This is the second in a series tracing the history of population control through to present day depopulation ambitions and intent. You can read Part 1 here.
Henry Kissinger, one of the most influential politicians of the last 50 years, who said ‘the elderly are useless eaters’, considered the idea of using food to control the population. In his 1974 ‘National Security Study Memorandum 200’ he outlined a number of countries of strategic importance for the US that he claimed had problems with population growth that might give them more economic and military strength. He advocated birth control programmes for those countries and suggested that if they did not do this willingly, withdrawing food aid to them may act as an incentive to make them comply.
Using food as a weapon is not just an idea. Russia did it in Turkestan in 1917, where they took control of food production and distribution, resulting in starvation and a drastic reduction in the indigenous population. The US and Canadian governments slaughtered the buffalo population to starve the indigenous people into submission.
Now there is concern among many including economists, Wall Street veterans, farmers and citizen groups that controlling the food supply is once more being implemented to control and reduce the population. The FBI have warned that there are cyber-attacks designed to shut down farms.
It is claimed by powerful groups like the UK’s Climate Change Committee and the International Panel on Climate Change, and the governments they influence, that the main factor exacerbating the so-called ‘climate crisis’ is CO2. In reality, CO2 is essential to all life. If CO2 levels are drastically reduced, plant life, which requires CO2 for photosynthesis, will be reduced and therefore the whole food chain will be affected. In fact a recent report claims that pursuing Net Zero could lead to half the world suffering from starvation.
Is this why so many governments in the world are intent on achieving Net Zero?
In addition to the fake ‘climate crisis’, we now have the fake ‘nitrogen crisis’. Nitrogen is one of the main elements of commercial fertilisers and is an essential nutrient for plant growth but at excessive amounts can be a pollutant and, according to the climate crisis zealots, can cause global warming. The EU’s Integrated Nutrient Action Plan aims to reduce nitrogen fertiliser by 20 per cent. The UN want to reduce all nitrogen ‘waste’ by 50 per cent by 2030. Some of the people targeted by the plan to reduce fertiliser usage are the Dutch farmers. The tyrannical government in the Netherlands plans to compulsorily purchase up to 3,000 farms in order to reduce nitrogen emissions and to cut cattle numbers by 50 per cent. As the Netherlands is the biggest food exporter in Europe, it won’t affect only the Dutch but have a devastating impact on the food supply for the rest of Europe.
But is there actually a nitrogen crisis? Just like the so-called climate crisis, the evidence is ambiguous at best but the statistics are manipulated by those in power to suit their own ends. It’s not as if they aren’t aware of the consequences of drastically reducing the use of commercial fertiliser: they only have to look at Sri Lanka. Food prices rose by 80 per cent and there were massive shortages resulting in thousands of desperate people laying siege to the president’s palace and the president having to flee the country.
Analysing current events, is it all just due to a set of unrelated circumstances that there appears to be a threat to the availability and cost of our food, or is there something more disturbing going on?
It may be worth noting that as farmland is being forcibly sequestered from farmers, Bill Gates is now the single biggest owner of farmland in the US. As the elite are trying to reduce meat consumption, Gates has investments in synthetic meat. As the US suffered severe baby formula shortages, Gates had invested in artificially produced breast milk. It would certainly appear that the elite are determined to monopolise and therefore control the food supply.
Other events suggest a planned assault on the food supply. In the US, since 2021, 96 facilities involved in food production have been damaged or had their poultry or livestock destroyed. The destruction of food processing plants is not limited to the US. In the UK fires have broken out at facilities in Ealing, Gillingham, Bury St Edmunds, Bradford, Stoke-on-Trent, Harlow and Kilkeel, Northern Ireland. In fact, it appears to be a global phenomenon.
In addition, we have the UK and other governments ordering the slaughtering of millions of poultry due to alleged outbreaks of bird flu. Supposedly there have been 174 outbreaks of bird flu in the UK since October 2022. They are diagnosed using PCR tests that we know from the Covid era are totally unreliable. On the subject of Covid, the world’s government-imposed lockdowns also had a negative and totally foreseeable impact on the food supply chains.
Recently, UK supermarkets suffered from shortages of an ever-expanding list of fresh fruit and vegetables. The media initially tried blaming it on adverse weather in Spain and Morocco from where we import the produce. However, other reports have suggested it is also because UK farmers, who grow their produce in greenhouses, can’t afford to heat them because of the high cost of fuel. It’s interesting, therefore, that the government has been giving farmers lump sum payments to leave farming altogether and to give up their land so it can no longer be used for agricultural purposes – thereby reducing the amount of land available for food production – when they could have been offering more financial help to farmers and food producers to increase our food security.
We must also ask why the energy costs are so high. Contrary to the mainstream media blaming it and everything else on the war in Ukraine, it is because of the government’s obsession with Net Zero. They have been drastically reducing our coal production and planning to close all coal-fired electricity plants by October 2024, and no longer encouraging any investment in fossil fuels. Instead, we are relying ever more on the totally unreliable renewables sector.
Our coal production dropped by 44 per cent between the third quarter of 2021 and the third quarter of 2022 but our imports increased by 34 per cent. So the government are deliberately reducing our own coal supplies to reach Net Zero targets whilst importing more to make up the shortfall, making a mockery of their environmental claims while ensuring the British public pay more for their energy. For the same period, gas exports increased by 369 per cent: why wasn’t this used domestically instead to reduce the soaring energy bills everyone, included, food producers, faced last year? Moreover, our electricity exports increased by 771 per cent and yet we were being warned of potential blackouts, and electricity bills for both businesses and households were exorbitant.
The cost of energy is inextricably linked to the price of food as high energy costs for the farmers and transporters equals high food prices and now shortages. At this point it is worth highlighting another quote form Henry Kissinger: ‘Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.’
The question must be: are all these events that are negatively impacting the food supply being orchestrated? A recent paper published by Leeds University may be enlightening. It is entitled ‘Rationing and Climate Change Mitigation’. The authors suggest that rationing of both food and fuel would be helpful to prevent climate change. They praise how successful rationing was during the war and believe it would be a great idea to re-introduce it. They admit that the public are unlikely to go along with this idea if they think resources are plentiful, so what do they suggest? If there is no scarcity of resources then the illusion of scarcity of something else must be created. To this end they claim there is a scarcity of carbon sinks. So we won’t be permitted to use all our resources, not because they are not plentiful, but because our planet cannot absorb the carbon produced by humans utilising them.
The authors realise that the public will need to be re-educated to believe in this fake scarcity: ‘Rationing in this context may require a public information campaign to help people to recognise the scarcity of carbon sinks, to make it clear that we would not be introducing rationing-in-the-face-of-abundance.’
