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.
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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.
I don’t normally watch TVNZ’s Seven Sharp, but on 5th October 2021 we were told that an immunologist would be on the programme to debunk certain ‘Covid myths’.
One such ‘myth’ was the belief that natural immunity is superior to vaccine-induced immunity. In response, clinical immunologist Dr. Maia Brewerton said that natural immunity to Covid-19 is not as good as the vaccine.
No evidence was given. Just an assertion.
As an ex-science teacher, I found Dr Brewerton’s statement to be unsatisfactory, for the following simple reason: the vaccine can only generate antibodies to a single viral antigen (the ‘spike’ protein), whereas the whole virus particle reportedly contains 29 proteins, which can therefore evoke the production of a correspondingly greater diversity of antibodies.
So, if the part of the viral RNA that codes for the spike protein RNA undergoes a mutation, the vaccine-induced antibody may be unable to bind to the mutant antigen, but with natural immunity there will a range of ‘back-up’ antibodies that can bind to the other proteins of the virus.
I wrote to Dr. Brewerton to make this point, asking her if she could provide evidence for her Seven Sharp statement.
I received no reply.
This was particularly disappointing because we had repeatedly been urged by the authorities to ‘accept the science’.
One might think that such a single experience may not be particularly significant; Dr. Brewerton might be snowed under with work. But soon after Dr. Brewerton’s appearance,Stuff invited readers to submit questions on Covid, so I sent a similar question to the one I had asked of Dr. Brewerton.
Again, I received no reply.
I was beginning to sense that the authorities might not be too keen to take their own advice to ‘go with the science’, since the very essence of science is examination and questioning of evidence.
This feeling was solidified in August 2022, when I came across a paper co-authored by Professor Michael Baker, an epidemiologist at the University of Otago, who has been one of chief advocates for the wearing of masks during Covid-19. The paper was titled “The Covid-19 experience in Aotearoa New Zealand and other comparable high-income jurisdictions and implications for managing the next pandemic phase”.
In the article I could find no evidence supporting the efficacy of masks in the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’, so I wrote to Prof. Baker, saying that I had looked for, but had failed to find, any research evidence supporting the efficacy of mask wearing and hoped that he might be able to provide it.
Again, I received no reply.
An essential element in science is the challenging of established ideas in robust, untrammelled debate, in an environment that encourages questioning. Without such openness, science can be misused by powerful interests as a means of disguising misinformation as information.
In the complete absence of evidence-based debate in the media, I was forced to go elsewhere to find out what’s going on. One such source is Ian Miller’s “Unmasked: The Global Failure of Mask Mandates”. Using data from North America, Europe, and parts of South America, and county level in the U.S., Miller presents a compelling case that masks have failed their most significant test – to significantly reduce transmission of Covid. Indeed, it’s clear that masks have no health utility at all, but are an emblem of obedience to power.
In March 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. Government’s chief medical expert was interviewed on 60 Minutes, and he unequivocally expressed his opinion on masks:
There’s no reason to be walking around with masks.. . . . .when you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”
Until his recent retirement, Dr. Fauci has spent his half-century-career as the US Government’s chief medical expert, whose calm, avuncular charm inspired confidence in millions, so his word on the airwaves carried a lot of weight.
Though his was the most familiar voice, organisations such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) prior to Covid, had expressed similar reservations on the utility of masks.
In February 2020, the CDC issued a document called “Community Mitigation Guidelines to Prevent Pandemic Influenza – United States, 2017”. It drew on the findings of nearly 200 research articles published over the years 1990 and 2006, and was specifically concerned with non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI’s) by which people could protect themselves in the event of an epidemic.
The NPI’s the CDC document described for influenza pandemics included voluntary home quarantine of exposed household members and use of face masks in community settings when ill (emphasis added). There was no recommendation that masks should be used by healthy people in the general population.
