An Australian Hero
Paul Collits is a hero to me.
Of all the interviews I have done so far, with so many amazing people, this is the most personal and significant.
In the darkest of the dark days, the people that I relied on the most to triangulate my sanity were Paul Collits, Michael Yeadon, Malcolm Kendrick, and Jeffrey Tucker.
Paul was different in two ways.
Firstly, he is Australian; there were very few sane people writing anything useful left in this country, and secondly, because of the sheer breadth and depth of his knowledge and insight, as you will soon see.
He helped me with far more than just navigating Covid insanity.
Having the opportunity to do this interview is an absolute honour, and truth be told, I was quite emotional when I first read it.
With thanks and gratitude to Paul Collits, for everything.
1. Paul, could you please start by giving readers a brief overview of your background and journey up to this point
First, many thanks to you for arranging the interview. I am very happy to be involved. I am in my late sixties, now well and truly retired. I live in northern New South Wales, close to the Queensland border. Brisbane is the closest large city. We live in a large rural town of about 30,000 people. I have had a pretty varied career, but mainly I have worked as a civil servant (policy professional) and an academic. In the former role, I have worked for a State Government and for the Feds. In the latter role, I have been both a researcher and a teacher. I have also done a short stint working for a Senator (when I was much younger) and briefly as a local economic development practitioner, in both Australian and New Zealand. So I have had had pretty good exposure to all levels of government. Much of my career was spent in regional economic development, and much of my academic writing was in this area. My initial training was in political science (International relations, political theory, public policy, Australian politics) and my PhD was in urban planning. In “retirement”, I have written on a range of topics related to politics, philosophy, economics, policy, education, religion and public health. I have published in The Spectator Australia, Politicom, Quadrant, The Conservative Woman (UK), The Daily Sceptic, News Weekly and A Sense of Place Magazine. I am the Senior Political Commentator at Politicom. And I have a substack. Briefly, I wrote for The Freedoms Project, a pro-life, Christian-inclined blog.
I think this phrase came from the British Covid hero and former Big Pharma executive, Mike Yeadon. I love Mike’s writing, sincerity, compassion, fierce independence and clear thinking. I think he landed on “convergent opportunism’ as his preferred explanation for the policy debacle over Covid. It is a middle position between the Hanlon’s Razor view – the decision makers were stupid – and the conspiracy theorists who think, probably correctly, that the Covid policy response was born of malfeasance and tyranny. For a political scientist like me, the convergent opportunism thesis had some appeal. It goes to the old Rahm Emmanuel dictum, don’t ever let a crisis go to waste. And to the public choice theory that public officials get captured by powerful interests and have their own private interests separate from the “public good”. Many actors had an interest in erecting the Covid State. And they did. There were the public health officials who discovered their fifteen minutes of glory and power. There were the pharmaceutical companies who spied profits. There were the globalists who saw opportunities for control. There were the petit fascists who luxuriated in the opportunity for social control and virtue signalling. There were the captured legacy media. There were the academics who got their grants from the Bill Gates class. There were many opportunists who saw Covid as chance to advance various agendas, all at the expense of the people. And subsequent events lend credence to the theory. Like the pandemic preparedness industry that has emerged. Interests converged. And they cashed in. Mind you, Mike Yeadon came to reject his earlier theory, and who now believes it was all planned, known and executed. Not merely convergent opportunism. There is much evidence to support his new position. Pretty much everything that the conspiracy theorists said of Covid has been proven to be correct. None of this, of course, has been admitted by the guilty parties. The powers that be cling, at best, to the position that “mistakes were made”. We still await Nuremberg Two.
Everyone knows (now) about Big Pharma. Less well known are the global public health tsars, housed in national bureaucracies, international governance institutions, research centres, universities, NGOs, corporates, the media, thinktanks, Big Philanthropy, and governments themselves. Klaus Schwab famously said that the World Economic Forum had “penetrated ze cabinets”. It certainly has. Just as Big Pharma has an interest in creating pandemics in order to find uses for their dangerous and ineffective drugs, governments and their puppet masters have an interest in control, in depopulation and in power. Back in the day, the Rockefellers determined that global control can be gained through crises, preferably crises at global scale that are said to “demand” global action in response. In the 1950s, the Rockefellers came up with financial crisis, climate crises and pandemics the perfect means of gaining global control of populations and pesky governments. One of the core means of assuring that governments played ball was to create globalist institutions, like the World Health Organisation, that could take over the functions of national governments. Another is to shape popular responses to global crises through fear-based propaganda. Create an expectation of crisis, create fear of the coming plagues, recruit hyper-connected actors to the cause, and use “science” or its illusion to suggest that “experts” and not elected governments should run things, and centrally plan responses. Vaccine nutters and global controllers like Gates provided big money to a global network of closely connected players, in the academy, in research institutes, in global institutions, and bought off the media, created narratives, and set up “events” to “plan” for the “inevitable” crises. He did this before Covid, in late 2019, and it worked. (See below). Since Covid, and despite all of the manifest failures and catastrophes of government public health policy, they are still at it, even more so, in planning future pandemic policy. From WHO to Davos and the WEF to the United Nations…
It turned out that the States still retain a lot of power, after all, despite the centralisation of much power in Canberra over the past century. The States still run the hospitals, the schools, the police, and their own borders. The Government of Scott Morrison surrendered authority to the States during Covid. This was spineless and based on fear of the already scared voters. He abandoned statesmanship and left the rule to thugs in State Government. He opted for a model of shared responsibility so as to avoid electoral pain. He created a National Cabinet to achieve this consensus model. This was a cop out and a disaster. The states pushed the boundaries of what they could do, and found compliant populations willing to give up their freedom for the “goodies”, like JobKeeper and JobSeeker, and the assurance of salvation from the coming vaccines. Australians, like other nationalities, bought the Covid lies and obeyed out of fear. They signed up for the track-and-trace technology, they suspected not the signs of coming tyranny, being large of supine disposition and clustered most in the most compliant quadrant of conformism. They became militant in their denunciation of covid dissidents, abusing vaccine doubters and lockdown laughers. They were cultural maskists, too. And dobbers. So, it was a lack of national leadership, cowed politicians fearful of backlash if they went “soft” on the virus – despite all of the science against lockdowns and in support of letting the virus run itself out, while protecting the vulnerable – a compliant population that simply didn’t question the elites’ lies, and State politician-tyrants who enjoyed the daily press conferences and the appearance of power, and who discovered, perhaps to their surprise, that the States can still be very powerful.
