The Free Market Is A Failure

Posted on July 20, 2020 by Reid Mukai

Sorry for the deliberately click-bait-y headline, but I think this message is important to get out there.

In my discussions few months back on What is Neoliberalism, I noted that a core element of neoliberal philosophy is that markets are the only efficient, effective and rational way to distribute goods and services.

Neoliberals profess the idea that only competitive markets can allocate “scarce” resources efficiently, and that it is only such “free” markets that can lift people out of poverty and deliver broad prosperity. They pound it into our heads constantly.

Yet the Covid-19 crisis has illustrated spectacular and pervasive failures of such “free” markets all over the globe, and especially in the U.S. Instead of fairness or efficiency, we see systemic failure in every market we look: the food industry, the medical industry, the retail industry, the employment market. Resources are being destroyed and misallocated on a massive scale

Let’s start with the food industry, because food is the most important thing (nine means from anarchy, and all that). Thousands and thousands of pigs are being slaughtered, their meat left to rot, eaten by no-one, regardless of the forces of supply and demand:

The United States faces a major meat shortage due to virus infections at processing plants. It means millions of pigs could be put down without ever making it to table…

Boerboom, a third-generation hog farmer, is just one of the tens of thousands of US pork producers who are facing a stark reality: although demand for their products is high in the nation’s grocery stores, they may have to euthanise and dispose of millions of pigs due to a breakdown in the American food supply chain.

Meat shortage leaves US farmers with ‘mind-blowing’ choice (BBC)

Potatoes are sitting in Belgian warehouses and left to rot, only two short years after a drought threatened to produce a severe shortage:

Belgium: Lighthearted campaign to ‘eat more fries’ aims to lift heavy load (DW)

Meanwhile, dairy farmers in the U.S. heartland are dumping milk into the ground, to be drunk by no one.

Cows don’t shut off: Why this farmer had to dump 30,000 gallons of milk (USA Today)

In fact, the whole food situation is rather ugly, as this piece from The Guardian summarizes:

This March and April, even as an astounding 30 million Americans plunged into unemployment and food bank needs soared, farmers across the US destroyed heartbreaking amounts of food to stem mounting financial losses.

In scenes reminiscent of the Great Depression, dairy farmers dumped lakes of fresh cow’s milk (3.7m gallons a day in early April, now about 1.5 million per day), hog and chicken farmers aborted piglets and euthanized hens by the thousands, and crop growers plowed acres of vegetables into the ground as the nation’s brittle and anarchic food supply chain began to snap and crumble.

After delays and reports of concealing worker complaints, meatpacking plants that slaughter and process hundreds of thousands of animals a day ground to a halt as coronavirus cases spread like wildfire among workers packed tightly together on dizzyingly fast assembly lines.

Meanwhile, immigrant farmworkers toiled in the eye of the coronavirus storm, working and living in crowded dangerous conditions at poverty wages; at one Washington state orchard, half the workers tested positive for Covid-19. Yet many of these hardest working of Americans were deprived of economic relief, as they are undocumented. Advocates report more farmworkers showing up at food banks – and some unable to access food aid because they can’t afford the gas to get there.

None of this is acceptable or necessary and it’s not just about Covid-19, it’s also illustrative of a deeply deregulated corporate capitalism. America’s food system meltdown amid the pandemic has been long-developing, and a primary cause is decades of corporate centralization and a chaotic array of policies designed to prop up agribusiness profits at any cost.

Farmers are destroying mountains of food. Here’s what to do about it (Guardian)

That doesn’t sound very “efficient” to me, does it? How about you? Free market fundamentalists, care to weigh in?

Meanwhile, hospitals in the United States, which one would think are the most important thing to keep open during a pandemic, are actually closing across the country. These are the very things you want most to be open! Why is this happening? Because health care in the U.S. is a profit-driven enterprise that “competes” in the free market. Because elective procedures—their cash cow—have either been suspended or postponed. U.S. hospitals are closing because they are dependent upon these elective procedures to shore up their profits, and markets rely on profits.

As the deadly virus has spread beyond urban hotspots, many more small hospitals across the country are on the verge of financial ruin as they’ve been forced to cancel elective procedures, one of the few dependable sources of revenue. Williamson Memorial and similar facilities have been struggling since long before the pandemic — at least 170 rural hospitals have shut down since 2005, according to University of North Carolina research on rural hospital closures.

But even as hospitals in cities like New York City and Detroit have been deluged with coronavirus patients, many rural facilities now have the opposite problem: their beds are near-empty, their operating rooms are silent, and they’re bleeding cash.

More than 100 hospitals and hospital systems around the country have already furloughed tens of thousands of employees, according to a tally by industry news outlet Becker’s Hospital Review. They’ve sent home nurses and support staffers who would be deemed essential under state stay-home orders.

Rural hospitals are facing financial ruin and furloughing staff during the coronavirus pandemic (CNN)

And how about allocating labor via impersonal markets? How’s that going? Well, not so well. The workers with the skills most desperately needed on the front lines during the crisis are taking pay cuts and getting laid off left and right. Instead of contributing, they are sitting at home, unable to work even if they wanted to:

At a time when medical professionals are putting their lives at risk, tens of thousands of doctors in the United States are taking large pay cuts. And even as some parts of the US are talking of desperate shortages in nursing staff, elsewhere in the country many nurses are being told to stay at home without pay.

That is because American healthcare companies are looking to cut costs as they struggle to generate revenue during the coronavirus crisis.

“Nurses are being called heroes,” Mariya Buxton says, clearly upset. “But I just really don’t feel like a hero right now because I’m not doing my part.”

Ms Buxton is a paediatric nurse in St Paul, Minnesota, but has been asked to stay at home.

At the unit at which Ms Buxton worked, and at hospitals across most of the country, medical procedures that are not deemed to be urgent have been stopped. That has meant a massive loss of income.

Coronavirus: Why so many US nurses are out of work (BBC)

It’s an ironic twist as the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the nation: The very workers tasked with treating those afflicted with the virus are losing work in droves.

Emergency room visits are down. Non-urgent surgical procedures have largely been put on hold. Health care spending fell 18% in the first three months of the year. And 1.4 million health care workers lost their jobs in April, a sharp increase from the 42,000 reported in March, according to the Labor Department. Nearly 135,000 of the April losses were in hospitals.

As Hospitals Lose Revenue, More Than A Million Health Care Workers Lose Jobs (NPR)

So it doesn’t seem like “free and open” markets are doing so well with either health care or labor.

Meanwhile, U.S. states are competing against each other for desperately needed PPE equipment, bidding up the price and preventing scarce resources from going to where they are most badly needed, which would naturally be where Covid-19 has struck the hardest:

As coronavirus testing expands and more cases of infection are being identified, doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers are scrambling to find enough medical supplies to replenish their dwindling supply.

But state and local governments across the United States are vying to purchase the same equipment, creating a competitive market for those materials that drives up prices for everyone.

“A system that’s based on state and local governments looking out for themselves and competing with other state and local governments across the nation isn’t sustainable,” said John Cohen, an ABC News contributor and former acting Undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security, “and if left to continue, we’ll certainly exacerbate the public health crisis we’re facing.”

“There’s a very real possibility,” he added, “that those state and local governments that have the most critical need won’t get the equipment they need.”

Competition among state, local governments creates bidding war for medical equipment (ABC News)

Yet neoliberals always tell us how important “competition” is in every arena of life.

Failure, failure, failure! Everywhere we look, we see failure. Pervasive, systematic failure. Resources going unused. Surpluses of food being dumped even while people go hungry and line up at food banks. Workers with necessary skills sitting at home, twiddling their thumbs. Other workers unable to even earn a living to support themselves and their families, no matter how badly they want to work. Masks and protective equipment NOT going to where they are most needed, their costs inflating, befitting no one except profiteers even as people die.

Tell me again about how the market is “efficient” at distributing resources. Tell me again about how central planning inevitably results in wasted resources, surfeits and shortages.

And here is the big, bold, underscored point:

The free-marketeers want to trumpet the market’s successes, but they don’t want to own its failures.

Free-market boosters always want to talk about the wonderful benefits of markets. How they allow multiple people to coordinate their activities across wide variations of space and time. How they allow knowledge to be distributed among many different actors. How they favor tacit knowledge that a single entity could not possess. Libraries of encomiums have been written celebrating the virtues of the “free” market. You know their names: The Provisioning of Paris, Economics in One Lesson, Free to Choose, I Pencil, and all of that. Much of what passes for economic “science” is simply cheerleading for markets– the bigger, freer and less-regulated the better.

Okay, fair enough.

But how about market failures? Why don’t they ever talk about that? Because if you read the economics books I cited above, you would come away with the idea that there are no market failures! That, in fact, there is no such thing. That markets, in effect, cannot fail!

If you want to own the successes, you need to own the failures.

Oh, they love, love, love to talk about central planning’s “failures”. They can’t get enough of that. They love to talk about empty shelves in the Soviet Union, long lines at supermarkets, the lack of toilet paper in Venezuela (amusingly, now a problem throughout the capitalist world), and the allegedly long waiting times in “socialized medicine” countries. We are constantly subjected to that drumbeat day after day after day. It’s part of every economics 101 course. Central planning doesn’t work. Central planning is inefficient. Central planning is “tyranny.”

But what about all that stuff I cited above?

Where are all the free-market fundamentalists now?

What is their excuse?

They’ll use special pleading. They’ll argue that it’s exceptional circumstances. That no one could have foreseen a “black swan” event like the global Covid-19 pandemic (despite numerous experts warning about it for years). They’ll tell us that markets work just fine under “normal” circumstances. They’ll say we cannot pass any kind of judgement on the failings of markets during such an unusual event.

Here’s why that argument is bullshit:

Pandemics are a real, and recurring phenomenon in human history. We’ve been incredibly fortunate that we’ve been in rare and atypical hundred-year period from 1918-1919 to today without a global pandemic or novel disease we couldn’t quickly contain and/or eradicate.

But pandemics are always—and always have always been—a societal threat, even if we’ve forgotten that fact. And the experts tell us that there will be a lot more of them in our future, with population overshoot, environmental destruction, encroachment on formerly unoccupied lands and climate change proceeding apace. What that means is this:

If your economic system can’t function properly during a pandemic, then your economic system is shit.

If your economic system only works when conditions are ideal, in fact depends upon conditions being ideal, then, your economic system doesn’t really work at all. If something like a pandemic causes it to seize up and fail, then your economic system is poorly designed and doesn’t work very well. Not only do the free markets graphed on economists’ chalkboards not exist in anywhere the real world, they apparently rely on a blissful Eden-like Arcadia to function as intended—a situation any causal glance at human history tells us is highly unusual. Any disruption and they fall like dominoes. They are about as resilient as tissue paper.

And the stresses are only going to get worse in the years ahead, with climate change making some areas uninhabitably hot, while other places are submerged under rising sea levels. And that’s before we get to the typical natural disasters like volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and earthquakes. And there will be new novel plant diseases as well, unfolding against the increasing resistance of germs to antibiotics.

Will the free market fundamentalists and libertarian market cheerleaders acknowledge this???

Don’t hold your breath.

No, they will continue to lionize “private initiative” at every opportunity, while completely ignoring the stuff I opened this post with. They’ll sweep it under the rug or, more likely, simply handwave it away. They’ll continue to say that we need to scale back government regulation and interference and let the invisible hand sort it all out.

Because discipline of modern economics as practiced today is not a science. It may not even rise to the level of a pseudoscience. It’s PR for laissez-faire capitalism.

Of course, we’ve had market failures before. They occurred all throughout the nineteenth century and during Great Depression, for example. These are well-documented. But many of the things that came out of those bygone market failures to prevent or mitigate them have been systematically and deliberately dismantled over the past generation due to rise of neoliberalism.

And now we’re paying the price.

Karl Polanyi made an important distinction between markets and Market Society. Markets are where people come together to buy, sell, and exchange surplus goods. These have existed throughout history. They are tangential to society; embedded in something larger than it. Such markets can be shut down without causing an existential threat to civilization.

But Market Society is dependent upon impersonal forces of supply and demand and functioning markets for absolutely everything in the society, from jobs to food to health care. Everything is oriented around maximizing private profits, and not human needs. Markets failing to function adequately lead to unemployment, sickness, starvation and death. Shutting them down is an existential threat to civilization.

As Dmitry Orlov wrote in his best-known work, the Russians survived the collapse of the Soviet Union precisely because they didn’t rely on the Market.

Naturalizing markets in this way is an abdication of both causal and moral responsibility for famines, a way to avoid reality and the ethical consequences for people in a position to change things. Markets are not given; they are predicated on a host of laws and social conventions that can, if the need arises, be changed. It makes no sense for American farmers to destroy produce they can’t sell while food banks are struggling to keep up with demand. This kind of thinking is a way for powerful people to outsource ethical choices to the market, but the market has no conscience.

Famine Is a Choice (Slate)

Now, to be clear I’m not necessarily making an argument for or against central planning as opposed to markets. That’s a different discussion.

But my core point is simply this: you cannot discuss market successes without discussing market failures. To do so is intellectually dishonest, disingenuous, and not to mention incredibly dangerous and irresponsible. If economics were a real science, instead of just PR for capitalism, it would take a look at the things I described above, and figure out ways they could have been avoided, regardless of any preconceived ideology or assumptions about the “right” way to arrange a society, or assumptions about how things “should” work. It would seek out ways for society to become, in Nassim Taleb’s terminology, “antifragile.”

But don’t hold your breath for that, either.

Contemplating Human Extinction Terrifies Most People: A Strategy for Survival

Posted on July 17, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

Any serious study of the relevant scholarly literature reveals at least four possible paths to imminent human extinction, that is, human extinction within five years: nuclear war, the climate catastrophe, the deployment of 5G and biodiversity collapse.