The evidence base on the effectiveness of NPIs in community settings is limited, and the overall quality of evidence was very low for most interventions. There have been a number of high-quality randomized controlled trials (RCTs) demonstrating that personal protective measures such as hand hygiene and face masks have, at best, a small effect on influenza transmission …”
And in the United Kingdom’s Department of Health issued a guidebook titled “UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011” which, in point 4.15, said [emphasis added]:
Although there is a perception that the wearing of facemasks by the public in the community and household setting may be beneficial, there is in fact very little evidence of widespread benefit from their use in this setting. Facemasks must be worn correctly, changed frequently, removed properly, disposed of safely and used in combination with good respiratory, hand, and home hygiene behaviour in order for them to achieve the intended benefit. Research also shows that compliance with these recommended behaviours when wearing facemasks for prolonged periods reduces over time.”
It’s clear, then, that pre-Covid, public health authorities were unconvinced of the utility of mask-wearing by the general public. So, one is entitled to wonder why, soon after the WHO announced that Covid-19 had pandemic status, governments in North America, Europe, and Australasia began to ‘encourage’ people to wear masks in indoor public places. This was achieved by a combination of legislation and publicly expressed statements by ‘experts’.
In some cases the language was hyperbolic, verging on blood-curdling. In an interview on Newshub in July 2022 Prof. Michael Baker said:
“If you go out when you have this infection and infect your friends and family…you are going to kill some people – just like drinking and driving. We need a massive shift in thinking,”
In my e-mail to Prof. Baker, I had mentioned that I had been unable to find any evidence to support enforced wearing of masks in indoor public places. Since then I have come across two research papers, the most recent showing an investigation into the effects of masking by Beny Spira, Associate Professor of Infectious Disease at the University of São Paulo in the Journal Cureus, Journal of Medical Science.
Data from 35 European countries on morbidity, mortality, and mask usage during a six-month period were analysed. They found that countries with high levels of mask compliance did not perform better than those with low mask usage. On the contrary, there was a positive (though not strong) correlation between mask usage and mortality, suggesting that mask use was associated with slightly greater risk of death.
Of course, correlation does not prove causation, but these results are, or should be, cause for reflection by the authorities. But it seems not.
Whereas the Beny Spira study was retrospective, studying possible effects of mask-wearing in whole populations, a prospective study follows the fate of samples of volunteers, some of whom wore masks and others who did not.
A particularly important study by scientists at the University of Copenhagen during April and May 2020 was published in the academic journal Annals of Internal Medicine. It cast doubt on policies that force healthy individuals to wear face coverings in hopes of limiting the spread of COVID-19. The New York Timesreported that…
“Researchers in Denmark reported on Wednesday that surgical masks did not protect the wearers against infection with the coronavirus in a large randomized clinical trial.”
The experiment involved over 6,000 participants who had tested negative for Covid-19 immediately prior to the experiment. Half the participants were given surgical masks and asked to wear them at all times in public places; the other, control half, were instructed to not wear masks. After a month, participants were tested for Covid-19 and for antibodies against the virus.
The Times reported that of the 4,860 participants who finished the experiment, 42 people in the mask group, or 1.8 percent, got infected, compared with 53 in the unmasked group, or 2.1 percent. The difference was not statistically significant.
Dr. Henning Bundgaard, lead author of the experiment and a physician at the University of Copenhagen, told the Times the results of his research were clear.
“Our study gives an indication of how much you gain from wearing a mask,” Bundgaard said. “Not a lot.”
Surprisingly, or perhaps (in view of what follows) unsurprisingly, the most elite medical journals – TheLancet, TheNew England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association – all refused to publish the paper.
Though the study’s researchers have been reticent about their results, some have hinted that it was their conclusions rather than their methodology that lay behind the rejections. Christian Torp-Pedersen, professor and chief physician at the research department at North Zealand Hospital, told Denmark’s Berlingske Daily:
We can’t start discussing what they are dissatisfied with. For if so, we must also explain what the study showed. And we do not want to discuss this until it has been published.”
When asked when the study would be published, one of its researchers, Thomas Benfield, Professor of infectious disease at the University of Copenhagen replied:
As soon as a journal is brave enough to accept the paper.”
In their paper, the Danish scientists described their findings as ‘inconclusive’, yet it seemed that their failure to produce evidence to support the official narrative was enough for the most élite journals to refuse to publish it.
