planet by 2079.
In September 2014 she was interviewed on the ABC’s Science Show by Dr (honoris causa) Robyn Williams, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, about the pet-deaths. One reader, she explained,
… started crying when the pets die, so I didn’t mean to upset people too much … I was just trying to come up with something that I thought people wouldn’t forget about, and I thought, ‘Well, Americans spend billions of dollars every year taking care of their pets’, and I thought if people’s dogs started dying, maybe then they would sit up and take notice.
Interviewer Dr Williams[2] was delighted with Oreskes’ pet-panic strategy. He chimed in,
Yes, not only because it’s an animal but it’s local. You see, one criticism of the scientists is they’re always talking about global things…And so if you are looking at your village, your animals, your fields, your park, your kids, and the scientists are talking about a small world that you know, then it makes a greater impact, doesn’t it.
Oreskes: Well, exactly. It was about bringing it literally home, literally into your home, your family, your pet, the dog or cat that you love who is your faithful and trusted companion.
As I type this, I look down fondly at Natasha, our doomed spaniel, although she is neither faithful nor trustworthy.
Oreskes began her Science Show appearance by reading from her book in sepulchrul tones:
Then, in the northern hemisphere summer of 2041, unprecedented heatwaves scorched the planet [and] led to widespread outbreaks of typhus, cholera, dengue fever, yellow fever, and viral and retroviral agents never seen before.
Naomi’s actually playing down her future horrors, she omits to tell him about the arrival of the Black Death:
Dislocation contributed to the Second Black Death, as a new strain of the bacterium Yersinia pestis emerged in Europe and spread to Asia and North America. In the Middle Ages, the Black Death killed as much as half the population of some parts of Europe; this second Black Death had similar effects. (p30).
Australians will wonder: does Medicare charge extra premiums to cover bubonic plague?
Williams, instead of asking Oreskes what she’s smoking, merely observed that all of the above is “fairly shocking”. He further wondered why it is only Western civilization that collapses, leaving the Chinese in charge. One reason, says Oreskes, is that Chinese civilisation is more durable, and two, that authoritarian regimes are better able to deal with hypothesised climate apocalypses.
Looking back from the future, Oreskes viewed China in the early 2000s as a beacon of carbon enlightenment. China, she said,
… took steps to control its population and convert its economy to non – carbon – based energy sources. These efforts were little noticed and less emulated in the West, in part because Westerners viewed Chinese population control efforts as immoral, and in part because the country’s exceptionally fast economic expansion led to a dramatic increase in greenhouse gas emissions, masking the impact of renewable energy. By 2050 , this impact became clear as China’s emissions began to fall rapidly. Had other nations followed China’s lead, the [grim future] history recounted here might have been very different. (p6).[3]
Interviewer: Just how much do you hate the American way of life? What gives you the intellectual chutzpah to make these kinds of projections?
Oreskes: Our story is a call to protect the American way of life before it’s too late.
I identify with Oreskes, who grew up in New York, because as a lass she was a geologist working on Western Mining Corp’s Olympic project in central Australia. I phoned WMC’s retired boss Hugh Morgan but he couldn’t give me any piquant anecdotes about young Naomi.
Her sojourn Down Under must have been unhappy because she’s forecast that the climate emergency will kill off every Australian man woman and child (all 26 million of us). “The human populations of Australia and Africa, of course, were wiped out.” (p33). As a resident of Australia’s pagan state of Victoria, I don’t believe in the afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear. (Witticism courtesy Woody Allen).
Oreskes dropped geology to co-write that Merchants of Doubt book, painting “climate deniers” as the evil twins of those denying that smoking causes cancer. The book in 2021 was set to music by composer Yvette Jackson, who sees climate doubt as having the
… low, somber insistence of the bass clarinet, skittering flute that cranks up anxiety, sonorous cello to hold things together, and the deep, doubting rumble of double bass.
At 65, Naomi’s job title is Harvard Professor of the History of Science — but don’t call, she’s on leave. She co-wrote her civilisational-collapse book with fellow alarmist Erik Conway. Her other collaborators include Pope Francis: she did the intro for his Laudato si’ encyclical in 2015.
Wikipedia lists only 30 of her honours, including the Stephen H. Schneider Award in 2016 for communicating “extraordinary scientific contributions” to a broad public in a clear and compelling fashion. Schneider (1945-2010) was a top IPCC climate scientist. He urged colleagues there to strike a balance between scaring the pants off the public and being honest about how weak the CO2 evidence really is. Oreskes also scored the 2019 Mary Rabbit Award from the US Geological Society. Her lifetime of bashing denialists is surely worth a million-dollar Nobel.