Moreover, as I have documented previously, under cover of the non-existent ‘virus’ labeled COVID-19, the global elite is conducting a coup against humanity. That is, by bombarding us with fear-mongering propaganda to focus our attention on the ‘virus’, the capacity of virtually all people, including activists, to devote attention to the coup, and to resist it, has been effectively eliminated. See ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup: Fighting for Our Humanity, Our Liberty and Our Future’.

Unfortunately, it has also meant that, despite the extensively documented evidence of the four paths to imminent human extinction, it is even more difficult than usual to get people to focus on this point. This means that engaging people to consider the evidence for themselves is extremely difficult: it is easier to live in delusion, reassured by elite-driven narratives promulgated through education systems and the corporate media which effectively convey the message that there is either no serious cause for concern (yet) or, perhaps, that the timeframe allows for an adequate official response in due course. In either case we, as individuals or groups, do not really need to do anything differently; going along with the elite-driven narrative, including timeframe, will ensure our survival.

Of course, as those paying attention to the evidence already know, being obedient to the elite-driven narrative is a recipe for extinction. We have already exceeded 2°C above the pre-industrial temperature, the ongoing and rapid deployment of 5G will be catastrophic, biodiversity is already collapsing (and will be seriously accelerated by the rising temperature and deployment of 5G) – for just the latest in the ongoing stream of disasters, see ‘Calls for swift action as hundreds of elephants die in Botswana’s Okavango Delta’ – and, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, nuclear war is now a greater possibility that at any previous time in human history. For summaries of the evidence and further documentation in each case, see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup to Destroy Humanity that is also Fast-Tracking Four Paths to Human Extinction’.

In this article I would like to explain why people are so terrified of the truth and what we can do about it so that an effective response to each of these threats can be implemented (assuming, problematically, that there is enough time).

Why are Most Human Beings so Terrified?

Virtually all human beings are terrified and they are terrified for the same reason: the child-raising process that sociologists like to label ‘socialization’ should be more accurately labeled ‘terrorization’. Why? Because from the moment of a child’s birth, parents, teachers, religious leaders and adults generally regard themselves as responsible for terrorizing the child into obedience of the commands, rules, conventions and laws that define the nature of permissible behaviour in their society.

This means that provided the child responds obediently to parental (or other adult) commands, obeys any rules imposed (by the parents, teachers and religious figures in the child’s life), learns all relevant social conventions for their society and, ultimately, obeys the law, they are allowed to live, recognized as compliant citizens, in their society.

Unfortunately, from society’s viewpoint, evolutionary pressures over vast time scales have led to each human individual being given Self-will to seek out and fulfill their own unique destiny: evolutionary pressures do not predispose any individual to obey the will of another for the simple reason that obedience has no evolutionary functionality.

Consequently, it takes enormous terrorization during childhood to ensure that the child surrenders their Self-will at the alter of obedience. To achieve this outcome and largely unknowingly, parents use a large range of behaviours from the three categories of violence that I have labeled ‘visible’ violence, ‘invisible’ violence and ‘utterly invisible’ violence. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

A common element of this terrorization is that the child is frequently threatened with, and/or actually suffers, violence for being ‘disobedient’. Of course, this violence, assuming it is even recognized as such (given that ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence are just that to virtually everyone), is invariably labeled ‘punishment’ so that we can delude ourselves that our violence is not harmful. See ‘Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive’.

This means that virtually every single individual has been successfully terrorized into being submissively obedient. And, fundamentally, this obedience includes accepting the elite-driven narrative delivered by education systems and the corporate media in relation to issues crucial to human survival.

So despite our preference for believing otherwise, those individuals in our societies who survive the education system capable of thinking for themselves, or even of ‘clear thinking’, are rare. And then they must also survive (preferably by refusing to access it) the propaganda (that is, lies) presented as ‘news’ by the corporate media. Given that another outcome of being terrorized throughout childhood means that most people are very gullible, perceiving lies is a huge challenge in itself. See ‘Why do People Lie? And Why do other People Believe them?’

Of course, this powerless imperative to believe the lies we are told and to behave obediently in response is always reinforced by the fear of violence (‘punishment’), including the fear of social ostracism for resisting elite narratives, but it is also reinforced by other fears: for example, the fear that makes people feel powerless to respond in any meaningful way, the fear of changing their behaviour, and the fear of feeling out of control of their own destiny. After all, if extinction is imminent and we are to avert it, we will need to do some fundamental things – including thinking and behaving – very differently. But we are not allowed to think or behave differently, are we? That would be disobedient.

This can be readily illustrated. When a young child does not get what they need, the child will have an emotional reaction. This will always include fear, it will probably include anger and it will probably include sadness, among other feelings. However, almost invariably, parents behave in a manner intended to prevent the child from having their emotional response (and using this information in formulating the appropriate behavioural response in the circumstance). They do not listen to the child while they express their feelings. Instead, they act to make the child suppress awareness of their feelings.

At its simplest and apparently most benign, the parent might comfort the child in the misguided belief that this is helpful. But it is not, unless you want a submissively obedient child. See ‘Comforting a Baby is Violent’.

Another simple and common way in which we suppress the emotional awareness and, hence, capacity for emotional expression of a child is by giving them food or a toy to distract them from how they feel. The fundamental outcome of this act is that we unconsciously ‘teach’ the child to seek food and/or material items as substitutes for feeling and acting on how they feel. But this is absolutely disastrous.

The net result of this behaviour is that virtually all people in industrialized societies have become addicted to material consumption, and the direct (including military), structural and ecological violence that makes excessive consumption in these societies possible. All so that we can suppress how we really feel. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

And, therefore, the very notion of substantially reducing consumption – a central part of any strategy for human survival by reducing greenhouse gas emissions from industrial production and transport, checking the collapse of biodiversity by halting the destruction of habitat such as rainforests, denying financial incentive to deploy technology for 5G, ending wars (and the threat of nuclear war) for resources – becomes ‘unthinkable’.

Because the fundamental imperative of materialist societies is ‘Consume!’ (so that corporations can profit). And we do not have the emotional power to disobey that imperative because deep in our unconscious remains the childhood terror of resisting the offered food or toy and insisting on expressing how we feel and behaving powerfully in accord with that. It is far simpler to just put something more in our mouth or use one of our ‘toys’. Who wants to feel scared, sad or angry instead?

In essence, the individual who has been terrorized into obedience is no longer capable of thinking for themself and then behaving in accord with their own Self-will. This means that imperatives of the global elite – mediated through its agents such as governments, education systems and the corporate media and enforced by legal systems, the police and prison cells (see ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’) – are readily obeyed by the vast bulk of the human population.

And because the global elite is insane – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – this obedience means that we are submitting to the elite coup and complying with its imperatives that are fast-tracking humanity to extinction on four separate paths, as noted above.

To reiterate: At this most critical moment in human history, when a coup is being conducted against us and four separate threats to human existence and all life on Earth require our engaged attention and powerful response, it is almost impossible to get people to even acknowledge these threats, let alone to consider the evidence and act strategically in response.

Which means that profoundly altering our approaches to parenting and education, so that we produce powerful individuals, is critical to any strategy to fight for human survival.

So what can we do?

Well, if you would like to fight for human survival, it would be useful to start by giving yourself time to focus on feeling your emotional responses – fear, anger, sadness, dread…. – to the elite coup and the four most imminent threats. See ‘Putting Feelings First’.

If you do not do this, you are unlikely to be able to engage meaningfully and strategically in the effort. You will, most likely and unconsciously, simply put your attention elsewhere and go back to what you were doing. See ‘The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth’.

So once you have a clearer sense of your emotional reactions to this knowledge and have allowed yourself time to focus on feeling these feelings, you will be in a far more powerful position to consider your response to the situation. And, depending on your interests and circumstances, there is a range of possible responses that will each make an important difference.

Fundamentally, you might consider making ‘My Promise to Children’ which will include considering what an education for your children means to you, particularly if you want powerful individuals who can resist violence. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

You might consider supporting others to become more powerful. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

If you wish to strategically resist the elite coup against humanity, you can read about nonviolent strategy, including strategic goals for doing so, from here: Strategic Aims.

If you wish to powerfully resist the primary threats to human existence – nuclear war, the deployment of 5G, the collapse of biodiversity and/or the climate catastrophe – you can read about nonviolent strategy, including strategic goals to focus your campaigns, from here: Strategic Aims.

You might also consider joining those who are powerful enough to recognize the critical importance of reduced consumption and greater self-reliance as essential elements of these strategies by participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

In addition, you are welcome to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

Or, if you want something simpler, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

1. I will listen deeply to children. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.
2. I will not travel by plane
3. I will not travel by car
4. I will not eat meat and fish
5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
7. I will not own or use a mobile (cell) phone
8. I will not buy rainforest timber
9. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
10. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
11. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
12. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
13. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
14. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

Given that submissive obedience is the primary behavioural characteristic of all ‘good citizens’, it is going to take a monumental effort to defeat the elite coup and avert the now imminent extinction of Homo Sapiens. This is because most common human behaviours – from parenting to consumption habits – have been shaped to serve elite interests, and it is these behaviours that must change.

Of course, this is also why lobbying elite agents – such as governments and corporations – cannot work. Apart from the fact that they exist to serve elite interests and obey elite directives accordingly (rather than respond to grassroots pressure which they function superbly to dissipate), governments and corporations cannot meaningfully impact the crises that confront us.

That power is ours but we must use it, and deploy it strategically.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Western Liberal Media Attacks Tanzania’s President John Magufuli For Exposing Covid-19 Tests and Population Control in Africa

Posted on July 15, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

From the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Tanzania’s President John ‘The Bulldozer’ Magufuli exposed the fraud behind the Covid-19 testing kits and criticized the mass hysteria in regards to the virus. Several mainstream media networks including Bloomberg News led an attack against Magufuli’s actions regarding how his government has responded to the pandemic. Bloomberg News reporter Antony Sguazzin published ‘Africa’s ‘Bulldozer’ Runs Into Covid-19, Claims God on His Side’, the title itself already mocks Magufuli for mentioning God when it comes to Covid-19, but Sguazzin conveniently bypasses what Magufuli actually said in his article and criticizes him to the point of hostility:

Tanzania’s maverick President John Magufuli has used his strong personality to cow corrupt civil servants and force foreign mining companies to pay millions of dollars in outstanding tax. The coronavirus may be less responsive

What a way for Antony Sguazzin to begin his propaganda piece by calling him the “maverick President”:

Last week, he became the first African leader to declare victory over the virus, even though health data haven’t been released for more than a month. He’s criticized the national laboratory for exaggerating the number of infections, dismissed health experts and discouraged the wearing of masks, all the while saying God will protect Tanzania. Restrictions on social gatherings such as weddings will be lifted from June 29, when schools can reopen

As Squazzin continued his attack by claiming that there were deaths and nighttime burials by health officials in a video published by Al Jazeera that neither confirms or denies the accusations. The video could have been filmed anywhere in the African continent where outbreaks like Ebola and other health crisis have emerged in the past. The US embassy had warned that contracting Covid-19 was “extremely high” in the main city of Dar es Salaam and that hospitals were overwhelmed despite the number of cases being reported by the Tanzanian government at 509 cases and with more than 21 deaths:

But the president’s optimism is belied by reports of deaths and nighttime burials by health officials wearing personal protective equipment. Dozens of Tanzanian truck drivers who had to undergo screening at border posts have tested positive. The U.S. Embassy warned last month that the risk of contracting the virus in the main city, Dar es Salaam, male was “extremely high” and that hospitals were overwhelmed

Sguazzin said that Magufuli’s response to activists who were detained because of their criticism towards his government of how he was handling Covid-19 pandemic was by intimidating the public:

Nicknamed “the bulldozer” for his no-nonsense approach when he was minister of works, Magufuli has made intimidation and bravado a feature of his presidency since assuming office in 2015. His campaign to fight graft — he often fired people while cameras were rolling — earned him widespread praise and elevated his authority within the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party.

Crackdowns on the media and those who poke fun at the government mean that criticism of how Magufuli is handling the outbreak is mostly restricted to social media. Official information is limited and tightly controlled. At least 13 journalists, students and politicians have been detained since March 23 for distributing information about the virus, Tanzania’s Legal and Human Rights Centre said

The 13 journalists, students and politicians who are being held for distributing information about Covid-19 is a human rights issue and extreme to go that far if all allegations are true. Magufuli’s government’s stance on the LGBTQ community is also extreme since they jail people up to 30 years in prison if you are convicted, but unfortunately that’s happens all over Africa and many countries around the world including in the most brutal dictatorship on the planet who is also a friend to the US is Saudi Arabia, where they execute people from the LGBTQ community but that is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media. Since Magufuli was elected, he has slashed his own salary from $15,000 a month to $4,000 and reduced his government from 30 to 11 ministries. He also cut excessive government spending in various areas including foreign travel by government officials and canceling the World’s AIDs Day in Tanzania and decided to use the funds for AIDS medications. Magufuli also suspended Independence Day in 2015 to declare a national cleanup day to reduce the spread of cholera and to improve the health system in the country. To increase domestic production, it was reported in 2017 that Tanzania banned exporting unprocessed ores for domestic smelting purposes. Magufuli also amended laws to renegotiate mining contracts or even terminate them if fraud is suspected. It’s apparent that Magufuli is a nationalist. Magufuli has done some bad, but he also has done some good, especially when he exposed Covid-19 testing kits as a fraud. Now the Mainstream media is attacking his policies and what he says concerning the Covid-19 consensus. What angered the West and the mainstream media is not what Magufuli is claiming about God, it is what he did to prove that the Covid-19 test kits were inaccurate and that’s what Sguazzin forgot to mention. Magufuli has proved to the world that the covid-19 test kits are a fraud and what the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) claims are on the dangers of the virus is basically false. Magufuli explains how he tested the test takers by instructing his country’s security services to send various samples to the Covid-19 testing labs that were not human:

We took samples from goats, we took samples from sheeps, we took samples from Pawpaws, we even took samples from car oil and we took samples from other different things and we took samples to the laboratory without them knowing and we even named all the samples, like the sample from the car oil, we named it Jabil Hamza, 30 years old, male, the results came back negative. When we took the sample from a jackfruit (durian), we named it Sara Samuel, 45 years old, female. the results came back unconclusive. When we took the samples from a Pawpaw, we named it

