Social Media’s Threat to Free Speech is Real

By Peter Van Buren

Source: We Meant Well

The interplay between the First Amendment and corporations like Twitter, Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook is the most significant challenge to free speech in our lifetimes. Pretending a corporation with the reach to influence elections is just another place that sells stuff is to pretend the role of debate in a free society is outdated.

From the day the Founders wrote the 1A until very recently no entity existed that could censor at scale other than the government. It was difficult for one company, never mind one man, to silence an idea or promote a false story in America, never mind the entire world. That was the stuff of Bond villains.

The arrival of global technology controlled by mega-corporations like Twitter brought first the ability the control speech and soon after the willingness. The rules are their rules, so we see the permanent banning of a president for whom some 70 million Americans voted from tweeting to his 88 million followers (ironically the courts earlier claimed it was unconstitutional for the president to block those who wanted to follow him.) Meanwhile the same censors allowed the Iranian and Chinese governments (along with the president’s critics) to speak freely. For these companies violence in one form is a threat to democracy while similar violence is valorized under a different color flag.

The year 2020 also saw the arrival of a new tactic by global media, sending a story down the memory hole to influence an election. The contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which strongly suggest illegal behavior on his part and unethical behavior by his father the president, were purposefully and effectively kept from the majority of voters. It was no longer for a voter to agree or disagree, it was now know and judge yourself or remain ignorant and just vote anyway.

Try an experiment. Google “Peter Van Buren” with the quotes. Most of you will see on the first page of results articles I wrote four years ago for outlets like The Nation and Salon. Almost none of you will see the scores of columns I wrote for The American Conservative over the past four years. Google buries them.

The ability of a handful of people nobody voted for to control the mass of public discourse has never been clearer. It represents a stunning centralization of power. It is this power which negates the argument of “why not start your own web forum.” Someone did until Amazon withdrew its server support, and Apple and Google banned the Parler app.

The same thing happened to The Daily Stormer, driven offline through a coordinated effort by tech companies, and 8Chan, deplatformed by Cloudflare. Amazon partner GoDaddy deplatformed the world’s largest gun forum AR15. Tech giants have also killed off local newspapers and other forums by gobbling up ad revenues. The companies are not, in @jack’s words, “one small part of the larger public conversation.”

The tech companies’ logic in destroying Parler was particularly evil – either start censoring like we do (“moderation”) or we shut you down. Parler allowing ideas and people banned by the others is what brought its demise. Amazon, et al, brought their power to censor to another company. The tech companies also said while Section 230 says we are not publishers, we just provide the platform, if Parler did not exercise editorial control to tech’s satisfaction it was finished. Even if Parler comes back online it will live only at the pleasure of the powerful.

Since democracy was created it has required a public forum, from the Acropolis to the town square on down. That place exists today, for better or worse, across global media. It is this seriousness of the threat to free speech that requires us to move beyond platitudes like “it’s not a violation of free speech, just a breach of the terms of service!” People once said “I’d like to help you vote ladies, but the Constitution specifically refers to men, my hands are tied.” That’s the side of history some are standing on.

This new reality must be the starting point, not the end point of discussions on the First Amendment and global media. Facebook, et al, have evolved into something new which can reach beyond their own corporate borders, beyond the idea of a company that just sells soap or cereal. Never mind being beyond the vision of the Founders when they wrote the 1A, it is hard to imagine Thomas Jefferson endorsing having a college dropout determine what the president can say to millions of Americans. The magic game play of words – it’s a company so it does not matter – is no longer enough to save us from drowning.

Tech companies currently work in casual consultation with one another, taking turns being the first to ban something so the others can follow. The next step is when a decision by one company ripples instantly across to the others, and then down to their contractors and supplies as a requirement to continue business. The decision by AirBnB to ban users for their political stance could cross platforms automatically so that same person could not fly, use a credit card, etc., essentially a non-person unable to participate in society beyond taking a walk. And why not fully automate the task, destroying people who use a certain hashtag, or like an offending tweet? Perhaps create a youth organization called Twitter Jugend to watch over media 24/7 and report dangerous ideas? A nation of high school hall monitors.

Consider linkages to the surveillance technology we idolize when it helps arrest the “right” people. So with the Capitol riots we fetishize how cell phone data was used to place people on site, coupled with facial recognition run against images pulled off social media. Throw in the calls from the media for people to turn in friends and neighbors to the FBI, alongside amateur efforts across Twitter and even Bumble to “out” participants. The goal was to jail people if possible, but most loyalists seemed equally satisfied if they could cause someone to lose their job. Tech is blithely providing these tools to users it approves of, knowing full well how they will be used. Orwellian? Orwell was an amateur.

There are legal arguments to extend limited 1A protections to social media. Section 230 could be amended. However, given Democrats benefit disproportionately from corporate censorship and current Democratic control of the government, no legislative solution appears likely. Those people care far more for the rights of some of its citizens (trans people seem popular now, it used to be disabled folks) then the most basic right for all the people.

They rely on the fact it is professional suicide today to defend all speech on principle. It is easy in divided America to claim the struggle against fascism (racism, misogyny, white supremacy, whatever) overrules the old norms. And they think they can control the beast.

But imagine someone’s views, which today match @jack and Zuck’s, change. Imagine Zuck finds religion and uses all of his resources to ban legal abortion. Consider a change of technology which allows a different company, run by someone who thinks like the MyPillow Guy, replacing Google in dictating what you can read. As one former ACLU director explained “Speech restrictions are like poison gas. They seem like they’re a great weapon when you’ve got your target in sight. But then the wind shifts.”

The election of 2020, when they hid the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop from voters, and the election’s aftermath, when they banned the president and other conservative voices, was the coming-of-age moment, the proof of concept for media giants that they could operate behind the illusion of democracy.

Hope rests with the Supreme Court expanding the First Amendment to social media, as it did when it grew the 1A to cover all levels of government, down to the hometown mayor, even though the Constitution specifically only mentions Congress. The Court has long acknowledged the flexibility of the 1A in general, expanding it over the years to acts of “speech” as disparate as nudity and advertising. But don’t expect much change any time soon. Landmark decisions on speech, like those on other civil rights, tend to be more evolutionary in line with society’s changes than revolutionary.

It is sad that many of the same people who quoted that “First they came for…” poem over Trump’s Muslim Ban are now gleefully supporting social media’s censorship of conservative voices. The funny part is both Trump and Twitter claim what they did was for peoples safety. One day people will wake up and realize it doesn’t matter who is doing the censoring, the government or Amazon. It’s all just censoring.

What a sad little argument “But you violated the terms of service nyah nyah!” is going to be then.

YouTube Financially Deplatforms Swath Of Indie Media Accounts

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

The Google-owned video sharing platform YouTube has demonetized numerous independent media accounts, a jarring escalation in the steadily intensifying campaign against alternative news outlets online.

Progressive commentators Graham ElwoodThe Progressive SoapboxThe Convo CouchFranc AnalysisHannah Reloaded and Cyberdemon531 have all received notifications from YouTube that their videos are no longer permitted to earn money through the platform’s various monetization features, as has Ford Fischer, a respected freelancer who films US political demonstrations. No explanation has been offered for this decision beyond the vague claim that “your channel is not in line with our YouTube Partner Program policies” due to “harmful content”.

Like all large online platforms, YouTube’s appeals process is notoriously opaque and unaccountable. These accounts could remain demonetized for months, or forever, without any clear explanation at all. Ford Fischer, who has been in this situation before, said on Twitter that his account was left demonetized for seven months before YouTube reversed its decision.

“Last time you demonetized my channel, I spoke out for seven months. I didn’t delete a single piece of content. You admitted you were wrong. I forgive you. Please don’t do this again,” Fischer tweeted.

“No superchats, no ad revenue, no YouTube premium money,” tweeted Elwood, who also said “I have a call with my lawyers later today.”

“You guys have destroyed my channel without legit explanation as to why,” tweeted Jamarl Thomas of Progressive Soapbox. “No videos are given – and frankly there is literally zero ‘harmful’ content on my channel. This is a radically bad error that needs to be corrected.”

The Convo Couch’s Jonathan Mayorca tweeted the notification he received from YouTube which gave the reason as “Harmful content: Content that focuses on controversial issues and that is harmful to viewers,” saying no specific video or subject was named. Nobody receiving these notifications appears to have any idea what is meant by “harmful” or “controversial” or why YouTube is mentioning them in the same breath as though these two things are connected or synonymous in some way.

YouTube has been providing template responses saying “We recommend making the needed changes to your content and reapply in 30 days” while refusing to specify what the “needed changes” even are.

Speaking for myself, I can say with absolute certainty that I would not be able to create content at anywhere near the pace I do were I not making enough money from it to do it full time. Life is far too demanding with far too much else going on for me to be able to maintain anything like daily output; being financially deplatformed and having to get another job would force me down to an essay a week in my spare time, if that. Anyone who works in independent media full time knows this, and so do the powerful people who are steadily ratcheting up the campaign to silence anyone who hasn’t passed through the gatekeepers of the plutocratic media.

Financial deplatforming is censorship. People were given an opportunity to devote themselves to the vocation of creating media outside the gatekeeping apparatus of billionaire news institutions, which is arguably the single most important vocation anyone can give themselves to in our world right now, and they built their lives around their ability to do this. Now it’s being ripped away from them; their literal jobs are being taken away. They were offered a reason to think they’d be able to make a living doing very important work, and then they were sucker punched with what amounts to political censorship.

This has been a continually escalating trend for years. The general population is herded onto huge monopolistic social media platforms offering democratization of information where your voice can be heard, and then those platforms proceed to censor an increasing amount of political speech in increasing coordination with the US government.

https://twitter.com/FordFischer/status/1357055942446223360

If the democratization of information online is successfully reversed and the mass media gatekeepers are again the sole authorities on what’s real and true, people will be locked into forming their ideas on how to think, act and vote based on what they are told by the same plutocratic media institutions which have been deceiving them into every war and manipulating them into accepting the status quo for generations.

If the door is locked to the possibility of a grassroots information rebellion against the narrative hegemony of our rulers, we will remain doomed to continue along the same ecocidal, omnicidal trajectory these bastards have us on until it reaches its inevitable conclusion. This must be resisted.

“At First I Thought it Was a Joke”: Academic Media Censorship Conference Censored by YouTube

The entire video record of the conference — estimated at around 24 hours of material — was mysteriously disappeared from YouTube say conference organizers.

By Alan Macleod

Source: Mint Press News

An academic critical media literacy conference warning of the dangers of media censorship has, ironically, been censored by YouTube. The Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas 2020 took place without incident online over two days in October and featured a number of esteemed speakers and panels discussing issues concerning modern media studies.

Weeks later, however, the entire video record of the conference — estimated at around 24 hours of material — disappeared from YouTube. Organizer Nolan Higdon of California State University East Bay, began receiving worried messages from other academics, some of which were shared with MintPress, who had been using the material in their classrooms, noting that it had all mysteriously disappeared.

“At first I thought it was a joke,” said Mickey Huff of Diablo Valley College, California. “My initial reaction was ‘that’s absurd;’ there must have been a mistake or an accident or it must have got swept under somehow. There is no violation, there was no reasoning, there was no warning, there was not an explanation, there was no nothing. The entire channel was just gone,” he told MintPress. Huff is also the director of Project Censored, an organization that sponsored the event.

Higdon suspected that it was the content critical of big tech monopolies like Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter that was the reason why the channel was deleted. “Each video was a different panel and every panel had different people from the other ones, so it is not like there was one theme or person or copyrighted content in all of our videos; this seems to be an attack on the conference, not on a singular video,” he said.

 

“This wasn’t a keg party with Parler users”

The organizers were careful to avoid copyright infringement, with the large majority of their videos in lecture format, essentially a recorded Zoom call. Speakers included some of the best-known names in media studies, with the event sponsored by institutions like Stanford University and UCLA. “This wasn’t a keg party with Parler users: it was an academic conference,” Huff said.

These are pioneering figures in critical media literacy scholarship. It’s mind numbing that all of this was just disappeared from YouTube. The irony is writ large…This is part of a potentially algorithmic way of getting rid of more radical positions that criticize establishment media systems, including journalism.”

Higdon too, suspected YouTube’s action was politicized: “This is the same year we saw big tech trying to influence Prop 22 here in California, so I am not too surprised that they would be aggressive with folks like us who are critical of media corporations.”

Organizers say they attempted to contact YouTube but did not receive a reply.

MintPress spoke to representatives from Google, YouTube’s parent company, who strenuously denied that they would ever remove content from their platforms purely because it was critical of the company, noting that there is a wealth of videos on the website that challenge or attack them.After looking into the matter, Google said they could find only one video and reinstated it (although the video does not appear on the conference’s channel). As for the hours of other footage, that remains an enigma to them, with no record of its existence. Thus, it appears that there will be no closure or a definitive answer to this mystery.

 

Algorithms take aim

Media literacy, big tech power, and censorship are hot topics right now. In the wake of the dramatic storming of the Capitol Building earlier this month, a host of companies, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram, took actions against Donald Trump, limiting his and his supporters’ ability to communicate online. Perhaps most notably, however, Google, Apple, and Amazon Web Services launched a coordinated assault on “free speech app” Parler, a service popular with the far-right for its lax laws on racism. Together, the three effectively took the service offline around the world.

More recently, the Wall Street Bets subreddit, responsible for intentionally sinking a multi-billion dollar hedge fund, has endured retaliation, its communications channels cut by messaging app Discord, amid calls to immediately criminalize their behavior.

While the pros and cons of such decisions can, and have been, debated, the bigger question of should privately-owned companies be allowed to have the power to regulate who can and cannot speak online, has largely been downplayed.

“On the one hand I understand they have the right to deplatform people,” Huff told MintPress. “On a broader level though, I don’t think they should have achieved this kind of power over our communication systems in the first place, and these should be publicly run platforms regulated the same way our government regulates and enforces the First Amendment.”

Higdon was equally worried about the power amassed by the tech giants. “By empowering these tech companies to decide what is and is not appropriate, they are going to look out for their vested interests, and people who are critical of their business model and practices are going to be targets,” he said, predicting that,

These lefties right now who are advocating for censorship…the outcome of this is going to be on them.”