The Liberal Prime Minister, John Howard (1996-2007) was in Washington DC on the day of 9/11, due to address Congress. He was, not unexpectedly for a staunch American ally who happened to be almost on site for the attack, deeply shocked by the events. He stated that this was not the time for Australia to be an “eighty per cent ally” of the USA. And so, Australia went to war in the Middle East in what as to turn out a costly disaster for all concerned, with Iraq an unholy mess and Afghanistan returned to the Taliban twenty years on. Howard was criticized at the time by the left, and subsequently by some on the right who may have been queasy about the Iraq War (in particular), but went along with Bush 43 because we are a one hundred per cent ally. Howard was derided as Bush’s “deputy sheriff”. Now, while Howard’s Liberal Party remains a firm US ally, others on the right in Australia are not quite so friendly these days. And with reason. They see America as a political and judicial basket case, Washington DC as a swamp that is perhaps undrainable, they are embarrassed that Trump caved in to the Deep State over Covid, and has not apologised, they simply cannot understand how a crook like Biden can occupy the White House, and, especially with Ukraine, they see US foreign policy run by a weird concoction of neocons and the military industrial complex. They are also convinced that the democrat machine will again rig the election, and that Trump will fail again, irrespective of whether he is likely to make the nation great again. In summary, from my perspective, the alliance with the USA is far more nuanced than before, despite the elites’ continued embrace of the alliance, seen through defence agreements and initiatives such as AUKUS. It is hard to say whether the left still hates America in the way it used to. Our current Prime Minister sucks up to Biden, but, as a leftist, probably because Biden’s regime is far left as well rather than because of any deeply held labor Party love for the USA.
The long march is a Marxist strategy for capturing power by infiltrating the key institutions of society and embedding revolutionary ideologies to effect permanent social change. They target and seek to undermine the key institutions of social power – the family, the Church, the bureaucracy, the universities, the media. It was born of the Italian Marxist Gramsci and perfected by 1960s radicals in the USA and Europe. Marxists came to believe that the working class was useless in advancing the communist revolution, and that the real action was not in the economy but in the culture. Especially after the collapse of Stalinism and the USSR in the 1980s, they realised that the workers didn’t want socialism but had aspirations to middle class comforts. The Marxist pivot was secured by then. The post-Gramsci strategy was firmly in place. The fruits of the strategy are plentiful. The bureaucracy is captured, as are the universities, the NGOs, the churches, and even right-of-centre political parties. It has been a brilliant and successful strategy. The modern Marxists now hate the working class and their (perceived) racist, homophobic, xenophobic attitudes. The beauty of the long march strategy has been that no one knew it was happening, until it was too late. The capture of the public imagination has been comprehensive. The leftists could never have imagined, for example, that their ideology would so totally capture the corporations, who now embrace woke ideology and are that ideology’s chief champions. Complete victory. And vindication of the Gramsci plan.
Jane Halton is a “retired” senior health bureaucrat from Australia. She is also impeccably connected to the establishment here, being married to a very senior public sector statistician who happens to be the brother of Brett Sutton, Victoria’s former Chief Health officer responsible for enforcing the Western world’s toughest and most brutal lockdown. Halton left the Australian public service for international roles in public health, including at the World Health Organisation. I have previously termed her Bill Gates’ girl down under, for her role in the CEPI (the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) , Gates’ funded Event 201 in October 2019, which conducted simulations of a coronavirus-type pandemic mere months before the Wuhan outbreak. Astonishingly, and with much lobbying of governments by Gates and others in the “family” – see Fauci, Daszak, Baric, Jeremy Farrar, Neil Ferguson, Tedros, Schwab, Deborah Birx, Walensky and friends – CEPI’s simulation turned into global pandemic policy. Halton was therefore front and centre in the push to enforce lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine rollouts and the defenestration of democracy and economic strength across the world. She is the international health bureaucrat’s international health bureaucrat, and continues to be closely involved with the organisation of the next global public health panic. She chairs the OECD’s health committee and numerous other international bodies. She is an enemy of freedom and human rights to health autonomy. She has escaped punishment, has not apologised, and must be outed. Inevitably, she did a review of aspects of Covid vaccine policy for the Australian Government, avoiding the real issues, like excess deaths, vaccine harms, the failure of lockdowns, and the rest of the existential harms done to our nation by covid policy. An unelected member of the administrative state, Halton would be utterly unknown to most Australians. Hence her extreme “covert power”. Halton’s continued presence at the global health policy table will ensure she will have a central role in future pretend health crises.