Anyone who was cynical enough to suspect that discouragement of open debate was not confined to these journals would have found support for this ‘conspiratorial’ view from two leading Oxford University academics, Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine, and Dr Tom Jefferson, a Clinical epidemiologist and Senior Associate Tutor, when they published an article in the Spectator magazine on Nov 19, 2020. The article was titled: ‘Landmark Danish study shows face masks have no significant effect.’
In quoting the Danish findings, Heneghan and Jefferson added: “As a result, it seems that any effect masks have on preventing the spread of the disease in the community is small.”
But then Facebook warned that the article was ‘false information’ claiming that it had been ‘checked by independent fact-checkers’
An angry Prof Heneghan told 70,000 followers on Twitter: ‘I’m aware of this happening to others – what has happened to academic freedom and freedom of speech? There is nothing in this article that is false.’
Such attempts to shut down views contrary to the official narrative should come as no surprise, especially in light of recent revelations about what amounts to ‘public-private censorship’ of free speech.
The revelations began soon after billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, in which he pledged to release internal documents that would reveal how the previous owners of Twitter had suppressed free speech. The files were released for examination by two independent journalists, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss. In an interview on Fox News, Taibbi said:
I think the major revelation of the Twitter files so far is that we’ve discovered an elaborate bureaucracy of what you might call public-private censorship. Basically, companies like Twitter have a system by which they receive ten tens of thousands of requests for action on various accounts, typically through the DHS [Department of Home Security] and FBI, but these requests were coming from basically every agency in the government. We’ve seen them from the HHS, from the Treasury, from the DOD [Department of Defence], even from the CIA, and they will send basically long lists of accounts in Excel spreadsheet files and ask for action on those accounts. And in many cases, Twitter is complying.”
So it’s not too much of a stretch to think that governments have been using Twitter to stifle public dissent over masks.
And it’s not just censorship that’s been the only tool in the box; even more has been the deliberate stoking up of fear, as Laura Dodsworth explains in an introduction to her book A State of Fear. In an introductory article to her book she gives some examples of things to be afraid of. A small sample:
Being tall: “People over 6ft have double the risk of coronavirus, study suggests” (DailyTelegraph 28 July 2020)
Being bald: “Bad news for baldies as new US study finds they’re 40% more at risk of coronavirus. New research has found a strange link between male baldness and the severity of the virus showing men without hair are more likely to end up in hospital.” (Daily Star, July 23, 2020).
Owning a dog and taking home supermarket deliveries: “Dog-owners face 78% higher risk of catching Covid-19 – and home grocery deliveries DOUBLE the risk, study finds.” (Mailonline 17 November 2020).
Being male: “Is testicle pain potentially a sign of Covid? 49-year-old Turkish man who had no other symptoms is diagnosed with the virus” (Mailonline 18 November 2020) and
Erectile dysfunction: “COVID-19 could cause erectile dysfunction in patients who have recovered from the virus, doctor warns” (Daily Mail, Dec 6, 2020)
Your toes: “Coronavirus: People who contract COVID may develop red and swollen toes which turn purple, say scientists” (Sky News UK 29 October, 2020
Taken individually, these might be amusing, but together, they are part of “a panoply of doom-mongering headlines”.
No doubt some will say that Dodsworth is a ‘conspiracy theorist’, but her allegations are confirmed by UK Government publications. On 22nd March 2020, SPI-B, the behavioural science sub-group of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), published a document titled “Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures”, advocating the use of applied psychology to influence social behaviour. Though the focus of the document was on social distancing rather than masks, the intention to use fear is clear:
“The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging. To be effective this must also empower people by making clear the actions they can take to reduce the threat.”
Moreover, Option 2 of Appendix B recommends using the media“to increase sense of personal threat” [emphasis added].
The cynical use of behavioural psychology to manipulate the attitudes and behaviour of populations has not been restricted to the U.K.; it’s been international. Here in New Zealand, in the early days of the pandemic, Jacinda Ardern’s use of the phrase ‘team of 5 million’ was a masterstroke.
But while this might have worked with a fearful, apathetic, naïve, and gullible public, masks and lockdown rules were flouted by some of our leaders in New Zealand, who didn’t see the need for such petty restrictions.