If history is any judge, he will be proven correct. In the wake of the 2016 election and the allegations that Russian disinformation swung the result in Trump’s favor, social media companies changed their algorithms to help halt the spread of fake news. The main result, however, was a throttling of traffic to high-quality alternative news sites and the promotion of corporate media like CNN and Fox News. Overnight, Consortium News’ Google traffic fell by 47%, Common Dreams’ by 37%, Democracy Now! By 36% and The Intercept by 19%. MintPress suffered similar, unrecoverable losses.

Likewise, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally approved the deliberate choking of alternative media, admitting that his company deranked Mother Jones because of its left-wing persuasion (despite Facebook’s assurances that it was doing no such thing). Other, more radical outlets have suffered even greater reductions in traffic.

 

Anti-social media

Whatever decisions big tech companies make reverberate throughout society. 35, 24, and 17% of Americans get their news from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, respectively, with similar numbers worldwide. This enormous user base makes them by far the greatest and most influential news platforms on the planet, with the ability to highlight stories, bury others, and even swing elections. Huff was extremely worried about the power of these new media monopolies.

“We can’t get away from the fact that Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, the whole corporate Alphabet soup of this big tech dystopia have gobbled up the public sphere. This is where people can go to congregate and share their information and it is also where invisible forces decide which voices get heard and which do not. Let’s also not forget that all of this tech was initially funded with taxpayer money.”

Worse still, although we now live in an online world, the public is hopelessly ill-equipped to navigate its waters, displaying a shocking lack of awareness and understanding of how they can be manipulated.

A 2016 study from Stanford University found that two-thirds of college-aged “digital natives” — people who grew up using the Internet — mistook native advertising for a genuine news story, even with the words “sponsored content” displayed prominently. “Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak,” the study concluded, leading to calls for more critical media literacy education in schools. “Since we are not teaching people how to use these technologies, or how these technologies use them, they are more susceptible to propaganda and to disinformation. And ironically our conference was designed to combat exactly that problem,” Huff added.

Perhaps more worrying of all is the increasingly close connections between Silicon Valley and the National Security State. “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century…technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first,” wrote Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Late last year, the CIA signed a partnership deal worth tens of billions of dollars with Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Amazon Web Services. Meanwhile, Facebook has partnered with the NATO cutout organization the Atlantic Council to help them curate the world’s news feeds. Reddit has also hired Atlantic Council official Jessica Ashooh as its director of policy.

The Atlantic Council’s board of directors includes eight former CIA chiefs, multiple U.S. Army Generals, and high statespeople like Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, meaning that any decisions big tech companies make are only one step removed from the U.S. government. “This is actually [state] censorship by proxy,” Higdon warned.

“These companies, we know thanks to Edward Snowden and others, have contracts with the Federal government. There is a revolving door between particularly the Democratic Party and big tech, and there are also various loans and government protections given to this industry. So this is not some independent set of entities making this decision.”

“If 1984’s protagonist Winston Smith were a real character today he’d be a fact checker at Facebook or a content curator at YouTube, relegating to the dustbins of history whatever programmers are told to or whatever keywords our conference triggered,” Huff added.

Big tech has repeatedly acted at the behest of the U.S. government to silence its international opponents, suspending the accounts of foreign leaders like Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro or Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei or deranking foreign media outlets like RT and TeleSUR.

It is in this light that the deletion of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas can be seen; not as a deliberate decision by an angry Google employee intent on revenge, but as the result of a powerful and Byzantine algorithm designed by Silicon Valley executives who are intimately intertwined with both the government and the corporate world. There is little oversight of their power or recourse to their decisions, given their enormous influence over public life today.

Huff was particularly sardonic about the whole affair:

There are layers of irony here that are certainly not lost on us. But I don’t know if the public at large is realizing the attack that is happening against the very people that are the intellectual bulwark against such institutional censorship. I’m not trying to make us out to be martyrs here, but my point is that I think it has a particular irony when the very public intellectuals who try to educate the public about how these systems work are silenced,” he said.

Another Mega Group Spy Scandal? Samanage, Sabotage, and the SolarWinds Hack

By Whitney Webb

Source: The Unz Review

The devastating hack on SolarWinds was quickly pinned on Russia by US intelligence. A more likely culprit, Samanage, a company whose software was integrated into SolarWinds’ software just as the “back door” was inserted, is deeply tied to Israeli intelligence and intelligence-linked families such as the Maxwells.

In mid-December of 2020, a massive hack compromised the networks of numerous US federal agencies, major corporations, the top five accounting firms in the country, and the military, among others. Despite most US media attention now focusing on election-related chaos, the fallout from the hack continues to make headlines day after day.

The hack, which affected Texas-based software provider SolarWinds, was blamed on Russia on January 5 by the US government’s Cyber Unified Coordination Group. Their statement asserted that the attackers were “likely Russian in origin,” but they failed to provide evidence to back up that claim.

Since then, numerous developments in the official investigation have been reported, but no actual evidence pointing to Russia has yet to be released. Rather, mainstream media outlets began reporting the intelligence community’s “likely” conclusion as fact right away, with the New York Times subsequently reporting that US investigators were examining a product used by SolarWinds that was sold by a Czech Republic–based company, as the possible entry point for the “Russian hackers.” Interest in that company, however, comes from the fact that the attackers most likely had access to the systems of a contractor or subsidiary of SolarWinds. This, combined with the evidence-free report from US intelligence on “likely” Russian involvement, is said to be the reason investigators are focusing on the Czech company, though any of SolarWinds’ contractors/subsidiaries could have been the entry point.

Such narratives clearly echo those that became prominent in the wake of the 2016 election, when now-debunked claims were made that Russian hackers were responsible for leaked emails published by WikiLeaks. Parallels are obvious when one considers that SolarWinds quickly brought on the discredited firm CrowdStrike to aid them in securing their networks and investigating the hack. CrowdStrike had also been brought on by the DNC after the 2016 WikiLeaks publication, and subsequently it was central in developing the false declarations regarding the involvement of “Russian hackers” in that event.

There are also other parallels. As Russiagate played out, it became apparent that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, but the nation was Israel, not Russia. Indeed, many of the reports that came out of Russiagate revealed collusion with Israel, yet those instances received little coverage and generated little media outrage. This has led some to suggest that Russiagate may have been a cover for what was in fact Israelgate.

Similarly, in the case of the SolarWinds hack, there is the odd case and timing of SolarWinds’ acquisition of a company called Samanage in 2019. As this report will explore, Samanage’s deep ties to Israeli intelligence, venture-capital firms connected to both intelligence and Isabel Maxwell, as well as Samange’s integration with the Orion software at the time of the back door’s insertion warrant investigation every bit as much as SolarWinds’ Czech-based contractor.

Orion’s Fall

In the month since the hack, evidence has emerged detailing the extent of the damage, with the Justice Department quietly announcing, the same day as the Capitol riots (January 6), that their email system had been breached in the hack—a “major incident” according to the department. This terminology means that the attack “is likely to result in demonstrable harm to the national security interests, foreign relations, or the economy of the United States or to the public confidence, civil liberties, or public health and safety of the American people,” per NextGov.

The Justice Department was the fourth US government agency to publicly acknowledge a breach in connection to the hack, with the others being the Departments of Commerce and Energy and the Treasury. Yet, while only four agencies have publicly acknowledged fallout from the hack, SolarWinds software is also used by the Department of Defense, the State Department, NASA, the NSA, and the Executive Office. Given that the Cyber Unified Coordination Group stated that “fewer than ten” US government agencies had been affected, it’s likely that some of these agencies were compromised, and some press reports have asserted that the State Department and Pentagon were affected.

In addition to government agencies, SolarWinds Orion software was in use by the top ten US telecommunications corporations, the top five US accounting firms, the New York Power Authority, and numerous US government contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics, and the Federal Reserve. Other notable SolarWinds clients include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Microsoft, Credit Suisse, and several mainstream news outlets including the Economist and the New York Times.

Based on what is officially known so far, the hackers appeared to have been highly sophisticated, with FireEye, the cybersecurity company that first discovered the implanted code used to conduct the hack, stating that the hackers “routinely removed their tools, including the backdoors, once legitimate remote access was achieved—implying a high degree of technical sophistication and attention to operational security.” In addition, top security experts have noted that the hack was “very very carefully orchestrated,” leading to a consensus that the hack was state sponsored.

FireEye stated that they first identified the compromise of SolarWinds after the version of the Orion software they were using contained a back door that was used to gain access to its “red team” suite of hacking tools. Not long after the disclosure of the SolarWinds hack, on December 31, the hackers were able to partially access Microsoft’s source code, raising concerns that the act was preparation for future and equally devastating attacks.

FireEye’s account can be taken with a grain of salt, however, as the CIA is one of FireEye’s clients, and FireEye was launched with funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-tel. It is also worth being skeptical of the “free tool” FireEye has made available in the hack’s aftermath for “spotting and keeping suspected Russians out of systems.”

In addition, Microsoft, another key source in the SolarWinds story, is a military contractor with close ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus, especially Unit 8200, and their reports of events also deserve scrutiny. Notably, it was Unit 8200 alumnus and executive at Israeli cybersecurity firm Cycode, Ronen Slavin, who told Reuters in a widely quoted article that he “was worried by the possibility that the SolarWinds hackers were poring over Microsoft’s source code as prelude to a much more ambitious offensive.” “To me the biggest question is, ‘Was this recon for the next big operation?’” Slavin stated.

Also odd about the actors involved in the response to the hack is the decision to bring on not only the discredited firm CrowdStrike but also the new consultancy firm of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos, former chief information security officer of Facebook and Yahoo, to investigate the hack. Chris Krebs is the former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and was previously a top Microsoft executive. Krebs was fired by Donald Trump after repeatedly and publicly challenging Trump on the issue of election fraud in the 2020 election.

As head of CISA, Krebs gave access to networks of critical infrastructure throughout the US, with a focus on the health-care industry, to the CTI League, a suspicious outfit of anonymous volunteers working “for free” and led by a former Unit 8200 officer. “We have brought in the expertise of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos to assist in this review and provide best-in-class guidance on our journey to evolve into an industry leading secure software development company,” a SolarWinds spokesperson said in an email cited by Reuters.

It is also worth noting that the SolarWinds hack did benefit a few actors aside from the attackers themselves. For instance, Israeli cybersecurity firms CheckPoint and CyberArk, which have close ties to Israeli intelligence Unit 8200, have seen their stocks soar in the weeks since the SolarWinds compromise was announced. Notably, in 2017, CyberArk was the company that “discovered” one of the main tactics used in an attack, a form of SAML token manipulation called GoldenSAML. CyberArk does not specify how they discovered this method of attack and, at the time they announced the tactic’s existence, released a free tool to identify systems vulnerable to GoldenSAML manipulation.

In addition, the other main mode of attack, a back door program nicknamed Sunburst, was found by Kaspersky researchers to be similar to a piece of malware called Kazuar that was also first discovered by another Unit 8200-linked company, Palo Alto Networks, also in 2017. The similarities only suggest that those who developed the Sunburst backdoor may have been inspired by Kazuar and “they may have common members between them or a shared software developer building their malware.” Kaspersky stressed that Sunburst and Kazuar are not likely to be one and the same. It is worth noting, as an aside, that Unit 8200 is known to have previously hacked Kaspersky and attempted to insert a back door into their products, per Kaspersky employees.

Crowdstrike claimed that this finding confirmed “the attribution at least to Russian intelligence,” only because an allegedly Russian hacking group is believed to have used Kazuar before. No technical evidence linking Russia to the SolarWinds hacking has yet been presented.

Samanage and Sabotage

The implanted code used to execute the hack was directly injected into the source code of SolarWinds Orion. Then, the modified and bugged version of the software was “compiled, signed and delivered through the existing software patch release management system,” per reports. This has led US investigators and observers to conclude that the perpetrators had direct access to SolarWinds code as they had “a high degree of familiarity with the software.” While the way the attackers gained access to Orion’s code base has yet to be determined, one possibility being pursued by investigators is that the attackers were working with employee(s) of a SolarWinds contractor or subsidiary.

US investigators have been focusing on offices of SolarWinds that are based abroad, suggesting that—in addition to the above—the attackers were likely working for SolarWinds or were given access by someone working for the company. That investigation has focused on offices in eastern Europe, allegedly because “Russian intelligence operatives are deeply rooted” in those countries.

It is worth pointing out, however, that Israeli intelligence is similarly “deeply rooted” in eastern European states both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, ties well illustrated by Israeli superspy and media tycoon Robert Maxwell’s frequent and close associations with Eastern European and Russian intelligence agencies as well as the leaders of many of those countries. Israeli intelligence operatives like Maxwell also had cozy ties with Russian organized crime. For instance, Maxwell enabled the access of the Russian organized crime network headed by Semion Mogilevich into the US financial system and was also Mogilevich’s business partner. In addition, the cross-pollination between Israeli and Russian organized crime networks (networks which also share ties to their respective intelligence agencies) and such links should be considered if the cybercriminals due prove to be Russian in origin, as US intelligence has claimed.

Though some contractors and subsidiaries of SolarWinds are now being investigated, one that has yet to be investigated, but should be, is Samanage. Samanage, acquired by SolarWinds in 2019, not only gained automatic access to Orion just as the malicious code was first inserted, but it has deep ties to Israeli intelligence and a web of venture-capital firms associated with numerous Israeli espionage scandals that have targeted the US government. Israel is deemed by the NSA to be one of the top spy threats facing US government agencies and Israel’s list of espionage scandals in the US is arguably the longest, and includes the Jonathan Pollard and PROMIS software scandals of the 1980s to the Larry Franklin/AIPAC espionage scandal in 2009.

Though much reporting has since been done on the recent compromise of SolarWinds Orion software, little attention has been paid to Samanage. Samanage offers what it describes as “an IT Service Desk solution.” It was acquired by SolarWinds so Samanage’s products could be added to SolarWinds’ IT Operations Management portfolio. Though US reporting and SolarWinds press releases state that Samanage is based in Cary, North Carolina, implying that it is an American company, Samanage is actually an Israeli firm. It was founded in 2007 by Doron Gordon, who previously worked for several years at MAMRAM, the Israeli military’s central computing unit.