First, I think there is now a large, growing and distinct third group of dissenters from the collectivist mindset and policy drive. These are the outsiders who cherish freedom, recognise that it has been taken from them, and hate the privileged insider class and all of its works. They aren’t necessarily conservatives or libertarians in the traditional sense, but they are dismayed and disillusioned. They want governments to keep their promises, safeguard the interests of the dispossessed, stop being crooked, disengage from corporate power, stop giving jobs to their mates, and to take elections seriously again. Covid radicalised them. They are nationalists, and reject globalism. They possibly read Compact magazine if they are intellectually inclined, rather than Reason or National Review. The new divide is insiders versus outsiders, and the rejection of executive power and the deep state. So the hew hybrid, call it social conservatism + social democracy, isn’t the same as the old enemies of collectivism, and the new enemy isn’t just collectivism either. So I would recast the question a little. Which isn’t to say that collectivism isn’t a problem. t just now has several new faces, like the nanny state, the administrative state, the post-Covid state, the military fact-checker complex, the cancel culture, the woke establishment. It is a hydra-headed beast. What are the push-back alternatives? Conventional party politics is out as a solution in the age if the UniParty, where the two major parties in each polity are often in agreement on the big issues, and often the only difference between them is the speed at which we are hurtling towards the cliff. So it is a must to support minor freedom parties and build coalitions that will hopefully win seats in legislatures and hold to account whichever of the major parties holds power. Electoral systems work against this and against minor parties. Outside of electoral politics, there are two possible strategies. One is to abandon the system altogether, to retreat to the cave. The American writer Rod Dreher calls this the Benedict Option. Perhaps the “cave” is a foreign country like Hungary (at present). Since all of the Western institutions have been captured, there is little hope (in our lifetimes) of a reversal of direction in the bureaucracy, the NGOs, the corporates, the universities and the legacy media. The other option, which a number of thinkers have suggested, is to form “parallel societies” and operate outside the system. Shop local. Use cash. Have large families. Home school them. Form online and other communities of shared interests. Avoid paying tax. Get offline where possible. Shun social media. Avoid digital ID if you can. But still engage with civil society. Attend peaceful protests against tyranny. Conventional politics and ideologies are legacy tools. Most politicians are chancers, bought up or ineffectual and spineless. Playing those games is a waste of time, when the enemy is at the gate already.
I once asked the doyen of Australian climate realists, Ian Plimer, why he still bothered to fight the good fight on climate change. My view is that this war is over, and no amount of rational, evidence based argument against the net zero nutters will persuade them to change their minds. Ian agreed up to a point, but said that he and others on the side of climate truth had a duty to place on the record the real picture, for future generations and future historians. Hence his continued crusade. I largely stopped writing about climate change a decade ago, since rational debate is now impossible with climate emoters, and, in any case, the private equity funds that run the world had put their chips on renewables. Nevertheless, the deceptions over climate policy are real, disastrous and ongoing, so one does have that duty. Especially when clowns like Michael Mann win court cases against the likes of Mark Steyn. The “climate madness” consists of a series of highly dubious propositions linked by a false logic path, and the acceptance of this nonsense by policy-makers and the public, or at least enough of the public for politicians to fear the electoral consequences of climate “inaction”. These propositions are as follows. The earth’s temperature is rising. It is rising substantially. The rise is caused by man. Governments of the world can do something about this. Governments of the world should do something about this. None of these propositions is true. Yet we have global action on climate, action that will impoverish the world’s economies, kill countless people, destroy freedom and blast us all back to the stone age. So, what are the five stages of descent into climate madness? First, there was the greenhouse gases theory of the Swede Arrhenius, and others, and the linking of rising emissions to the industrial revolution. Next came the realization by early generation green radicals that climate could be the big global threat they could use to garner support for their extremist anti-capitalist crusade. Third came the end of the Cold War and the eclipse of traditional Soviet style Marxism, and the emergence of cultural Marxism and post-modernism as drivers of leftist thought. The pivot away from the working class and towards alleged victims of oppression came with a green tinge, and the acceptance of “sustainability” as the new unifying ideology of radicals. Fourth came the leftists’ capture of science and scientists only too eager to harvest the research funding that the new world promised. This has been called academic “grant troughing”. Finally, the last stage has been the capture of both governments and corporates by the watermelon ideology, as James Delingpole has called it. It is all another example of convergent opportunism, you might say. Everyone in the establishment is a winner. Greenies win. Academics get their grants. Politicians salve their consciences. Bankers and other capitalists get their profits through green-washing and ponzi schemes, their green investments typically paid for by the taxpayer. Bureaucrats have new jobs for life. Yes, it turns out that the case for taking up the fight, seemingly hopeless, remains strong.
I can’t really comment on feminism in other countries, but will focus instead on some of the harmful consequences of feminism and especially me-tooism as they have emerged in Australia. I suspect that Australian feminism isn’t that different from the practices and views of the sisterhood in other places. Some of the worst consequences of feminism as it emerged in the 1960s have been the trashing of the traditional family, the raising of children by childcare workers, the lies told to women that persuaded several generations to assume they have to be wage slaves, making taxpayers pay for the raising of children in childcare centres, at great and growing cost, massive house price inflation resulting from the emergence of two income families as the norm, and the hounding of innocent men wrongly accused – either through the courts or in the court of public opinion – of sexual assault. It isn’t just feminism on its own, of course. It is leftist feminism typically part of an ideological package that also includes socialism, multiculturalism and environmentalism. Few radical feminists are not also rabid socialists, greenies, anti-Israel and supporters of mass immigration. They often support the suppression of free speech, create moral panics over rape and sex abuse, and especially go after the churches and churchmen. We saw the destruction of Cardinal George Pell’s reputation and his imprisonment on false charges, and the attack on him was led by radical feminists in the Victorian legal system, the police, the publishing industry and the media. I have written upwards of 50,000 words on the Pell case, and was threatened by The Age newspaper with contempt of court over one of the articles I wrote.