The Collapse book is about Western civilisation’s ruin while China saves the planet with its enlightened anti-CO2 measures. She is writing from the future in 2393 when she will be aged 435. Oreskes (as at 2393) is cross because we have refused to build enough windmills to stop at 11degC warming (p32) and eight-metre sea rises (p30). We should not have eaten so many fillet steaks[4] and, personally, I should not have tooled around in my reasonably priced, petrol-powered Hyundai i30 when Teslas were available at $80,000.
Oreskes was talking about Collapse at a Sydney Writers’ Festival when someone in the audience piped up, “Will you write fiction next?” She doesn’t of course view Collapse as fiction: “Speculative? Of course, but the book is extremely fact-based” (p79). And she elaborated to the ABC’s Dr Williams, “Well, it’s all based on solid science. Everything in this book is based on the scientific projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. All we did was to add to the social and human aspects to it and to ask the question; what does this really mean in terms of what its potential impacts would be on people and its potential impacts on our institutions of governance?”
Her “science based” technical projection involved an angry summer in 2023 continuing year-round, “taking 500,000 lives worldwide and costing nearly $ 500 billion in losses due to fires , crop failure , and the deaths of livestock and companion animals” (p8) In 2014, how was Naomi (no-one’s perfect) to know that current agricultural output and yields continue smashing records?
The book’s “fact-based” projections have drought and desert ravaging the US in the 2050s:
The US government declared martial law to prevent food riots and looting [similar to 2020s’ mostly-peaceful burning and robbing]. A few years later, the United States announced plans with Canada for the two nations to begin negotiations … to develop an orderly plan for resource-sharing and northward population relocation (p26).
The talks led to the combined United States of North America. I imagine Texans started adding “eh” to their sentences, as in Why do Canadians say “eh?”? It’s so silly right?Because we want to, eh.
Even at the age of 435 in 2393, Oreskes remains really sore about the Climategate email scandal of 2009 (IPCC climate scientists conspiring to fudge data). She blames Climategate on a “massive campaign” that was “funded primarily by fossil fuel corporations” (p8) — this alleged largesse must have by-passed sceptic bloggers, who still rely on their tip jars.Oreskes remains vigilant to smite deniers:
It will also be crucial not to allow new forms of denial to take hold. We are already seeing examples, such as the false claim that off-shore wind kills whales and that restrictions on gas stoves are the latest excuse by liberals to control our lives and deny our freedom. Scientists will have to work with climate activists to block the spread of such misleading narratives.
She finished her interview with the ABC’s Dr Williams by claiming, improbably, that some readers of Collapse wished her 80-page book to be longer. She explained,
We didn’t want it to be too depressing, we didn’t want to go on and on and on, like 300 pages of misery, that really wouldn’t be any fun. So we are sort of hoping that the book, despite the fact that it’s a depressing topic, it’s actually we think kind of a fun read.
Apart from our dead kittens, that is.
[1]Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971. Link broken.
[2] The ABC Ombudsman told me it’s fine for people with honorary doctorates to be called “Dr” in any context.
“The ABC style guide does not form part of the editorial standards and we consider there is nothing materially inaccurate in referring to Ms O’Donoghue as Dr O’Donoghue.” Email from James, Investigations Officer, ABC Ombudsman’s Office, Feb 14, 2024. (The late Ms Donoghue’s Doctorates are honorary).
[3] On the ABC iview’s posting of the Oreskes/Williams interview, the ABC claimed the planet was warming at the top of the IPCC models’ forecasting. I wrote to my friend Kirsten McLiesh, who runs Audience & Consumer Affairs (i.e. the complaints department) pointing out that actual warming was at the bottom of the IPCC models’ range. In those days (2014) the ABC had some integrity and Kirsten wrote back,
“Having been alerted to your complaint, the program acknowledges that the sentence read on the website as an incontrovertible fact and have undertaken to remove it. An Editor’s Note has been added to the page.”
[4] Oreskes, Twitter May 4, 2023: “I’m often asked “What can I do to stop climate change.” That’s a hard question because so much of the change we need is structural, but this new study proves one thing: EAT LESS BEEF. (And now, drum roll, here come the beef industry trolls.)”
Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here
There’s been a drastic drop in the registration of new electric cars in Germany as sales of the “clean” electric cars have slumped nearly 30% compared to a year earlier, reports Germany’s online Blackout News.