Samanage was SolarWinds’ first acquisition of an Israeli company, and, at the time, Israeli media reported that SolarWinds was expected to set up its first development center in Israel. It appears, however, that SolarWinds, rather than setting up a new center, merely began using Samanage’s research and development center located in Netanya, Israel.

Several months after the acquisition was announced, in November 2019, Samanage, renamed SolarWinds Service Desk, became listed as a standard feature of SolarWinds Orion software, whereas the integration of Samanage and Orion had previously been optional since the acquisition’s announcement in April of that year. This means that complete integration was likely made standard in either October or November. It has since been reported that the perpetrators of the recent hack gained access to the networks of US federal agencies and major corporations at around the same time. Samanage’s automatic integration into Orion was a major modification made to the now-compromised software during that period.

Samanage appears to have had access to Orion following the announcement of the acquisition in April 2019. Integration first began with Orion version 2019.4, the earliest version believed to contain the malicious code that enabled the hack. In addition, the integrated Samanage component of Orion was responsible for “ensuring the appropriate teams are quickly notified when critical events or performance issues [with Orion] are detected,” which was meant to allow “service agents to react faster and resolve issues before . . . employees are impacted.”

In other words, the Samanage component that was integrated into Orion at the same time the compromise took place was also responsible for Orion’s alert system for critical events or performance issues. The code that was inserted into Orion by hackers in late 2019 nevertheless went undetected by this Samanage-made component for over a year, giving the “hackers” access to millions of devices critical to both US government and corporate networks. Furthermore, it is this Samanage-produced component of the affected Orion software that advises end users to exempt the software from antivirus scans and group policy object (GPO) restrictions by providing a warning that Orion may not work properly unless those exemptions are granted.

Samanage, Salesforce, and the World Economic Forum

Around the time of Samange’s acquisition by SolarWinds, it was reported that one of Samanage’s top backers was the company Salesforce, with Salesforce being both a major investor in Samanage as well as a partner of the company.

Salesforce is run by Marc Benioff, a billionaire who got his start at the tech giant Oracle. Oracle was originally created as a CIA spin-off and has deep ties to Israel’s government and the outgoing Trump administration. Salesforce also has a large presence in Israel, with much of its global research and development based there. Salesforce also recently partnered with the Unit 8200-linked Israeli firm Diagnostic Robotics to “predictively” diagnose COVID-19 cases using Artificial Intelligence.

Aside from leading Salesforce, Benioff is a member of the Vatican’s Council for Inclusive Capitalism alongside Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein and the Clintons, and members of the Lauder family, who have deep ties to the Mega Group and Israeli politics.

Benioff is also a prominent member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum and the inaugural chair of the WEF’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR), making him one of the most critical players in the unfolding of the WEF-backed Great Reset. Other WEF leaders, including the organization’s founder Klaus Schwab, have openly discussed how massive cyberattacks such as befell SolarWinds will soon result in “even more significant economic and social implications than COVID-19.”

Last year, the WEF’s Centre for Cybersecurity, of which Salesforce is part, simulated a “digital pandemic” cyberattack in an exercise entitled Cyber Polygon. Cyber Polygon’s speakers in 2020 included former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Russia Mikhail Mishustin, WEF founder Klaus Schwab, and IBM executive Wendi Whitmore, who previously held top posts at both Crowdstrike and a FireEye subsidiary. Notably, just months before the COVID-19 crisis, the WEF had held Event 201, which simulated a global coronavirus pandemic that crippled the world’s economy.

In addition to Samanage’s ties to WEF big shots such as Marc Benioff, the other main investors behind Samanage’s rise have ties to major Israeli espionage scandals, including the Jonathan Pollard affair and the PROMIS software scandal. There are also ties to one of the WEF’s founding “technology pioneers,” Isabel Maxwell (the daughter of Robert Maxwell and sister of Ghislaine), who has long-standing ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus and the country’s hi-tech sector.

The Bronfmans, the Maxwells, and Viola Ventures

At the time of its acquisition by SolarWinds, Samanage’s top investor was Viola Ventures, a major Israeli venture-capital firm. Viola’s investment in Samanage, until its acquisition, was managed by Ronen Nir, who was also on Samanage’s board before it became part of SolarWinds.

Prior to working at Viola, Ronen Nir was a vice president at Verint, formerly Converse Infosys. Verint, whose other alumni have gone on to found Israeli intelligence-front companies such as Cybereason. Verint has a history of aggressively spying on US government facilities, including the White House, and created the backdoors into all US telecommunications systems and major tech companies, including Microsoft, Google and Facebook, on behalf of the US’ NSA.

In addition to his background at Verint, Ronen Nir is an Israeli spy, having served for thirteen years in an elite IDF intelligence unit, and he remains a lieutenant colonel on reserve duty. His biography also notes that he worked for two years at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, which is fitting given his background in espionage and the major role that Israeli embassy has played in several major espionage scandals.

As an aside, Nir has stated that “thought leader” Henry Kissinger is his “favorite historical character.” Notably, Kissinger was instrumental in allowing Robert Maxwell, Israeli superspy and father of Ghislaine and Isabel Maxwell, to sell software with a back door for Israeli intelligence to US national laboratories, where it was used to spy on the US nuclear program. Kissinger had told Maxwell to connect with Senator John Tower in order to gain access to US national laboratories, which directly enabled this action, part of the larger PROMIS software scandal.

In addition, Viola’s stake was managed through a firm known as Carmel Ventures, which is part of the Viola Group. At the time, Carmel Ventures was advised by Isabel Maxwell, whose father had previously been directly involved in the operation of the front company used to sell bugged software to US national laboratories. As noted in a previous article at Unlimited Hangout, Isabel “inherited” her father’s circle of Israeli government and intelligence contacts after his death and has been instrumental in building the “bridge” between Israel’s intelligence and military-linked hi-tech sector to Silicon Valley.

Isabel also has ties to the Viola Group itself through Jonathan Kolber, a general partner at Viola. Kolber previously cofounded and led the Bronfman family’s private-equity fund, Claridge Israel (based in Israel). Kolber then led Koor Industries, which he had acquired alongside the Bronfmans via Claridge. Kolber is closely associated with Stephen Bronfman, the son of Charles Bronfman who created Claridge and also cofounded the Mega Group with Leslie Wexner in the early 1990s.

Kolber, like Isabel Maxwell, is a founding director of the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation. Maxwell, who used to chair the center’s board, stepped down following the Epstein scandal, though it’s not exactly clear when. Other directors of the center include Tamir Pardo, former head of Mossad. Kolber’s area of expertise, like that of Isabel Maxwell, is “structuring complex, cross-border and cross industry business and financial transactions,” that is, arranging acquisitions and partnerships of Israeli firms by US companies. Incidentally, this is also a major focus of the Peres Center.

Other connections to Isabel Maxwell, aside from her espionage ties, are worth noting, given that she is a “technology pioneer” of the World Economic Forum. As previously mentioned, Salesforce—a major investor in Samanage—is deeply involved with the WEF and its Great Reset.

The links of Israeli intelligence and Salesforce to Samanage, and thus to SolarWinds, is particularly relevant given the WEF’s “prediction” of a coming “pandemic” of cyberattacks and the early hints from former Unit 8200 officers that the SolarWinds hack is just the beginning. It is also worth mentioning the Israeli government’s considerable ties to the WEF over the years, particularly last year when it joined the Benioff-chaired C4IR and participated in the October 2020 WEF panel entitled “The Great Reset: Harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

Start Up Nation Central, an organization aimed at integrating Israeli start-ups with US firms set up by Netanyahu’s longtime economic adviser Eugene Kandel and American Zionist billionaire Paul Singer, have asserted that Israel will serve a “key role” globally in the 4th Industrial Revolution following the implementation of the Great Reset.

Gemini, the BIRD Foundation, and Jonathan Pollard

In addition to Viola, another of Samange’s leading investors is Gemini Israel Ventures. Gemini is one of Israel’s oldest venture-capital firms, dating back to the Israeli government’s 1993 Yozma program.

The first firm created by Yozma, Gemini was put under the control of Ed Mlavsky, who Israel’s government had chosen specifically for this position. As previously reported by Unlimited Hangout, Mlavsky was then serving as the executive director of the Israel-US Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation, where “he was responsible for investments of $100 million in more than 300 joint projects between US and Israeli high-tech companies.”

A few years before Gemini was created, while Mlavsky still headed BIRD, the foundation became embroiled in one of the worst espionage scandals in US history, the Jonathan Pollard affair.

In the indictment of US citizen Pollard for espionage on Israel’s behalf, it was noted that Pollard delivered the documents he stole to agents of Israel at two locations, one of which was an apartment owned by Harold Katz, the then legal counsel of the BIRD Foundation and an adviser to Israel’s military, which oversaw Israel’s scientific intelligence-gathering agency, Lekem. US officials told the New York Times at the time that they believed Katz “has detailed knowledge about the [Pollard] spy ring and could implicate senior Israeli officials.”

Subsequent reporting by journalist Claudia Wright pointed the finger at the Mlavsky-run BIRD Foundation as one of the ways Israeli intelligence funneled money to Pollard before his capture by US authorities.

One of the first companies Gemini invested in was CommTouch (now Cyren), which was founded by ex-IDF officers and later led by Isabel Maxwell. Under Maxwell’s leadership, CommTouch developed close ties to Microsoft, partially due to Maxwell’s relationship with its cofounder Bill Gates.

A Coming “Hack” of Microsoft?

If the SolarWinds hack is as serious as has been reported, it’s difficult to understand why a company like Samanage would not be looked into as part of a legitimate investigation into the attack. The timing of Samanage employees gaining access to the Orion software and the company’s investors including Israeli spies and those with ties to past espionage scandals where Israel used back doors to spy on the US and beyond raises obvious red flags. Yet, any meaningful investigation of the incident is unlikely to take place, especially given the considerable involvement of discredited firms like CrowdStrike, CIA fronts like FireEye and a consultancy firm led by former Silicon Valley executives with their own government/intelligence ties.

There is also the added fact that both of the main methods used in the attack were analogous or bore similarities to hacking tools that were both discovered by Unit 8200-linked companies in 2017. Unit 8200-founded cybersecurity firms are among the few “winners” from the SolarWinds hack, as their stocks have skyrocketed and demand for their services has increased globally.

While some may argue that Unit 8200 alumni are not necessarily connected to the Israeli intelligence apparatus, numerous reports have pointed out the admitted fusion of Israeli military intelligence with Israel’s hi-tech sector and its tech-focused venture capital networks, with Israeli military and intelligence officials themselves noting that the line between the private cybersecurity sector and Israel’s intelligence apparatus is so blurred, it’s difficult to know where one begins and the other ends. There is also the Israeli government policy, formally launched in 2012, whereby Israel’s intelligence and military intelligence agencies began outsourcing “activities that were previously managed in-house, with a focus on software and cyber technologies.”

Samanage certainly appears to be such a company, not only because it was founded by a former IDF officer in the military’s central computing unit, but because its main investors include spies on “reserve duty” and venture capital firms linked to the Pollard scandal as well as the Bronfman and Maxwell families, both of whom have been tied to espionage and sexual blackmail scandals over the years.

Yet, as the Epstein scandal has recently indicated, major espionage scandals involving Israel receive little coverage and investigations into these events rarely lead anywhere. PROMIS was covered up largely thanks to Bill Barr during his first term as Attorney General and even the Pollard affair has all been swept under the rug with Donald Trump allowing Pollard to move to Israel and, more recently, pardoning the Israeli spy who recruited Pollard during his final day as President. Also under Trump, there was the discovery of “stingray” surveillance devices placed by Israel’s government throughout Washington DC, including next to the White House, which were quickly memory holed and oddly not investigated by authorities. Israel had previously wiretapped the White House’s phone lines during the Clinton years.

Another cover up is likely in the case of SolarWinds, particularly if the entry point was in fact Samanage. Though a cover up would certainly be more of the same, the SolarWinds case is different as major tech companies and cybersecurity firms with ties to US and Israeli intelligence now insist that Microsoft is soon to be targeted in what would clearly be a much more devastating event than SolarWinds due to the ubiquity of Microsoft’s products.

On Tuesday, CIA-linked firm FireEye, which apparently has a leadership role in investigating the hack, claimed that the perpetrators are still gathering data from US government agencies and that “the hackers are moving into Microsoft 365 cloud applications from physical, on-premises servers,” meaning that changes to fix Orion’s vulnerabilities will not necessarily deny hacker access to previously compromised systems as they allegedly maintain access to those systems via Microsoft cloud applications. In addition to Microsoft’s own claims that some of its source code was accessed by the hackers, this builds the narrative that Microsoft products are poised to be targeted in the next high-profile hack.

Microsoft’s cloud security infrastructure, set to be the next target of the SolarWinds hackers, was largely developed and later managed by Assaf Rappaport, a former Unit 8200 officer who was most recently the head of Microsoft’s Research and Development and Security teams at its massive Israel branch. Rappaport left Microsoft right before the COVID-19 crisis began last year to found a new cybersecurity company called Wiz.

Microsoft, like some of Samanage’s main backers, is part of the World Economic Forum and is an enthusiastic supporter of and participant in the Great Reset agenda, so much so that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote the foreword to Klaus Schwab’s book “Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” With the WEF simulating a cyber “pandemic” and both the WEF and Israel’s head of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate warning of an imminent “cyber winter”, SolarWinds does indeed appear to be just the beginning, though perhaps a scripted one to create the foundation for something much more severe. A cyberattack on Microsoft products globally would certainly upend most of the global economy and likely have economic effects more severe than the COVID-19 crisis, just as the WEF has been warning. Yet, if such a hack does occur, it will inevitably serve the aims of the Great Reset to “reset” and then rebuild electronic infrastructure.

IN 1917 RUDOLF STEINER FORESAW A VACCINE THAT WOULD ‘DRIVE ALL INCLINATION TOWARD SPIRITUALITY OUT OF PEOPLE’S SOULS’

By Dylan Charles

Source: Waking Times

If you’ve felt at all like you’re in a spiritual war right now, you’re not alone.