As I have noted, the WEF has “penetrated ze cabinets”. It isn’t just some country club for rich, greenie wankers, who meet in the snow once a year. It isn’t simply a fantasy made up by “conspiracy theorists”. Yes, thousands of gas guzzling private jets ferrying oligarchs into a Swiss village do make for good copy and a charge of hypocrisy. Their use of $3000-a-time sex workers, the same. These people are not clowns. They make a difference to the world. Money talks. So does proximity to power. It has become clear who really has that power, and it isn’t the puppet politicians. Establishment types like the Spectator’s Toby Young like to mock those who see the world run by Bond villains. They are so unawake it isn’t funny. As many others have pointed out, Klaus Schwab, initially a messenger boy for Henry Kissinger, writes books on his and the WEF’s vision for the world, and he means business. They are not secretive, not like the Bilderbergs, the Trilateral Commission, the Committee on Foreign Relations, the Club of Rome and the other world-dominator types, with whom the WEF share fraternal bonds and overlapping membership. The WEF puts it all out there, and hides nothing. They are confident that half the world will agree with them, and the other half will shrug them off. They win. The things they are pushing, with real resources and lethal intent, include the destruction of farming, global digital vaccine passports, WHO control of national public health policy, digital currencies, the end of cash, programmable spending by individuals, social credit, depopulation, eugenics, abortion, socialism for the peasants, the end of global travel for the masses, and censorship. Oh, and the much-adored Chinese model. The penetration of ze cabinets has included Australia. The Health Minister during Covid was a former employee of the WEF. Many other Australians, like the American born Julie Inman Grant, our eSafety Commissar, who is a Davos girl, are regulars. Former participants in the WEF’s Young Global Leaders Program are scattered across the world’s governments. And the merest casual observer of world politics these days will have noticed the utter alignment of the policies of all the major parties, of whichever hue, with the tripe coming out of Geneva. No coincidence, that.
Mass immigration is a blight on Australian culture and a ponzi scheme for the economy. We now have, post-Covid and under a far-left Government, upwards of half a million migrants arriving every year. This was never agreed to by voters in any election. A referendum on the subject would end in catastrophic defeat for supporters of huge migrant numbers. The arrivals put upward pressure on infrastructure costs, housing prices and the cost of living. They lead to the apartment booms in our cities, where often the jerry-built structures simply fall down after a few years. The apartment boom has become a form of urban blight, especially in middle ring suburbs traditionally the homes of the middle classes and older people and families. These are now under threat from the vertical expansion said to be needed because of the exploding population. (The trendy new urbanism embraced by most town planners is, of course, a cause as well as bloated in-migrant populations. Mass immigration has also led to the formation of enclaves. We don’t have multiculturalism so much as multi mono-culturalism. Half of Australia’s people now have at least one parent born overseas. About one third were born overseas themselves. And the mix is by no means conducive to social harmony, as many Jews here are now finding out. One commentator has noted that “they hate us before they get here”. Many new Australians do not accept our values, yet we keep on bringing more in, in increasing numbers. It is a recipe for disaster. Some have called it “replacement theory”. If you don’t like the population, and its racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic values, well change the population. Leftists call this theory a nasty conspiracy theory. To me it is simple reality, and it is utterly plausible that replacement is the aim, as well as the effect, of the policy. And the economic impact? Neutral, at best, many economists agree. Businesses love mass migration – cheap labour to do the nasty jobs many Australians won’t do. Governments keep inviting more migrants in order to cover up their own economic mismanagement.
See also the answer to Q 8. Many people have traded freedom for convenience, and boredom for wall-to-wall entertainment, since the arrival of smartphones. A retired Australian judge, in explaining the willingness of our people to follow Covid tyrannical instructions, once said Australians were content so long as they had Netflix, full bellies and a warm place to defaecate. He had that pretty right. In other words, many are in the passive conformist quadrant in the quadrant of conformity. They don’t see, for example, digital IDs as anything to be remotely worried about. How the active dissidents and non-conformists can change the attitudes of the former group is a question to which I have no real answers. For those who do wish to resist, as I have said, do all of the things that the elites don’t want you to do. Use cash, form parallel communities, ditch the search engines that lie and track you, live off-line, shop local, ditch the big corporates, throw away the newspaper subscriptions, avoid tax, scrub social media. Elite control is worsening, so the task will only get harder. Bringing the dangers of elite control, even the existence of it, to the attention of the unawake will get harder over time, but also it will become more urgent. Some observers have argued that using rational counter-arguments is pointless, at least at the beginning of a process of educating others. Data comes later. First try emotive counter-arguments, exaggerate, get their attention, find personal examples of general phenomena. Tell people how many people YOU know who have had vaccine injuries, rather that quoting the latest study by (for example) Denis Rancourt or Steve Kirsch or Bret Weinstein, brilliant and necessary though their work is. In other words, there are two issues with resistance. There is your own resistance as an individual or family. Then there is influencing the broader debates and the behaviour of others.
This question is linked to my answers to Questions 8 and 13. There is a crisis of meaninglessness in the West, a crisis of alienation, a crisis of addiction and a crisis of loneliness. The evidence for these trends is everywhere, and their relevance to the collapse of community is equally clear. Robert Putnam in his famous book, Bowling Alone, cottoned on to it, well before the advent of the Web 2.0 and social media arrived and took over so many lives. And way before Covid lockdowns crushed the whole notion of “community”. Other observers have picked up on aspects of the crises. Like Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Haidt, Australia’s former Deputy Prime Minister, John Anderson, the late Roger Scruton, and the writers at Compact magazine. What is the evidence? Friendship has given way to fake friends online, half of marriages break up, children are lonely and suffer from depression and anxiety, suicides are increasing, JD Vance and others have highlighted the opioid crisis, huge numbers of people are medicated for mental health ailments, violence is increasing, identity hatreds now trump civilised debates and friendships across the aisle are far fewer. The sense of place is diminished, belonging now means belonging to victim groups rather than real communities, and globalization and mass migration are killing nationhood and patriotism. Working from home and online learning are destroying real work and real study, respectively. These are existential threats to the traditional order, an order thoroughly upended by the class of 68 and the post-modernist ideas they transmitted. Again, as in answers to Questions 8 and 13, the choice is retreat to the cave, live and operate in parallel societies, build real as opposed to online communities, speak out on the ills that befall us. Or simply go with the trends and watch our societies sink into the mire. One solution sometimes floated is localism, and this sums up much of the thinking of those who argue for “parallel societies”. There are many who do not see any of these things as problems to be addressed or even lamented. This, above all, is our biggest problem. And I don’t just speak of the enemies of freedom and community, but also of those who simply shrug their shoulders. Those who appeal for world peace normally say – start at home, be people of peace yourselves. This strikes one as pretty lame, but what else is there?