They will also need to make us feel guilty: ‘Second, this may also need to be supported by moral argument – highlighting the moral imperative to consider future generations or at least the current younger generations.’
It sounds suspiciously like the behavioural psychology from the Covid era. This time, though, instead of making us believe that we must comply with restrictions in case we kill granny, they want us to believe that carbon dioxide will kill everyone and if we don’t comply, we will kill young people.
Of course, their plan would be made a lot easier if the government created a real scarcity, which is what they go on to suggest. They want the government to close all coal mines, stop all oil exploration and severely restrict any sale of fossil fuels. They admit that this will cause scarcity and it will be a problem initially. To overcome this, they suggest the government resort to the usual propaganda about saving the lives of future generations and eventually the gullible public will buy it.
They also advocate deliberately creating food shortages: ‘In addition to stricter regulations on fossil fuels, regulation could also target other areas. For example, carbon-intensive farming methods and factory-farmed livestock could be banned – which would clearly have impacts on food supplies.’
Does this not sound more like our current reality than a mere suggestion for the future?
In Part 3 we will examine how vaccines are causing fertility issues.
This is the first in a series tracing the history of population control through to present day depopulation ambitions and intent.
Population growth and the consequent need for population control and even ‘depopulation’ has long been a concern of the elites. Thomas Malthus, an 18th century economist, was one of the first people to voice concerns that there was insufficient farmland and therefore insufficient means to grow enough food to feed the burgeoning population.
Ironically, as we shall see in part 2, today’s government policies could be making this scenario more likely with some academics even suggesting deliberately creating the scarcity that Malthus feared in order to alleviate the ‘climate crisis’.
The idea of population reduction was embraced by the eugenics movement who sought to improve the human race by eradicating undesirable characteristics. One of the main proponents of this was Sir Francis Galton. He was a Victorian polymath who believed intelligence was inheritable and resorted to meticulously taking body measurements, including skull size, in a failed attempt to find a defining characteristic which would be an indicator of intelligence. This pseudo-science of craniology was later adopted by the Nazis in their quest to prove they were the superior race.
Whereas these early proponents of population control targeted races and other minority groups to promote their racist ideas, today’s advocates for depopulation target the whole of humanity to promote their environmental ideology. One of the favoured options of the eugenicists was forced birth control or sterilisation of the undesirables. It may just be that today’s environmental zealots, who appear to have their hands on all the levers of power, and who view us all as undesirables, will have their dreams fulfilled as birth rates are falling dramatically in many countries. This is hardly surprising as vaccines, food, water and the air around us are laden with anti-fertility substances, as will be explored in parts 3 and 4.
Just as the anti-human, pseudo-scientific ideas of the net-zero zealots are accepted by our so-called ‘educated’ class today, the unscientific and racist theories of yesterday’s eugenicists were once common among the intellectual classes, particularly after Charles Darwin, the cousin of Galton, gave them a gloss of scientific responsibility when he developed the idea of the ‘survival of the fittest’.
In his 1871 book The Descent of Man Darwin wrote: ‘Thus, the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.’
Julian Huxley, whose great-grandfather was a friend of Darwin, was president of the British Eugenics society and was embraced by academia and the elites, being a Fellow of the Royal Society and president of UNESCO. In 1944 he wrote: ‘The lowest strata are reproducing too fast. Therefore . . . they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilisation.’
George Bernard Shaw, another favourite of the intelligentsia, was an admirer of Stalin and a rabid eugenicist. He frequently advocated the extermination of those who did not benefit society proclaiming that the only justification needed was their ‘incorrigible social incompatibility’-
He re-iterated this philosophy when he said: ‘If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent, human way.’
H G Wells, beloved by the intellectuals of his day, promoted the killing of alcoholics, people with physical and mental illness and sterilisation of ‘inferior’ people.
Wells was a friend of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, an organisation founded on eugenics. Her contempt of people she deemed inferior is well known. She said: ‘The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.’ Another one of her many sickening quotes is: ‘Feeble-minded persons, habitual congenital criminals, those afflicted with inheritable disease, and others found biologically unfit by authorities qualified judge should be sterilised or, in cases of doubt, should be so isolated as to prevent the perpetuation of their afflictions by breeding.’
Planned Parenthood is a ‘pro-choice’ advocate that performs over 350,000 abortions every year. It was recently found to be selling aborted baby parts for profit, which tells you all you need to know. To emphasise how important this group is, one has only to see the companies that donate to it – Microsoft, General Electric, Bank of America, Shell, Pfizer, Starbucks, American Express, PayPal, Boeing and the Temple of Satan. The last of these organisations openly supports abortion because it is part of their satanic rituals. Planned Parenthood is also a big hit with celebrities, receives vast amounts of money from the US government and one of its previous board members was Bill Gates’s father.
After the Second World War, eugenics could not be openly embraced so another reason to justify depopulation had to be created – the environment.
The clarion call for the elites to promote their depopulation agenda came in 1972. That year, the Club of Rome, founded by David Rockefeller and consisting of world leaders and businessmen, had a meeting with the purpose of uniting the world behind a common crisis that could be solved only by the globalist elite and, at the same time, would advance their depopulation plans. After the meeting they said: ‘In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.’
Thus was born the global warming myth, promulgated with the assistance of the mainstream media and used to justify depopulation, with the whole of humanity now the target.
Prince Philip was a big supporter of culling the population. He said: ‘In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.’
Paul Ehrlich, an environmentalist renowned for making apocalyptic predictions about the end of the world due to overpopulation, wrote in his 1968 book The Population Bomb: ‘We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.’
Ted Turner, founder of CNN, is another great fan of depopulation and once said: ‘A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95 per cent decline from present levels, would be ideal.’
Jacques Cousteau, the oceanographer and film-maker was another supporter of wiping out vast swathes of humanity. In a 1991 interview he proclaimed: ‘World population must be stabilised and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day.’ The following year he was invited to the Rio Earth Summit and became a consultant for the United Nations.
John Holdren, President Obama’s Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is a staunch supporter of forced sterilisation, even advocating putting sterilising chemicals in our drinking water. This is interesting as fluoride and chlorine, already introduced to the water supply in various parts of the world, do cause fertility issues as will be discussed in part 4.
He has also said: ‘The development of a long-term sterilising capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.’
David Brower, founder of various environmental movements and three times nominated for the Nobel peace prize, suggested that only the select few should be allowed to have children: ‘Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government licence . . . All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.’
The following is one of the most horrific and disturbing quotes of all, from a 2012 paper by Italian professors published in the British Medical Journal. The authors propose that murdering new-born infants is totally acceptable as they are not really human: ‘By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled. ‘
It would appear that California is now wanting to make this scenario a reality. A recently created Bill would allow the mother of an unwanted baby to kill it up to a number of weeks after birth without fear of prosecution. In Maryland, a similar Bill would prohibit any investigation into a baby’s death is if it born healthy but is allowed to die by starvation or by freezing to death for example within the first few weeks after birth.