Elizabeth Ane, 26 years, female, the results from the Pawpaw came back positive, that it has corona. That means the liquid from the pawpaw is positive.” We took samples from (a bird type) called Kware, the results came back positive. We took samples from a rabbit, the results came back undeterminent. We took samples from a goat and the results came back positive. We took samples from a sheep and it came back negative and so on and so on

This is where Magufuli made his point:

So now when you see this, you have taken the samples and say they are humans and the results come back positive that they have corona, that means all the pawpaws should be in isolation also and when you take goat samples and they are also positive, that means all the goats that we have here by assumption or maybe the goat with the sample which was taken should also should also be in isolation. and when you take jackfruit (durian) and it’s also positive that liquid from the jackfruit (durian) which we named it Elizabeth, meaning Elizabeth the Jackfruit (Durian) that means all the Jackfruits (Durian) should be in isolation also so when you notice something like this, you must know there is a dirty game played in these tests

Magufuli also said that the people who work in the laboratories are most likely bought and paid for by special interests:

That there unbelievable things happening in this country, either the laboratory workers in there are bought by people with money, either they are not well educated which isn’t true because this laboratory is used for other diseases, either the samples which are brought in because even the reagents are imported, because even the swambs are also imported, so it’s a must that something is actually going on

Magufuli earned instant criticism from US and European media networks on his leadership with allegations of corruption and human rights abuses considering the imprisonment of journalists, students and politicians who criticized his government. Whether corruption in the Tanzanian government is true or not, many countries in Africa are corrupt with dictatorships. There was also regime change operations backed by Western powers including the US when they gave the CIA the green light to set up the assassination of Zaire’s President Patrice Lamumba in 1961 and in 1966, the CIA overthrew Ghana’s first president under its new independence, Kwame Nkrumah, a pan-Africanist and an anti-imperialist who authored a book titled ‘Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism’. We must also take into account the centuries old European colonialism since the Portuguese built its trading posts in the late 15th century, followed up by US interventions in Africa during the Cold War leading up to the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) which was created under the George W. Bush regime in 2007. The US military and intelligence apparatus currently have numerous military bases all over Africa in efforts to stop Chinese and Russian influence and to control the natural resources which has basically put the African continent at a disadvantage in comparison to the rest of the world. In this case, Magufuli has actually stood up to the powers that be and took a stand for his people.

Western Imperialism Did Not End: Population Control, Birth Control to Experimenting with Dangerous Vaccines

In 2018, liberal media network, CNN headlined with ‘Don’t Use Birth Control, ‘Tanzania’s President Tells Women In The Country’ said that “Tanzania’s President John Magufuli has told women in the East African nation to stop taking birth control pills because the country needs more people, according to local media reports.” Magufuli was quoted in a local newspaper called The Citizen in a public rally saying that “those going for family planning are lazy … they are afraid they will not be able to feed their children. They do not want to work hard to feed a large family and that is why they opt for birth controls and end up with one or two children only.” According to CNN, “he was quoted in a local newspaper, The Citizen, as saying that those advocating for birth control were foreign and had sinister motives.” Which by all means is true.

Magufuli’s understands how the depopulation agenda works. CNN mentions Jacqueline Mahon the representative for Tanzania for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) who was present at the time at least according to The Citizen quoted Magufuli saying that “I have traveled to Europe and I have seen the effects of birth control. In some countries they are now struggling with declining population. They have no labor force.” Then of course, in an old propaganda tactic which CNN loves to use, they criticized the President on other various issues including his stance on how women lawmakers should dress:

In another development, the speaker of the Tanzanian parliament banned female lawmakers from wearing fake nails and eyelashes in parliament. “With the powers vested in me by the Constitution of the United Republic of Tanzania, I now ban all MPs with false eyelashes and false finger nails from stepping into Parliament,” Job Ndugai said, a day after Magufuli’s comments. The new rules also ban women MPs from wearing short dresses and jeans. Female visitors to parliament are also expected to adhere to the dress code

In September 2018, the World Economic Forum (WEF) website headlined with ‘Bill Gates has a warning about population growth’ it began with “rapid population growth in some of Africa’s poorest countries could put at risk future progress towards reducing global poverty and improving health, according to a report by the philanthropic foundation of Bill Gates.” The site quoted what Gates had told reporters “population growth in Africa is a challenge.” WEF article mentioned what the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation’s own report had discovered in their research and it “found that poverty in Africa is increasingly concentrated in a few countries, which also have among the fastest-growing populations in the world.” The report claimed that “by 2050, it projected, more than 40 percent of world’s extremely poor people will live in just two countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria.” Gates was asked about growing populations and an increase of poverty in Africa and he said that access to birth control combined with investments in health and education for the younger generation was necessary. Gates said that “the biggest things are the modern tools of contraception” and “If you have those things available then people have more control over being able to space their children.”

Forbes magazine recently published ‘Bill And Melinda Gates Have Sharp Words For U.S.’ Lack Of Leadership Role In Fighting Pandemic’ on a virtual Forbes philanthropy summit with the genocidal power couple, Melinda Gates spoke on who should get the vaccines first, and they are black and the indigenous people:

There are 60 million healthcare workers [around the world]. They deserve to get the vaccine first, they’re the ones dealing with this on the front lines, trying to keep us all safe. And then you have to start to tier from there, based on the countries and the populations. Here in the United States, it’s going to be Black people who really should get it first and many indigenous people, as well as people with underlying symptoms, and then elderly people

In other words, black and the indigenous people will be guinea pigs once again. Forbes also reported that “The couple, whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed more than $350 million to fight the coronavirus, plans to utilize two nonprofits—The Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance—to help equitably distribute therapeutics and vaccines to developing countries.” There is good news in regards to Africa as Fox news reported about the Covid-19 vaccine trials in South Africa ‘Protest versus Africa’s 1st COVID-19 vaccine test shows fear’ said that “Protesters against Africa’s first COVID-19 vaccine trial burned their face masks Wednesday as experts note a worrying level of resistance and misinformation around testing on the continent” and that the “Anti-vaccine sentiment in Africa is “the worst I’ve ever seen,” the CEO of the GAVI vaccine alliance, Seth Berkley, told an African Union vaccine conference last week.” The Fox news report explains why the African people is concerned:

But the small band of demonstrators who gathered Wednesday at the University of the Witwatersrand, where the trial is based, reflect long-running fears among some in Africa over testing drugs on people who don’t understand the risks.

“The people chosen as volunteers for the vaccination, they look as if they’re from poor backgrounds, not qualified enough to understand” protest organizer Phapano Phasha told The Associated Press ahead of the event. “We believe they are manipulating the vulnerable”

The report also mentioned the controversial French doctor, Jean-Paul Mira, head of intensive care at Cochin hospital in Paris said “If I can be provocative, shouldn’t we be doing this study in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatments, no resuscitation?” comparing the corona virus to previous AIDS studies: “In prostitutes, we try things because we know that they are highly exposed and that they do not protect themselves.” The imperial mentality by the west to control Africa’s population growth and to test Africans with vaccines has been proven time and time again to be dangerous and problematic for the African people. Tanzania’s president John Magufuli has helped expose Western intentions in Africa especially when it comes to the Covid-19 testing kits giving false positive results. The mainstream media quickly criticizes those who do not follow Western instituted depopulation programs from the US and Europe such as Magufuli who actually did something right in the face of Covid-19 hysteria. Magufuli is now the subject of Western media criticism and mockery not because he mentioned God, it’s because he is not following the program, it’s pretty obvious at this point.

Remdesivir for Covid-19: $1.6 Billion for a “Modestly Beneficial” Drug?

Posted on July 14, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Elizabeth Woodworth

Source: Global Research

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has recently “bought” all of Gilead Science’s Remdesivir for $1.6 billion. “500,000 doses at $3,200 per patient – to be available to American hospitals but not for other countries”[6]

That’s $1.6 billion tax dollars for a virtually untested drug showing only marginal efficacy in the hospital setting.

How could such a thing happen?

Introduction

If you believe an urgent call from the Yale School of Public Health that was recently published in the American Journal of Epidemiology— the top epidemiology journal in America — hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) + azithromycin is the quickest and most effective way to halt the Covid-19 pandemic.[1]

According to this Yale statement, hydroxychloroquine – a cheap, natural anti-malarial tree-bark known as quinine for 400 years – is highly effective during Phase 1 of Covid-19, while the virus is loading into the body.

As the first line of defense, it should be immediately, freely, and widely available to symptomatic high-risk patients – through doctors’ offices, outpatient clinics, and hospitals across the land.

Indeed, under the directorship of Dr. Anthony Fauci, a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) a clinical trial had been launched on May 14 to look into it.[2]

The HCQ + azithromycin protocol is being used successfully by France’s top, award-winning microbiologist, Dr. Didier Raoult. He is director of the Infectious and Tropical Emergent Diseases Research Unit in Marseille (Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire) (IHU), with 200 staff. Raoult, now almost a celebrity in France, has recently published his protocol and results, showing an overall 1.1% case fatality rate.[3]

The same protocol has also been highly successful in China, India, Senegal, and Brazil.[4]

So why suddenly is the U.S. government and the media ignoring recommendations from these top specialists,[5] and waiting, instead, until people get very sick and hospitalized to treat them with the relatively untested drug, Remdesivir, which is administered intravenously?

Why has the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services just bought up all the Remdesivir it could order – 500,000 doses at $3,200 per patient – to be available to American hospitals but not for other countries?[6]

To put Remdesivir’s cost in perspective, the CDC reports that the flu vaccine costs from $12-$18 a dose.[7]

The government, in order to justify its mind-boggling price, would need to show exceptional efficacy in saving lives. Efficacy, that is, once the disease has been allowed, through failure to use the HCQ + azithromycinearly preventive approach, to advance to Phase 2 (the dangerous inflammatory period) and Phase 3 (ICU ventilator intubation, often leading to death).[8]

What do studies say about the efficacy of remdesivir?

There are three main studies that have examined remdesivir as a treatment for Covid-19:

The first, a study of seriously ill patients, was originally reported in the New England Journal of Medicine on April 10, 2020. Treated with “compassionate-use” remdesivir, clinical improvement was observed in 36 of 53 patients (68%).

The article was co-authored by 56 people, some of whom were on the staff of remdesivir’s producer, Gilead Sciences.[9] The study was funded by Gilead, and writing assistance was provided by David McNeel, also of Gilead.[10]

The following day, April 11, the Science Media Centre published expert reactions to the compassionate study from five British university professors. These assessments were not encouraging: “the research doesn’t prove anything at this point;” “the data is almost uninterpretable;” the research should be treated “with extreme caution.”[11]

A Wuhan, China randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of 237 patients was accidentally leaked by the World Health Organization and published in The Lancet. It showed no statistically significant clinical benefits from remdesivir:

“The antiviral medicine remdesivir from Gilead Sciences failed to speed the improvement of patients with Covid-19 or prevent them from dying, according to results from a long-awaited clinical trial conducted in China.” [12]

This Lancet study also found that some 14% of patients in the treatment group died after 28 days, compared to 13% in the group that did not receive the treatment.

And it further reported that “remdesivir was stopped early because of adverse events in 18 (12%) patients versus four (5%) patients who stopped placebo early.”[13]

The preliminary results of a NIAID remdesivir trial of 1063 patients showed a “modest” benefit in a controlled clinical trial:

“The infected people who received remdesivir, an experimental drug made by Gilead Sciences that cripples an enzyme several viruses use to copy their RNA, recovered in an average of 11 days versus 15 in patients who received a placebo. ‘Although a 31% improvement doesn’t seem like a knockout, 100% [success], it is a very important proof of concept,’ said Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).”[14]

Health Policy Watch reported that “the death rate was 8% in the group that received remdesivir compared to 11.6% in the control group, although this result was not statistically significant.” Dr. Fauci told reporters that “what [this trial] has proven is that a drug can block the virus.”[15]

The excerpt below from a June 24 article in the British Medical Journal assesses the problems in the foregoing studies. (One of the four co-authors, Fiona Godlee, is the editor-in-chief of the BMJ):

“A serious imbalance in covid-19 research strongly favours the study of drug treatments over non-drug interventions, with many studies too small or too weak to produce reliable results. Equally concerning is the release of partial or preliminary findings before peer review—often through commercial press releases—that is distorting public perceptions, ongoing evaluations efforts, and political responses to the pandemic.

Remdesivir is a key example. The antiviral drug, made by US company Gilead, was unapproved at the start of the pandemic, but in early April the New England Journal of Medicine published a small descriptive study of a compassionate use scheme for patients with covid-19. Gilead funded the study, a third of the authors were Gilead employees, and Gilead’s press release reported “clinical improvement in 68% of patients in this limited dataset.” Despite being a non-randomised, uncontrolled, company funded study of just 53 patients, media headlines described “hopeful” signs and reported “two thirds” of patients showing improvement.[16]

Two weeks later, the Lancet published a randomised placebo controlled trial of remdesivir from China, finding no statistically significant clinical benefit in the primary outcome of time to clinical improvement. Twelve per cent of participants taking remdesivir stopped treatment early because of adverse events, compared with 5% taking placebo. The trial was stopped before meeting recruitment targets.”[17]

To summarize, the only study demonstrating even marginal efficacy for remdesivir shows it to reduce hospital recovery times 31%, from 15 days to 11 days.

What is the justification for spending $3,200 tax dollars per Covid-19 patient to save four days in hospital, unless it is to shorten hospital stays, thereby saving the average U.S. bed cost of approximately $2000 per day, while delaying hospital saturation that could leave some people untreated to die?

Leaving people untreated to die could cause civil unrest, which may be the covert political reason for spending the $1.6 billion.