Many of the world’s greatest scholars, philosophers and ascetics understood the world to be multi-dimensional and co-inhabited by non-physical beings both good and evil, always at war with us and each other.

It’s not something that can be rightly explained with language or science. One must cultivate such sensitivity that the existence of spiritual beings can be directly experienced.

Rudolf Steiner was an Austrian philosopher, educator, and spiritualist, and over the course of his life he published numerous books and papers on the science of spirituality. He viewed the human body as a spiritual vessel, open to occupation by other entities.

To be conscious of these forces was to have the power to reject their negative influence. To remain unconscious of them was to be a leaf in their wind, and spiritual cultivation was the key to developing conscious awareness of them.

“The spirits of darkness are now among us. We have to be on guard so that we may realize what is happening when we encounter them and gain a real idea of where they are to be found. The most dangerous thing you can do in the immediate future will be to give yourself up unconsciously to the influences which are definitely present.” ~ Rudolf Steiner

If people express the natural human inclination toward spiritual growth, they free themselves from fear and anxiety, and effectively develop a sort of immunity to the influences of negative entities. If not, our vibration attracts hostile spirits and we fall unconsciously unto their influence.

“There are beings in the spiritual realms for whom anxiety and fear emanating from human beings offer welcome food. When humans have no anxiety and fear, then these creatures starve… If fear and anxiety radiates from people and they break out in panic, then these creatures find welcome nutrition and they become more and more powerful. These beings are hostile towards humanity.

Everything that feeds on negative feelings, on anxiety, fear and superstition, despair or doubt, are in reality hostile forces in supersensible worlds, launching cruel attacks on human beings, while they are being fed. Therefore, it is above all necessary to begin with that the person who enters the spiritual world overcomes fear, feelings of helplessness, despair and anxiety. But these are exactly the feelings that belong to contemporary culture and materialism; because it estranges people from the spiritual world, it is especially suited to evoke hopelessness and fear of the unknown in people, thereby calling up the above mentioned hostile forces against them.” ~Rudolf Steiner

With such profound global fear, anxiety, and panic over the present pandemic, many are exposing their own spiritual sicknesses and acquiescing to any recommended behavior or intervention that might alleviate these emotions. Along with this is the push to vaccinate 7 billion healthy people.

Nearly 100 years ago, in a series of 14 essays published under the title, The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness, Steiner issued a warning to future generations about a possible measure of mass control, quite similar to the  visions presented by Orwell and Huxley. Steiner foresaw a future when vaccines could steal our spiritual nature.

First, some background:

“In these fourteen lectures, given at the end of 1917 following four years of war in Europe, Steiner speaks on the complex spiritual forces behind the World War I, humanity’s attempts to build theoretically perfect social orders, and the many divisions and disruptions that would continue on Earth into our own time. Humanity in general was asleep to the fact that fallen spirits, cast from the spiritual worlds, had become intensely active on Earth. This manifested mainly in human thinking and perception of the surrounding world. ” [Source]

The fall into such  destructive slumber would be marked by an age of materialism and centralization of power, during which the influences of ‘spirits of darkness’ would inspire humans to devise new technologies and new means of oppression. Steiner comments:

“I have told you that the spirits of darkness are going to inspire their human hosts, in whom they will be dwelling, to find a vaccine that will drive all inclination toward spirituality out of people’s souls when they are still very young, and this will happen in a roundabout way through the living body. Today, bodies are vaccinated against one thing and another; in future, children will be vaccinated with a substance which it will certainly be possible to produce, and this will make them immune, so that they do not develop foolish inclinations connected with spiritual life – ‘foolish’ here, or course, in the eyes of materialists. . . .

“. . . a way will finally be found to vaccinate bodies so that these bodies will not allow the inclination toward spiritual ideas to develop and all their lives people will believe only in the physical world they perceive with the senses. Out of impulses which the medical profession gained from presumption – oh, I beg your pardon, from the consumption [tuberculosis] they themselves suffered – people are now vaccinated against consumption, and in the same way they will be vaccinated against any inclination toward spirituality. This is merely to give you a particularly striking example of many things which will come in the near and more distant future in this field – the aim being to bring confusion into the impulses which want to stream down to earth after the victory of the [Michaelic] spirits of light [in 1879].” ~Rudolf Steiner

Steiner was talking only about vaccines here. His comment does not consider the compounded effects on human spirituality of the many myriad influences we have in our world today, all of which work against spiritual connection on their own right.

Again, if you’ve felt at all like you’re in a spiritual war, you’re not alone.

Destroying The Web Of Life: The Destruction Of Earth’s Biodiversity Is Accelerating

By Robert J. Burrowes

In August 2010, the secretary-general of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, Ahmed Djoghlaf, warned that ‘We are losing biodiversity at an unprecedented rate.’ According to the UN Environment Program, ‘the Earth is in the midst of a mass extinction of life’ with scientists estimating that ‘150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours’ which is nearly 1,000 times the ‘natural’ or ‘background’ rate. Moreover, it ‘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’.

Two months later, at the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, held from 18 to 29 October 2010, in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture in Japan, a revised and updated Strategic Plan for Biodiversity, including the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, for the 2011-2020 period was adopted. See ‘Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020, including Aichi Biodiversity Targets’.

You can read the 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets on the Convention’s website. They were ambitious but represented a realistic assessment of what needed to be achieved by 2020 if national governments were to achieve the longer term goal of ‘Living in Harmony with Nature’ by 2050. The 2050 Vision for Biodiversity required ‘a significant shift away from “business as usual” across a broad range of human activities.’ See ‘Global Biodiversity Outlook 5’.

So how have we done in the past ten years?

In 2015, distinguished conservationists Professor Gerardo Ceballos, Anne H. Ehrlich and Professor Paul R. Ehrlich published their book titled The Annihilation of Nature: Human Extinction of Birds and Mammals which tells the story of humanity’s ‘massive and escalating assault on all living things on this planet’ precipitating what is now Earth’s sixth great mass extinction: ‘a time of darkness for our planet’s birds and mammals’.

Noting that the roots of this destruction ‘run deep through time’ with human hunting and other activities responsible for pushing populations of animals to extinction long before the agricultural revolution (which began about 10,000 years ago), they observe that the current collective assault on animals, plants and microbes has reached a level so horrendous that ‘any alarm call we might sound will be too faint to match the tragedy that is unfolding’. But while the decimation of life that is currently underway is being caused by Homo sapiens, the consequences of this decimation will also have impact on humanity itself because the life-forms being annihilated are ‘working parts of life-support systems on which civilization depends’.

Despite the impressive statistics that record the demise of life on Earth and the fundamental threat this extinction crisis poses, Cebellos and the Ehrlichs are well aware that the public and politicians generally are not reacting emotionally to this crisis as do those who are ‘deeply familiar with the impoverishment of nature’. They hope we can relate to the fate of the last Spix’s macaw, a male that searched fruitlessly for a mate until it disappeared from the savannah of northeastern Brazil in 2000.

And did you know that even the iconic African lion may be facing extinction in the wild? In 2015, as a result of decades of hunting, disease and habitat loss, only 23,000 lions remained in Africa’s vast savannahs: less than 10% of what roamed there in 1950. There are fewer lions today.

But separately from species extinctions, Earth continues to experience ‘a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization’. In a 2017 report, Professor Ceballos and his coauthors describe what they label ‘a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.’ Moreover, local population extinctions ‘are orders of magnitude more frequent than species extinctions. Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species extinctions, so Earth’s sixth mass extinction episode has proceeded further than most assume.’ See ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines’.

Beyond even this, however, many additional species are now trapped in a feedback loop that will inevitably precipitate their extinction as well because of the way in which ‘co-extinctions’, ‘localized extinctions’ and ‘extinction cascades’ work once initiated and as has already occurred in almost all ecosystem contexts. See the (so far) six-part series ‘Our Vanishing World’.

Have you seen a flock of birds of any size recently? A butterfly?

What Is Driving the Sixth Mass Extinction?

Homo sapiens. And the key tool is always destruction of habitat, whether on land or in the ocean.

Of course, particular human behaviours have a huge impact. Fighting wars (or even just wasting resources to manufacture weapons and other military infrastructure) is one (particularly given that the perpetual war in which the US is engaged is to secure resources and markets), destroying the climate is another and deploying 5G is yet another. But there are many other destructive human behaviours too.

Consider the forests. Just last year, 6.5 million hectares of pristine forest were cut or burnt down for purposes such as clearing land to establish cattle farms so that many people can eat cheap hamburgers, mining (much of it illegal) for a variety of minerals (such as gold, silver, copper, coltan, cassiterite and diamonds) and logging to produce woodchips so that some people can buy cheap paper (including cheap toilet paper). See ‘Our Vanishing World: Rainforests’.

One outcome of this destruction is that 40,000 tropical tree species are now threatened with extinction. In addition, rainforest destruction is also the primary cause of species extinctions globally given the number of species that live in rainforests. See ‘Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’.

Another outcome is that ‘the precious Amazon is teetering on the edge of functional destruction and, with it, so are we’. See ‘Amazon Tipping Point: Last Chance for Action’.

And in relation to another major habitat that is being destroyed, consider the world’s oceans. In summary, the oceans are warming, acidifying and deoxygenating; being contaminated with nuclear radiation, by offshore oil and gas drilling as well as oil spills; being damaged by deep sea mining; being polluted by industrial (including chemical) and farming wastes while being damaged in a myriad other ways and being overfished.

In short: the oceans are under siege on a vast range of fronts and are effectively ‘dying’. For a comprehensive 18-point summary, see ‘Our Vanishing World: Oceans’.

If you like, you can read comprehensive summaries of the fate of Earth’s birds and insects too. See ‘Our Vanishing World: Birds’ and ‘Our Vanishing World: Insects’.

What Is the State of Play in Early 2021?

In a report published by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in May 2020, the authors observe that ‘Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history – and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely.’ With a total estimated number of animal and plant species on Earth of 8 million (of which 5.5 million are insect species), an accelerating daily extinction rate combined with an ongoing decline in ecosystem health, the report concludes that 1,000,000 species of life on Earth are threatened with extinction. See ‘Nature’s Dangerous Decline “Unprecedented”; Species Extinction Rates “Accelerating”’ and ‘A million threatened species? Thirteen questions and answers’.

And the latest edition of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s flagship publication ‘Global Biodiversity Outlook 5’ was published on 18 August 2020. It reports that ‘Humanity stands at a crossroads with regard to the legacy it leaves to future generations. Biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, and the pressures driving this decline are intensifying. None of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets will be fully met.’

But this is an understatement, to put it politely.

In their commentary on this predicament in November 2020, scholars Ruchi Shroff and Carla Ramos Cortés note that ‘Despite wide-spread international calls to curb the sixth mass extinction, no single goal of the Convention of Biological Diversity’s Aichi Biodiversity Targets, for the second consecutive decade, have been met. In some cases, biodiversity loss has been made worse as no action has been taken to curb pesticide use, pollution, fossil fuels and plastics.’ See ‘The Biodiversity Paradigm: Building Resilience for Human and Environmental Health’.

But the destruction is far worse than suggested by this. Given, as already noted above, the ongoing destruction of rainforests and oceans, not to mention other habitats ranging from wetlands to deserts, the annihilation of life on Earth continues to accelerate with no indicators signaling that this destruction is being slowed in any way.

Therefore, destruction of biodiversity remains one of the four primary paths to human extinction (along with nuclear war, the deployment of 5G and the climate catastrophe).

Is It too Late to Do Anything?

It might be. As mentioned above: Because many species are now trapped in a feedback loop that will inevitably precipitate their extinction because of the way in which ‘co-extinctions’, ‘localized extinctions’ and ‘extinction cascades’ work once initiated, many further extinctions are now inevitable.

However, we can take action to save those individuals and species not yet trapped in a feedback loop and that might yet be saved. But if you wait for governments or corporations to act responsibly, you will wait in vain as the last 20 years has demonstrated.

So you have some powerful options to consider. The first, and most important, is to consider the ways in which you can reduce your own consumption. The planetary environment is only being destroyed so that governments and corporations can respond to consumer demand. Everything from military spending and war to the extraction and burning of fossil fuels are fundamentally driven by what you buy. And each and every item that you buy has a negative environmental impact. There are no exceptions.

If you reduce your own consumption and increase your self-reliance, you will reduce the burden that extraction, transport, manufacture and distribution of resources imposes on the natural environment resulting in the destruction of habitat and the annihilation of biodiversity.

One option to consider is ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ which outlines a graduated series of steps for reducing consumption and increasing self-reliance.

If you want to better understand why so many human beings are addicted to endless consumption, see ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’. There is more detail on the origins of this behaviour in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

If you are inclined to campaign to defend biodiversity in one context or another, whether by campaigning to end war, halt the climate catastrophe, stop the deployment of 5G or end wildlife trafficking for example, consider doing so strategically. See ‘Nonviolent Campaign Strategy’.

You might also consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

Or, if the options above seem too complicated, 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

One species – Homo sapiens – is annihilating life on Earth, driving at least 200 species to extinction each day. In the time it took you to read this article, another species of life on Earth vanished into the fossil record.

This annihilation of life is driven by our over-consumption. As Mahatma Gandhi, already wearing his own homespun cloth, noted more than 100 years ago: ‘Earth provides enough for every person’s need but not for every person’s greed.’

Of course, many people around the world are not responsible for over-consuming; they live life on its margins, with barely enough to eat let alone thrive. And this reflects inequities built into a global economic system that prioritizes profit for the few, not resources for living for all.

So that means that the burden for reducing consumption must fall on those in industrialized societies who benefit from the maldistribution of planetary resources.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once noted that ‘The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.’

If we are to prove him wrong, we do not have much time left.

This is because Homo Sapiens is a part of the web of life. And we are ruthlessly destroying that web.

 

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.

Twitter’s ban on Trump will only deepen the US tribal divide

By Jonathan Cook

Source: Jonathan Cook Blog

Anyone who believes locking President Donald Trump out of his social media accounts will serve as the first step on the path to healing the political divide in the United States is likely to be in for a bitter disappointment.