And it’s not just infants they want to kill. The authors of a Lancet report claim that ‘death is healthy’ and want to let people with life-threatening illness die to reduce their carbon footprint. Naturally, the elderly are also targets. Recently a Yale professor has suggested that elderly Japanese should commit suicide to stop them being a burden on society.
As previously stated, Thomas Malthus feared food scarcity due to overpopulation. Part 2 will examine how government policies may lead to this very eventuality.
There are various degrees of acceptable insanity, but in general you would not want a person who thought a toad had the same intrinsic value as your mother to manage her Alzheimer’s disease. You would not want a person who equated the value of your daughter with that of a rat to decide whether she be injected with medicine still under trial, such as an mRNA vaccine. Or perhaps you would, as you may agree with the Lancet editorial in January 2023 that equates these, insisting: “All life is equal, and of equal concern.”
Whatever value system you apply to other humans, it is important to understand that international public health is currently dominated by such rhetoric, if not such thinking. This will greatly influence society and your health for the next few decades.
The Lancet is one of the most influential international medical journals. The above passage is not taken out of context. The editorial recommends we change the way society is managed:
Taking a fundamentally different approach to the natural world, one in which we are as concerned about the welfare of non-human animals and the environment as we are about humans.
To understand where public health has gone during the past few years, and why the Covid response could happen, it is important to pick this short editorial apart. Why did health professionals recommend children be denied the right to play together, and coerce pregnant women to be injected with novel pharmaceuticals that pass to their foetus? The answer lies partly in the dogma that now dominates health institutions and the journals that claim to inform them.
The concept that human health is influenced by the environment is as old as society itself. The ‘One Health’ label was attached to this a couple of decades ago to encompass the benefits of approaching public health in a more ecologically holistic manner. Bovine tuberculosis will affect humans less if it is controlled more effectively in cattle. Human well-being will benefit if forest preservation maintains local rainfall and shade, improving crop and animal production. Few would disagree.
Many religious beliefs also hold nature in high regard. Jains and some Buddhist schools hold that humans should minimise harm to any animal, maintaining strict vegetarian diets and taking steps to avoid the killing even of earthworms. Judaism and related beliefs hold that all of nature is God’s work and while humans have sovereignty over animals, they also have an obligation to nurture the world that God created. These religions maintain a strictly hierarchical view.
The difference with current One Health dogma is that it goes beyond revering nature to considering humans to be just one of many equal creatures. One Health in 2023, as the Lancet explains, involves “a revolutionary shift in perspective”. The Lancet’s editors are calling, specifically, for animals to be considered on a par with humans, dispensing with the “purely anthropocentric” or hierarchical view held by other nature-revering religions.
This insistence on inter-species equity is where the current One Health argument begins to come unstuck. Preserving an ecosystem (good) requires the infliction of staggering pain and suffering on many of its inhabitants by other, predatory animals (terrible for the victims). You cannot have it both ways. So, if you want animals to be treated like humans, either separate the animals from their natural predators, or leave humans also to the harsh cruelty of nature.
The Lancet opens by calling on indigenous peoples’ care for land to stand as an example. It then advocates that we do away with indigenous meat-dominated diets, quoting its EAT-Lancet Commission that it
…takes an equitable approach by recommending people move away from an animal-based diet to a plant-based one, which not only benefits human health, but also animal health and wellbeing.
The ‘welfare’ of animals, in the Lancet’s opinion, is better served by the cut and thrust of the savannah, where bovids are disemboweled alive by carnivores. This naïve view of indigenous people and nature smacks of the cultural paternalism of the Victorian romantics. Many indigenous peoples, together with species ranging from weasels to jaguars, will be hoping they take their equity elsewhere.
Being “as concerned about the welfare of non-human animals” as one is about humans (‘ecological equity’ in the Lancet’s parlance) is a dangerous position to hold. Equity means all animals and humans should have equal rights or outcomes. Consistent with this, management of a highway triage event would have to weigh a severely injured goat (or rabbit) against a severely injured human, and not discriminate based on species. If the goat is more likely to respond to emergency measures, then save it and leave the unfortunate human to his or her fate. While the Lancet‘s editorial team may hold this view, most people would recognise this as a degradation of humans. One Health, however, extends far beyond the Lancet, and is being woven into the proposed pandemic agreements by which the World Health Organisation and others hope to increase control of global public health.
If the public health industry truly views the world through this lens, then the public should consider whether its protagonists can be trusted with any influence or authority. If they view the world otherwise, then they should cease the false rhetoric. The idea that fellow humans are to be held at a higher level than animals underpins virtually all human ethical systems. These include the Nuremberg Codes developed after the medical profession led the degradation of human dignity before and during World War Two.
I, personally, shall not entrust my children’s welfare to the hands of people who consider them on a level with the rodents I regularly trap and kill. I want to minimise the trauma I put these rodents through, and I want to see their species thrive in the wild, but I don’t want them crawling in my children’s beds. That means killing them, because they thrive otherwise in the local environment in which we live, and we don’t have the capacity, as the Lancet editors might, to maintain a fully rodent-proof house.
One Health, as a recognition of the close ties between human health and the health of the environment, is not new. Caring for and loving nature is also nothing new, and is a healthy state in which to live. Minimising pollution and maintaining diversity is an important part of this. So, incidentally, is eating meat. Siberian tigers and poodles agree.
A rational One Health approach does not require a fanciful world in which gazelles, lions, hyaenas and humans drink from the same cup. It has nothing to do with a code of medical conduct in which the life of a lemming is weighed against the life of a baby. We have just been through three years in which novel drugs were trialled en masse on children and pregnant women, and corporate investors enriched themselves through the coercion of millions. This repulsive devaluation of our fellow humans needs to stop.
Health professionals who do not prioritise people over animals may get by as veterinary surgeons, but are unsafe with people. It is time for those who believe in the intrinsic and undefinable value of each human to find their voice, and rebuild our institutions on that basis. Public health should elevate humanity rather than degrade it.
Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Director of the Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in the USA, Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva, and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a member of the Executive Committee of PANDA.
Matt Taibbi continues his Twitter reporting on what he calls the CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. His report yesterday on the Aspen Institute’s activities caught my eye. As he put it:
14. The Woodstock of the Censorship-Industrial Complex came when the Aspen Institute – which receives millions a year from both the State Department and USAID – held a star-studded confab in Aspen in August 2021 to release its final report on “Information Disorder.”