Chief among these was Siouxsie Wiles, the 2021 Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year, and a key adviser to Jacinda Ardern. On Sept 18, 2021 Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon interviewed her.
“Now that we know Covid-19 is airborne, stay away from people who aren’t in your bubble. With new knowledge that Covid-19 is airborne, that’s no longer something safe to do. Please don’t go out and chat with a friend while you are out. Don’t hang around and have a chat, connect in other ways. We’ve got phones, we’ve got Skype, we’ve got Zoom…we need to physically disconnect for a little while,” she said.
“Stay away from people.”
The trouble is, Wiles wasn’t following her own advice. On September 3, 2021, while Auckland was still in Level Four lockdown, she was observed “hanging around and having a chat” with a journalist at Judges Bay, Parnell.
Even more damning, the whole episode was recorded on video, in which Wiles was shown sitting in close proximity to the journalist, and neither was wearing a mask, in clear breach of her own and the government’s advice and mandates.
It depends on where the wind is blowing you could have a gust of wind that if someone infected blows it to you or if you were infected blows it to someone else… For the good of everybody, wearing a mask when you’re out of your home is a good idea.”
As independent journalist Cameron Slater pointed out: “If her advice is to wear a mask at Level Two, presumably it would apply doubly at Level Four.” And “Siouxsie Wiles lives in Freemans Bay, and in order to get to Judges Bay would require a trip in excess of 5km one way and 5km back again. This is in contravention of Level Four regulations that require you to ‘stay local’”.
Slater reported that when the Prime Minister was approached for comment about why it was acceptable for one of her key science advisers to be seen breaking lockdown rules, while Police are busy harassing shoppers, no reply had been received.
In a healthy democracy, the media would be speaking truth to power, so why were the media silent on Wiles’ flouting of the rules? Slater explained why the BFD made it public:
The simple reason is that we are not part of the Prime Minister’s Team of $55 million [a reference to the NZ government fund to rescue “grassroots public interest journalism”, which many see as a form of government control]. This story was given to 1News journalist Benedict Collins. After sitting on the story for five days he informed my source that they had spiked the story. The reason given was that it wasn’t a politician so there was no public interest in the story. Make no mistake, this story was suppressed by an editor at 1News.”
The Wiles case is one of many. The one garnering the most international odium was the 2021 G7 Summit in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, U.K. Among the leaders attending were President Joe Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Photographs taken of the President and First Lady, the Queen, President Trudeau and Prince Charles show them clearly in breach of the ‘two metre’ social distancing rule, and neither is any of them wearing masks, and some show them with arms on each other’s shoulders.
Cynical comments referred to their ‘hypocrisy’ – ‘do as I say, not as I do’, and so on, but their behaviour goes deeper than that.
For one thing, the elite clearly didn’t believe there was any medical need for such social measures, implying that the real purpose was the enforcement of obedience.
Moreover, in making no attempt to conceal their flouting of their own rules, they were showing ostentatious contempt for us, the proles.
In the greater scheme of things, Covid-19 is but one ‘dot’ of many in the picture. While many can cope with the individual ‘dots’, joining them together to see the whole picture is, for some, just too much.
One thing that can make it easier is the fact that it’s nothing new. Over 2300 years ago the Greek philosopher Plato dealt with the problem of how hierarchical societies ensure that people did not think ‘incorrectly’ using his Allegory of the Cave, described in his Republic. The allegory takes the form of an imaginary conversation between Socrates and his pupil, Glaucon.
Socrates asks Glaucon to imagine people living in a huge cave that is only open to the outside world with difficulty. Most of the people in the cave are prisoners since early childhood. They are chained to the wall, facing the back of the cave, unable to move so they cannot turn their heads to see a fire behind them. Between the prisoners and the fire is a low wall, behind which is a path along which non-prisoners carry puppets and other objects that cast shadows on the wall of the cave. The shadows playing on the wall are all the prisoners can see; unable to see the fire, the prisoners believe the shadows to be real.
The central message of Plato’s allegory is that the human-created shadows are the political doctrine of a nation state. Although that was over two millennia ago, the cave allegory is more relevant than ever today. Industrial society is living in a state of deep ignorance, in which ‘reality’ is created by powerful agencies and their ‘puppeteer’ stenographers, the media.