The flaws in this reasoning need to be peeled away, like the layers of an onion.

Twitter’s decision to permanently ban Trump for, among other things, “incitement of violence” effectively cuts him off from 88 million followers. Facebook has said it will deny Trump access to his account till at least the end of his presidential term.

The act of barring an elected president, even an outgoing one, from the digital equivalent of the public square is bound to be every bit as polarising as allowing him to continue tweeting.

These moves threaten to widen the tribal divide between the Democratic and Republican parties into a chasm, and open up a damaging rift among liberals and the left on the limits of political speech.

Claims of ‘stolen’ election

The proximate cause of Facebook and Twitter’s decision is his encouragement of a protest march on Washington DC last week by his supporters that rapidly turned violent as several thousand stormed the Capitol building, the seat of the US government.

Five people are reported to have died, including a police officer struck on the head with a fire extinguisher and a woman who was shot dead inside the building, apparently by a security guard.

The protesters – and much of the Republican party – believe that Trump’s Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, “stole” November’s presidential election. The storming of the Capitol occurred on the day electoral college votes were being counted, marking the moment when Biden’s win became irreversible.

Since the November election, Trump has cultivated his supporters’ political grievances by implying in regular tweets that the election was “rigged”, that he supposedly won by a “landslide”, and that Biden is an illegitimate president.

The social networks’ immediate fear appears to be that, should he be allowed to continue, there could be a repetition of the turmoil at the Capitol when the inauguration – the formal transfer of power from Trump to Biden – takes place next week.

No simple solutions

Whatever we – or the tech giants who now dominate our lives – might hope, there are no simple solutions to the problems caused by extreme political speech.

To many, banning Trump from Twitter – his main megaphone – sounds like a proportionate response to his incitement and his narcissistic behaviour. It appears to accord with a much-cited restriction on free speech: no one should be allowed to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre.

But that comparison serves only to blur important distinctions between ordinary speech and political speech.

The prohibition on shouting “Fire!” reflects a broad social consensus that giving voice to a falsehood of this kind – a lie that can be easily verified as such and one that has indisputably harmful outcomes – is a bad thing.

There is a clear way to calculate the benefits and losses of allowing this type of speech. It is certain to cause a stampede that risks injury and death – and at no gain, apart from possibly to the instigator’s ego.

It is also easy to determine how we should respond to someone who shouts “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. They should be prosecuted according to the law.

Who gets to decide

Banning political speech, by contrast, is a more complicated affair because there is rarely consensus on the legitimacy of such censorship, and – as we shall see – any gains are likely to be outweighed by the losses.

Trump’s ban is just the latest instance in a growing wave of exclusions by Twitter and Facebook of users who espouse political views outside the mainstream, whether on the right or the left. In addition, the tech giants have been tinkering with their algorithms to make it harder to find such content – in what amounts to a kind of pre-censorship.

But the critical issue in a democracy is: who gets to decide if political speech is unreasonable when it falls short of breaching hate and incitement laws?

Few of us want state institutions – the permanent bureaucracy, or the intelligence and security services – wielding that kind of power over our ability to comment and converse. These institutions, which lie at the heart of government and need to be scrutinised as fully as possible, have a vested interest in silencing critics.

There are equally good grounds to object to giving ruling parties the power to censor, precisely because government officials from one side of the political aisle have a strong incentive to gag their opponents. Incitement and protection of public order are perfect pretexts for authoritarianism.

And leaving the democratic majority with the power to arbitrate over political speech has major drawbacks too. In a liberal democracy, the right to criticise the majority and their representatives is an essential freedom, one designed to curb the majority’s tyrranical impulses and ensure minorities are protected.

‘Terms of service’

In this case, however, the ones deciding which users get to speak and which are banned are the globe-spanning tech corporations, the wealthiest companies in human history.

Facebook and Twitter have justified banning Trump, and anyone else, on the grounds that he violated vague business “terms of service” – the small print on agreement forms we all sign before being allowed access to their platforms.

But barring users from the chief means of communication in a modern, digitised world cannot be defended simply on commercial or business grounds, especially when those firms have been allowed to develop their respective monopolies by our governments.

Social media is now at the heart of many people’s political lives. It is how we share and clarify political views, organise political actions, and more generally shape the information universe.

The fact that western societies have agreed to let private hands control what should be essential public utilities – turning them into vastly profitable industries – is a political decision in itself.

Political pressures

Unlike governments, which have to submit to intermittent elections, tech giants are accountable chiefly to their billionaire owners and shareholders – a tiny wealth elite whose interests are tied to greater wealth accumulation, not the public good.

But in addition to these economic imperatives, the tech companies are also increasingly subjected to direct and indirect political pressures.

Sometimes that occurs out in the open, when Facebook executives get hauled before congressional committees to explain their actions. And doubtless pressure is being exerted too out of sight, behind closed doors.

Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple all want their respective, highly profitable tech monopolies to continue, and currying favour with the party in power – or the one coming into power – is the best strategy for avoiding greater regulation.

Either way, it means that, in their role as gatekeepers to the global, digital public square, the tech giants exercise overtly political powers. They regulate an outsourced public utility, but are not subject to normal democratic oversight or accountability because their relationship with the state is veiled.

Censorship backfires

Banning Trump from social media, whatever the intention, will inevitably look like an act of political suppression to his supporters, to potential supporters and even to some critics who worry about the precedent being set.

In fact, to many it will smack of vengeful retaliation by the “elites”.

Consider these two issues. They may not seem relevant to some opponents but we can be sure they will fuel his supporters’ mounting sense of righteous indignation and grievance.

First, both the department of justice and the federal trade commission under Trump have opened anti-trust investigations of the major tech corporations to break up their monopolies. Last month the Trump administration initiated two anti-trust lawsuits – the first of their kind – specifically against Facebook.

Second, these tech giants have chosen to act against Trump now, just as Biden prepares to replace him in the White House. Silicon Valley was a generous funder of Biden’s election campaign and quickly won for itself positions in the incoming administration. The new president will decide whether to continue the anti-trust actions or drop them.

Whether these matters are connected or not, whether they are “fake news” or not, is beside the point. The decision by Facebook and Twitter to bar Trump from its platforms can easily be spun in his supporters’ minds as an opportunistic reprisal against Trump for his efforts to limit the excesses of these overweening tech empires.

This is a perfect illustration of why curbs on political speech – even of the most irresponsible kind – invariably backfire. Censorship of major politicians will always be contested and are likely to generate opposition and stoke resentment.

Banning Trump won’t end conspiracy theories on the American right. It will intensify them, reinforce them, embolden them.

Obnoxious symptom

So in the cost-beneft calculus, censoring Trump is almost certain to further polarise an already deeply divided American society, amplify genuine grievances and conspiracy theories alike, sow greater distrust towards political elites, further fracture an already broken political system and ultimately rationalise political violence.

The solution is not to crack down on political speech, even extreme and irresponsible speech, if it does not break the law. Trump is not the cause of US political woes, he is one obnoxious symptom.

The solution is to address the real causes, and tackle the only too justified resentments that fuelled Trump’s rise and will sustain him and the US right in defeat. Banning Trump – just like labelling his supporters “a basket of deplorables” – will prove entirely counter-productive.

Fixing a broken system

Meaningful reform will be no simple task. The US political system looks fundamentally broken – and has been for a long time.

It will require a much more transparent electoral system. Big donor money will have to be removed from Congressional and presidential races. Powerful lobbies will need to be ousted from Washington, where they now act as the primary authors of Congressional legislation promoting their own narrow interests.

The old and new media monopolies – the latter our new public square – will have to be broken up. New, publicly funded and publicly accountable media models must be developed that reflect a greater pluralism of views.

In these ways, the public can be encouraged to become more democratically engaged, active participants in their national and local politics rather than alienated onlookers or simple-minded cheerleaders. Politicians can be held truly accountable for their decisions, with an expectation that they serve the public interest, not the interests of the most powerful corporations.

The outcome of such reforms, as surveys of the American public’s preferences regularly show, would be much greater social and economic equality. Joblessness, home evictions and loss of medical cover would not stalk so many millions of Americans as they do now, during a pandemic. In this environment, the wider appeal of a demagogue like Trump would evaporate.

If this all sounds like pie-in-the-sky idealism, that in itself should serve as a wake-up call, highlighting just how far the US political system is from the liberal democracy it claims to be.

For Whom the Bell Tolls: A Report on the State of Planet Earth at Year’s End 2020

By Robert J. Burrowes

In 1624, English poet John Donne penned his famous poem ‘No Man Is an Island’, sublimely evoking the reality of human unity: ‘Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.’ Therefore, he concluded his poem, ‘never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.’

This report does two things.

First, in the hope of generating greater consideration of the human condition and the state of the planet, I have presented in straightforward language and point form, a reasonable summary of the nature and extent of our predicament as well as citing the relevant scientific and/or other evidence that explains each problem in more detail.

And second, the article outlines a powerful series of actions and strategies that individuals as well as community groups, neighborhoods and action groups can take as part of a global effort to restore agency to human individuals as well as to fight to avert human extinction.

Introduction

Tragically, in 2020, the bell tolled for all of humanity, in more ways than one, as we suffered the greatest political, economic, social and environmental upheaval in human history when the global elite initiated its long-planned coup – presented by the World Economic Forum as ‘The Great Reset’ – to take complete control of the entire human population in order to reduce it to techno-slavery in service of elite ends.

See ‘Planned Surveillance and Control by Global Technocrats: A Big-Picture Look at the Current Pandemic Beneficiaries’Big Brother in Disguise: The Rise of a New, Technological World Order‘Beware the Transhumanists: How “Being Human” is being Re-engineered by the Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’ and watch the interview of Catherine Austin Fitts for the film ‘Planet Lockdown’.

This was done under cover of the threat supposedly posed by a virus – labeled SARS-CoV-2 – which has not been scientifically demonstrated to exist, as a lengthening list of scholars were pointing out throughout the year. See ‘ZERO Evidence that COVID Fulfills Koch’s 4 Germ Theory Postulates – Dr. Andrew Kaufman & Sayer Ji’ and, for the latest explanation, COVID-19: The virus does not exist – it is confirmed!’

Unfortunately but as planned, the elite-directed response to the so-called ‘pandemic’ subsequently declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020, caused virtually all national governments to immediately shut down their national economies, imprison their populations in their homes (variously under ‘lockdown’, quarantine and curfew policies) and implement other politically, socially, economically and environmentally destructive practices which are killing millions of people, inflicting enormous suffering on billions more, and accelerating the four primary paths to human extinction: nuclear war, biodiversity collapse, the deployment of 5G and the climate catastrophe. See ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup to Destroy Humanity that is also Fast-Tracking Four Paths to Human Extinction’.

Of course, there are other possible paths to human extinction in the near term, particularly when considered in conjunction with the four threats just mentioned. These include the cascading impacts triggered by destruction of the Amazon rainforest (which is now imminent) particularly given its critical role in the global hydrological cycle, the rapidly spreading radioactive contamination of Earth, and geoengineering for military purposes (which has been occurring for decades and continues).

Far worse, however, is 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 noted below.

These interrelated threats have generated a shocking series of ‘points of no return’ (‘tipping points’) that we have already crossed, the 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.

One acknowledgment of the depth of our crisis, which takes into account just two variables and preceded declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic precipitating the elite coup putting us on the path to technotyranny, was the fact that the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was moved to 100 seconds to midnight in January 2020, the closest it has ever been to ‘doomsday’ (and more severe than both the previous year and in 1953 when the Soviet Union first exploded a thermonuclear weapon matching the US capacity and raising the spectre of nuclear war). See ‘It is Now 100 Seconds to Midnight’.

Of course, as implied above, information about the deeper strands of what is taking place and strategies to address these, only have utility in one context. They depend, fundamentally, on how one perceives what is happening and this is shaped by one’s perception of how the world in which we live actually works. If, on the one hand, someone is inclined to perceive the world as it has been traditionally presented via elite agents, then the ‘virus’ is a serious threat to individual lives for the reasons presented by governments and the corporate media and we must respond as directed.

If, on the other hand, someone has a critique of the global elite and the way in which current events are just the latest manoeuver in a centuries-long series of events designed to consolidate elite control at the expense of the rest of us, then it is the deeper agenda behind what is happening that is the focus of attention.

Given that the evidence in support of the latter position is overwhelming, and that the forces arrayed against us are very powerful, humanity faces the greatest challenge to its existence since Homo sapiens first walked the Earth.

So let me identify some of the more crucial backward steps humanity took during 2020 and what we can do about them.

Some Key Lowlights of 2020

1. As briefly reported above, the global elite implemented its long-planned coup to take complete control of human life in order to eliminate or marginalize a substantial proportion of the population while perverting the identity and will of the rest of us to serve elite ends. While there is significant resistance to this coup, strategic resistance to it in any meaningful form is yet to emerge.

Given that most people have fallen victim to the elite propaganda – see ‘The Psychology of the COVID-19 Coup: The Elite, their Victims and those who Resist’ and ‘Why Do Most People Believe Propaganda and False Flag Attacks? – as well as being distracted by sideshows (such as the ‘fight’ over the outcome of the US presidential election: see ‘What to Expect in 2021: Madness, Mayhem, Manipulation and More Tyranny’) and are also not considering the massive ‘collateral damage’ that is taking place under cover of Covid-19, the resistance that is occurring (dismissed, one way or another, by those supporting the elite coup) remains insufficient if humanity is to successfully defend human identity, freedom, dignity and volition and, even more vitally, to avert our own extinction.

As James Corbett noted in a recent video:

‘If you are advocating for lockdowns, you are complicit in tearing families apart. You are complicit in inflicting untold suffering on millions of people around the world. You are complicit in casting the poorest and most vulnerable in our societies into even further grinding poverty. You are complicit in murder.’ Watch What NO ONE is Saying About The Lockdowns.