15. The report was co-authored by Katie Couric and Chris Krebs, the founder of the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Yoel Roth of Twitter and Nathaniel Gleicher of Facebook were technical advisors. Prince Harry joined Couric as a Commissioner.
16. Their taxpayer-backed conclusions: the state should have total access to data to make searching speech easier, speech offenders should be put in a “holding area,” and government should probably restrict disinformation, “even if it means losing some freedom.”
In other words, a group of extremely wealthy, privileged, half-educated, self-important people assemble in North America’s swankiest mountain retreat, at an institution heavily financed by taxpayer money, to discuss censoring and correcting the plebs’ “information disorder.” A naive outsider might wonder if this sort of activity was conceived as an intentional insult of the middle class, taxpaying citizenry.
The mental habits of the participants are perhaps best expressed by their choice of Prince Harry—a descendent of King George III, who once publicly characterized the U.S. First Amendment protection of free speech as “bonkers”—as a Commissioner. How strange that a young man who seems unable to manage his personal and family affairs was commissioned with making recommendations to U.S. policymakers about governing the American people.
“The Free State of Florida” is set to have the most oppressive hate crime laws in America in order to “combat anti-Semitism.”
“There is no First Amendment right to conduct,” Jewish Florida State Rep. Randy Fine told the media earlier this week. “If you graffiti a building, it is a crime now, but if your motivation is hate, it will be a third-degree felony and you will spend five years in prison. If you want to litter, it’s a crime right now, but if you litter and your motivation is a hate crime, it will be a third-degree felony and you will spend 5 years in jail.”
The bill was put forward by the GOP to silence the “Goyim Defense League” who’ve been sharing anti-Semitic flyers in Florida neighborhoods and holding up anti-Semitic banners over bridges which are critical of Jews.
Florida Rep. Mike Caruso told reporter Chris Nelson on Friday that the bill “makes anti-Semitism a hate crime.”
“If we do nothing we are going to have 1933’s Nazi Germany all over again,” Caruso said.
The Florida GOP is expected to pass their new hate crime bill this legislative session.
If Governor Ron DeSantis signs the bill into law, Florida will have worse hate crime laws than California, New York, Connecticut and every other state in the Union.
Christine Pulfrey remembers her mother as ‘very fit’ and ‘in good form’ when she was admitted to a private hospital in Hull for a routine knee operation. Complications arose after surgery so the 86-year-old was transferred to the Royal Hull Infirmary where, according to her daughter, in February 2017 she was ‘deliberately deprived of hydration and food and was neglected’.
‘When she died she looked as if she had been starved, like people who were starved in the concentration camps,’ said Christine.
This anecdote is from one of 17 case studies included a report called ‘When End of Life Care Goes Wrong’, which will be published on Tuesday by the Lords and Commons Family and Child Protection Group in response to a growing number of complaints made by bereaved relatives to Voice for Justice UK, a campaign group.
All the studies, drawn from more than 600 cases (a total described by the group as only ‘the tip of the iceberg’), make deeply disturbing reading.
They include, for instance, the case of a 78-year-old man called John with non-terminal lung cancer. At the Countess of Chester Hospital he was injected with both morphine and midazolam, a lethal combination in a patient like him.
This jab, in the view of Sam Ahmedzai, Emeritus Professor of Palliative Medicine who offers medical analysis for each case study, was ‘directly responsible for the cessation of breathing’ some 30 seconds later. He concluded that the family ‘were made to witness what they could only interpret as an act of involuntary euthanasia’.
The family called in their lawyers, intent on bringing about the prosecution of medics who might have killed John by a combination of drugs they knew to be lethal. According to the report, their efforts were thwarted by medical documentation they say was fabricated but which was taken at face value by the police.
Another case concerned Laura Jane Booth, 21, who had learning difficulties and Crohn’s disease. She could communicate only through limited sign language, yet her family knew her as ‘kind and caring’ and someone who ‘loved life’.
Laura was admitted to the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield for a routine eye operation and died there three weeks later. The NHS issued a death certificate attributing Laura’s demise to her conditions combined with pneumonia and respiratory failure from fluid on the lungs. Her family were convinced she was starved to death and fought for an inquest. They had to wait four and a half years for their day in court but the coroner issued a new death certificate which listed untreated ‘malnutrition’ among the causes. Jamie Bogle, a barrister and co-author of the report, identifies this case as one of a number ‘where proceedings for alleged homicide may have been indicated’.
Fat chance of that. As a journalist who spent years researching and writing about the Liverpool Care Pathway, the end-of-life care protocol scrapped in 2014 as a ‘national disgrace’, I would consider it a minor miracle if the police took such complaints seriously. My debut novel, The Beast of Bethulia Park,https://amzn.eu/d/i9rllc1 published shortly before Christmas, was written partly with the purpose of demonstrating how unscrupulous doctors and nurses could use such ‘death pathways’ to kill elderly and ‘nuisance’ patients more or less with impunity, if they chose, or indeed were encouraged, to do so.
The evils about which I had heard so many families complain over the last decade are practised in the book by two villainous characters and other manifestations of the problem, which appear in this report, are there too: falsified death certificates, fabricated or omitted medical documents, police officers unwilling or unable to investigate allegations from families, a system which callously places obstacles in the way of aggrieved relatives seeking the truth, which short-circuits their complaints or takes years to resolve them and to scant satisfaction, and which treats the bereaved, the anxious and the heartbroken as contemptuously as criminals. Common mechanisms for killing are set out: contrived prognoses of death followed by the withdrawal of food and fluid and the simultaneous use of a sedating ‘chemical cosh’, or ruses like the deliberate use of contra-indicated drugs in patients susceptible to their lethal side effects. They appear in this report as well.
What is shocking and new about the report is that all but two of the case studies have occurred since the abolition of the LCP in 2014 following the review led by Baroness Neuberger the previous year. Eleven of the patient deaths described came after new guidelines were issued in 2015 by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, and four of them were within the last three years.
This would suggest that the problems that the demise of LCP was supposed to have remedied are continuing, that the protocol was damaged but far from dead, and that patients have been duped into believing they are safe.
The Rev Lynda Rose, a former barrister and the executive editor of the report, said the work of the parliamentary group showed ‘all too clearly that misdiagnoses and mis-assessments as to quality of life and proximity to dying are disturbingly common.
‘Excessive and inappropriate use of midazolam and morphine, rendering a patient comatose, coupled with the withdrawal of food and hydration, have combined to impose a death sentence on the elderly and vulnerable from which there is no right of appeal,’ she said. ‘For all our sakes we need to end the abuse now.’