The massive sales drop is bad news for the current German socialist-green government, which aims to have 15 million vehicles on the road by 2030. Currently there are just 1.4 million!
The dismal trend underscores the unpopularity of electric cars and consumers’ hesitancy when it comes to purchasing them. Electric vehicles are plagued by limited range, sparse charging infrastructure, steep upfront purchase price and their huge environmental impact, which involves the largescale mining of rare earths.
“Their market share has fallen to just 11.9%. This casts a harsh light on the mismatch between Germany’s political goals and the reality of the automotive market. It is clear that political incentives and measures are inadequate,” reports Blackout News. “The abolition of the electric bonus at the end of 2023 has revealed another problem. The sector’s dependence on state subsidies became apparent. This has further exacerbated the crisis of confidence in the electric car market.”
Fahrverbot: Germany floats national weekend driving ban!
Another possible reason for hesitancy when it comes to purchasing a new car of any type may be partly due to the government’s general hostility to private mobility.
Germany’s federal minister of transportation, Dr. Volker Wissing, is threatening to ban driving on weekends by motorists in order for the country “to meet climate goals set forth by the Climate Protection Act.”
“A reduction in traffic to help meet the climate goals would only be possible through measures that are difficult to communicate to the public, such as ‘comprehensive and indefinite driving bans on Saturdays and Sundays,’ Wissing added,” so reports Politico.
Germany’s transportation sector would need to reduce CO2 by 22 million tonnes to meet its climate goals.
So, what’s the point of buying a new car when drivers nay be forced to leave them in the garage every weekend? Germany’s economy and energy policy has turned into a circus run by clowns.
Welcome. This is James Corbett of corbettreport.com with the last word on overpopulation.
As human beings, we are hard wired to be constantly on the lookout for potential dangers. This is to be expected. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors had to be ever-vigilant to the threat of natural predators, contagious disease and inclement weather, or suffer the consequences. Today we have largely overcome many of the natural dangers which plagued our forebears, but the same instincts compel us to guard against threats both real and imagined, and heed the call of those who raise the alarm of potential new threats.
This concept has been well understood for thousands of years by those who have sought to control populations.
Before the modern understanding of our solar system had been articulated, the ancient Egyptians believed that the sun itself was a god named Ra who was devoured every evening by an evil snake god named Apep. It was by no means assured that Ra would be able to escape Apep to return in the morning, and the priest class manipulated this basic fear by developing elaborate rites for warding off the snake god. These rites, of course, could only be properly administered by the priests themselves, thus assuring them a central role in ancient Egyptian society.
We may laugh at the gullibility of the ancient Egyptians, but for them the existence of Apep and the importance of the rituals were instilled from an early age and reinforced by the pronouncements of the priestly class. To question the reality of the sun god myth would have been akin to questioning the fabric of Egyptian society itself.
To think that we are not capable of being similarly manipulated in our modern “enlightened” era would be the grossest form of historical naïveté.
In the 20th century, fears over the red menace of the Soviet Union and its supposed military juggernaut were used to steer the course of American society. Jack Kennedy himself became president campaigning on the notion that the Eisenhower administration had allowed a dangerous missile gap to build up between the Soviets and the Americans. According to this scare story, fed to the Kennedy campaign by RAND Corporation analysts, the Soviet Union had 500 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles ready to fire at America at a moment’s notice. In reality, the Soviets only had 4 such missiles at that time, but that did not stop the military-industrial propaganda machine from convincing Americans that they had to pump ever more of their resources into arms purchases from defense contractors in order to counter the Soviet threat.
Incredibly, in some cases the same threat has been touted for centuries, always coming with the same dire warnings that the end of the world is nigh unless the public is willing to give up money, sovereignty, or even their lives in order to avert it.
In the late 18th century an Anglican priest named Thomas Malthus demonstrated with “mathematical certainty” that the world was heading toward demographic disaster. After all, human population increases exponentially while food supply increases arithmetically. From this it logically follows that it is only a matter of time before the world population outstrips our ability to feed ourselves.
Thomas Malthus
Of course, just as a parent might look at his infant son’s first year of growth and extrapolate that he will be 20 feet tall by the time he’s 30, over 200 years of the expected population crisis failing to arrive has demonstrated that there are fundamental flaws in Malthus’ reasoning. The earth is not a zero-sum game and human ingenuity has always and in every generation manged to bake a bigger pie even as they take a bigger and bigger slice of it. Now even the United Nations’ most alarmist predictions admit that global population will level off and begin declining in 2050, and Malthus is now understood to have been a third-rate scholar spreading Chicken Little sky-is-falling fantasies for the benefit of the British East India Company that employed him.