To highlight just a few of the severe economic impacts, official responses supposedly to Covid-19 have vastly exacerbated poverty and starvation (leading to millions of deaths), destroyed millions of small businesses, dramatically increased unemployment, enabled a monumental wealth transfer from poor to rich (with the wealth of US billionaires increasing by nearly a trillion dollars during the year, and the world’s 2,189 billionaires – obviously excluding the immensely wealthier Rothschilds and Rockefellers – amassing fortunes totaling around $US10.2 trillion) and is leading to the greatest and most rapid rise in homelessness in world history.

See, for example, WFP chief warns of “hunger pandemic” as Global Food Crises Report launched’‘Why Lockdowns Don’t Work and Hurt the Most Vulnerable. Bankruptcies, Poverty, Despair’‘US Unemployed Rising, Evictions, Mortgages Crisis Brewing, Small Business Collapsing: Economic Consequences of a 2nd “Mitigation” Bill’‘Planned Surveillance and Control by Global Technocrats: A Big-Picture Look at the Current Pandemic Beneficiaries’‘Net Worth of US Billionaires Has Soared by $1 Trillion to Total of $4 Trillion Since Pandemic Began’‘Riding the storm: Market turbulence accelerates diverging fortunes’ and ‘Windfall profits and deadly risks: How the biggest retail companies are compensating essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic’.

Key threats posed by the elite coup include the fact that, 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.

But even more importantly, Professor Vandana Shiva has evocatively explained 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’, has given 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’.

Separately from this, the adverse physical and psychological health impacts of official responses to Covid-19 have been heavily documented as well, including by the United Nations and World Health Organization, despite their complicity in the coup. For example, there has been a dramatic increase in the violence inflicted within the family home, especially by men and women against children – see Why Violence?’ – and by the more usually acknowledged men against women. See UN chief calls for domestic violence “ceasefire” amid “horrifying global surge”.

In addition, there has been official acknowledgment of the elevated levels and rates of fear (usually labeled ‘stress’ or ‘anxiety’) and the increased levels of loneliness, depression, harmful alcohol and drug use, and self-harm along with suicides – see ‘Mental health and COVID-19’ – although they have been officially underestimated to conceal the true extent of the harm being done which was, of course, planned as part of the strategy to preoccupy the population and weaken resistance to the coup.

In some cases below, I have made reference to how the elite-generated responses to the non-existent virus and fake pandemic have exacerbated existing adverse circumstances and, for example, led to the ‘sitting duck’ murder of indigenous activists trapped in their homes by lockdown restrictions.

2. The global elite, using key elite fora such as the Group of 30, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group and the World Economic Forum, and despite much rhetoric to the contrary, continued to plan, generate and exacerbate the many ongoing wars, deepening exploitation within the global economy, climate and environmental destruction, and the killing and exploitation of fellow human beings in a multitude of contexts, in pursuit of greater elite profit, power and privilege. See, for example, ‘Who Is Really in Control of US Foreign Policy?’Giants: The Global Power Elite and ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

3. International organizations (such as the United Nations, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund) and national governments and corporations used military forces, legal systems, police forces and prison systems – see ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’ – around the world to serve the global elite by defending its interests against the bulk of the human population, including those individuals and organizations courageous enough to challenge elite profit, power and privilege who are being killed in record numbers. (See more in point 39 below).

4. $US1.92 trillion was officially spent worldwide on military weapons to kill fellow human beings and other lifeforms, and to destroy the biosphere. This is the highest official (because the figures are taken from ‘open sources’) annual military expenditure ever recorded and the third consecutive year in which an increase occurred. Spending $732 billion, the United States accounted for more than one-third of global military expenditure. See ‘SIPRI Yearbook 2020: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security; Summary’.

In addition to direct military spending, national governments spent billions more on such items as interest on national debt accrued through military expenditure, and medical, hospital, housing and other costs associated with rehabilitation of injured, and support of incapacitated, veterans.

Apart from military spending, weapons transfers worldwide remained high, key weapons control agreements such as that to limit strategic nuclear weapons (‘New START’) were rapidly approaching expiry with attempts to renew them stalled by the US, and there were many other regional and national military conflicts including new ones such as those in Nagorno-Karabakh and Ethiopia. See ‘Fate Of Armenian-Azerbaijani War Is Being Decided In Battle Of Shusha’ and ‘Alarm as Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict becomes internationalised’.

In relation to the military spending of the United States, as noted previously, so out-of-control is this spending that the US government has now spent at least $US21trillion on its military in the past 20 years for which it cannot even account! That’s right, $US1trillion each year above the official US national budget for killing is ‘lost’. See Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported‘Has Our Government Spent $21 Trillion Of Our Money Without Telling Us?’ and ‘The Pentagon Can’t Account for $21 Trillion (That’s Not a Typo)’.

There has been no progress reported in accounting for this ‘lost’ expenditure during the past year.

5. Under the direction of the global elite (as explained above), the United States government and its NATO allies continued their perpetual war across the planet wreaking devastation on many countries and regions, particularly in the Middle East and Africa, at staggering cost in terms of civilian and military lives lost, refugees displaced, national heritage destroyed, financial expenditure and environmental damage. See, for example, The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, From Columbus to the Islamic StateTowards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear WarDirty Wars: The World is a BattlefieldCosts of War and ‘Understanding NATO, Ending War’.

As a result, whether in the US-sponsored and supplied Saudi Arabian war against Yemen where the UNHCR reports ‘Yemen is facing a humanitarian catastrophe…. Civilians bear the brunt of the crisis, with 22.2 million Yemenis now in need of humanitarian assistance’ – see ‘The world cannot afford to let Yemen slip into the abyss’ – the result of the US use of depleted uranium on top of its other extraordinary military destruction of Iraq over the past 30 years – see ‘Depleted Uranium and Radioactive Contamination in Iraq: An Overview’ – the complete dismemberment of Libya as a result of NATO’s bombing of that country and the subsequent assassination of its leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 – see ‘Endless War and Chaos in Libya’ – the systematic killing of children by CIA-trained death squads in Afghanistan as just one feature of the US war on that country – see ‘The CIA’s Afghan Death Squads: A U.S.-Backed Militia That Kills Children May Be America’s Exit Strategy From Its Longest War’ – or the ongoing US occupation of Syrian territory and control of its resources – see ‘Endless US Rape, Occupation and Plunder of Syria’ – the United States and its NATO allies have continued their efforts to destroy entire countries at staggering cost to their populations and environments, not because these countries posed a threat to security outside their borders but in order to maintain geopolitical control and to facilitate the theft of their resources (including oil) at great profit to the global elite. See, for example, ‘Hillary Emails Reveal NATO Killed Gaddafi to Stop Libyan Creation of Gold-Backed Currency’.

Moreover, of course, the perpetually-profitable perpetual war, by definition, has no end. But the elite has no problem frightening most people into supporting its perpetual wars using manufactured excuses that are dutifully promulgated by its corporate media. And, with a gullibly terrified human population disinclined to question authority, this isn’t a problem. See ‘The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth’. The same unconvincing formula invariably works each time. For a fuller and insightful explanation of this point, see Edward Curtin’s article ‘The war hoax redux’.

Additional costs associated with war and military spending include the simple fact that by deliberately exaggerating the risk posed by the threat of war, additional expenditure is endlessly ‘justified’ to an unsuspecting and gullible public – see ‘Scary “R” Us: The Exaggerated Threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Part 7 of “Elephants in the room” series’ – they impose a staggering cost on the global environment – see The Ecological Impact of Militarism’ – and they destroy human rights and freedoms including, obviously, the right to life of those individuals killed.

Additional dangers associated with perpetual war by the US include the risk of accidental nuclear war, nuclear war triggered by a cyber attack – see Nuclear weapons agency breached amid massive cyber onslaught’ – and ‘simply’ that endless confrontation with, and provocation of, other major powers Russia and China will, one day, explode into a high-tech ‘world’ war. See Trump’s Pernicious Military Legacy: From the Forever Wars to the Cataclysmic Wars’.

6. Not content with the devastating impact of the military violence it is inflicting already, during 2020 the global elite continued to plan and develop ways to cause more destruction in future. This included ongoing work by US military agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), accelerated by initiatives in relation to the elite coup, to advance mind-controlled weapons – see ‘The Government Is Serious About Creating Mind-Controlled Weapons’ – autonomous systems and artificial intelligence technologies that will undermine nuclear deterrence and increase the likelihood of nuclear escalation – see ‘A Stable Nuclear Future? The Impact of Autonomous Systems and Artificial Intelligence’ – and further development by the United States to create its Space Force, a sixth branch of the US military forces, just three manifestations of this. See ‘The Big Push for Nukes in Space’. In addition, DARPA continues to sponsor research on ‘extinction gene drive’ technology for use against an ‘enemy’ race as explained in item 35 below.

In its turn, Russian military advances include development and deployment of a hypersonic weapon that travels at Mach 27 and which makes the US missile defense installations in Europe ‘obsolete’. See Avangard changes everything: What Russia’s hypersonic warhead deployment means for the global arms race.

And, according to US sources, China now has the largest navy in the world while expanding its arsenal of ground-based conventional ballistic and cruise missiles and planning to double its nuclear arsenal. See Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2020 and Pentagon Releases Annual China Military Power Report’.

But other initiatives receiving renewed attention – ‘hypervelocity guns, particle beams and laser weapons onboard orbiting battle platforms with onboard nuclear reactors or “super” plutonium systems providing the power for the weapons’ – also enhance the threat that ‘Modern society would go dark’ in the words of Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell. Why? Because ‘any war in space would be the one and only. By destroying satellites in space massive amounts of space debris would be created that would cause a cascading effect and even the billion-dollar International Space Station would likely be broken into tiny bits. So much space junk would be created… that we’d never be able to get a rocket off the planet again because of the minefield of debris orbiting the Earth at 15,000 mph’. See ‘Trump Signs Measure Enabling Establishment of a U.S. Space Force’.

Of course, technological ‘advances’ in weaponry reflect retrograde steps in policy with the US Air Force Global Strike Command (AFGSC) – which includes 20 B-2 stealth bombers, 76 B-52 bombers and 450 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles together capable of delivering thousands of nuclear warheads – along with the U.S. Navy’s submarine-launched Trident ballistic missiles, now ‘capable of extinguishing essentially all life on Earth within a matter of hours.’ See ‘The Air Force’s Global Strike Command Is Preparing For A Delivery Of New Nuclear Weapons’.

7. Following the US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in 2002 and after withdrawing from 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 further and unilaterally signaled its intention to dismantle the little that remained of attempts during the Cold War and since that time to contain the threat of nuclear war by further acting in violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 – see ‘Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies’ and ‘US Weaponizing Space in Bid to Launch Arms Race’ – 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 ‘US, Russia Trade Blame for Failed New START Negotiations’. There is some prospect that the incoming US president will seek to renew the treaty which expires on 5 February 2021.

If you are in any doubt regarding the devastating consequences of nuclear war, you will find Professor Steven Starr’s thoughts – see ‘Nuclear Darkness, Global Climate Change and Nuclear Famine: The Deadly Consequences of Nuclear War’ – illuminating. In addition, the description by Lynn Eden in ‘City on Fire’ (based on her book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation) is compelling.

8. Another substantial proportion of global private financial wealth – conservatively estimated by the Tax Justice Network in 2010 to already total between $US21 and $US32 trillion – has been invested virtually tax-free through the world’s still-expanding black hole of more than 80 ‘offshore’ tax havens (such as the City of London Corporation, Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, Nauru, St. Kitts, Antigua, Tortola, Switzerland, the Channel Islands, Monaco, Cyprus, Gibraltar and Liechtenstein).

Tax havens, or ‘secrecy jurisdictions’, are locations around the world where wealthy individuals, criminals and terrorists, as well as governments and government agencies (such as the CIA), banks, corporations, hedge funds, international organizations (such as the Vatican) and crime syndicates (such as the Mafia), can stash their money so that they can avoid laws, regulation and oversight and, very often, evade tax. See ‘Elite Banking at Your Expense: How Secretive Tax Havens are Used to Steal Your Money’.

‘Countries are losing over $427 billion in tax each year to international corporate tax abuse and private tax evasion.’ $245 billion is lost through corporate tax abuse and $182 billion is lost as wealthy individuals evade tax. While wealthier countries lost more tax it was only equal to 8% of their annual health budgets; for lower income countries the losses were equal to more than half their health budgets. See $427bn lost to tax havens every year: landmark study reveals countries’ losses and worst offenders.

As the latest report of the Tax Justice Network ‘The State of Tax Justice 2020’ concluded: ‘A global tax system that loses over $427 billion a year isn’t a broken system, it’s a system programmed to fail.’

Controlled by the global elite, Wall Street and other major banks manage this monstrous diversion of wealth under Government protection. (This means that any effort to contain this diversion by introducing robustly-enforced tax laws, including wealth and excess taxes, are thwarted.) ‘Their business is fraud and grand theft.’ But tax havens offer more than tax avoidance. ‘Almost anything goes on.’ It includes ‘bribery, illegal gambling, money laundering, human and sex trafficking, arms dealing, toxic waste dumping, conflict diamonds and endangered species trafficking, bootlegged software, and endless other lawless practices.’ See ‘Trillions Stashed in Offshore Tax Havens’.

Moreover, the losses noted above are just financial wealth. Additionally, a large share of the real estate, yachts, racehorses, gold bricks and many other assets that count as non-financial wealth are also owned via offshore structures that make it impossible to identify their owners. See Tax Justice Network.

9. The world’s major corporations continued to inflict enormous ongoing violence (in a myriad of ways) in their pursuit of endless profit at the expense of living beings (human and otherwise) and Earth’s biosphere by producing and marketing a wide range of life-destroying products ranging from nuclear weapons and nuclear power to fossil fuels, junk food, pharmaceutical drugs (including health-destroying and sometimes life-destroying vaccinations: see, for example, ‘Vaxxed-Unvaxxed – The Science’), synthetic poisons and genetically mutilated organisms (GMOs).