The group is recommending a national inventory of local end of life care plans, policies and procedures being used in all healthcare settings; a national rapid response service to advise and support people who have a loved one experiencing poor quality end-of-life care; a fast track advice helpline for bereaved families; a national register of cases where end-of-life care has fallen below standards or breached guidelines; the urgent adoption of a uniform national system to capture patients’ preferences for end-of-life care, and further high quality research into social, medical and nursing aspects of end-of-life care.
However Professor Patrick Pullicino, a recently retired consultant neurologist who was among the senior physicians to blow the whistle on LCP abuses more than a decade ago, believes that more must be done.
‘The report flags up shortcomings of the Care Quality Commission repeatedly,’ he said. ‘This is the body that is tasked with the safety of patients in NHS. The CQC must bear full responsibility for the continued use of lethal pathways.
‘They need to make dehydration a notifiable occurrence and sanction hospitals that dehydrate patients. The one body that could force a change and stop inappropriate deaths is doing nothing despite repeated complaints made to it.
‘The sick elderly necessarily take up a lot of hospital beds and therefore consume a lot of resources. Despite the increase in the elderly population the number of hospital beds in the UK has dramatically fallen. It is impossible to avoid the connection with the widespread use of end-of-life pathways.’
Pullicino puts his finger on the nub of the problem. The real dangers of such pathways lie not inherently in the systems, the level of expertise of those who deploy them, or the extent of communication between families and medical professionals. They lie first and foremost in fallen human nature. Is it so really so difficult to accept that the ‘key workers’ of our glorious NHS are not always motivated by the best of intentions? Any system of care must not only be conceived, operated and regulated to the highest standards but sufficiently robust and transparent to withstand the designs of those who would kill from pleasure or from conviction, and from those who would permit and encourage such killings for gain and for profit. Such people will always be around.
The NHS needs to be effectively policed. The law exists, after all, to protect the innocent and to punish the perpetrator. Yet this new report would suggest that in some areas of health care it is barely present at all. That is not only a scandal, it’s a danger to all of us.
Privileged ARD German Public Television journalist Anja Reschke wants to turn Germans into worm-eaters, to save the planet. From paternalism to abuse.
Generously funded, spoiled ARD public television treats its regular viewers like Cinderellas who are to be exploited, to live in squalor and eat worms instead of meat. AI generated image by DALL E 2.
Germany’s ARD public broadcasting network is funded to the tune of more than eight billion euros by compulsory fees levied on every German household each year.
But the network has gone far beyond its original charter of keeping the public informed and educated, and now appears to have even drifted past being an paternalistic institution with the self-assigned role of properly upbringing the masses of the working uncouth.
The latest comes from ARD left-wing know-it-all Anja Reschke who appeared in the early evening program “Wissen vor Acht” (Knowledge before Eight) with a new nutrition tip for those who don’t want to wean themselves off “climate- destroying” meat: They can can simply grow worm meat in their “kitchens of tomorrow”.
“Round and juicy” after 6 weeks!
In the ARD show, Reschke demonstrates how worms can be grown and then fattened in six to eight weeks until they become “round and juicy”.
Then all they have to do is put them in the freezer “and later they can be processed into minced meat,” says the leftie journalist Reschke. Supposedly, the plant yields 200 to 500 grams of meat per week, but uses “only a fraction of the land, food and water compared to cattle or pig farming,” Reschke enthuses.
While a kilogram of beef produces around 70 kilos of CO2, a kilo of worm meat produces “just under three kilos.”
People will just have to get over their disgust
There’s only one obstacle: We only have to “overcome our disgust against insects as food, because insects surely belong on the menu of the future,” says Rescke. It just takes a little getting used to, Reschke seems to imply as she and her dim-witted daughters at the ARD ready themselves for the royal evening ball.
Meat eaters like “consumers of child pornography”
“This is no April Fools joke,” writes AUF 1. The ARD is dead serious about it: “This madness is meant dead-seriously. The climate mania serves to encourage people in all seriousness to eat vermin in order to save the world.”
Deutschlandfunk, also a part of the massive German public broadcasting organization, recently compared meat eaters to “consumers of child pornography”.
Wow! Even Cinderella’s evil stepmother never went that far.
I have used the trick of trying to think like the enemy and it has been a successful strategy for me. So here are a few thoughts to help focus on what might come and what the other side might be up to, but what might also stand in their way.
I’d be thrilled that my psychological warfare worked so well on a huge chunk of people. At first, anyway. I’d be wondering if it would work again.
I’d be worried that at least half the population (mostly blue collar) is no longer completely brainwashed. They are silent, but they are not buying the narrative. Only 15% got that bivalent booster.
I would not give a d**m about nation states (except for destroying them and diluting their people and cultures) and I would have no allegiance to any jurisdiction.
I would be a bit nervous about what those other globalists are doing, messing with MY air, water and soil.
I’d be very mad that Fauci and his buds promised me a deadly pandemic and it didn’t really make the cut, and now it is so mild no one is frightened of it any more.
I’d be mad that the same crowd promised me a severe monkeypox pandemic, and that didn’t work out so well, either. I can’t really trust them to get me the types of pandemics I wanted, can I?
I’d be nervous about how the people will respond to the next one that Bill Gates promised would be coming soon. They might just go after us for creating it and unleashing it. How do Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos ever show their face in public? I don’t want to be unable to go wherever I please.
I’d be nervous about the fact the COVID shots started killing people off too soon—too many people have figured it out, and getting them to take another shot is not going to be easy. This could be a huge problem, since the plan seems to have entailed giving everyone ten shots.
The vaccine passport plan failed, since the vaccines didn’t protect and Americans won’t go for it now. While we may be able to install them in some European countries, the plan was to get everyone to pay for their own tracker and control system. Now people are starting to ditch their phones, or keep them in Faraday bags. And the population is getting wary of politicians and public health officials.
We could pull out all the stops and kill or maim the majority of the population, but when people understand what’s happening, and they have nothing left to lose by fighting, they fight back. And we don’t have enough police and armies on our side to control them yet. We don’t have robot armies yet, either.
Will we dare to keep destroying food storage and production facilities? Won’t we make a mistake and it could be traced back to us?
How much can we squeeze the public over energy before they take matters into their own hands?
Our hardware infrastructure, till it is up on satellites, is vulnerable. But once it’s up on satellites, how do we fix it when it breaks? What if we kill off all the competent tech guys, almost all of whom in the US and Israel took the shots?
Small cells (5G) are easy to knock down. Tractors can knock down towers. I can build underground, but I don’t want to have to live in an underground bunker.
We can sink economies everywhere, whenever we choose. But if we starve enough people, there will be too many people with nothing left to lose.
What happens when the people find out who we are?
No one better start using any nukes on MY planet.
What happens when the people decide the governments aren’t legitimate because of the vote scams, and they turn off the money spigot? Do you expect me to spend my own billions on this world takeover? Fuggedaboudit.