None of the studies mention side effects of the drug. In the China study, kidney injury led to discontinuation for one patient, and in its use for ebola, liver risks were identified.[18]

How much does it cost to produce remdesivir?

The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) is a non-profit organization seeking to improve healthcare value through clinical and cost-effective analyses.[19]

In a May 1, 2020 study, the ICER calculated that the cost of producing the remdesivir “final finished product,” including the pharmaceutical ingredients, formulation, packaging, and a small profit margin, was $9.32 US for a 10-day course of treatment. They rounded this up to $10.[20]

Dr. Fauci’s NIAID Clinical Trial Evaluating Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin Closes Early

On June 20, 2020, nine days before the Department of Health and Human Services announced its $1.6 billion purchase of remdesivir on June 29, its NIAID branch closed a clinical trial that had been launched May 14 to investigate whether the inexpensive combination, hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin, might be an effective treatment when given early in the course of the disease.[21]

The Department of Health and Human Services knew that hydroxychloroquine (aka chloroquine) was effective against coronavirus because chloroquine was tested against the SARS-1 virus during the outbreak in 2002. This work was written up in 2005, under the auspices of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, which reports to the Department of Human Health and Services.[22]

Truth, as the saying goes, is stranger than fiction.

Who was responsible for this debacle?

Dr. Fauci has served in the National Institutes of Health under six presidents.

Were these bizarre decisions carried out under his authority? Or were they forced upon him from higher up? Or has he become a victim of regulatory capture[23] by the drug industry?

Whatever the answer, this unprecedented fleecing of the American public should have been shouted from the rooftops, had there been a functioning US media.

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Notes

[1] Harvey A. Risch, “Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk Covid-19 Patients that Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to the Pandemic Crisis,” Amer. J. Epid, 27 May 2020 (https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/aje/kwaa093/5847586). Risch is Professor at the Yale Schools of both Medicine and Public Health.

[2] National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “NIH Begins Clinical Trial of Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin to Treat COVID-19,” 14 May 2020 (https://www.niaid.nih.gov/news-events/nih-begins-clinical-trial-hydroxychloroquine-and-azithromycin-treat-covid-19).

[3] Jean-Christophe Lagier, et al, “Outcomes of 3,737 COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin and other regimens in Marseille, France: A retrospective analysis,” Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease, 25 June 2020 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1477893920302817). Rault has 2,300 indexed medical journals in print.

[4] The group “COVEXIT.com – News About Hydroxychloroquine & Other COVID-19 Treatments,” was founded March 29, 2020 by Jean-Pierre Kiekens. It keeps daily track of successful Covid treatments worldwide (https://www.facebook.com/groups/covexit)

[5] Elizabeth Woodworth, “The Media Sabotage of Hydroxychloroquine Use for COVID-19: Doctors Worldwide Protest the Disaster,” Global Research, 30 June 2020 (https://www.globalresearch.ca/media-sabotage-hydroxychloroquine-covid-19-doctors-worldwide-protest-disaster/5717382).

[6] US Department of Health and Human Services, “Trump Administration Secures New Supplies of Remdesivir for the United States,” June 29, 2010 (https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2020/06/29/trump-administration-secures-new-supplies-remdesivir-united-states.html).

[7] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Vaccines for Children Program, “CDC Vaccine Price List,” updated 1 July 2020 (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/programs/vfc/awardees/vaccine-management/price-list/index.html#adflu).

[8] Dr. Raoult identified the three stages of Covid-19 while treating 3,737 patients with HCQ+azithromycin at his own clinic: “At the first viral stage, one must give medicines against the virus, in the second inflammatory phase, one needs to give medications against that [inflammatory] reaction, and then in the third phase, it’s work to be done in intensive care units.” Summarized from Didier Raoult, at: “The Marx Brothers are Doing Science: the Example of RECOVERY,” 9 June 2020 (http://covexit.com/professor-raoult-compares-the-oxford-recovery-trial-academics-to-the-marx-brothers/).

[9] Jonathan Grein, and 55 other authors, “Compassionate Use of Remdesivir for Patients with Severe Covid-19,” New England Journal of Medicine, 11 June 2020 (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2007016), “Editor’s Note: This article was published on April 10, 2020, at NEJM.org.”

[10] Jason D. Goldman, et al., “Remdesivir for 5 or 10 days in Patients with Severe Covid,” New England Journal of Medicine, no date in header (https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa2015301?articleTools=true). Sidebar:“This article was published on May 27, 2020, at NEJM.org.”

[11] Prof. Duncan Richards et al., “Expert reaction to a study about compassionate use of remdesivir for patients with severe COVID-19,” Science Media Centre, 11 April 2020 (https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-a-study-about-compassionate-use-of-remdesivir-for-patients-with-severe-covid-19/).

[12] Ed Silverman, et al, “New data on Gilead’s remdesivir, released by accident, show no benefit for coronavirus patients. Company still sees reason for hope,” StatNews, 23 April 2020 (https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/23/data-on-gileads-remdesivir-released-by-accident-show-no-benefit-for-coronavirus-patients/).

[13] Yeming Wang, et al., “Remdesivir in adults with severe COVID-19: a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multicentre trial,” The Lancet, 16 May 2020 (original online publication 29 April 2020) (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31022-9/fulltext).

[14] Jon Cohen, “Large trial yields strongest evidence yet that antiviral drug can help COVID-19 patients,” Science, 29 April 2020 (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/large-trial-yields-strongest-evidence-yet-antiviral-drug-can-help-covid-19-patients).

[15] Grace Ren, “Conflicting Remdesivir Trial Results Released; Experts Urge More Research,” Health Policy Watch, 29 April 2020 (https://healthpolicy-watch.news/first-remdesivir-rct-shows-no-significant-clinical-benefit-for-severe-covid-19-patients-but-experts-urge-for-more-research/).

[16] Christopher Rowland, “Gilead’s experimental drug remdesivir shows ‘hopeful’ signs in small group of coronavirus patients,” Washington Post, 10 April 2020 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/10/gileads-experimental-drug-remdesivir-shows-hopeful-signs-small-group-coronavirus-patients/).

[17] Ray Moynihan et al.,“Commercial influence and covid-19,” BMJ2020;369:m2456 (Published 24 June 2020) (https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m2456).

[18] Crystal Phend, “Remdesivir Safety Forecast: Watch the Liver, Kidneys,” Medpage Today, 19 May 2020 (https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/86582).

[19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Clinical_and_Economic_Review

[20] Melanie D. Whittington and Jonathan B. Campbell, “Alternative Pricing Models for Remdesivir and Other Potential Treatments for COVID-19,” Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, 1 May 2020 (https://icer-review.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/ICER-COVID_Initial_Abstract_05012020-3.pdf).

[21] National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “BULLETIN—NIH Clinical Trial Evaluating Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin for COVID-19 Closes Early,” 20 June 2020 (https://www.niaid.nih.gov/news-events/bulletin-nih-clinical-trial-evaluating-hydroxychloroquine-and-azithromycin-covid-19).

[22] Martin J. Vincent et al., “Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread,” Journal of Virology, 22 August 2005 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1232869/).

[23] “Regulatory capture is a theory that regulatory agencies may be dominated by the interests they regulate and not by the public interest.” In: Will Kenton, “Regulatory Capture,” Investopedia, 23 October 2019 (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp).

Deadly Rainbow: Will 5G Precipitate the Extinction of All Life on Earth?

Posted on July 6, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

In his recently revised and updated book The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life, scientist Arthur Firstenberg has made both science and history comprehensible by explaining the importance and significance to life on Earth of a vital consideration that has long been ‘invisible’: electricity.

Indeed, as Firstenberg makes clear, if we want to understand life on Earth, we cannot do so without understanding the role that electricity plays in making life possible, healing it and, if abused, threatening us all.

Firstenberg’s book is unusual on at least two counts. Based on decades of scientific research, he carefully explains each point in language accessible to the non-scientist while documenting his case with exceptional clarity and detail complemented by a 138-page bibliography.

If you want to really understand this issue, and what is at stake, you will be doing yourself a favor by reading this book.

The Universe, Electricity and Life: In Brief

As Firstenberg’s subtitle promises, his book includes a history of electricity and its role in the Universe but particularly on Earth.

‘Almost all of the matter in the universe is electrically charged…. The stars we see are made of… charged particles in constant motion. The space between the stars and galaxies, far from being empty, teems with electrically charged subatomic particles, swimming in vast swirling electromagnetic fields, accelerated by those fields to near-light speeds. Plasma is such a good conductor of electricity, far better than any metals, that filaments of plasma – invisible wires billions of light-years long – transport electromagnetic energy in gigantic circuits from one part of the universe to another…. Under the influence of electromagnetic forces, over billions of years, cosmic whirlpools of matter collect along these filaments, like beads on a string, evolving into the galaxies that decorate our night sky.’

The Milky Way, the galaxy in which Earth is located, is a medium-sized spiral galaxy that is 100,000 light-years across; it rotates around its center every 250,000,000 earth years, generating around itself a galactic-size magnetic field. Filaments of plasma, 500 light-years long, generate additional magnetic fields.

Our sun, also made of plasma, sends out an ocean of electrons, protons and helium ions in a steady current called the solar wind. This wind bathes the Earth before diffusing out into the plasma between the stars.

The Earth, with its core of iron, rotates on its axis in the electric fields of the solar system and the galaxy, in turn generating its own magnetic field that traps and deflects the charged particles of the solar wind wrapping the Earth in an envelope of plasma called the magnetosphere. Some of the particles from the solar wind collect in layers we call the Van Allen belts where they circulate 600 to 35,000 miles overhead.

The sun also bombards the Earth with ultraviolet light and X-rays. In addition, atomic nuclei and subatomic particles (known as cosmic rays) shower the Earth from all directions as well. It is these cosmic rays from Space and the radiation emitted by uranium and other radioactive elements in Earth’s crust that provide the small ions that carry the electric currents that surround us in the lower atmosphere.

It is within this electromagnetic environment – a fairly constant vertical field averaging 130 volts per meter – that all life, including Homo Sapiens, evolved on Earth.

In fair weather, the ground beneath us has a negative charge and the ionosphere above us a positive charge. ‘Electricity courses through the sky far above us, explodes downward in thunderstorms, rushes through the ground beneath us, and flows gently back up through the air in fair weather.’ This happens in an endless cycle as about 100 bolts of lightning, each delivering a trillion watts of energy, strike the Earth every second.

Every living thing is part of this circuit. The current enters our heads from the sky, circulates through our meridians, and enters the earth through the soles of our feet. This current provides the energy for growth, healing, and life itself. See ‘Putting the Earth Inside a High-Speed Computer’.

The strength of the atmospheric electrical current is between 1 and 10 picoamperes (trillionths of an ampere) per square meter. Dr. Robert Becker found that 1 picoampere is all the current that is necessary to stimulate healing in frogs…. It is these tiny currents that keep us alive and healthy. See ‘Planetary Emergency’.

The fundamental point about all this is simple: The Earth is incredibly delicately balanced with a great many forces making up this balance and thus making life possible.

One of the many ways in which we have been disrupting this balance is by disturbing the global electrical circuit, that evolved over eons and sustains all life, without paying genuine and sincere attention to what we are doing and what this means for the Earth and all of its inhabitants, including us.

Given the profound implications of generating ‘electric pollution’, some might label this behaviour insane. It is certainly unaware.

Human-Generated Electricity on Earth

It was in 1746 that scientists were finally able to ‘capture’ electricity so that a start could be made on using it directly for human ends. Sure, the wider implications of its use were not considered but it offered opportunities not previously available. And when the damage from its use, on humans and other living organisms, started and then rapidly picked up pace, the association between the spread of electricity (particularly through the telegraph wires in the mid-nineteenth century and electric lighting a few decades later) and the adverse health and environmental impacts were not made, or ignored when they were. And so diseases not previously recorded in the medical literature started to appear: anxiety disorder, influenza, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

But it wasn’t just us that was impacted; so were the other living organisms of our planet.

And now we are bathed in the 60-cycle current in our house-wiring; the ultrasonic frequencies in our computers, Wi-Fi routers and modems; the radio waves in our televisions; the microwaves in our cell phones and the electromagnetic radiation generated by everything from baby monitors to ‘smart’ devices of all kinds, as well as the vast network of satellites, transmission towers and power lines all endlessly but variably impacting, adversely, virtually every human being on Earth. And if 5G is deployed, there will be nowhere on Earth that is safe for humans, insects, birds, animals and plants.

We will have fundamentally altered the very conditions that made the evolution of life on Earth possible.

An exaggeration?

Here is the briefest sample of the damage existing human-generated electromagnetic radiation is causing life on Earth.

Forests

Apart from being logged mercilessly, burned down to create cattle or soy farms or palm oil plantations, destroyed by the endless proliferation of mining for various mineral resources including coal and oil, damaged by dam construction, wildlife poaching and the extraction of resources like rayon, viscose and modal to make clothing, and adversely impacted in many other ways, forests are being destroyed by electromagnetic radiation inflicted by humans. While acid rain and global warming have been blamed for much of the ‘forest die-off’ that has occurred over the past 40 years, the evidence that electromagnetic radiation has been the real, or at least primary, cause is rather overwhelming once the full circumstances of the damage are seriously investigated. While Firstenberg cites many very compelling examples, the case of the Amazon rainforest makes the point rather starkly.

In 2005, it was noticed that trees were dying without obvious cause. This has been blamed on global warming which caused an unusual drought in that year. However, on 27 July 2002, the US-financed and Raytheon-built System for Vigilance of the Amazon (SIVAM), a $US1.4 billion system of radars and sensors, began its monitoring activities in a two million square mile area of remote wilderness.

Ostensibly to deprive drug traffickers and guerrillas a safe haven, it also ‘required pretending that blasting the rainforest with radiation at levels that were unprecedented in the history of the world was of no consequence to the forest’s precious inhabitants, human or otherwise’. So the system’s ‘25 enormously powerful surveillance radars, 10 Doppler weather radars, 200 floating water-monitoring stations, 900 radio-equipped “listening posts”, 32 radio stations, 8 airborne state-of-the-art surveillance jets equipped with fog-penetrating radar, and 99 “attack/trainer” support aircraft’ can track individual human beings and ‘hear a twig snap’ anywhere in the Amazon.