These corporations include the following: weapons manufacturers, major banks and their ‘industry groups’ like the International Monetary Conference, asset management firms, investment companies, financial services companies, fossil fuel (coal, oil and gas) corporations, technology corporations, media corporations, major marketing and public relations corporations, agrochemical (pesticides, seeds, fertilizers) giants, pharmaceutical corporations (with their handmaidens in the medical and psychiatric industries: see ‘Defeating the Violence in Our Food and Medicine’ and ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’), biotechnology (genetic mutilation) corporations, mining corporations, nuclear power corporations, food multinationals and water corporations. You can see a list of the major corporations in this article: ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

10. More than two billion people continued to live under military occupation (such as the people of Kashmir, Kurdistan, Palestine, Tibet, West Papua and Western Sahara), dictatorship (such as the people of Cambodia, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, North Korea and Saudi Arabia) or threat of genocidal assault (such as the Rohingya of Myanmar) invariably with the global elite sponsoring the oppressive local elite that exercises power. For details of just one of a great many examples, see ‘500 Years is Long Enough! Human Depravity in the Congo’.

11. 36,000,000 human beings (mainly in Africa, Asia and Central/South America) were starved to death in 2020. That is, more than one person each second died because they did not have enough eat. See ‘How Many People Die from Hunger Each Year’.

Are we serious about ending these totally unnecessary deaths? Not even remotely, as thoughtfully explained by Professor George Kent in his report as deputy editor of World Nutrition. See ‘Are We Serious About Ending Hunger?’

As Professor Kent notes: currently, around the world, ‘around 800 million people suffer from hunger’ and that ‘global efforts to end hunger have not been serious’: There has been ‘no substantial commitment of resources, no management group to control the process, no realistic timeline, and no means for mid-course corrections on the way to the goal. There [have been] no contracts with agencies that would work toward achievement of the goal…. hoping for the end of hunger won’t work. Hope is not a strategy.’ Moreover, ‘The UN system offers little more than vague aspirations.’

‘Over the decades, the stated global goal of ending hunger was not achieved, repeatedly. Instead of strengthening the effort, the response has been to reduce the aspirations. That is a clear indicator of the lack of seriousness.’

By one estimate: ‘World hunger can be eliminated with an additional $265 billion per year.’ See ‘How Many People Die from Hunger Each Year’. That is, redirecting 13.8% of official current military spending would end world hunger and starvation on Earth.

But complicated by official responses to Covid-19 (that is, the elite coup), earlier in the year World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director David Beasley warned of one outcome:

If we don’t prepare and act now to secure access, to avoid funding shortfalls and disruptions to trade, we could be facing multiple famines of biblical proportions within a short few months… our analysis shows that 300,000 people could starve to death every single day over a three-month period. See WFP chief warns of “hunger pandemic” as Global Food Crises Report launched’.

Beyond this, food availability for many vulnerable people was exacerbated by locust infestations in parts of Africa, the Middle East and South Asia as yet another manifestation of ongoing climate and environmental degradation. See ‘360 Billion Locusts And Growing – A Plague Of “Biblical Proportions” Is Destroying Crops Across The Middle East And Africa’.

While this crisis was partly averted, it was done at great cost to the environment: at least 834,000 litres of pesticide and 12,675kg of bio-pesticide were procured and administered through the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) alone. See ‘Desert locust crisis’.

Of course, spraying pesticides on ‘more than 1.3 million hectares of locust infestations… across ten countries this year’ didn’t solve the problem with the threat to ‘agricultural livelihoods and the food security of millions of people’ simply re-emerging late in the year. See Desert Locust “re-invasion” threatens millions across Horn of Africa.

This was inevitable as humans endlessly try to ‘patch up’ symptoms of damage to the environment and climate that has been inflicted over decades and now requires integrated solutions that violate the endless demand for corporate profit.

12. 18,250,000 children were killed by adults in wars, by starving them to death, by denying them clean drinking water, as a result of gun deaths, and in a large variety of other ways.

13. 8,000,000 children were trafficked into sexual slavery; executed in sacrificial killings after being kidnapped; bred to be sold as a ‘cash crop’ for sexual violation, to produce child pornography (‘kiddie porn’) and ‘snuff’ movies (in which children are killed during the filming); ritually tortured and murdered as well as raped by dogs trained for the purpose. See ‘Humanity’s “Dirty Little Secret”: Starving, Enslaving, Raping, Torturing and Killing our Children’.

14. Hundreds of thousands of individuals were kidnapped or tricked into slavery, which now denies 46,000,000 human beings (more than at any time in human history) the right to live the life of their choice, condemning many individuals – especially women and children – to lives of sexual slavery (perhaps in a forced ‘marriage’), forced labor or as child soldiers. Needless to say, the global elite continues to expand this highly profitable business while its compliant governments do no more than mouth an occasional objection to the practice while doing nothing effective to actually end it, as is patently evident following disclosures about the involvement of high-profile public figures and major industries in the slave trade.

See The Global Slavery Index’. For one recent account of the life of a modern slave, see ‘My Family’s Slave’. For an account of the involvement of public figures in sex slavery, see ‘Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein: what you need to know’ and the other articles listed at the end of this one. And for an account of the fashion industry’s complicity in the slave trade (which ranks second after computers and mobile phones for industry involvement), see ‘Fashion identified as one of five key industries implicated in modern slavery’.

15. Well over 100,000 people (particularly Falun Gong practitioners) in China, where an extensive state-controlled program is conducted, were subjected to forced organ removal for the trade in human organs. Watch ‘Hard to Believe’ and Fighting China’s Forced Organ Harvesting and see Bloody Harvest and The Slaughter.

16. 8,700,000 people were displaced by war, persecution or famine. There are now 79,500,000 people – 1% of the world population – who have been forcibly displaced worldwide and remain precariously unsettled, usually in adverse circumstances. 40% of those who are displaced are children, and more than 4,000,000 displaced people are stateless. 17 people in the world are forcibly displaced every minute. Notably, official responses to the supposed ‘pandemic’ in 2020 seriously exacerbated the adverse circumstances of displaced people further reducing their capacity to meet basic needs. See ‘Figures at a Glance’ and ‘UNHCR releases supplementary COVID-19 appeal to meet exceptional refugee needs in 2021’.

17. Millions of people were made homeless in their own country as a result of war, persecution, ‘natural’ disasters (many of which, including hurricanes/cyclones and wildfires, were actually generated by dysfunctional human behavior rather than nature), internal conflict, poverty or as a result of elite-driven national economic policies. The last time a global survey was attempted – by the United Nations back in 2005 – an estimated 100 million people were homeless worldwide. In addition, as many as 1.6 billion people lack adequate housing (living in slums, for example). See ‘Global Homelessness Statistics’.

18. Highlighting the unheralded biodiversity crisis on Earth, as a result of habitat destruction and degradation as well as a multitude of other threats, 73,000 species of life (plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects, reptiles and microbes) on Earth were driven to extinction with the worldwide loss of many of these species now at catastrophic levels. Tragically, many additional species are now trapped in a feedback loop which will inevitably precipitate their extinction as well because of the way in which ‘co-extinctions’, ‘localized extinctions’ and ‘extinction cascades’ work once initiated and as has already occurred in almost all ecosystem contexts. See the (so far) six-part series ‘Our Vanishing World’. Have you seen a flock of birds of any size recently? A butterfly?

19. Separately from species extinctions, Earth continued to experience ‘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.’ Moreover, local population extinctions ‘are orders of magnitude more frequent than species extinctions. Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species extinctions, so Earth’s sixth mass extinction episode has proceeded further than most assume.’ See ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines’ and ‘Our Vanishing World: Wildlife’.

20. Wildlife trafficking, worth up to $20 billion in 2020, is pushing many endangered species to the brink of extinction. Illegal wildlife products include jewelry, traditional medicine, clothing, furniture, and souvenirs, as well as some exotic pets, most of which are sold to unaware/unconcerned consumers in the West although China is heavily implicated too. For just one example: every 15 minutes an elephant is killed for its tusks. See Stop Wildlife Trafficking.

21. 6.5 million hectares of pristine forest were cut or burnt down for purposes such as the following: acquiring timbers used in construction, clearing land to establish cattle farms so that many people can eat cheap hamburgers, clearing land to establish palm oil plantations so that many people can eat processed (including junk) foods based on this oil, clearing land to establish palm oil and soybean plantations so that some people can delude themselves that they are using a ‘green biofuel’ in their car (when, in fact, these fuels generate a far greater carbon footprint than fossil fuels), mining (much of it illegal) for a variety of minerals (such as gold, silver, copper, coltan, cassiterite and diamonds), logging to produce woodchips so that some people can buy cheap paper (including cheap toilet paper), oil drilling, dam construction, tourism and clothing. Separately from this, the climate catastrophe is destroying forests, as are fires.

See ‘Our Vanishing World: Rainforests’‘Estimating the global conservation status of more than 15,000 Amazonian tree species’‘Tropical forests’ lost decade: the 2010s’‘How much rainforest is being destroyed?’Global Forest Watch and New data show world lost a Switzerland-size area of primary rainforest in 2019.

One outcome of this destruction is that 40,000 tropical tree species are now threatened with extinction. In addition, rainforest destruction is also the key driver of species extinctions globally with one million species of life on Earth threatened with extinction, as reported in the recent ‘Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’.

Another outcome is that ‘the precious Amazon is teetering on the edge of functional destruction and, with it, so are we’. How long do we have? ‘The tipping point is here, it is now.’ Professor Thomas E. Lovejoy and his fellow researcher Carlos Nobre elaborate this point: ‘Bluntly put, the Amazon not only cannot withstand further deforestation but also now requires rebuilding as the underpinning base of the hydrological cycle if the Amazon is to continue to serve as a flywheel of continental climate for the planet and an essential part of the global carbon cycle.’ See ‘Amazon Tipping Point: Last Chance for Action’.

22. Vast quantities of soil were washed away as we destroyed the rainforests, and enormous quantities of both inorganic constituents (such as heavy metals like cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, nickel and zinc) and organic pollutants (particularly synthetic chemicals in the form of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides) were dumped into the soil as well, thus reducing its nutrients and killing the microbes and earthworms within it. We also contaminated enormous quantities of soil with radioactive waste. See Soil-net‘Glyphosate effects on soil rhizosphere-associated bacterial communities’ and ‘Disposing of Nuclear Waste is a Challenge for Humanity’.

To briefly elaborate the evidence in relation to earthworms: Given ‘recent reports of critical declines of microbes, plants, insects and other invertebrates, birds and other vertebrates, the situation pertaining to neglected earthworms’ was evaluated in an extensive investigation recently undertaken by Robert J. Blakemore. His research demonstrated an 83.3 percent decline in earthworms in agrichemical farms – that is, those that use pesticides, herbicides and synthetic fertilizers – compared with farms utilizing organic methods. Why? Because ‘it is impossible to replace or artificially engineer the myriad beneficial processes and services freely provided by earthworms’ which includes extensive burrows in pastures enriched with soil organic matter that allow ingress of air & water and provide living space for other soil organisms. Moreover, given that ecological services overall have been given a median value of US$135 trillion per year, which is almost double the global economic GDP of around $75 trillion – see ‘Changes in the global value of ecosystem services’ and ‘Valuing nature and the hidden costs of biodiversity loss’ – Blakemore reaches an obvious conclusion: ‘Persistence with failing chemical agriculture makes neither ecological nor economic sense.’ See ‘Critical Decline of Earthworms from Organic Origins under Intensive, Humic SOM-Depleting Agriculture’.

Given that this multifaceted destruction of the soil fundamentally threatens the global grain supply, when the ability to grow, store and distribute grains at scale is a defining element of civilization, as Professor Guy McPherson eloquently explains it: ‘A significant decline in grain harvest will surely drive this version of civilization to the abyss and beyond.’ See ‘Seven Distinct Paths to Loss of Habitat for Humans’.

23. When nuclear power plants were first being constructed, they were envisaged to have a maximum lifespan of 40 years because the radioactive emissions made the metal parts of the plant brittle causing safety problems. However, Professor Karl Grossman explains, with the passage of time the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission ‘has extended the operating licenses of nuclear power plants from 40 years to 60 years and then 80 years, and is now considering 100 years’. Crazy? As Robert Alvarez notes: It is ‘an act of desperation in response to the collapse of the nuclear program in this country and the rest of the world’. See ‘Inviting Nuclear Disaster’.

Despite the lower cost, far greater safety and lack of radioactive waste products from renewable energy, nuclear power corporations continue their efforts to resist closure of their industry, in various ways. These range from developing ‘floating mini-nukes’, towed to and anchored off coastlines ‘for up to 24 years’ to power developing nations – see ‘Floating “mini-nukes” could power countries by 2025, says startup’ – using nuclear power as the energy source to support ‘a sustained lunar presence and allow Mars to be more easily explored’ but, of course, with resource mining planned and production of nuclear weapons a possibility – see ‘U.S. Plans to Build a Nuclear Plant on the Moon Is a Major Challenge to Other Great Powers’ – and using nuclear power to travel to Mars quickly (partly to minimize astronaut exposure to extraordinary cosmic radiation) and then using it for various purposes once there but, essentially, to ‘allow humans to live for long periods in harsh space environments’. See ‘The Thermal Nuclear Engine That Could Get Us to Mars in Just 3 Months’ and ‘US Eyes Building Nuclear Power Plants for Moon and Mars’.

Of course, the hazards (and insanity) of doing this are monumental, as Professor Grossman has documented. See ‘The Big Push for Nukes in Space’ and The Case Against Nuclear Power: The U.S. Space Force and the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear war in space. And there is more information on this and related subjects on the website of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.

Moreover, apart from their obvious problems as mentioned above and illustrated in the next item below as well, nuclear power plants are vulnerable to cyber attack too. See ‘6 Things to Know about the 2020 Cyberattack and Nuclear Power Plants’.

24. Despite an extensive and ongoing coverup by the Japanese government and nuclear corporations, as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), vast amounts of radioactive waste were dumped into the biosphere from the TEPCO nuclear power plant at Fukushima in Japan including by discharge into the Pacific Ocean. This is killing an incalculable number of fish and other marine organisms and indefinitely contaminating expanding areas of that ocean. See ‘Fukushima: A Nuclear War without a War: The Unspoken Crisis of Worldwide Nuclear Radiation’‘2019 Annual Report – Fukushima 8th Anniversary’‘Eight years after triple nuclear meltdown, Fukushima No. 1’s water woes show no signs of ebbing’ and ‘Fukushima’s Three Nuclear Meltdowns Are “Under Control” – That’s a Lie’.