____________________________
Thanks to the commenter who identified this piece in Brownstone: Technocratic Dystopia Is Impossible by Robert Blumen. His thesis is that it is physically not possible for elites to produce the desired utopia/dystopia. He mentions various descriptors of the dystopia below. Worth a read of his whole piece.
Aaron Kheriaty, who says much the same in his book The New Abnormal, calls the oncoming system “communist capitalism.” Jeffrey Tucker calls it “techno-primitivism.”
Three years ago few of us knew the impending storm that was brewing; one that would upend the very fabric of global democracy, destroy whole communities, businesses and families and cause a vast number of children and adolescents to become unmoored and disengage from society, among many other deleterious outcomes.
Perhaps most chilling of all has been the sinister turn in those three years of what was once seemingly a force for good, “public health;” which changed into a punitive and authoritarian entity that wilfully engages in iatrogenesis and the disenfranchisement of those skeptical of the medical-industrial complex through widespread and draconian vaccine mandates.
In retrospect, America in February of 2020 seems like a libertarian, innocent age compared to our current one. We did not live under the shadow of possible nuclear holocaust. Everyday life was devoid of the nanny-state elements of our current age. Many of us had gone through life never quite knowing what the destructive power of a government run amok looked like.
Moreover, the government and the security state during the last few years has proved itself to be in the service of only a tiny sliver of shadowy and in some cases invisible elites and “experts” whose actions have, in America most especially, been held to little accountability. In the face of lockdowns, which happened to be the most universally undemocratic and destructive event of my lifetime, regular citizens were held in contempt and with little more agency than the serfs of the Middle Ages. Some of us were made completely irrelevant and “non-essential.”
Yet, amongst this wreckage and horror, many skeptical people, who once believed in benevolent leaders, have been freed from the flawed faith in “good” government. In this freedom lie several important lessons for how to move forward into a (hopefully) less totalitarian future.
Lesson #1: We need to hold the medical-industrial complex accountable.
My skepticism about the medical-industrial complex felt inchoate and somehow unfounded pre-Covid. Sure, I knew I’d be given a lecture at every doctor’s appointment about how I needed to schedule colonoscopies (in my early 40s!), buy new medicines, get blood work done, no questions about my holistic well-being, diet, etc. It didn’t matter which doctor I saw, they were all like that. There was always a feeling that these big buildings and office parks that housed the machinery of the medical industrial complex were, like consolidated public schools or prisons, quite anti-human. But I still . . . believed, more or less.
What the Covid mania revealed is that much of the medical-industrial complex, like the military-industrial complex, is part of a system of hierarchical relationships that only truly benefits those in power. The beneficiaries being Big Pharma, massive corporate health systems, wealthy physicians and even a security state/biodefense apparatus that sees vast swaths of the global population as dots on a chart to be manipulated, vaccinated and medicalized.
Even worse, iatrogenesis – the massive health harms caused by Covid medical interventions – generates unseemly and massive profits, again for a tiny segment of individuals with unfathomable power and wealth (Bill Gates is the prime example). This sinister complex relies on sickness, not health to make their profits. I believe this is one reason why Covid was so intensely medicalized and why we all became pawns of the vaccine industry, instead of public health pursuing more holistic attempts for better outcomes for people with Covid.
None of us has to take this lying down, though. Health consumers can take back their rights through the great work of organizations such as the Children’s Defense Fund and No College Mandates, two groups with writers affiliated with Brownstone Institute.
Lesson #2: The “real” American left is not MSNBC and has perhaps vanished entirely
The American liberal-left is a coalition that has deteriorated so far as to be unrecognizable, filled with purity tests, blind obedience to secret service agencies like the FBI, the CIA and shadow organizations in the military like DARPA, with authoritarian leaders who constantly virtue signal and who will censor and cancel those they do not agree with.
For many years, since the late Obama years particularly, I’ve felt more and more out of place within the cultural ideology of the American left, which has placed identity politics above economic fairness, and in many instances is entirely unrecognizable from the “left” of old.
Covid remains the demarcation point–when I and millions of others abandoned the movement entirely.
Nothing about being a cheerleader for lockdowns represented traditional leftist values. In fact, I would argue that the natural place for the American left was to viciously oppose lockdowns, because they so deleteriously affected the working class, working poor, and minorities. And yet the silence on the left in the mid-part of 2020, much to my horror, soon became derision and then full scale hatred toward those of us who proclaimed our opposition to lockdowns, even with reasoned analysis or proposals such as the Great Barrington Declaration.
That we were brutally censored and that all protestations ended up falling on deaf ears was such an alienating experience, many of us who at one time proclaimed to be “of the left” have abandoned the project entirely, and most especially the political party that was supposed to represent us in America, the Democrats. We have emerged politically homeless; some having even established alliances within the welcoming arms of the libertarian and conservative movements.
This begs the question that many of us have pondered: what is the political left now? And what has it always been?
It certainly does not resemble the George Orwell version, which had so much influence on me as a college student. The spirit of the left contained in “The Road to Wigan Pier,” for instance, feels like a world gone by, infused as it was with a healthy skepticism, admiration and reverence for the working classes, and the mutually supportive ideas of liberty and egalitarianism. Such humility and nuance have almost wholly disappeared from our current rendition of “leftism.”
Some of us have even wondered (and indeed Orwell pondered the same thing): does leftism, if unchecked, always loop into something horrendous, the inevitable conclusion not being utopia but the graveyards of Cheong Ek or tendentious, censorious authoritarianism?
Does dialectical materialism only go down one road in the end, and that toward Stalinism or fascism?
Yet, despite the loneliness of becoming a dissenter within one’s old political home, the complete destruction of what used to be “left” and in some instances “right” political spheres is in itself freeing. Many of us are carving out new political identities and in some cases new political parties and alliances are forming. This outcome will ultimately be very healthy for the future of democracy.
Lesson #3: We have proof that “experts” are often wrong.
A healthy skepticism of the “experts” and elites has always been a hallmark of American life, especially out here in the provinces where I reside. Yet, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy – the last book he published and maybe most prescient – many American elites and professional “experts” have now completely abandoned their advisory roles to become de facto rulers in themselves, worshiped in almost a religious sense by a segment of completely secularized, well-to-do liberals. These elites, however, mostly hold contempt toward the working and middle class. This has been happening for quite some time (Lasch’s book was published in 1996).
The most egregious recent example of this worship and the power of the 21st century technocrat is embodied by the former Director of NIAID, Anthony Fauci, who was the public face of the disastrous Covid response for nearly three full years. The myopic reverence for this man is dangerous on many levels, but it also showcases a grave weakness of modern humanity; many of us will give up even the most basic freedoms because we blindly trust a technocratic “savior” who just may have all the wrong data or simply be a mendacious, cunning bureaucrat.