Again, at the cost of electromagnetically damaging every living organism in the rainforest.

To reiterate though, the Amazon is not the only forest in the world adversely impacted by electromagnetic radiation with many studies examining the issue, wherever they are conducted, consistently revealing forest damage by electromagnetic radiation from civilian and military installations (and even recovery when, as happens occasionally, the local radiation stops).

Insects

In 1901, Marconi sent the world’s first long-distance radio transmission from the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England. By 1906 and now host to the greatest density of radio transmissions in the world, the island was almost empty of bees. ‘Thousands, unable to fly, were found crawling and dying on the ground outside their hives’. And healthy bees, imported from the mainland, began dying within a week of arrival. ‘Isle of Wight disease’ was then reported in European countries, South Africa, Australia and North America over following decades with almost everyone assuming it was infectious. Despite various suspected diseases and parasites accused over many decades, each was eventually ‘cleared’ of causing the problem.

But in the second half of the 1990s, the ‘disappearing bee’ problem again accelerated and acquired the name ‘colony collapse disorder’ in 2007 as bee populations were decimated in many parts of the world. And despite the resistance of beekeepers (who are largely convinced that infectious diseases are driving bee losses and that toxic pesticides are necessary to kill mites), some scientists were starting to investigate the impact of electromagnetic radiation on bees. The simplest experiments involved placing a cell phone inside a bee hive: ‘The results of such experiments, considering the complete denial by our society that wireless technology has any environmental effects at all, have been almost unbelievable.’

‘The quickest way to destroy a bee hive, investigators have found, is to place a wireless telephone inside it.’ Landmark research conducted originally in 2009 and then subsequently, which involved placing two cell phones in a hive for 30 minutes at a time every few days, demonstrated that electromagnetic fields interfere with cellular metabolism: bees practically could not metabolize sugars, proteins or fats and, as in humans but far more rapidly, their cells become oxygen starved. Three months, at this modest level of exposure, would destroy a hive.

One particularly nasty development that occurred in the (northern) Winter of 2006-2007 that is considered by some the likely immediate cause of the disastrous colony collapse disorder at the time, is that the US military’s HAARP – High-frequency Active Auroral Research Project – in Alaska reached full power with the installation of the last of its 180 antennas at that time. HAARP is the most powerful radio transmitter on Earth and ‘turned the ionosphere itself – the life-giving layer of sky to which every creature is tuned – into a gigantic radio transmitter’. Why? HAARP was being used for US military communications, particularly with submarines. Even in 1988, when HAARP was still being planned, physicist Richard Williams, a consultant to Princeton University’s David Sarnoff Laboratory, called the project ‘an irresponsible act of global vandalism’ given the power levels that were to be used.

In fact, according to other researchers, the HAARP project has also been used to research and develop electromagnetic weapons, such as directed energy beams. See ‘HAARP: Secret Weapon Used For Weather Modification, Electromagnetic Warfare’.

But whatever its functions, even though now transferred to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Ulrich Warnke points out that the frequencies of HAARP superimpose unnatural magnetic fields on the natural resonant frequencies of the sky, the daily variations of which have not changed since life appeared on Earth. This is disastrous for bees because they ‘lose an orientation that served them for millions of years as a reliable indicator of the time of day’.

Of course bees are not the only insects adversely impacted by this recent human obsession with electromagnetic radiation. Experiments with other insects, such as ants and fruit flies, again simply using exposure to cell phones rather than any specialized equipment, revealed equally instructive results. A few minutes exposure for a few days, for example, dramatically reduced the reproductive success of the flies. And exposed to phones turned off, in standby mode and then turned on, ants displayed a variety of behaviors including leaving their nest and taking all of their eggs, larvae and nymphs with them.

As an aside, experiments of this nature also revealed ‘intensity windows’ of maximal effect. This means that ‘the greatest damage is not always done by the greatest levels of radiation. Holding your cell phone away from your head may actually worsen the damage.’ And even a cell phone that is turned off but has the battery in it, is ‘clearly and obviously dangerous’.

Birds

The disastrous effects of radio waves on birds were first noted in the 1930s. It was immediately obvious, for example, to diverse groups of people who worked with pigeons – those involved in pigeon racing and those still using pigeons for military communications – when the birds lost their way during the rapid expansion of radio broadcasting. But by the late 1990s, as cell phone towers proliferated and vastly greater numbers of birds were unable to fly home, pigeon-racing plummeted compelling pigeon-fanciers to revisit an issue they had earlier set aside. Unfortunately, it was too late. In 1998, shortly after Motorola’s launch of 66 Iridium satellites had begun providing the first cell phone service from Space, 90% of pigeons being raced in various locations in the United States over a two-week period vanished.

Of course, it is not just pigeon populations that are being decimated. Wherever dramatic bird population declines are being studied and electromagnetic radiation is considered as a possible factor (which is not always the case), the results usually reveal a link even if the damaging impact is variable.

If electromagnetic radiation totally disorients pigeons, how do migratory birds navigate? Often enough, they don’t. For example, in 2004, scientists at the University of Oldenburg in Germany were shocked to discover that migratory songbirds they had been studying were no longer able to orient themselves for their migratory journeys. Conducting a simple experiment – surrounding the aviaries of European robins with grounded aluminium sheeting to remove the influence of electromagnetic radiation – the immediate and positive impact ‘on the birds’ orientation capabilities was profound’, they noted in a study published in 2014.

One series of studies was conducted by wildlife biologist Alfonso Balmori Martínez in Spain for more than a decade from the 1990s, after noting the dramatic increase in leukemias, cancers, headaches, insomnia, memory loss, heart arrhythmias and acute neurological reactions suffered by people near a new installation of antennas adjacent to a local school. His subsequently published research revealed, among many other points, the following: kestrels vanishing from breeding sites after antennas for mobile telecommunications were installed, nest abandonment by storks near the radiation beams from telephone masts, rock doves dead near phone masts, plumage deterioration and locomotive problems in magpies at points highly contaminated with microwave radiation, and a dramatic decline in sparrow populations in irradiated areas, which matched a European-wide trend with, for example, sparrows in the UK declining by 75% between 1994 and 2002. Balmori’s conclusion was simple: ‘This coincides with the rollout of mobile telephony.’

One of the problems peculiar to birds, already identified by Canadian researchers in the 1960s, is that ‘feathers make fine receiving aerials for microwaves’.

By the way, have a ponder what happens when a bird (or animal, reptile, amphibian, fish or even insect, for that matter) is radio tagged so that its behavior can be monitored. It exposes the creatures to immediate radiation, in comparison to that from distant cell phone towers, thus adversely impacting their functioning and altering their behavior! Firstenberg characterized this procedure, politely in my view, as ‘scientific folly’. Other scientists have documented many serious, adverse impacts from radio tagging but the practice is far from over with most wildlife scientists simply assuming that tagging has zero impact.

Amphibians

The ongoing serious decline of frogs, toads, salamanders and other amphibians all over the world has been notable since at least the 1980s. Not something you think about?

Well, amphibians have been falling silent for a range of reasons but, once again, electromagnetic radiation is a key one. Notably, even iconic species, such as the famous and highly protected Golden Toad, named for its brightly colored skin and resident of the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve in Costa Rica, have gone extinct without any real fight to save them.

Puzzling to most scientists was the fact that amphibians have been vanishing even in ‘many pristine, remote environments that they thought to be unpolluted’. And they were pristine, except for the ‘invisible pollutant’ that permeated even these environments: electromagnetic radiation.

Needless to say, the usual range of scientific studies has long since proved that exposure of amphibians to electromagnetic radiation is ‘incompatible with [their] survival’.

As Firstenberg notes:

Environmentalists, for the most part, like the rest of modern humanity, have one terrific blindspot: they don’t acknowledge electromagnetic radiation as an environmental factor, and they are comfortable with placing power lines, telephone relay towers, cell towers, and radar stations in the middle of the most remote, pristine mountainous locations, never realizing that they are intensely polluting those environments.

The key question is this: Will humanity, and not just environmentalists, wake up to the threat posed by electromagnetic radiation in time?

Humans

In this brief review, I am not going to discuss the extensive evidence of the damage to human health caused by electromagnetic radiation. But there is not a significant, modern human disease – diabetes, ‘influenza’, cancer, heart disease, strokes, obesity… – and a host of other mental and physical ill-effects (including anxiety, memory loss, impaired motor function, attention-deficit, sleep disturbance, reduced lung capacity, higher white cell counts and headaches as well as a disturbed balance in the boy/girl birth ratio) that can be fully understood without understanding the impact of living in a disturbed electrical environment. Again, Firstenberg spells it out in gruesome detail.

However, to mention two brief examples: Firstenberg explains how electromagnetic radiation damages the mitochondria – thus inhibiting cellular metabolism – with disastrous consequences for those many individuals impacted. However, they are only rarely medically diagnosed as such. And the effects of radio waves on blood sugar are extremely well documented but none of this research has been done in the United States or western Europe.

As an aside, you might be interested to know that a large, rapid, qualitative change in the Earth’s electromagnetic environment has occurred six times in Earth’s history, as noted by Firstenberg: in 1889 power line harmonic radiation began (accompanied by the 1889 pandemic of influenza), in 1918 the radio era began (accompanied by the ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic), in 1957 the radar era began (accompanied by the Asian flu pandemic), in 1968 the satellite era began (accompanied by the Hong Kong flu pandemic), and twice more coinciding with changes that you can read in the book.

Since a few months before the book was published in February 2020, however, the deployment of 5G technology has been proceeding in earnest, as discussed below. Interesting that during this time people have also been impacted by a ‘virus’ labeled COVID-19, don’t you think?

Anyway, as you probably guessed as well, electromagnetic radiation causes biological damage to fruit trees, crops, farm birds and animals too, with adverse implications for the human food supply (apart from the shocking impact from the mass killing of pollinators such as bees).

What is the State of Play Now?

Despite its enormous health hazards and implications for military violence, as well as its potential for intrusive surveillance, which is also extensively documented – see ‘How Big Wireless Lobbied Governments to Build 5G for Citizen Data Collection and Surveillance ’ – and the vulnerability of satellites to cyber attacks with potentially horrific consequences – see ‘Hackers could shut down satellites – or turn them into weapons’ – the deployment of 5G has begun. From the elite perspective, it is critical to implementation of the so-called fourth industrial revolution. See ‘Techno-Tyranny: How The US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision ’.

This means that the existing fleet of functional satellites orbiting Earth, which totaled 2,666 on 1 April 2020 – see ‘Satellite Database’ – but has already grown by a couple of hundred since then, will be vastly expanded to tens of thousands in the near future.

For example, the Elon Musk corporation SpaceX has already launched 538 satellites into Space and is planning to launch another 60 every two weeks into the ionosphere. See ‘538 Satellites and Counting’. Again: ‘The ionosphere is a source of high voltage that controls the global electric circuit, which in turn provides the energy for life.’

Moreover, on 26 May 2020 SpaceX filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the USA for 30,000 ‘next-generation’ (‘Gen2’) satellites. ‘If and when [SpaceX’s] Starlink signs up millions of paying customers, it is possible that nothing will survive – no humans, no animals, and no insects. It is likely that it will be blamed on COVID-19, unless this world wakes up in time.’ See ‘Putting the Earth Inside a High-Speed Computer’.

But SpaceX is not the only satellite corporation although it has a large scheme compared to most of its major competitors, except OneWeb (UK/USA) which submitted a plan to the FCC in the USA on 27 May 2020 for 48,000 satellites.

Some other private corporations or government agencies that have satellite constellations they are planning to expand include Boeing (USA), Spire Global (Luxembourg, Scotland, USA), Iridium (USA), Orbcomm (USA), Globalstar (USA), Telesat (Canada), Eutelsat (Europe), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Earth Observing System (USA), the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency (USA) with plans for hundreds or potentially thousands of satellites in seven layers – see ‘National Defense Space Architecture (NDSA), Systems, Technologies, and Emerging Capabilities (STEC)’ – the Russian Satellite Communications Company, GLONASS (Russia) and the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (China).

Yet other groups, such as Amazon, are planning major constellations – see ‘Amazon to offer broadband access from orbit with 3,236-satellite “Project Kuiper” constellation’ – and Facebook has an experimental satellite license.

In addition, the new corporation Lynk (USA) has been deploying ‘cell-towers-in-space’ satellites and boasts ‘We will connect all 5.2 billion mobile phones on the planet, everywhere.’ How? ‘Subscribers receive coverage from terrestrial towers when they have it and satellite towers when they need it, all from their existing phone.’

As has been noted before this, the slowly-evolving night sky that creatures from Earth have observed for billions of years will be rapidly obliterated in what will presumably be the first instance of astronomical pollution. Stars visible to the naked eye will vanish from view.

On 23 March 2020, the ‘Secure 5G and Beyond Act of 2020’ became law in the United States. See ‘Secure 5G and Beyond Act of 2020 ’. It’s purpose?

To require the President [within 180 days] to develop a strategy to ensure the security of next generation mobile telecommunications systems and infrastructure in the United States and to assist allies and strategic partners in maximizing the security of next generation mobile telecommunications systems, infrastructure, and software, and for other purposes.

So 5G technology is now being rapidly rolled out with elite agents in the telecommunications industry advertising bigger and faster downloads. They just don’t mention that it will kill us.

‘Why not?’ you might ask. ‘Won’t it kill them too?’

Yes, but they are insane which, in this case, means that their minds are incapable of paying attention to, and considering, the ‘big picture’ (including all of the ecological and social variables impacted by their decisions) because their focus is on limited imperatives, such as profit. This is why all of those scientific studies that have consistently exposed the extreme dangers of electromagnetic radiation over recent decades have not only been ignored but great effort, including through the corporate media, has been made to prevent public discussion of the impacts based on the knowledge in this research.