Amazingly, though, despite every one of the doomsday predictions of Malthus and his Malthusian acolytes proving to be false decade after decade for two centuries on end, Malthus’ ideas are still being taken seriously and still being hyped and promoted by the moneyed oligarchs who benefit from the idea that there are too many useless eaters using up the world’s resources.
Malthus himself, an Anglican minister, wrote that: “We are bound in justice and honour formally to disdain the Right of the poor to support,” arguing for a law making it illegal for the Anglican church to give any food, clothing or support to any children. Not content with consigning thousands of children to death for the misfortune of being born poor, however, Malthus also advocated actively contributing to the deaths of more of the poor through social engineering:
“Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlement in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and restrain those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they are doing a service to mankind by protecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.”
The horrific nature of this idea is made all the more preposterous by the fact that Malthus was encouraging the spread of disease and plague in order to “save” humanity from the diseases and plagues that overpopulation fosters. But this self-contradiction is completely lost on those whose bloodlust drives them to support such drastic population reduction schemes to kill of the poor and downtrodden of society.
As repulsive as Malthus’ ideas are to our sensibilities, they have provided an ideological framework for those with a psychopathic urge to dominate others for the past two hundred years.
In his infamous 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne wrote: “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. [. . .] We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.” He felt the cancer of newborn babies was so potentially devastating to humanity that in 1969 he actually advocated adding sterilants to the food and water supply. Lest there were any doubt about his remarks, he further elaborated on them in Ecoscience, a 1977 book that he co-authored with Obama’s current science czar, John Holdren, where they once again advocated adding sterilants to the water supply.
In 1972, ex-World Bank advisor and UN functionary Maurice Strong advocated government licensing for women’s right to have children.
In 1988, Prince Philip uttered his deplorable comment, “[i]n the event I am reborn, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”
In the 1990s, Ted Turner told Audubon magazine that a total world population of 250-300 million people—a 95 percent decline from present levels—would be ideal.
Of course, the overpopulation myth itself crumbles under the slightest scrutiny. No one, not even the UN, is projecting limitless growth of the human population. Even the most alarmist projections show the world population leveling off within 40 years. What’s more, the birth rate in every major industrialized nation in the world is now below the replacement level of 2.1, meaning that they are in fact dying nations of aging populations that require an ever-increasing influx of immigrants just to maintain their population level. In addition to the well-known phenomenon of industrialization reducing the sizes of families, there are now indications that chemicals called endocrine disruptors which are mysteriously ending up in our foods, plastics and drinking water are limiting our biological ability to reproduce, with sperm rates among Western men declining a staggering 50% in the last 50 years with 85% of the remaining sperm being abnormal.
But still, even if we were to take the hysteria over population size at face value, the “solutions” suggested by the Malthusians—forced sterilization programs, de-industrialization, and even genocide—represent the biggest fraud of all: the idea that merely reducing the size of a population will somehow reduce the inequalities and iniquities within that society.
NARRATOR: War, one of the leading causes of world hunger, destroys crops and disrupts relief efforts. Widespread poverty prevents many from buying the food that they need. And a lack of infrastructure means that there isn’t a reliable way to transport food to areas that need it.
This is why reducing the number of hungry people will not make the remaining people less hungry. Those who have access to the food will continue to have access to it, and those who don’t will still be hungry.
Reducing population will not magically cause food to be spread around equally. And blaming overpopulation for everything does nothing but distract us from the real problems that we actually have.
But therein lies the secret. The people who fret over the overpopulation non-problem cannot be reasoned with because their concern for humanity is only a pretense. The way they approach the problem itself displays their bias. Most people see an increase in the number of people on the planet not as a scourge, but as an opportunity to increase our understanding of the human species and its capabilities. In the twisted vision of the overpopulation fearmongers, however, newborn babies are not a joy to behold, not a gift, not the living, breathing potential of the future of the human race, but a cancer that must be killed.
The Malthusians are not interested in increasing food production, lifting the poor out of poverty or developing technology to increase our ability to share in the abundant wealth of the world. Instead they wish for the forcible sterilization of the poor, the consignment of billions around the world to grinding poverty and the elimination of vast swathes of the population. They do not wish to reduce the pain and suffering in the world, but to increase it. In short, the overpopulation hysteria is a convenient lie for the Chicken Littles who stand to benefit from the panic they themselves cause.