With the world as insane as it is, with democracies trashed, with individual rights removed, with government out of control, with traditional families and their values under constant siege, with world war a real possibility, and with education systems failing, the world of a political commentator is “target rich”. As a political scientist, I tend to focus on government failure and on the changing nature of ideology. Australian politics are always in view, with both major parties abandoning their roots and their base and an election coming in a year’s time. I write less on conservatism than I used to, less on climate change and less on US politics. The 2020 presidential election took away a lot of my interest in taking American politics seriously, the system is so flawed. Trump’s performance during Covid disillusioned me. Covid provided a rich vein of commentary, such was the sheer madness and evil on display as well as the abandonment of all pretence at following medical science and good practice. The absence of any apologies by anyone means that there is still work to be done in outing the Covid criminals. And the ramping up of post-Covid totalitarianism, seen in the war on cash, digital IDs and the institutionalisation of cancel culture, as merely three example deserves ongoing exposure and critique. The changing dynamics of ideologies and new, hybrid ideological forms are of increasing interest to me, especially the increasing convergence of social leftism (and globalism) with belief in the virtues of economic freedom on the one hand, and the emergence of social democrat/social conservatives on the other. The former has solidified into a distinct class, with progressive, green, pro-Covid-state, woke, globalist worldviews emerging across the political spectrum and solidifying. This is likely to be a history of ideas project. I am still interested in classical liberalism, from my Master of Arts thesis days in the 1980s. In that project, I examined the crossovers in libertarian thought exemplified by FA Hayek and Robert Nozick. Finally, because of my writing gig at Britain’s Conservative Woman (TCW), I have spent an increasing amount of time studying British politics.
May 9, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Australia, Covid-19, Human rights |
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For two decades and more, the political position of the climate alarm cult in the U.S. and Europe has only seemed to strengthen with time. In the U.S., the Obama and Biden Administrations have both pushed huge regulatory initiatives to restrict use of fossil fuels (with only some modest roll-backs during Trump’s four years); some of the most sweeping restrictions got pushed through just a week ago. Meanwhile, blue states like California and New York have enacted ever-more-extreme restrictions by statute. In Europe, there has been a near all-party political consensus in favor of the “net zero” agenda, notably including even the mainstream conservative parties in the largest countries like the UK and Germany.
I have long said that sooner or later a combination of physical reality and cost would stop the “net zero” juggernaut in its tracks. Indeed, that has begun to happen, particularly in Europe. Elections for the European Parliament are coming up in about a month, with climate skeptic candidates and parties looking to score substantial gains.
So how is the left reacting? So far, the official talking point seems to be to belittle the resistance to fossil fuel restrictions as some kind of scheme of the “far right.” The “far right,” we are told, are those nefarious people who dare to stand up for maintaining the living standards of the working stiffs against those who would impoverish us all in the quixotic drive to reduce carbon emissions. Somehow, seemingly independent news organizations put out articles using the exact same words and phrases. Here are a couple of recent examples.
In the Washington Post on May 1, the headline is “How car bans and heat pump rules drive voters to the far right.” Subheadline: “Studies show that as energy prices rise, so do right-wing movements against green policies.” Excerpt:
A . . . backlash is happening all over Europe, as far-right parties position themselves in opposition to green policies. In Germany, a law that would have required homeowners to install heat pumps galvanized the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, giving it a boost. Farmers have rolled tractors into Paris to protest E.U. agricultural rules, and drivers in Italy and Britain have protested attempts to ban gas-guzzling cars from city centers. . . .
Th[e] resurgence of the right could slow down the green transition in Europe, . . . as climate policies increasingly touch citizens’ lives. . . . “This has really expanded the coalition of the far right,” said Erik Voeten, a professor of geopolitics at Georgetown University and the author of the new study on the Netherlands.
The Post’s writer, Shannon Osaka, seems genuinely surprised that the common people of Europe would place any value on maintaining their standard of living:
[C]hanges to driving, home heating and farming are beginning to affect individual Europeans — sparking criticism and anger. “What’s happening as we accelerate the pace of the transition is we’re now starting to get into sectors that inevitably touch on people’s lives,” said Luke Shore, strategy director for Project Tempo, a nonprofit research organization that is assessing how climate policies affect voting patterns in Europe. “We’ve reached the point at which it’s becoming personal — and for that reason, it’s also becoming more political.” The problem, researchers say, occurs when individual consumers feel that the cost of the energy transition is being borne on their shoulders — rather than on governments and corporations.
Who could ever have guessed that this might happen? As an example of crazy “far right” lunacy, the Post cites this line from the manifesto of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands:
“Energy is a basic need, but climate madness has turned it into a very expensive luxury item.”
I mean, how could you get any more extreme “far right” than that?