Yet, before Covid many of us, including myself, trusted unelected bureaucrats like Fauci far too often with little questioning of their motives. Lockdowns showed their hand and tipped the balance toward egregious authoritarianism. Unelected administrative-state actors should not have any ability to create policy by fiat, and groups such as the NCLA are fighting many of the unconstitutional edicts pushed forward by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the NIH as part of the Covid response.
Lesson #4: The technology that was supposed to lessen inequality actually increases societal rifts.
The modern worship of technology has created an undemocratic information ecosystem rife with inequity, which helped smooth the way for authoritarian and coercive lockdown policies. In fact, with the aforementioned DARPA heavily involved in the Covid response and Big Tech gaining nearly unfettered power during the pandemic, technology’s tentacles are lodged in every classroom, courthouse and boardroom across the country. It seems likely that the architecture for future lockdowns is now firmly in place.
We should never, at any moment moving forward, accept this as our future. The Western world imitated China’s brutal, authoritarian lockdowns because digital technology facilitated it. These policies would have been impossible as little as 25 years ago.
And in the end it was all a sham.
Millions still had to keep the sewers clear, emergency services running, the lights on and our grocery stores stocked. Working class people, many of whom were rightly skeptical of the Covid vaccine, and who subsequently lost their jobs because of the illegal vaccine mandates, were completely ignored by the laptop class who were able to work from home. In the midst of receiving endless curbside deliveries, virtue signaling on social media about “anti-vaxxers,” and sidelining those who actually had to leave their homes and work for a living, Big Tech only fueled the culture wars and ultimately hurt the working class.
Lesson #5: The most meaningful things are still the most meaningful things.
If we cannot trust the experts, the government, the global order, or technology, who can we trust? This is perhaps the most important question of all, and one that has been asked from time immemorial. In intense readings of Leo Tolstoy’s non-fiction work during this strange and awful time, especially Patriotism and Governmentand The Kingdom of God is Within You, I’ve come to realize that in the very act of trusting monolithic institutions or the state in general, we are looking for all the wrong answers and even perhaps asking the wrong questions.
For, like all of the material world, institutions are fallible and crumble. The right questions are much larger and far more personal, and the answers are immutable and have been there forever.
Outside the bounds of our fallible institutions, the most important answers to nearly every question are to be found in authentic feelings of love and belonging. Love for your family, or the little plot of land and house that you own, or the tiny farming community that you live in, the church you belong to, or the group of kind-hearted and supportive friends and writers, like those who have found one another in Brownstone Institute and other grassroots communities.
Faceless federal institutions and their representatives do not deserve our love, nor in most cases do they deserve even admiration or respect. They are the products of very flawed, uncaring systems and are ultimately artificial creations of a flawed humankind.
Despite the anguish and pain we have all felt–and the divisions the last three years of authoritarianism have created–don’t let the elites and their petty politics divide your friendships and family. Love is still the ultimate answer.
Seth Smith is an avid outdoorsman and public librarian based in Missouri.
We are in the midst of history’s greatest wealth transfer. Government subsidized wind systems, solar arrays, and electric vehicles overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy members of society and rich nations. The poor and middle class pay for green energy programs with higher taxes and higher electricity and energy costs. Developing nations suffer environmental damage to deliver mined materials needed for renewables in rich nations.
Since 2000, the world has spent more than $5 trillion on green energy. More than 300,000 wind turbines have been erected, millions of solar arrays were installed, more than 25 million electric vehicles (EVs) have been sold, hundreds of thousands of acres of forest were cut down to produce biomass fuel, and about three percent of agricultural land is now used to produce biofuel for vehicles. The world spends about $1 trillion per year on green energy. Government subsidies run about $200 billion annually, with more than $1 trillion in subsidies spent over the last 20 years.
World leaders obsess over the need for a renewable energy transition to save the planet from human-caused global warming. Governments deliver an endless river of cash to promote adoption of green energy. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 provided $370 billion in subsidies and loans for renewables and EVs. But renewable subsidies and mandates overwhelmingly favor the rich members of society at the expense of the poor.
Wind systems receive production tax credits, property tax exemptions, and sometimes receive payments even when not generating electricity. Landowners receive as much as $8,000 per turbine each year from leases for wind systems on their land. Lease income can be quite high for a landowner with many turbines. In England, ordinary taxpayers pay hundreds of millions of pounds per year in taxes that are funneled as subsidies to wind companies and wealthy land owners.
In the US, 39 states currently have net metering laws. Net metering provides a credit for electricity generated by rooftop solar systems that is fed back into the grid. Solar generators typically get credits at the retail electricity rate, about 14 cents per kilowatt-hour. This is a subsidized rate, which is more than double the roughly five cents per kilowatt-hour earned by power plants. Apartment residents and homeowners that cannot afford to install rooftop solar pay higher electricity bills to subsidize homes that receive net metering credits. Rooftop solar owners also receive federal and state tax incentives, another wealth transfer from ordinary citizens.
US federal subsidies of up to $7,500 for each electric car purchased, along with additional state subsidies, directly benefit EV buyers. The average price of an EV in the US last year was $66,000, which is out of reach for most drivers. A 2021 University of Chicago study found that California EV owners only drive 5,300 miles per year, less than half the mileage for a typical car. Most electric cars in the US are second cars for the rich.
A mid-size electric car needs a battery that weighs about a 1,000 pounds to provide acceptable driving range. Because of battery weight, EVs tend to be about 50 percent heavier than gasoline cars, which causes increased road damage. But EVs don’t pay the road tax included in the price of every gallon of gasoline. EVs should pay higher road taxes than traditional cars, but today this cost is borne by everyday gasoline car drivers.
Renewable systems require huge amounts of special metals. Electric car batteries need cobalt, nickel, and lithium to achieve high energy density and performance. Magnets in wind turbines require rare earth metals, such as neodymium and dysprosium. Large quantities of copper are essential for EV engines, batteries, wind and solar arrays, and electricity transmission systems to connect to remote wind and solar sites. According to the International Energy Agency, an EV requires about six times the special metals of a gasoline or diesel car. A wind array requires more than ten times the metals of a natural gas power plant on a delivered-electricity basis. The majority of these metals are mined in developing countries.
Almost 70 percent of cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Indonesia produces more than 30 percent of the world’s nickel. Chile produces 28 percent of the copper. China produces 60 percent of the rare earth metals. These nations struggle with serious air and water pollution from mining operations. Workers in mines also suffer from poor working conditions and the use of forced labor and child labor practices. But apparently no cost is too great so that rich people in developed nations can drive a Tesla.