For the rest of us, it comes down to a simple question: After 200 years of the sky failing to fall, isn’t it time to stop listening to Chicken Little?
For The Corbett Report in western Japan, I am James Corbett.
Who is Pushkov? Below is his bio; but important to note that he is also claimed to be a good friend of Vladimir Putin.
Aleksey Konstantinovich Pushkov, born 10 August 1954, is a Russian politician who has been Senator from Perm Krai since 29 September 2016. He is also a former Deputy of the State Duma and former head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament. As a member of the United Russia political party in the federation council, he is the chairman of the Commission on Information Policy.
What did Pushkov say, and how was it reported? Here is what RIA reported in English:
This film exposes the climate alarm as an invented scare without any basis in science. It shows that mainstream studies and official data do not support the claim that we are witnessing an increase in extreme weather events – hurricanes, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires and all the rest. It emphatically counters the claim that current temperatures and levels of atmospheric CO2 are unusually and worryingly high. On the contrary, it is very clearly the case, as can be seen in all mainstream studies, that, compared to the last half billion years of earth’s history, both current temperatures and CO2 levels are extremely and unusually low. We are currently in an ice age. It also shows that there is no evidence that changing levels of CO2 (it has changed many times) has ever ‘driven’ climate change in the past.
Why then, are we told, again and again, that ‘catastrophic man-made climate-change’ is an irrefutable fact? Why are we told that there is no evidence that contradicts it? Why are we told that anyone who questions ‘climate chaos’ is a ‘flat-earther’ and a ‘science-denier’?
The film explores the nature of the consensus behind climate change. It describes the origins of the climate funding bandwagon, and the rise of the trillion-dollar climate industry. It describes the hundreds of thousands of jobs that depend on the climate crisis. It explains the enormous pressure on scientists and others not to question the climate alarm: the withdrawal of funds, rejection by science journals, social ostracism.
But the climate alarm is much more than a funding and jobs bandwagon. The film explores the politics of climate. From the beginning, the climate scare was political. The culprit was free-market industrial capitalism. The solution was higher taxes and more regulation. From the start, the climate alarm appealed to, and has been adopted and promoted by, those groups who favour bigger government.
This is the unspoken political divide behind the climate alarm. The climate scare appeals especially to all those in the sprawling publicly-funded establishment. This includes the largely publicly-funded Western intelligentsia, for whom climate has become a moral cause. In these circles, to criticise or question the climate alarm has become is a breach of social etiquette.
The film was shot on location in the U.S., Canada, Israel, Kenya and UK.
For decades the primary way environmentalists concerned about manmade global warming have advocated to slow it has been to reduce human emissions of the “greenhouse gas” carbon dioxide (mainly from burning coal, oil, and natural gas for energy). Lately they have focused increasingly on contributions from two other “greenhouse gases,” primarily from agriculture—methane (CH4) from livestock flatulence, and nitrous oxide (N2O) from chemical fertilizers.
Why? Because CH4’s forcing effect (the amount of infrared radiation, or heat, each molecule in the atmosphere impedes from escaping from Earth’s surface to space, thus warming the surface) is 30 times, and N2O’s 230 times, that of CO2, as illustrated here:
Why? Because almost all the outgoing longwave radiation (infrared) in the frequency bands CO2 can absorb has already been absorbed—by both CO2 and water vapor (H2O)—while far less in the bands CH4 and N2O can absorb has already been absorbed. So we say CO2’s bands are nearly “saturated,” while CH4’s and N2O’s are nearly “transparent.”
So, it looks like we should be much more concerned about N2O than about CO2 or even CH4. Or should we?
The rate at which we’re adding CO2 to the atmosphere is about 3000 times that at which we’re adding N2O, and 30 times that at which we’re adding CH4, as illustrated here:
Consequently—because CO2’s rate of increase in the atmosphere is so much faster than CH4’s or N2O’s—the contribution to forcing (and so to global average temperature) from CO2 is about 10 times that from CH4 and 13 times that from N2O, as illustrated here:
So, should we reduce CH4 and N2O emissions (by reducing agricultural production) to slow global warming?
As atmospheric physicist and MIT emeritus professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen put it in a talk to Irish beef farmers February 27, “shutting down emissions of CH4 and N2O globally (forget little Ireland) will have no discernible impact on the climate metric regardless of what you believe about global warming and which model you are using.”