In a very similar vein, we have a piece from the Guardian on April 30, with the headline, “How climate policies are becoming focus for far-right attacks in Germany.” Again, the gist is that this is just coming from extremists that you don’t need to pay any attention to. Excerpt:
At the marches held in Görlitz, a stronghold of the far right on the Polish border, and other towns across Germany every Monday night, supporters of [the Alternative for Germany and Free Saxony] parties vent their fury at immigration, coronavirus restrictions and military aid to Ukraine. But one group bears the brunt of the blame. “The Greens are our main enemy,” said Jankus, describing the AfD as a party of freedom and the Greens as a party of bans. “We don’t want to tell people how to heat their homes. We don’t want to tell people what kind of engine should be in their car.”
Freedom — there’s a really lunatic “far right” idea. Rather than trying to explain to the readers why there is something wrong with support of “freedom,” the Guardian instead veers off into characterizing these “far right” demonstrators as really, really bad people:
[Green] party speaker Carolin Renner said she and her colleagues had had death threats screamed in their faces, white-pride stickers stuck to their door and a daily barrage of hateful comments posted on their social media channels. Shortly before Christmas, protesters dumped horse manure in front of the Greens’ office in nearby Zittau.
Despite the characterizations, the article contains no actual example of anything described as a “death threat” or a “hateful comment.” We’ll just have to take the word of the Green Party spokesperson.
Well, the European elections are just about a month away at this point. The climate skeptic parties are expected to make some noticeable gains. However, the actual mandatory requirements for most people to ditch the gas-powered car for an electric one, or to buy a heat pump to heat their home, have not yet kicked in. When that happens, perhaps we will see a real political tornado.
May 8, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | European Union, Germany, Netherlands |
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BBC oddball Chris Packham has hit back at claims reported on Neil Oliver‘s GB News show that half the world’s population could die if Net Zero was implemented in full. “So Ofcom can you please explain how you allow this utter BS to be broadcast,” he wails. Running to Ofcom would appear to be a trade protection measure – millions will die has been the tried and trusted modus operandi of climate catastrophist Chris for decades.
This would appear to be the same Chris Packham who told the Telegraph in October 2010 that there were too many humans on the planet, and “we need to do something about it”. In 2020, he informed the Daily Mail that “quite frankly” smallpox, measles, mumps and malaria were there “to regulate our population”. Over his broadcast career, untroubled by Ofcom interest, Packham has claimed mass extinctions of all life on Earth unless humans stop burning hydrocarbons. Of course there are those who point out that these popular mass extinctions only seem to exist in computer models. Hydrocarbons, meanwhile, have led to unprecedented prosperity and health, unimaginable to previous generations, across many parts of a planet that now supports a sustainable population of humans numbering eight billion.
Of course Net Zero is not going to kill four billion people because Net Zero is never going to happen. Day-by-day, support is crumbling around the world as the political collectivisation project, supported by increasingly discredited computer-modelled opinions, is starting to fall apart as it bumps into the hard rock of reality. History teaches us that tribes that grow weak and decadent are easy prey for their stronger neighbours. But the suggestion that four billion will die if Net Zero should ever be inflicted on global populations is worth examining. After all, it is likely to be true.
The four billion dead noted on GB News came from a remark made by Dr. Patrick Moore, one of the original founders of Greenpeace. Interviewed on Fox News, he said: “If we ban fossil fuels, agricultural production would collapse. People will begin to starve, and half the population will die in a very short period of time”. Four billion dead if artificial fertiliser is banned is not ‘BS’, it is an almost guaranteed outcome. In a recent science paper, Emeritus Professors William Happer and Richard Lindzen of Princeton and MIT respectively noted that “eliminating fossil fuel-derived nitrogen fertiliser and pesticides will create worldwide starvation”. With the use of nitrogen fertiliser, crop yields around the world have soared in recent decades and natural famines, as opposed to those local outbreaks caused by humans, have largely disappeared.
Much of the luxury middle class Net Zero obsession is based on a seeming hatred of human progress. It is a campaign to push back the benefit of mass industrialisation, although it is doubtful that many of the ardent promoters think the drastic reductions in standards of living will apply to them. It is narcissism on stilts and based on an almost complete ignorance of how the food in their faddy diets arrives on their plates. It shows a complete disregard for the central role that hydrocarbons play in their lives. It is based on a profound distaste for almost any modern manufacturing process. These days, they do not know people who actually make things, and when they meet them they often dislike them. Nutty Guardianista George Monbiot recently tweeted that ending animal farming is as important as leaving fossil fuels in the ground. “Eating meat, milk and eggs is an indulgence the planet cannot afford,” he added.
Leaving fossil fuels in the ground will mean the following products will largely disappear.
Circulated on social media and recently published by Paul Homewood, the illustration is a wake-up call to the importance of hydrocarbons. Without it, humans would struggle to make many medicines and plastics. Similar difficulties would be found in the manufacture of common products such as clothing, food preservatives, cleaning products and soft contact lens.
Alec Epstein, the author of the best-selling book Fossil Future, agrees that Net Zero policies by 2050 would be “apocalyptically destructive”, and have in fact already been catastrophically destructive when barely implemented. A reference here, perhaps, to the wicked policies conducted by Western banks and elites in refusing to loan money to build hydrocarbon-fuelled water treatment plants in the poorer parts of the developing world. Billions still lack the cost-effective energy they need to live lives of abundance and safety, notes Epstein. Many people in developing countries still use wood and dung for cooking. Like Happer and Lindzen, he believes that if Net Zero is followed, “virtually all the world’s eight billion people will plunge into poverty and premature death”.
Much of what is planned is hiding in plain sight. The C40 group, funded by wealthy billionaires and chaired by London mayor Sadiq Khan, has investigated World War 2 style rationing with a daily meat allowance of 44g. Reduced private transport and massive restrictions on air travel have all been considered. Labour party member Khan has already made a cracking start on his elite paymasters’ concerns having recently driven many of the cars of the less affluent off London roads with specialist charging penalties.