For brief explanations of this insanity, see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ and ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’ with fuller explanations in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice ’.

This insanity is why the global elite, through its corporate and political agents, is endlessly manipulating us into fighting their wars – even dragging us to the brink of nuclear war – destroying the climate and the environment, driving the collapse of biodiversity, and generating a vast range of political, economic and social crises without ever considering the fundamental outcome – its deleterious impact on all life – of their behaviors. 5G is just the latest manifestation of this insanity.

Of course, all of these crises could be resolved if we were dealing with people who were sane. And if most of us were not readily distracted from paying attention to reality. See ‘The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth’.

Resisting the Deployment of 5G

Given the military and surveillance implications of 5G, if you think that governments are particularly concerned to investigate and consider the extensive evidence of the enormous hazards of 5G, you might find it sobering to read the dismissive three paragraphs given to the subject in the European Parliament’s official report on 5G. See ‘5G Deployment: State of Play in Europe, USA and Asia’.

The reality, as touched on just above, is that elite interests are shaping what happens. You still don’t think so?

In 2002, Gro Harlem Brundtland, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the former Prime Minister of Norway, ordered people entering her office in Geneva to not carry a cell phone. Why? Because cell phones gave her a headache. The following year Brundtland was no longer the Director-General of the WHO. ‘No other public officials have repeated her mistake.’ See The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life.

Nevertheless, the resistance to 5G is rapidly gaining pace with concerned scientists and activists setting the pace. For example, you can see a ‘List of Cities, T owns, Councils and Countries that have Banned 5G’.

And if you wish to join those resisting the deployment of 5G, options include signing the ‘International Appeal: Stop 5G on Earth and in Space ’, supporting legal challenges such as this one in Denmark – see ‘State of Play and Danish Suing FiveG Network’ – and simply getting rid of your mobile (cell) phone. See ‘End Cellphones Here on Earth (ECHOEarth)’.

Moreover, if you wish, you can campaign strategically to halt the deployment of 5G. You can read a list of strategic goals, as well as how to develop a local strategy to prevent/halt the deployment of 5G, at Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

Separately from this, if you would like to join the worldwide movement of people working to end all violence, you can do so by signing the online pledge of ‘The People ’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World ’.

Conclusion

So what is Arthur Firstenberg’s chilling conclusion?

‘You cannot contaminate the global electrical circuit with millions of pulsed, modulated electronic signals without destroying all of life.’

But, as outlined above, since ‘controlling’ electricity in 1746, humans have been increasingly contaminating the global electrical circuit and it has culminated in what will now be the final electromagnetic assault on Earth.

Which means that unless we can halt the launch of these 5G satellites and the rollout of the technology ‘on the ground’ we will be ‘destroying all of life’. And while some groups advocate measures to protect ourselves as individuals, inadequate though these must be in the unfolding circumstances, no amount of measures to individually protect ourselves from this electromagnetic radiation will protect ‘all of life’ in the wild.

According to Ross Adey, the grandfather of bioelectromagnetics and atmospheric physicist Neil Cherry, we are electrically tuned to the world around us and ‘the safe level of exposure to radio waves is zero’.

There is virtually no time left to understand and act powerfully on that knowledge. What will you do?

Is Data Our New False Religion?

Posted on July 3, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Here’s how every modern con starts: let’s look at the data. Every modern con starts with an earnest appeal to look at the data because the con artist has assembled the data to grease the slides of the con.

We have been indoctrinated into a new and false religion, the faith of data. We’ve been relentlessly indoctrinated with the quasi-religious belief that “data doesn’t lie,” when the reality is that data consistently misleads us because that is the intent.

Nobody in the False Religion of Data ever looks at what we don’t measure because that would uncover disruptive truths. My latest book Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World looks at everything consequential that we don’t measure, and since we don’t measure it, we assume it doesn’t exist. That’s the end-game of the False Religion of Data: what’s actually important isn’t measured and therefore it doesn’t exist, while what is measured is artfully packaged to support a narrative that enriches those behind the screen of “objective data-based science.”

The data-based con can be constructed in any number of ways. A few data points can be cleverly extrapolated to “prove” some self-serving claim, a bit of data can be conjured into a model that just so happens to support the most profitable policy option, inconvenient data points can be covertly deleted via “filtering out the outliers,” statistical trickery can be invoked (with a wave of this magic wand…) to declare semi-random data “statistically significant,” and so on, in an almost endless stream of tricks.

Exhibit #1: the official rate of inflation. Here is the data con elevated to artistry. As I explained in Burrito Index Update: Burrito Cost Triples, Official Inflation Up 43% from 2001 (May 31, 2018), apples-to-apples unmanipulated data shows inflation is dramatically reducing the purchasing power of wages, a dynamic that is unevenly distributed: Inflation Isn’t Evenly Distributed: The Protected Are Fine, the Unprotected Are Impoverished Debt-Serfs (May 25, 2017).

While the official statistics on inflation claim an annual rate of 2.5%, unmanipulated estimates (the Chapwood Index for example) find inflation is north of 10% in major U.S. urban areas.

The official data soothsayers’ bag of tricks include completely bogus, made-up “hedonic adjustments” which magically lower the price of real-world goods and services. Autos are supposedly “cheaper” now because they’re so much safer and reliable. Perhaps, but can we be honest and admit they cost a lot more than they did a generation ago?

No, Autos Are Not “Cheaper Now” (June 28, 2019)

The poor fools giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the con artists of Big Data Marketing apparently don’t understand the flimsiness of the “science.” As Mark, Jesse and I discuss in our latest Salon, Algorithmic Guerrilla Warfare, a few purposefully misleading data points turn the entire Big Data Marketing “science” into the familar “garbage in, garbage out.”

And so here we are in the midst of a pandemic, and the battles over “what the data tells us” sound more like religious wars than science. Everybody’s in such a hurry to conjure up a profitable con or make grandiose claims for their narrative that what we aren’t measuring is ignored.

Here’s the raw data I’d like to see collected:

1. What percentage of people under the age of 50 who do not have chronic health conditions who test positive end up with severe symptoms that incapacitate them for weeks or months?

2. What percentage of these younger, healthier people who exhibit severe symptoms have organ damage that doesn’t heal in a few months?

3. What percentage of people who had antibodies for the virus end up coming down with the illness again a few months later?

Collecting this data is non-trivial, and so it may never be collected–partly because the results might not support the approved narratives: whatever data we don’t collect doesn’t exist and can’t disrupt our models, profit centers, narratives, policies, etc.

In the false religion of data, heresy is asking for data that is not being collected because it might reveal unpalatably unprofitable realities. Much safer to burn heretics at the stake than let them question the cons.

The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup to Destroy Humanity that is also Fast-Tracking Four Paths to Human Extinction

Posted on June 12, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

The global elite is conducting a coup that is designed to destroy all of the key elements of human society. It is doing this by destroying the essence of what it means to be human, by destroying the nature of existing human relationships, and by destroying the political, economic and social institutions of nation states.

Intentionally or otherwise, the elite coup is also fast-tracking four paths to human extinction.

If this coup succeeds, the human individual will have been reduced to a digitized identity who lives in a ‘techno tyranny’ serving the global elite or Homo Sapiens will be extinct. There is no third option unless we can defeat the coup and stop key structures and processes being put into place.

Do we have long? According to some scholars, as explained below, Homo Sapiens is already ‘functionally extinct’. If this is the case, only a monumental global effort can give us even a remote chance of surviving.

Sound implausible? Preposterous even? Let me offer you the evidence to support the scenario presented above with some brief reiteration to begin followed by more elaborate explanation of the paths to extinction.

And, if you are up for the fight to try to avert this outcome, I have outlined a range of options, designed to have strategic impact, for your involvement.

Destroying the Human Individual

Many authors have explained how vital rights and freedoms that our predecessors fought for decades or even centuries to win have been wiped away in one fell swoop by government responses to COVID-19 – for a summary, see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’ – and how, if it comes to pass, the compulsory vaccination along with the digital certificate that will go with it will leave us as nothing more than robotized organisms monitored and controlled by the elite’s agents.

For example, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has explained in ‘Gates’ Globalist Vaccine Agenda: A Win-Win for Pharma and Mandatory Vaccination’:

Vaccines, for Bill Gates, are a strategic philanthropy that feed his many vaccine-related businesses (including Microsoft’s ambition to control a global vaccination ID enterprise) and give him dictatorial control of global health policy.

Gates’ obsession with vaccines seems to be fueled by a conviction to save the world with technology.

Former World Bank economist Peter Koenig in ‘The Farce and Diabolical Agenda of A “Universal Lockdown”’ identifies some parts of the program:

A massive vaccination program, probably through compulsory vaccination – Bill Gates’ dream and brainchild is vaccinating 7 billion people.

Massive population reduction, a eugenics plan – in part through vaccination and other means:… Bill Gates, ‘if we are doing a real good job vaccinating, we may reduce the world population by 10% to 15%’. See ‘Innovating to Zero!’….

An electronic ID for every person on the planet – in the form of a nano chip, possibly injected along with the mandatory vaccination. This nano-chip could be remotely uploaded with all personal data.

But even more importantly, in a recent article Professor Vandana Shiva evocatively explains why the world patent granted by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to Microsoft on 26 March 2020 titled ‘1. WO2020060606 – Cryptocurrency System Using Body Activity Data’, gives Microsoft (that is, Bill Gates) extraordinary power over our lives and is ‘robbing us of our deep humanity’. In essence:

‘The patent is dramatically changing the meaning of being human…. It is redefining us as ‘mines’ for data – robbing us of our autonomy, our sovereignty, and control over our bodies and minds…. It is erasing our humanity – as sovereign, living beings, spiritual, conscious, intelligent beings, making our decisions and choices with wisdom and ethical values about the impacts of our actions on the natural and social world of which we are a part; and to which we are inextricably related. We are being reduced to being ‘users’ of tasks assigned to us by the extractive digital mega machine. A ‘user’ is a consumer without choice in the digital empire. Human creativity and consciousness disappear in the world imagined in #patent060606.’ See ‘My Earth Journey in defence of Biodiversity, Life and Freedom over 5 decades’.

Destroying Human Society

Simultaneously with the destruction of the human individual, however, many authors have described how the nature of human relationships is being transformed and the political, economic and social structures and processes previously characteristic of national societies are being removed in favor of versions that enable a vastly greater degree of elite control.

Here is a sample of how astute authors describe what is happening politically, economically and/or socially based on the compelling evidence they provide.

Chris Hedges in ‘The Treason of the Ruling Class’:

The ruling elites no longer have legitimacy. They have destroyed our capitalist democracy and replaced it with a mafia state. What the Roman philosopher Cicero called a commonwealth, a res publica, a ‘public thing’ or the ‘property of a people,’ has been transformed into an instrument of naked pillage and repression on behalf of a global corporate oligarchy. We are serfs ruled by obscenely rich, omnipotent masters who loot the U.S. Treasury, pay little or no taxes and have perverted the judiciary, the media and the legislative branches of government to strip us of civil liberties and give them the freedom to commit financial fraud and theft.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky in ‘Global Capitalism, “World Government” and the Corona Crisis’:

The World is being misled concerning the causes and consequences of the corona crisis. The COVID-19 crisis… is being used as a pretext and a justification to triggering a Worldwide process of economic, social and political restructuring. Social engineering is being applied…. What is happening is unprecedented in World history.

A new stage in the evolution of global capitalism is unfolding…. National governments become subordinate to “Global Governance”. The Global Governance scenario imposes a totalitarian agenda of social engineering and economic compliance… It consists in scrapping ‘national autodetermination’ and constructing a Worldwide nexus of pro-US proxy regimes controlled by a ‘supranational sovereignty’ (World Government) composed of leading financial institutions, billionaires and their philanthropic foundations.

The crisis redefines the structure of the global economic landscape. Let’s be clear. This is an imperial agenda. What do the global financial elites want? To privatize the State? To own and privatize the entire planet?

Whitney Webb in ‘Techno-Tyranny: How The US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision ’ examines a great deal of evidence to draw her conclusion:

Like major crises of the past, the national security state appears to be using the chaos and fear to promote and implement initiatives that would be normally rejected by [citizens] and, if history is any indicator, these new changes will remain long after the coronavirus crisis fades from the news cycle. It is essential that these so-called “solutions” be recognized for what they are and that we consider what type of world they will end up creating – an authoritarian technocracy.

And, since the brutal police killing of George Floyd in the United States on 25 May, US constitutional attorney and author of Battlefield America: The War On the American People, John W. Whitehead has warned in ‘This Is Not a Revolution. It’s a Blueprint for Locking Down the Nation’:

The looting, the burning, the rioting, the violence: this is an anti-revolution. The protesters are playing right into the government’s hands, because the powers-that-be want this. They want an excuse to lockdown the nation and throw the switch to all-out martial law. They want a reason to make the police state stronger. It’s happening faster than we can keep up.

Kurt Nimmo in his article ‘George Floyd Endgame: Martial Law and a Police State: COVID was the first act’ notes that:

Rampaging ‘anarchists’ – many undoubtedly agent provocateurs – are not interested in justice, fairness, nonviolence, and peaceful dialogue. They are providing a pretext to usher in a fascist police state.

This state of affairs will be exploited to call for a clampdown on political dissent. COVID ‘contact tracing’ is now being used to track down activists and those associated with them. Facial recognition is used to find targeted individuals in crowds. From the start, I said this supposed public safety gimmick would be used to isolate and destroy peaceful activism.

If the chaos continues, there will be citizen demands for law and order…. Officials will argue that the ongoing destruction and violence can only be contained by the military.

Moreover, as Shenali D. Waduge pointed out in her article ‘George Floyd Murder Enflames US. America Is a Failed State’:

The death has also brought to the focus and exposed the double standards of the UNHRC/international human rights organizations and other righteous mouthpieces who remain mum…. 5 days since the murder of George Floyd and not a single statement or condemnation by international entities.