To top it off, the European Union recently approved a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). The CBAM will tax goods coming from poor nations which aren’t manufactured using low-carbon processes. CBAM revenues will be a great source of funds for Europe’s green energy programs that benefit the wealthy.
In January, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New York, and Washington proposed a wealth tax on billionaires. It’s interesting to note that all seven of these states mandate and heavily subsidize wind and solar arrays and electric vehicles, which transfer wealth from poor and middle-class residents to those same billionaires.
Ordinary Russians feel no sympathy for their rich compatriots who had their assets frozen by Western countries, President Vladimir Putin stated on Tuesday.
Addressing the Federal Assembly in his key annual program speech he argued that in their kitchen conversations ordinary Russians remembered both the privatization of the 1990s and the conspicuous consumption of the new elites.
“None of the ordinary citizens of Russia felt sorry for those who lost their capital in foreign banks. They didn’t feel sorry for those who lost their yachts and palaces abroad,” Putin stressed.
He recalled “imbalances” faced by the post-Soviet economy when Russia began to build the country again from scratch by aligning with the West.
“We were considered as a source of raw materials,” Putin said, stressing that it took Russia years to break this trend. Meanwhile, instead of expanding production and creating jobs in Russia, the wealthy “elite” spent money on luxury goods like yachts, mansions, and the education of their children abroad, Putin pointed out.
As a result, the image of the West as a safe haven for capital turned out to be “a fake” and everything was taken away from the oligarchs – savings, houses and also their yachts.
“They were simply robbed there and even legally earned money was taken away,” the president said, adding that an attractive Western lifestyle turned out to be an illusion.
Perhaps before he makes a fool of himself next time, he might like to check what the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organisation have to say on the matter:
ABOUT 60 PERCENT of the world’s pasture land (about 2.2 million km2), just less than half the world’s usable surface is covered by grazing systems. Distributed between arid, semi arid and sub humid, humid, temperate and tropical highlands zones, this supports about 360 million cattle (half of which are in the humid savannas), and over 600 million sheep and goats, mostly in the arid rangelands. The distribution of livestock over the different ecological zones is provided in Annex Table 2.
Grazing systems supply about 9 percent of the world’s production of beef and about 30 percent of the world’s production of sheep and goat meat. For an estimated 100 million people in arid areas, and probably a similar number in other zones, grazing livestock is the only possible source of livelihood.
Environmental challenges
Grazing can be visualized as beautiful cows in lush pastures in north-western Europe or New Zealand-livestock in harmony with nature. Indeed, livestock can improve soil and vegetation cover and plant and animal biodiversity, as described in this chapter’s case studies of widely different conditions in Kenya, the western United States and Guinea. By removing biomass, which otherwise might provide the fuel for bush fires, by controlling shrub growth and by dispersing seeds through their hoofs and manure, grazing animals can improve plant species composition. In addition, trampling can stimulate grass tillering, improve seed germination and break-up hard soil crusts.
However, many people associate grazing animals with overgrazing, soil degradation and deforestation. To them livestock keeping in arid regions of the tropics provokes images of clouds of dust, bleached cow skeletons and an advancing desert. The two most quoted sources are the Global Assessment of Soil Degradation (Oldeman et al., 1991), which estimates that 680 million hectares of rangeland have become degraded since 1945, and Dregne et al., (1991) who argue that 73 percent of the world’s 4.5 billion hectares of rangeland is moderately or severely degraded. In humid areas, livestock are associated with ranch encroachment and deforestation of tropical rainforests and competition with wildlife.
Prolonged heavy grazing undoubtedly contributes to the disappearance of palatable species and the subsequent dominance by other, less palatable, herbaceous plants or bushes. Such loss of plant and, in consequence, animal biodiversity can require a long regenerative cycle (30 years in savannas, 100 years in rainforests). Excessive livestock grazing also causes soil compaction and erosion, decreased soil fertility and water infiltration, and a loss in organic matter content and water storage capacity. On the other hand, total absence of grazing also reduces biodiversity because a thick canopy of shrubs and trees develops which intercepts light and moisture and results in overprotected plant communities which are susceptible to natural disasters.
The environmental challenge is thus to identify the policies, institutions and technologies which will enhance the positive and mitigate the negative effects of grazing. Environmental challenges, issues and options differ significantly according to climate and land capabilities. Livestock-environment interactions are therefore described separately for the arid, semi-arid and sub-humid, humid rainforest, and temperate and tropical highlands grazing systems respectively. As will be seen, that differentiation is particularly important for the arid eco-systems. As aridity increases, so does variability of rainfall, to the extent that the periodicity of rain becomes the single most important factor affecting the state of the natural resource base. Classical concepts of vegetation succession and climax vegetation do not apply in such environments and new concepts are required.
Forget climate change and all the other things that Monbiot rambles on about. His only real concern, as he makes clear at the end of his rant, is that farming takes up too much land, which he thinks should be rewilded.
And he is evidently happy to condemn billions to starvation to do it.
Psychiatric drugs lead to the deaths of over 500,000 people aged 65 and over annually in the West, a Danish scientist says. He warns the benefits of these drugs are “minimal,” and have been vastly overstated.
Research director at Denmark’s Nordic Cochrane Centre, Professor Peter Gøtzsche, says the use of most antidepressants and dementia drugs could be halted without inflicting harm on patients. The Danish scientist’s views were published in the British Medical Journal on Tuesday.
His scathing analysis will likely prove controversial among traditional medics. However, concern is mounting among doctors and scientists worldwide that psychiatric medication is doing more harm than good. In particular, they say antipsychotic drugs have been over-prescribed to many dementia patients in a bid to calm agitated behavior.
Gøtzsche warns psychiatric drugs kill patients year in year out, and hold few positive benefits. He says in excess of half a million citizens across the Western world aged 65 and over die annually as a result of taking these drugs.
“Their benefits would need to be colossal to justify this, but they are minimal,” he writes.
“Given their lack of benefit, I estimate we could stop almost all psychotropic drugs without causing harm.”
Gøtzsche, who is also a clinical trials expert, says drug trials funded by big pharmaceutical companies tend to produce biased results because many patients took other medication prior to the tests.
He says patients cease taking the old drugs and then experience a phase of withdrawal prior to taking the trial pharmaceuticals, which appear highly beneficial at first.
The Danish professor also warns fatalities from suicides in clinical trials are significantly under-reported. … continue
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ABOUT 60 PERCENT of the world’s pasture land (about 2.2 million km2), just less than half the world’s usable surface is covered by grazing systems. Distributed between arid, semi arid and sub humid, humid, temperate and tropical highlands zones, this supports about 360 million cattle (half of which are in the humid savannas), and over 600 million sheep and goats, mostly in the arid rangelands. The distribution of livestock over the different ecological zones is provided in Annex Table 2.
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