Honesty rules the day at the U.K. Government-funded UK FIRES operation where Ivory Tower academics produce gruesomely frank reports showing that Net Zero would cut available energy by around three quarters. They assume, rightly, that there is no realistic technology currently available, or likely in the foreseeable future, to back up power sourced from the intermittent breezes and sun beams. No flying, no shipping, drastic cuts in meat consumption and no home heating are all discussed. A ruthless purge of modern building material is also proposed with traditional building supplies replaced by new materials such as “rammed earth”
A move back to primitivism is also foreshadowed by a recent United Nations report which suggested building using mud bricks, bamboo and forest ‘detritus’. It might be thought that mud and grass huts will hardly be enough to deter unfriendly foreign hordes that hove into future view on the horizon. And no point in asking the last person to turn out the lights, because there won’t be electricity anyway.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
April 30, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | BBC |
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Two states have passed laws — and two states have bills pending — intended to prevent the World Health Organization (WHO) from overriding states’ authority on matters of public health policy.
Utah and Florida passed laws and Louisiana and Oklahoma have legislation set to take effect soon pending final votes. Several other states are considering similar bills.
The WHO member states will convene next month at the World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, to vote on two proposals — the so-called “pandemic accord” or “pandemic treaty,” and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) — that would give the WHO sweeping new pandemic powers.
The Biden administration supports the two WHO proposals, but opposition is growing at the state level.
Proponents of the WHO’s proposals say they are vital for preparing humanity against the “next pandemic,” perhaps caused by a yet-unknown “Disease X.”
But the bills passed by state legislatures reflect frequently voiced criticisms that the WHO’s proposals imperil national sovereignty, medical and bodily sovereignty and personal liberties, and may lead to global vaccine mandates.
Critics also argue the WHO proposals may open the door to global digital “health passports” and global censorship targeting alleged “misinformation.”
Such criticisms are behind state legislative initiatives to oppose the WHO, on the basis that states’ rights are protected under the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Under the 10th Amendment, all powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states. Such powers, critics say, include public health policy.
Mary Holland, president of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), told The Defender :
“It is encouraging to see states like Louisiana, Oklahoma and Utah pass resolutions to clarify that the WHO has no power to determine health policy in their states. Historically, health has been the purview of state and local government, not the U.S. federal government.
“There is no legitimate constitutional basis for the federal government to outsource health decision-making on pandemics to an international body. As state legislatures become aware of the WHO’s agenda, they are pushing back to assert their autonomy — and this is welcome.”
Internist Dr. Meryl Nass, founder of Door to Freedom, told The Defender that, contrary to arguments that the drafters of the constitution could not foresee future public health needs, vaccines, doctors and medicine were all in existence at the time the 10th Amendment was written. They were “deliberately left out,” she said.
This has implications for the federal government’s efforts in support of the WHO’s proposals, according to Nass. “The government doesn’t have the authority to give the WHO powers for which it lacks authority,” she said.
Tennessee state Rep. Bud Hulsey (R-Sullivan County) told The Epoch Times, “We’re almost to a place in this country that the federal government has trampled on the sovereignty of states for so long that in peoples’ minds, they have no options.”
“It’s like whatever the federal government says is the supreme law of the land, and it’s not. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land,” he added.
Utah, Florida laws passed
On Jan. 31, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) signed Senate Bill 57, the “Utah Constitutional Sovereignty Act,” into law. It does not mention the WHO, but prohibits “enforcement of a federal directive within the state by government officers if the Legislature determines the federal directive violates the principles of state sovereignty.”
In May 2023, Florida passed Senate Bill 252 (SB 252), a bill for “Protection from Discrimination Based on Health Care Choices.” Among other clauses, it prohibits businesses and public entities from requiring proof of vaccination or prophylaxis for the purposes of employment, receipt of services, or gaining entry to such entities.
According to Section 3 of SB 252:
“A governmental entity as defined … or an educational institution … may not adopt, implement, or enforce an international health organization’s public health policies or guidelines unless authorized to do so under state law, rule, or executive order issued by the Governor.”
Nass told The Defender that Florida’s legislation offers a back door through which WHO the state can implement WHO policies because it allows a state law, rule or executive order by the governor to override the bill. According to Nass, efforts to strengthen the bill have been unsuccessful.
SB 252 was one of four bills Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed in May 2023 in support of medical freedom. The other bills were House Bill 1387, banning gain-of-function research, Senate Bill 1580, protecting physicians’ freedom of speech and Senate Bill 238, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of people’s medical choices.
Louisiana, Oklahoma also push back against the WHO
The Louisiana Senate on March 26 voted unanimously to pass Senate Law No. 133, barring the WHO, United Nations (U.N.) and World Economic Forum from wielding influence over the state.
According to the legislation:
“No rule, regulation, fee, tax, policy, or mandate of any kind of the World Health Organization, United Nations, and the World Economic Forum shall be enforced or implemented by the state of Louisiana or any agency, department, board, commission, political subdivision, governmental entity of the state, parish, municipality, or any other political entity.”
The bill is now pending Louisiana House of Representatives approval and if passed, is set to take effect Aug. 1.
On April 24, the Oklahoma House of Representatives passed Senate Bill 426 (SB 426), which states, “The World Health Organization, the United Nations and the World Economic Forum shall have no jurisdiction in the State of Oklahoma.”
According to the bill:
“Any mandates, recommendations, instructions, communications or guidance issued by the World Health Organization, the United Nations or the World Economic Forum shall not be used in this state as a basis for action, nor to direct, order or otherwise impose, contrary to the constitution and laws of the State of Oklahoma any requirements whatsoever, including those for masks, vaccines or medical testing, or gather any public or private information about the state’s citizens or residents, and shall have no force or effect in the State of Oklahoma.”