Bankrupt, blackout Britain where the ever-expanding ranks of the poor get clobbered, open borders place intolerable burdens on public spending and services, the rich spivs get richer backing heavily-subsidised energy white elephants – and those of a certain age look back to the good old days of the 1970s. That isn’t quite how Professor Gordon Hughes spells it out in his excellent new report that crunches the energy transition numbers of the collectivist Net Zero project, but it might be considered a fair summation of reading between the lines.
The insanity of Net Zero becomes clearer by the day. The idea that hydrocarbons – a natural resource whose use from medicines to reliable energy is ubiquitous in modern industrial society – can be removed within less than 30 years is ridiculous. In his report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Hughes concerns himself with the transition from hydrocarbons to ‘green’ technologies such as wind and solar. Forget all the politically-inspired low-ball figures of transition, he is suggesting. Looking at you, Climate Change Committee. It is likely that the amount of new investment needed for the transition will be a minimum of 5% of gross domestic product for the next 20 years, and might exceed 7.5%. Gordon Hughes is a former World Bank economist, and is Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh.
There is no chance of borrowing such an “astronomical” amount, notes Hughes, and the only viable way to raise the cash for new capital expenditure would be a two decades-long reduction in private consumption of up to 10%. “Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war, and even then never for more than a decade,” he notes.
Recent polling in the U.S. has shown that the desire of a majority of citizens to pay for Net Zero barely stretches to more than the ‘chump’ change in their back pockets. “Commitment to the energy transition is a classic ‘luxury belief’ held most strongly by those who are sufficiently well-off not to worry about the costs… Indeed at least some of those who promote the transition most strongly are among those who expect to gain from the business opportunities.” On this latter point, Hughes was possibly recalling the recent activities of rising media star Dale Vince (£110 million in wind subsidies to date, and counting).
Politicians sometimes blather about the pioneering role taken by European countries in Net Zero. Hughes points out that leaders in China and India are not fools. “Posturing about targets that are patently not achievable and might be economically ruinous is unlikely to convince anyone, although most will be too polite to point this out,” he observed.
Writing a foreword, Lord Frost identified a make-believe world inhabited by Net Zero proponents where it is claimed costs will magically come down, new technologies will somehow be invented and promised green growth will pay for everything. “But they never give any evidence for believing this – and, where we can check what they say, for example in the real costs of wind power, we can see that these cost reductions are simply not happening,” he said.
On the immigration front, Hughes notes a 1% increase in the British population every year. He notes that 4% of GDP must be invested every year in new (not replacement) capital per head. Of course nothing like this is being spent and capital per head is falling rapidly. “Just maintaining the amounts of capital per head will eat up an amount of investment equivalent to that required for the energy transition,” he states.
Squeezing domestic consumption, in other words making the already squeezed poor even poorer by removing all their remaining luxuries in life (older cars, cheap foreign holidays, meat), is the only realistic way to fund the enormous sums required for the Net Zero energy transition. Possibly a glimmer of reality is creeping into political circles with the opposition Labour party having gone through “agonies” and ditched its £28 billion a year green deal. “Clearly, they concluded that it was impossible to sell an increase in the tax burden of that magnitude to a reluctant electorate,” he said. In fact, the sums involved in the Labour plan were only a fifth of the estimated cost of transition.
Any future Government wishing to travel the path of Net Zero must make the choices of reducing public services and mandating savage cuts in household expenditure. Needless to say, the general population is in almost total ignorance about these realities. Hughes notes that the electorate has given no indication that they are willing to bear the costs involved. “Indeed until now all they have been told is that there are few or no trade-offs required, and technology will somehow magically solve everything.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’sEnvironment Editor.
The people leading India and China lack the ability to predict the long-term consequences of their policies, a senior aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has claimed.
Mikhail Podoliak pointed to what he called “the problem of the modern world,” singling out India and China, in an interview with Ukrainian media on Tuesday.
“The problem with these countries is that they do not analyze the consequences of their own moves. These countries, unfortunately, have low intellectual potential,” he said.
Podoliak suggested that even though India has a lunar exploration program, it “does not mean that this nation understands what the modern world precisely is.”
The dismissive remarks were in the context of Beijing and New Delhi’s refusal to support Kiev in its conflict with Moscow. Podoliak complained that India, China and Türkiye were “profiting” from the war by maintaining trade with Russia.
“Technically, it is in their national interests,” he acknowledged, before presenting his view of what would benefit China in the long-run.
“China should be interested in Russia disappearing, because it is an archaic nation that drags China into unnecessary conflicts,” he claimed. … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Russian Senator Aleksey Pushkov took to Telegram to complain about the WHO, and then RIA Novosti reported on it.
Aletho News 