Having noted the above however, it is worth pointing out that most of the people protesting the police murder of George Floyd have been nonviolent (about which I will write more below). But if you would like to better understand the psychology of racist violence, see ‘Why are all those Racists so Terrified?’ and for psychological insight into the pervasive police violence in the United States, see ‘Why are Police in the USA so Terrified?’

But while the global elite is intent on destroying us as individuals as well as destroying the societies in which we have lived, the coup has also accelerated each of the four primary paths to human extinction.

Fast-Tracking the Four Paths to Human Extinction

I have previously explained the four distinct paths to imminent human extinction (that is, within five years), making laughable the elite-driven narrative that we have until 2030 or even 2050 to avert it. I have also explained the three other possible paths to extinction in the near term, particularly when considered in conjunction with the four primary threats, as well as the path to extinction that looms before us when we consider the impact of all seven of these paths in combination with the vast range of other threats to Earth’s biosphere. See ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’.

These interrelated threats have generated a shocking series of ‘points of no return’ (‘tipping points’) that we have already crossed, a mutually reinforcing set of negative feedback loops that we have already triggered (and which we will continue to trigger) which cannot be reversed in the short-term, as well as the ongoing synergistic impact of the various ‘extinction drivers’ (such as ongoing extinctions because dependent species have lost their resource species) we have set in motion and which cannot be halted irrespective of any remedial action we might take. Hence, taking into account all of the above factors, the prospects of averting human extinction are now remote, at best.

Given these ongoing threats, coupled with the latest threats to our essential humanity and political freedom posed by measures being taken during the elite coup, I have also explained the vital importance of defending our humanity and this political freedom from these latest threats if we are to have any prospect of even fighting for our own survival. See ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup: Fighting for Our Humanity, Our Liberty and Our Future’.

In essence then, the elite coup being conducted under ‘cover’ of the fake virus known as COVID-19 – see ‘Unmasking the Lies Around COVID-19: Facts vs Fiction of the Coronavirus Pandemic’ – has not only facilitated a dramatic acceleration in the process of destroying what remains of the human individual and society, it has also fast-tracked each of the four primary paths to imminent human extinction. Let me briefly elaborate this and explain why it is happening.

Nuclear War

In his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, former US nuclear war planner Daniel Ellsberg described the architecture of the nuclear doomsday machine. It is not just the horrifically destructive fission and fusion weapons but the entire framework of the arsenal, from fallible and institutionalized human beings in ‘command’ to antiquated computer systems built in the 1970s and 1980s with thousands of these weapons on hair-trigger alert.

The formal reason, which doesn’t account for the informal reasons such as luck or clear thinking in a panicked situation – see ‘“I was just doing my job”: Soviet officer who averted nuclear war dies at age 77’ – that these weapons have not been used is the nuclear arms control regime that was laboriously built during the Cold War but from which the US has progressively retreated, successively withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in 2002, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the ‘Iran nuclear deal’) and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (which limited the deployment of intermediate range nuclear weapons) in 2018.

The US government has also unilaterally signaled its intention to further dismantle treaties that contain the threat of nuclear war by acting in violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 by establishing its ‘Space Force’ as a new branch of the US military – see ‘US Making Outer Space the Next Battle Zone – Karl Grossman’ – and demonstrating its disinterest in extending New START: the sole remaining restraint on U.S.-Russian nuclear arsenals that caps deployed offensive strategic nuclear weapons to no more than 1,550 each. See ‘Global Zero Urges Trump to Accept Putin’s Offer on Nuclear Treaty’.

Not content with progressively increasing the risk of nuclear war in recent years, the US government has used the COVID-19 coup as an opportunity to ‘sabre (that is, nuclear weapons) rattle’ with Russia and China by considering detonating a nuclear weapon, which would be the first such ‘test’ by the US since 1992. See ‘Trump the Peace Candidate? This President Abhors International Treaties ’ and ‘Trump apparently wants a nuclear test. It could be bad for your health’.

In another provocation, the US government has also announced it will withdraw from the Open Skies Treaty, signed in 1992. See ‘The Open Skies Treaty at a Glance’ and ‘Pompeo Announces Open Skies Withdrawal’.

And demonstrating it is not passive in response to these initiatives, the Russian government has declared it will now consider using nuclear weapons in response to a conventional attack in particular circumstances including a conventional strike targeting the nation’s critical government and military infrastructure. See ‘Russia OKs Use of Nukes in Response to Non-Nuclear Attacks’.

If you believe that nuclear war is ‘unthinkable’, earlier this year (and taking into account the climate catastrophe), the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight, closer to midnight than it was even during the height of the Cold War. See ‘Closer than ever: It is 100 seconds to midnight’.

So three developments that elevate the risk of nuclear war that each took place with less scrutiny than might have occurred otherwise – the discussed detonation of a US nuclear weapon, US withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty and the Russian decision to respond to a conventional attack on certain infrastructure with nuclear weapons – have all occurred under cover of the COVID-19 coup.

If you would like a reminder of the frequency with which we have already subjected Earth and its species to radioactive contamination by exploding nuclear weapons, watch Isao Hashimoto’s ‘A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945’.

Deployment of 5G

Also under cover of the COVID-19 coup, the extinction-threatening 5G is now being rapidly deployed in many parts of the world although there is considerable resistance to it by those who are aware of its dangers. This resistance ranges from nonviolent actions (starting with people giving up their mobile phones) to international appeals and legal challenges to its deployment.

If you are not familiar with the danger of microwave radiation to human and planetary health, you can read an explanation by Arthur Firstenberg in ‘Planetary Emergency’ or a more detailed explanation in his book The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life.

In brief, however: the global electrical circuit, which sustains all life, is now being seriously disturbed.

What is the global electrical circuit? How is it being disturbed? Here is a brief explanation:

The global electrical circuit flows through the earth, up to the sky in thunderstorms, through the ionosphere, and back down to earth through the atmosphere and through our bodies. See ‘Planetary Emergency’.

All animals and plants are polarized positive to negative from head to feet, or from leaves to roots. An electric current of picowatt per square meter amplitude flows from the positively charged sky to the negatively charged earth in fair weather, courses through the earth beneath our feet, and returns to the sky via lightning bolts during thunderstorms. Every living thing is part of this circuit. The current enters our heads from the sky, circulates through our meridians, and enters the earth through the soles of our feet. This current provides the energy for growth, healing, and life itself. We do not live by bread alone, but by the energy provided to us by the biosphere. Oriental medicine calls it qi or ki, Ayurvedic medicine calls it prana, and atmospheric physicists call it electricity. It provides us energy for life, and information that organizes our bodies. If you pollute this circuit with billions of digital pulsations, you will destroy all life. See ‘Putting the Earth Inside a High-Speed Computer’.

Despite its enormous health hazards and implications for intrusive surveillance, which are extensively documented – for recent articles which also cite some of the wider evidence, see ‘5G: “The End of All Things”. The Health Impacts of Electromagnetic Radiation ’ and ‘How Big Wireless Lobbied Governments to Build 5G for Citizen Data Collection and Surveillance ’ – the deployment of 5G has now started. For example, the Elon Musk corporation SpaceX has already launched 600 ‘first generation’ (‘Gen1’) satellites into Space and is planning to launch another 60 every two weeks into the ionosphere. Again: ‘The ionosphere is a source of high voltage that controls the global electric circuit, which in turn provides the energy for life.’ However, on 26 May 2020, SpaceX filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission in the United States for 30,000 ‘next-generation’ (‘Gen2’) satellites.

‘If and when Starlink signs up millions of paying customers, it is possible that nothing will survive – no humans, no animals, and no insects. It is likely that it will be blamed on COVID-19, unless this world wakes up in time.’

On 23 March 2020, the ‘Secure 5G and Beyond Act of 2020’ became law in the United States. See ‘Secure 5G and Beyond Act of 2020 ’. It’s purpose?

Nevertheless, the resistance to 5G is rapidly gaining pace. For example, you can see a ‘List of Cities, T owns, Councils and Countries that have Banned 5G’.

Biodiversity Collapse

In 2010, the secretary-general of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, Ahmed Djoghlaf, noted that ‘What we are seeing today is a total disaster…. No country has met its targets to protect nature. We are losing biodiversity at an unprecedented rate.’ In the same year, the UN Environment Programme observed that ‘the Earth is in the midst of a mass extinction of life. Scientists estimate that 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours. This is nearly 1,000 times the “natural” or “background” rate.’ Moreover, according to many biologists, the extinction rate ‘is greater than anything the world has experienced since the vanishing of the dinosaurs nearly 65m years ago.’ See ‘Protect nature for world economic security, warns UN biodiversity chief’.

By 2017, Professor Gerardo Ceballos and his colleagues had extensively documented the ‘biological annihilation’ that humans were precipitating on Earth:

‘Earth’s sixth mass extinction is more severe than perceived when looking exclusively at species extinctions…. That conclusion is based on analyses of the numbers and degrees of range contraction … using a sample of 27,600 vertebrate species, and on a more detailed analysis documenting the population extinctions between 1900 and 2015 in 177 mammal species.

Their data revealed that ‘beyond global species extinctions Earth is experiencing a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization. We describe this as a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.’ See ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines’.

However, in their latest paper Professor Ceballos and his colleagues provide further evidence of the ongoing biological annihilation and what it means for ecosystem functioning while documenting the complicating factors that have arisen during the COVID-19 crisis.

‘Even though only an estimated 2% of all of the species that ever lived are alive today, the absolute number of species is greater now than ever before. It was into such a biologically diverse world that we humans evolved, and such a world that we are destroying…. Millions of populations have vanished in the last 100 years…. The reason so many species are being pushed to extinction by anthropogenic causes is indicated by humans and their domesticated animals being some 30 times the living mass of all of the wild mammals that must compete with them for space and resources’. But, Dr Ceballos adds: ‘Many of the species endangered or at the brink of extinction are being decimated by the legal and illegal wildlife trade.’ See ‘Vertebrates on the brink’.

Of course, as has been extensively documented, while people in countries such as China, the United States and various European nations drive the demand for wildlife, it is filled by poverty-stricken people in Africa, Asia and Central/South America who capture wildlife to trade, eat or sell as bushmeat. And for those people for whom the COVID-19 crisis eliminated other economic survival options, capturing wildlife for trade or food was one backup survival option which simply accelerated the rush to extinction for some species.

You can watch a video of Professor Ceballos and read more about the extinction crisis at Stop Extinctions.

But, in essence, the only way to slow, and halt, the collapsing biodiversity on Earth is to substantially reduce our consumption so that the insects, animals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians and plants of planet Earth have the habitat they need to survive.

Climate Catastrophe

Given that Earth passed 2°C above the 1750 (preindustrial) baseline in February 2020 – see ‘Crossing the Paris Agreement thresholds’ and ‘2°C crossed’ – and that carbon dioxide emissions generate ‘maximum warming’ about one decade after the emission actually occurred – see ‘Maximum warming occurs about one decade after a carbon dioxide emission’ – ‘the full warming wrath of the carbon dioxide emissions over the past ten years is still to come’. See ‘2°C crossed’.

Moreover, given that the CO2 level in the atmosphere is already ‘higher than it has been for millions of years’ and temperatures are ‘rising at ever faster speed as the rise in greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere is accelerating’ it is arguably the case that human beings are already ‘functionally extinct’, that is, they are ‘threatened to be wiped out by a catastrophe that appears to be both imminent and inescapable’. See ‘Arctic Ocean February 2020’.

However, while the global industrial shutdown has temporarily reduced emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, it has also significantly reduced the aerosol masking effect generated by burning fossil fuels as explained by Professor Guy McPherson in his recently-published paper ‘Will COVID-19 Trigger Extinction of All Life on Earth?’

Coincident with industrial activity adding to greenhouse gases that warm the planet, industrial activity simultaneously cools the planet by adding aerosols to the atmosphere. These aerosols block incoming sunlight, thereby keeping cool our pale blue dot. Reducing industrial activity by as little as 35 percent is expected to cause a global-average temperature rise of 1 degree Celsius within a few weeks, according to research on the aerosol masking effect…. The ongoing reduction in industrial activity as a result of COVID-19 almost certainly leads to loss of habitat for human animals, hence putting us on the fast track to human extinction.

Even worse, as Professor McPherson notes in a subsequent paper, because there is ‘no known means to rapidly stabilize or cool the temperature of Earth… [and] temperatures lethal for humans already have been reported, despite climate-change models indicating that such an event would not occur until the middle of the current century’ – see ‘The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance’ – and because even the slow rate of temperature rise assumed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) outstrips the adaptive response of vertebrates by a factor of 10,000 times meaning that ‘mammals cannot evolve rapidly enough to escape the current extinction crisis’, the ‘reduction in industrial activity that resulted from the ongoing pandemic might have already reduced the aerosol masking effect sufficiently to trigger a 1 C spike in global-average temperature’ thus triggering ‘the rapid extinction of all life on Earth’. See ‘Earth is in the Midst of Abrupt, Irreversible Climate Change’.

In plain English, human extinction – and possibly the extinction of all life on Earth – might already be guaranteed.

How has this all happened?

‘How has this all happened?’ you might ask. And, unfortunately, the answer is ‘All too simply’. With an insane global elite and a human population that is, on the whole, fearfully and submissively obedient, there hasn’t even been a real fight. Hence, the global elite’s insane and longstanding conspiracy to take much greater control of our lives proceeds apace while driving us all to the brink of extinction in the process.

If you would like to read more about the origin of the fearful obedience of most humans, see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup: Fighting for Our Humanity, Our Liberty and Our Future’.

And if you would like to better understand the origin, identity and insane behaviour of the global elite, see the section headed ‘How the World Works’ in ‘Why Activists Fail’ as well as the articles ‘Exposing the Giants: The Global Power Elite’ and ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ along with the many references cited in these documents. For a deeper understanding of why elite and other human violence is so pervasive, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice ’.

So what can we do about all of this?