According to Door to Freedom, the bill was first introduced last year and unanimously passed the Senate. An amended version will return to the Senate for a new vote, and if passed, the law will take effect June 1.
Legislative push continues in states where bills opposing the WHO failed
Legislative initiatives opposing the WHO in other states have so far been unsuccessful.
In Tennessee, lawmakers proposed three bills opposing the WHO, but “none of them made it over the finish line,” said Bernadette Pajer of the CHD Tennessee Chapter.
“Many Tennessee legislators are concerned about the WHO and three of them filed resolutions to protect our sovereignty,” Pajer said. “Our legislature runs on a biennium, and this was the second year, so those three bills have died. But I do expect new ones will be filed next session.”
The proposed bills were:
- House Joint Resolution 820 (HJR 820), passed in the Tennessee House of Representatives. The bill called on the federal government to “end taxpayer funding” of the WHO and reject the WHO’s two proposals.
- House Joint Resolution 1359 (HJR 1359) stalled in the Delayed Bills Committee. It proposed that “neither the World Health Organization, United Nations, nor the World Economic Forum shall have any jurisdiction or power within the State of Tennessee.”
- Senate Joint Resolution 1135 (SJR 1135) opposed “the United States’ participation in the World Health Organization (WHO) Pandemic Prevention Preparedness and Response Accord (PPPRA) and urges the Biden Administration to withdraw our nation from the PPPRA.”
Amy Miller, a registered lobbyist for Reform Pharma, told The Defender she “supported these resolutions, especially HJR 1359. She said the bill “went to a committee where the sponsor didn’t think it would come out since a unanimous vote was needed and one of the three members was a Democrat.”
Tennessee’s HJR 820 came the closest to being enacted. According to Nass, this bill was “flawed,” as it “did not assert state sovereignty or the 10th Amendment.”
Another Tennessee bill, House Bill 2795 and Senate Bill 2775, “establishes processes by which the general assembly [of the state of Tennessee] may nullify an unconstitutional federal statute, regulation, agency order, or executive order.”
According to The Epoch Times, this would give Tennessee residents “the right to demand that state legislators vote on whether or not to enforce regulations or executive orders that violate citizens’ rights under the federal or state constitutions.” The bill is tabled for “summer study” in the Senate.
In May 2023, Tennessee passed legislation opposing “net zero” proposals and the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals — which have been connected to “green” policies and the implementation of digital ID for newborn babies and for which the U.N. has set a target date of 2030 for implementation.
According to The Epoch Times, “Maine state Rep. Heidi Sampson attempted to get a ‘joint order’ passed in support of personal autonomy and against compliance with the WHO agreements, but it garnered little interest in the Democrat supermajority legislature.”
In Alabama, the Senate passed House Joint Resolution 113 opposing the WHO. The bill was reported out of committee but, according to Nass, it stalled.
Other states where similar legislation was proposed in the 2024 session or is pending include Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, South Carolina and Wyoming.
Recent Supreme Court ruling may curtail federal government’s powers
While opponents of the WHO’s proposed “pandemic agreement” and IHR amendments point to the states’ rights provision of the 10th Amendment, others argue that a 1984 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council allowed federal agencies to assert more authority to make laws.
The tide may be turning, however. According to The Epoch Times, “The current Supreme Court has taken some steps to rein in the administrative state, including the landmark decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, ruling that federal agencies can’t assume powers that Congress didn’t explicitly give them.”
Nass said that even in states where lawmakers have not yet proposed bills to oppose the WHO, citizens can take action, by contacting the office of their state governor, who can issue an executive order, or their attorney general, who can issue a legal opinion.
Door to Freedom has also developed a model resolution that state legislative bodies can use as the basis for their own legislation.
“It’s important for people to realize that if the federal government imposes something on the people, the people can go through their state’s powers to overturn it,” Nass said.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
April 30, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | Human rights, United States, WHO |
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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.
April 26, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | European Union, Human rights |
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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.”
In addition to removing references to the once-voluntary herd culling program, the USDA is also implementing mandatory RFID ear tags in cattle and bison.
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.
April 24, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | EPA, Gates Foundation, OneHealth, United States, USDA |
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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.
April 19, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | European Union, Poland |
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By Drago Bosnic | April 18, 2024
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.
As for the extremely controversial EU Asylum and Migration Pact recently approved by the European Parliament, which will effectively force member states to accept their “fair share of new immigrants” or pay a fine for every migrant they reject, the conservative parties are furious, and rightfully so, it should be noted. While the EU, a mere geopolitical pendant of NATO at this point, is allocating hundreds of billions to the deeply corrupt Neo-Nazi junta, farmers across the bloc are faced with a plethora of issues that will soon spill over to other industries and sectors of fledgling European economies. The unelected Brussels bureaucrats believe that encouraging their (neo)colonialist policies through immigration might ameliorate some of those issues by essentially importing more cheap labor force.
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.
April 18, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | European Union |
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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]
Another interviewer — a friendly one, actually — played the devil’s advocate:
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.
Listen to that anxious, sonorous cello and more here (fourth video down).
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
April 17, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | Harvard University |
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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.”
April 13, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | Germany |
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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.
SOURCE: Food: There’s Lots Of It
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.
April 8, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular, Video | Human rights |
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“Thinning of humanity,” lack of accountability and WHO coverups are all mentioned in a few sentences. What might this portend?
Russian Senator Aleksey Pushkov took to Telegram to complain about the WHO, and then RIA Novosti reported on it.
What is RIA Novosti ? “RIA Novosti is the most cited Russian news agency in the mass media and across social media.”
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:
March 29, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | Russia, WHO |
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