Nearly a century ago, Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, implied that we are being manipulated by the clever use of psychology. Bernays is widely regarded as the ‘father’ of public relations, the polite term for the manipulation of public opinion. In his 1928 book Propaganda he wrote:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world. This is merely a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organised.
38 years later, Harvard history professor Carroll Quigley published an extraordinary 1300-page book Tragedy and Hope, and in 2016 Joseph Plummer published a condensed 200 page version, Tragedy and Hope 101.
Quigley reveals that real political power operates in secret, over which ‘democratic’ elections have little or no influence. He shows that secret, powerful networks of individuals are behind world events, and that “representative government” is a fraud.
Real power is unelected. Politicians change, but the power structure does not. The Network operates behind the scenes, for its own benefit, without ever consulting those who are affected by its decisions.
The Network is composed of individuals who prefer anonymity. They are “satisfied to possess the reality rather than the appearance of power.” This approach of secretly exercising power is common throughout history because it protects the conspirators from the consequences of their actions.
A primary tactic for directing public opinion and ‘government’ policy is to place willing servants in leadership positions of trusted institutions (media, universities, government, foundations, etc.). If there is ever a major backlash against a given policy, the servant can be replaced. This leaves both the institution and the individuals who actually direct its power unharmed.
Historically, those who establish sophisticated systems of domination are not only highly intelligent; they are supremely deceptive and ruthless. They completely ignore the ethical barriers that govern a normal human being’s behavior. They do not believe that the moral and legislative laws, which others are expected to abide by, apply to them. This gives them an enormous advantage over the masses that cannot easily imagine their mind-set.
Advances in technology have enabled modern rulers to dominate larger and larger areas of the globe. As a result, the substance of national sovereignty has already been destroyed, and whatever remains of its shell is being dismantled as quickly as possible. The new system they’re building (which they themselves refer to as a New World Order), will trade the existing illusion of democratically directed government for their long-sought, “expert-directed,” authoritarian technocracy.
This disturbing reality contradicts everything our governments, education and media instil in us from cradle to grave, so it is inevitable that such ideas will be dismissed as the ravings of a crazy ‘conspiracy theorist’.
The trouble is, far from being a conspiracy nutter, Quigley was a distinguished member of the Ivy League; a pre-eminent historian who taught at Princeton and Harvard universities and an adviser to the American Defense Department and US Navy.
So how did Quigley arrive at this ‘secret knowledge’? Plummer explains:
Carroll Quigley was a well-connected and well-credentialed member of Ivy League society. Based on his own words, and his training as a historian, it appears that he was chosen by members of a secret network to write the real history of their rise to power. However, as Quigley later realized, these individuals did not expect or intend for him to publish their secrets for the rest of the world to see. Shortly after publishing Tragedy and Hope in 1966, “the Network” apparently made its displeasure known to Quigley’s publisher, and the book he’d spent twenty years writing was pulled from the market.”
Much of the above will be very disturbing to neophytes, so much so that many will throw up their hands and reject it out of hand. To such doubters, I would ask them to explain the facts I’ve presented in any other way.
Martin Hanson is a retired biology teacher living on New Zealand’s South Island. He was born and educated in the UK, where he received a degree in zoology from the University of Manchester.
The people leading India and China lack the ability to predict the long-term consequences of their policies, a senior aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has claimed.
Mikhail Podoliak pointed to what he called “the problem of the modern world,” singling out India and China, in an interview with Ukrainian media on Tuesday.
“The problem with these countries is that they do not analyze the consequences of their own moves. These countries, unfortunately, have low intellectual potential,” he said.
Podoliak suggested that even though India has a lunar exploration program, it “does not mean that this nation understands what the modern world precisely is.”
The dismissive remarks were in the context of Beijing and New Delhi’s refusal to support Kiev in its conflict with Moscow. Podoliak complained that India, China and Türkiye were “profiting” from the war by maintaining trade with Russia.
“Technically, it is in their national interests,” he acknowledged, before presenting his view of what would benefit China in the long-run.
“China should be interested in Russia disappearing, because it is an archaic nation that drags China into unnecessary conflicts,” he claimed. … continue
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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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