A Nonviolent Strategy to Fight for our Humanity, Liberty and Future

Many people, including authors cited above, have decried the violence by some that has broken out in response to the police murder of African-American George Floyd (by a white policeman who has killed and gone unpunished before: see ‘As Chief Prosecutor, Klobuchar Declined to Bring Charges Against Cop that Killed George Floyd’) and which has captured most corporate media attention.

Of course, a considerable amount of this violence (both against people and property) is initiated by police and their provocateurs to discredit those people peacefully protesting against Floyd’s murder. For a thorough and documented report, see ‘Agent Provocateurs: Police at Protests All Over the Country Caught Destroying Property’.

As another commentator noted in relation to the United States: ‘It came as no surprise that local and state officials across the US reacted to largely peaceful, spontaneous mass protests against police brutality and racism by unleashing a maelstrom of militarized police violence. For a generation, the Federal government has been quietly gifting huge stocks of surplus military equipment, including tanks, to local police forces and sheriff’s offices eager to play with lethal new toys designed for counter-insurgency.’ See ‘Ten Days that May Have Changed the World’.

But some of the violence is also being instigated by those associated with groups that have a very different agenda. These range from white racist groups – see ‘Far-Right Infiltrators and Agitators in George Floyd Protests: Indicators of White Supremacists’ – to antifascist groups like Antifa – see ‘What is Antifa?’ – who, as explained above and also pointed out by Timothy Alexander Guzman, ‘has given more ammunition for the establishment to enforce a total police state.’ See ‘US Police Forces Are Trained by Israel: The Knee-On-Neck Tactic That Was Used On George Floyd Is The Same Tactic That Has Been Used on the Palestinians’.

However, whatever the political motivation for their violence, none of these racist or antifascist groups has a coherent analysis or strategy for worthwhile fundamental change in society and can only provoke a response from authorities that would achieve the opposite of what they want, whether it be an authoritarian technocracy, police state or martial law. See ‘War on Antifa: As Trump vows to declare it a “Terrorist Group”, AG Barr equates rioting to domestic terrorism’.

Moreover, we would be unwise to attribute much credit to those former and serving US military leaders, including the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who are speaking in defense of ‘the right to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly’. See ‘Message to the Joint Force [re George Floyd protests]’. When it really matters, however, it is highly likely that virtually all senior military personnel will be called into line and it will depend largely on those in lower ranks to find the conscience and courage to resist their superiors in trying to contain resistance to the coup.

So if we are going to use this crisis, in all of its dimensions, as an opportunity to fight for our individuality, our society and our future, then we are going to need to do some things very differently and do them in a way that makes a strategic difference. Otherwise, we have a very bleak future or none at all.

Depending on your interests and circumstances, here is a range of suggestions that will each make an important difference.

If you wish to address your own emotional health issues preceding or arising from the COVID-19 coup and to become more powerful in the process, consider ‘Putting Feelings First’. If you wish to support others, including children, to become more powerful, see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

Vitally importantly, you might also like to consider making ‘My Promise to Children’ which will include considering what an education for your children means to you, particularly if you want powerful individuals who can stand up to the violence being inflicted on us at the moment. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

In relation to the coup itself, I have identified the appropriate political purpose – obviously ‘To defend humanity against a political/military coup conducted by the global elite’ – and set out a basic list of (now) 28 strategic goals for achieving this purpose (which will also play a vital role in tackling key threats to human survival). The first thirteen of these strategic goals are as follows (and you are welcome to consider those you will do yourself and how you, either as an individual or part of a group, might help to mobilize others to do so too):

(1) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by wearing a global symbol of human solidarity, such as an image of several people of different genders/races/religions/abilities/classes holding hands.

(2) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting all corporate media outlets (television, radio, newspapers, Google, Facebook, Twitter…) and by seeking news from progressive news outlets committed to telling the truth.

(3) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by refusing to download the COVID-19 ‘contact tracing’ surveillance app.

(4) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by ending their ownership and use of a mobile (cell) phone. See ‘EchoEarth: End Cell Phones on Earth’ and ‘Cancel Your Cellphone Account Day, 20-21 June 2020’.

(5) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by withdrawing all funds from the corporate banks and depositing their money in local community banks or credit unions.

(6) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting the medical and pharmaceutical industries – including by conscientiously refusing to submit to vaccination – and by seeking health advice and treatment from natural therapists. (If you are unfamiliar with the different philosophies underpinning these approaches, and hence why many natural therapies are so much more effective, there is a straightforward explanation here: ‘Pasteur vs. Bechamp: An Alternative View of Infectious Disease’.)

(7) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting corporate supermarkets and by supporting small and family businesses, and local markets.

(8) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in other locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For this item and many subsequent, see the list of possible nonviolent actions in the document ‘198 Tactics of Nonviolent Action’.

(9) To cause the workers [in trade unions or labor organizations T1, T2, T…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include withdrawing labor from an elite-controlled bank, media, pharmaceutical or other corporation operating in your country.

(10) To cause the small farmers and farmworkers [in organizations F1, F2, F…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include distributing farm produce through (existing or created) grassroots networks to small and family businesses as well as local markets rather than through corporate supply chains.

(11) To cause the indigenous peoples [in organizations IP1,IP2, IP…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include utilizing indigenous knowledge to improve local self-reliance in food production and in other ways.

(12) To cause the soldiers and military police [in army units AU1, AU2, AU… and MP1, MP2, MP…], wherever stationed around the world, to refuse to obey orders from the global elite and its agents to arrest, assault, torture and shoot nonviolent activists and the other citizens of [your country].

(13) To cause the police [in police units P1, P2, P…], wherever stationed around the world, to refuse to obey orders from the global elite and its agents to arrest, assault, torture and shoot nonviolent activists and the other citizens of [your country].

You can read all 28 of the ‘Strategic goals for defeating a political/military coup conducted by the global elite against humanity’ by scrolling down the page at ‘Strategic A ims ’.

Remaining pages on the website fully explain the twelve components of the strategy, as illustrated by the Nonviolent Strategy Wheel, as well as articles and videos explaining all of the vital points of strategy and tactics, such as those to help you understand ‘Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works’.

Given the complexity of the configuration of this conflict, however, which involves the need to fight simultaneously to retain our ‘deep humanity’, defeat the elite coup and avert near-term human extinction, it is important that our tactical choices are strategically-oriented (as the examples I cite in the thirteen strategic goals above illustrate). Hence, three further considerations assume importance.

First, choose/design tactics that have strategic impact, that is, they fundamentally and permanently alter, in our favor, the power relationship between the elite and us.

Second, when tactical choices are made, focus them on undermining the elite coup, not just features of it, such as ‘social distancing’ or the lockdowns. At its most basic, this can be achieved by using tactical choices that mobilize people to act initially, as is happening, but then inviting them to consider taking further, more focused, action as well (such as those nominated in the 28 strategic goals listed or referenced above). This is important because existing actions will have little impact on key underlying measures, such as those being taken by the elite to advance the fourth industrial revolution, which includes reducing us to a ‘digital identity’.

Third, choose/design tactics that also have strategic impact on the greatest threats to human survival, including the collapsing biodiversity on Earth, the threat of nuclear war, the climate catastrophe and the deployment of 5G. Given the incredibly short timeframe in which we are now working to avert human extinction, while people are mobilizing it is important to use this opportunity to give them the chance to perceive the ‘big picture’ of what is taking place – beyond lockdowns and other measures supposedly being used to tackle COVID-19 – and to act powerfully in response.

Equally importantly, the Nonviolent Strategy website explains how to prepare, frame and conduct any nonviolent action to minimize the risk of violent repression and to contain any risk of damage to our cause by association with, or disruption by, those groups and provocateurs with a very different and possibly violent agenda. See ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’.

Fortunately, as more people become aware of the deeper strands of what is taking place, the energy to break the lockdowns and resist the coup will gather pace. As I have previously outlined, using a locally relevant focus, or perhaps several, for which many people would traditionally be together – a cultural, religious or sporting event, a community activity such as working to establish a community garden to increase local self-reliance, a birthday celebration and/or a return to work – we can mobilize people to collectively resist.

In addition, as I mentioned above, given the pressing (and, possibly, now uncontainable) threat of human extinction but also because becoming more self-reliant is vital to our ongoing capacity to resist elite encroachments on our rights, freedom and economic security, consider accelerated participation in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth ’.

And for those nonviolent activists concerned about preventing nuclear war, stopping the deployment of 5G, halting the collapse of biodiversity or the climate catastrophe, and ending other threats to human survival – including those in relation to the environment and war – you can read about nonviolent strategy, including strategic goals to focus your campaigns, from here: Strategic Aims.

Or, for those who want something simpler, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

I will listen deeply to children. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.
I will not travel by plane
I will not travel by car
I will not eat meat and fish
I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
I will not own or use a mobile (cell) phone
I will not buy rainforest timber
I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

Some people will no doubt shy away from the analysis above. To those unfamiliar with elite politics, it might indeed sound preposterous. Surely, some might think, this is a ‘conspiracy theory’.

And you are right. See ‘In defence of conspiracy theories (and why the term is a misnomer)’.

This is because the evidence that there is a great deal wrong with the world, and that a select group of people, some identifiable, some less easily so, have orchestrated these events over an extended period of time is overwhelming. Even if the emotional and behavioural dysfunctionalities of most people have made it easy for them.

So I encourage you to have a ponder. There is a great deal at stake at this time. A human future, no less.

Collective Revolution And Individual Enlightening Are The Same Thing

Posted on June 7, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Revolution–the real kind–is an inside job.

This is not a click-friendly fact to highlight. Whenever I talk about revolution as having more to do with sincere inner work than with demonstrations and pitchforks and the proletariat rising up against the bourgeoisie, I get met with a lot of blank stares and dead air. It’s much more click-friendly to talk about how terrible this or that politician or oligarch or media figure is and how they should be launched into the sun with a giant crossbow.

It’s true though. Revolution is an inside job.

This is not a click-friendly thing to say because it is not an egoically pleasing thing to say. When they ask why the world is screwed up and what to do about it, people want to be told that it’s because of those Bad Guys over there and they need to be put in their place by these Good Guys over here; they don’t want to be told they need to disentangle themselves from egoic consciousness so they can see clearly enough to operate in an efficacious way.

But it’s a fact.

This is not some new agey, metaphysical philosophical position. I’m not saying that there are no villains outside yourself or any of that dopey spiritual woo woo crap; there absolutely are horrible people in the world who absolutely are doing horrible things that have absolutely horrible consequences for all of us. I’m not saying that if you do inner work you’ll magically make the sociopathic elites who are manipulating humanity toward its doom somehow turn into nice people via some esoteric mystical principle or anything like that. And I’m definitely not saying not to organize, demonstrate or take large, decisive actions against establishment power structures.

What I am saying is that the most effective thing you can do to fight the bastards and create a healthy world is to bring clarity to your own inner processes, so that’s where your energy should be most emphasised.

Egos love being told that the problem and the solution exists outside in other people. Egos thrive on conflict and drama, so the more you make it about fighting others the better; hell it’s even more fun if you can make the case that traitors within your own ranks need to be fought because they have slightly different views from you. What egos don’t like to be told is that it’s the ego itself (or more specifically the belief in it) that is the problem.

But simply pouring your energy into fighting Bad Guys is not an efficacious means toward the end of a healthy world. People who do this find their efforts stagnated and ignored, which is a big part of why so many lifelong revolutionary-minded individuals wind up becoming bitter and jaded in their struggles.

This is because most people, even people who are relatively more awake than the general mainstream population, are severely confused. Most people simply are not conscious of the way their own perception and cognition is actually happening from moment to moment, so their perception and cognition are beholden to subconscious conditioning patterns which were set years or decades ago without any consideration as to whether they would be helpful later on or would be useful in rallying the masses to overthrow their capitalist oppressors. This is made infinitely more complex and confusing by the fact that vast troves of wealth go into manipulating the public away from revolution and toward establishment loyalism.

The word “enlightenment” has a ton of sticky baggage, and can make a shoddy pointer in the way it implies some lofty, elevated state that a very few special people can attain through great effort and then are finished. Really it’s just meant to point to the process of becoming aware of the way your own field of consciousness operates and the perceptual/cognitive habits that you’ve formed for interpreting/understanding your experience. For this purpose I prefer the word “enlightening“, since it suggests an ongoing process rather than some remote “done” state.

By emphasising your own enlightening, your energy is well spent eliminating the mental distortions and egoic sticking points which so often bog down dissident movements (and if you’ve spent any time in revolutionary-minded circles with your eyes even half-open you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about). Because you’re investing your energy in your own backyard, so to speak, you’re dealing with the one area of your life that you actually have some degree of control over. You have no influence over whether the left will espouse your particular vision of revolutionary action by November or whatever, but you absolutely do have influence over whether you’re operating from truth or from delusion.

By making a firm commitment to being ruthlessly honest with yourself and exploring your own inner dimensions via meditation, self-enquiry, contemplation etc, you are opening up the possibility of the birth of a true revolutionary: someone who both desires revolutionary change and has the clarity of vision to efficaciously help manifest it in the world. But first you must pursue the truth at any cost; not “the truth” about Bad Guys and secret societies, but the truth about you and your actual experience of this world. You must put truth, and the desire to know it, above all else.

In this way you are bringing to your own personal microcosm the transformation that we need to see in the outer societal macrocosm: you are enlightening yourself in the exact same way humanity as a whole needs to enlighten. Indeed, it is the exact same movement; your inner work is no more separable from humanity’s collective awakening than an individual antibody’s attack on a pathogen is separable from the entire immune system’s return to health.

A man named Ramana Maharshi once said “Your own Self-realization is the greatest gift you can render the world.” This is what your drive toward revolution is calling you home to. Not toward egoically pleasing conflict and drama, not toward a violent uprising which will inevitably see a reversion to the same preexisting conditioning patterns, but toward a transformation in yourself which will enable you to guide the world toward health in a lucid and efficacious way.

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Category Archives: Health

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