But the challenges to be overcome in safely handling and, ultimately, safely storing the radiation hazards (such as the three melted nuclear reactors and the spent fuel rods) and the radioactive waste from the Fukushima disaster are monumental, as touched on in this article outlining the 40-year plan that the Japanese government hopes will delude us into believing will deal with the many components of this perpetual radioactive nightmare. See Japan revises Fukushima cleanup plan, delays key steps.

In addition, one critical legacy of the US military’s 67 secretive and lethal nuclear weapons tests on the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 is the ‘eternally’ radioactive garbage left behind and now leaking into the Pacific Ocean. See ‘The Pentagon’s Disastrous Radioactive Waste Dump in the Drowning Marshall Islands is Leaking into the Pacific Ocean’.

Is other nuclear waste safely stored? Of course not! See, for example, ‘NRC admits San Onofre Holtec nuclear waste canisters are all damaged’‘USA’s Hanford nuclear site could suffer the same fate as Russia’s Mayak – or worse’ and, for a more comprehensive report, ‘The World Nuclear Waste Report 2019: Focus Europe’.

Of course, the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe in 1986 continues to inflict extensive damage on the biosphere which you can learn more about from the research by Professor Kate Brown, author of Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future – see ‘Chernobyl Radiation Cover-Ups & Deadly Truth’‘UN and Western countries covered up the facts on the huge health toll of Chernobyl radiation’ and ‘Unreported Deaths, Child Cancer & Radioactive Meat: The Untold Story of Chernobyl’ – as well as the investigatory work of Alison Katz of Independent WHO: ‘Chernobyl Health Cover-Up, Lies by UN/WHO Exposed’.

In addition, there are up to 70 ‘still functional’ nuclear weapons as well as nine nuclear reactors lying on the ocean floor as a result of accidents involving nuclear warships and submarines. These are leaking an unknown amount of radiation into the oceans. See ‘Naval Nuclear Accidents: The Secret Story’‘A Nuclear Needle in a Haystack: The Cold War’s Missing Atom Bombs’ and, for one specific example (the former Soviet submarine Komsomolets), see ‘Soviet nuclear submarine emitting radiation “100,000 times normal level” into sea, scientists find’.

But not content with the existing radioactive threats to life, in 2020 the US approved the use of radioactive materials in roadbuilding! See Phosphogypsum Use in Roadbuilding Previously Prohibited Due to Risks of Cancer, Genetic Damage.

25. Despite largely successful efforts by the elite-controlled IPCC to delude people into believing that the global mean temperature has increased by only 1°C, in fact, since the pre-industrial era (prior to 1750) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have already caused the global temperature to rise by more than 2°C above this baseline (in February 2020). This occurred despite the Paris climate agreement in 2015 when politicians pledged to hold the global temperature rise to well below 2°C above the pre-industrial level and pledged to try to limit the temperature rise to 1.5°C above this level. See ‘2°C crossed’.

Among a lengthy list of adverse outcomes, this has caused the melting of Arctic permafrost and undersea methane ice clathrates resulting in an incalculable quantity of methane (CH₄) being uncontrollably released into the atmosphere, including during 2020, with the quantity being released getting ever closer to ‘exploding’. According to one study, ‘Global warming triggered by the massive release of carbon dioxide may be catastrophic, but the release of methane from hydrate may be apocalyptic.’ See ‘Methane Hydrate: Killer cause of Earth’s greatest mass extinction’ and also ‘Anomalies of methane in the atmosphere over the East Siberian shelf: Is there any sign of methane leakage from shallow shelf hydrates?’‘7,000 underground gas bubbles poised to “explode” in Arctic’‘Release of Arctic Methane “May Be Apocalyptic,” Study Warns’ and ‘Understanding the Permafrost-Hydrate System and Associated Methane Releases in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf’.

Highlighting some other manifestations in 2020 of this accelerating climate catastrophe, Dr Jeff Masters and Dana Nuccitelli noted that it was the wildest Atlantic hurricane season on record (doubling the average), an ‘apocalyptic wildfire season’ (that ran all year), that the most expensive disaster was a $US32billion flood in China, and that 2020 is likely to be the hottest year in human history. See ‘The top 10 weather and climate events of a record-setting year’.

Complicating efforts to tackle this catastrophe are factors not normally considered impacting the climate, such as the jetwash from aircraft. According to Wesley Schouw and Professor Gunter Pauli, the climate catastrophe ‘is also driven by shifts in the patterns of global atmospheric circulation which are influenced by persistent, large-scale vortices caused by the wake turbulence left by commercial air traffic. Because this traffic is highly concentrated along the most frequently traveled routes, the vortices aircraft create have transformed into semi-permanent atmospheric circulation which have widespread effects on how the atmosphere traps and releases heat. It is also possible that these changes alter the loss of water from the atmosphere. This would endanger all life on earth, not just the human population.’ See ‘Jetwash-induced vortices and climate change’.

Anyway, the combined impact of all drivers of the climate catastrophe have led to a situation in which humans in particular locations are already being increasingly forced to contend with heat and humidity beyond human tolerance. This is precipitating increasing levels of heat-induced stress, organ failure and therefore deaths, contrary to models indicating that such impacts lie decades in the future. See The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance.

Tragically, however, as noted by Dr Andrew Glikson, with climate projections now ‘disturbingly consistent’ in indicating a ‘shift in state of the climate toward +4 degrees and even +6 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels’, climate scientists are caught in a quandary: ‘In private conversations, many scientists express far greater concern at the trend of global warming than they do in public. However, faced with social and psychological barriers, as well as threats of losing positions and jobs, in business, public service and academia, a majority keeps silent.’ This is especially tragic, given that ‘The pace of current global warming exceeds those of the last 2.6 million years by an order of magnitude, with calamitous consequences for biological systems.’ See An Orwellian climate while Rome burns’.

And noting that ‘We currently occupy the warmest Earth with Homo sapiens present beyond the much-vaunted 2°C “guardrail” above the 1750 baseline’, Professor Guy McPherson reports that ‘There is no known way to stabilize or reduce the global-average temperature of Earth.’ He goes on to describe ‘a few means by which Earth could lose all habitat for Homo sapiens, a process that is already under way’. And concludes that ‘Human extinction likely was triggered when Earth exceeded 2°C above the 1750 baseline.’ For the details, see ‘Near-Term Loss of Habitat for Homo sapiens’.

Moreover, given ill-informed elite responses to the fake pandemic, the extinction of all life on Earth (not just human life) may have already been precipitated: ‘The rapidity of change associated with loss of aerosol masking [due to the industrial shutdown] precludes retention of habitat for human animals anywhere on Earth. In addition, the catastrophic meltdown of the world’s nuclear power facilities poses an additional threat to all life on Earth.’ See ‘The Means by Which COVID-19 Could Cause Extinction of All Life on Earth’.

Of course, as Professor McPherson concedes, he may be wrong. It’s just that the evidence offered by an increasing number of scientists on different aspects of the crisis now indicates that it will be many scientists who will need to be wrong for near-term extinction not to occur. Watch Edge of Extinction: Maybe I’m Wrong.

26. Human use of fossil fuels to power aircraft, shipping and vehicles as well as for industrial production and to generate electricity (among other purposes) released 34 billion metric tons (34 gigatons) of carbon dioxide into Earth’s biosphere, a 7% decrease on 2019 due to the elite shutdown of the global economy. The biggest reductions occurred in the USA and Europe with China’s monstrous CO₂ emissions only marginally less than 2019. See Global Carbon Project’.

Of course carbon dioxide was also released in response to certain ‘land-use changes’, such as rainforest destruction which led to 16 billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions, and human-caused tragedies such as extensive wildfires during the year. Taking into account CO₂ removals, primarily from vegetation regrowth due to abandonment of agricultural lands, total CO₂ emissions from human activities (from fossil CO₂ and land-use change) were about 40 billion tonnes in 2020, compared to 43 billion tonnes in 2019. Hence, the expected growth rate in atmospheric CO₂ concentration in 2020 (2.5 ppm) is near the 2019 growth rate, despite slightly lower anthropogenic emissions due to elite-driven policies slowing the global economy.

According to the observatory at Mauna Loa, the monthly average atmospheric CO₂ concentration had reached 413ppm by year’s end. See ‘Monthly Average Mauna Loa CO₂.

So while the land and ocean sinks absorbed 54% of CO₂ emissions from the atmosphere in 2020, exacerbating ocean acidification among other problems, atmospheric CO₂ concentrations in 2020 are now 50% above the pre-industrial (1750) level of 275ppm.

As one measure of their contempt for the utterly inadequate goals of the Paris climate agreement in 2015, and with government approval, ‘437 of the 935 companies featured in the [Global Coal Exit List] are planning either new coal plants, new coal mines or new coal transport infrastructure’. Since 2015, ‘the world’s installed coal-fired capacity has increased by 137 GW, an amount equal to the operating coal plant fleets of Germany, Russia and Japan combined. And over 500 GW of new coal-fired capacity is still in the pipeline’ with more than half of that in China. See ‘NGOs Release the 2020 Global Coal Exit List: 935 Companies that Banks, Investors and Insurers Need to avoid’.

27. 72 billion land animals (mainly chickens, ducks, pigs, rabbits, geese, turkeys, sheep, goats and beef cattle) were killed for food. In addition, between 37 and 120 billion fish were killed on commercial farms with another 2.7 trillion fish caught and killed in the wild. See ‘How Many Animals Are Killed for Food Every Day?’

In addition, according to Humane Society International, about 100 million animals (particularly mink, foxes, raccoon dogs and rabbits) were bred and slaughtered in fur farms geared to supplying the fashion industry. In addition to farming, millions of wild animals were trapped and killed for fur, as were hundreds of thousands of seals. See ‘How Many Animals Do Humans Kill Each Year?’

Apart from that, more than 100 million animals were killed for laboratory purposes in the United States alone and there were other animal deaths in shelters, zoos and in blood sports. See ‘How Many Animals Are Killed Each Year?’

Obviously, the primary ‘blood sport’ is hunting. In the United States, over 100 million animals are reported killed by hunters each year. See ‘Facts – Wildlife’. ‘This figure does not include millions of animals killed illegally by poachers, animals who are injured, escape, and die later, or orphaned animals who die after their mothers are killed.’ See ‘How Many Animals Do Humans Kill Each Year?’ But, worldwide, killing of animals and birds hunted for the purpose exacts a staggering toll on wildlife. For another example, see ‘Our Vanishing World: Birds’.

But there are many other ‘blood sports’, such as cockfighting and bullfighting, often involving gambling, each of which exacts a shocking death and injury toll on the unfortunate birds and animals forced to ‘fight’.

While practiced in many countries, in the Philippines the practice is 6,000 years old and legal, with cockfighting having the status of a national sport, generating billions of dollars annually and killing 30 million roosters each year. See ‘Cockfighting in the Philippines: The billion dollar industry and national obsession’.

In relation to another ancient practice – bullfighting – ‘thousands of bulls are barbarically slaughtered in bullrings around the world’ each year. As one would expect, centuries of the practice have enabled ‘bullfighters’ to learn countless ways to rig the fight in their favor and this is done shamelessly. See ‘Bullfighting’. Particularly popular in Spain and Mexico, bullfighting is still practiced in many countries despite activist efforts inducing a declining popularity in some places.

28. Farming of animals for human consumption released 7.1 gigatons of CO₂-equivalent into Earth’s atmosphere; this represented 14.5% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. About 44% of livestock emissions were in the form of methane (which was 44% of anthropogenic CH₄ emissions), 29% as Nitrous Oxide (which was 53% of anthropogenic N₂O emissions) and 27% as Carbon Dioxide (which was 5% of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions). See ‘GHG Emissions by Livestock’.

29. Human use of fossil fuels and farming of crops and animals released more than 3.2 million metric tons of (CO₂ equivalent) nitrous oxide (N₂O) into Earth’s atmosphere. See ‘Nitrous oxide emissions’. Each year, more than 100 million tonnes of nitrogen is spread on crops in the form of synthetic fertilizer. See ‘Fertilizers by Nutrient’. Along with an equivalent amount of livestock manure, this releases a colossal amount of N₂O into the atmosphere, accounting for almost 70% of N₂O emissions. See A comprehensive quantification of global nitrous oxide sources and sinks.

While N₂O is ‘only’ the third most important greenhouse gas after CO₂ (which lasts up to thousands of years in the atmosphere) and CH₄, N₂O has 300 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and stays in the atmosphere for an average 116 years. Atmospheric concentrations of N₂O have now exceeded 331 parts per billion, 22% above the level in 1750, before the industrial era began. See ‘United in Science 2020: A multi-organization high-level compilation of the latest climate science information’ and ‘New research: nitrous oxide emissions 300 times more powerful than CO₂ are jeopardising Earth’s future’.

30. Glaciers and mountain ice fields – whether located in Greenland or other regions of the far north, the Himalaya, at the Equator, in southern latitudes or Antarctica – are all melting at unprecedented and accelerating rates, losing billions of tonnes of ice in 2020. For a discussion of the details and the implications of this, see ‘Our Vanishing World: Glaciers’.

31. The ongoing destruction of Earth’s oceans continued unabated and accelerated in key areas.

In summary, the oceans are warming, acidifying and deoxygenating; being contaminated with nuclear radiation, by offshore oil and gas drilling as well as oil spills; being damaged by deep sea mining; being polluted by industrial (including chemical) and farming wastes which are generating ocean ‘dead zones’; being polluted by nitrogen and discharges from warships, commercial shipping and cruise ships as well as monumental amounts of plastic; being overfished and illegally fished; being subjected to destructive fishing practices such as bottom trawling, blast fishing, cyanide fishing, ghost fishing and aquaculture; being damaged by sand mining, port and harbor dredging, the increasing spread of invasive species, the live trade in fish and coral for the aquarium industry, the increasing level of noise pollution, and even by wildfires.

In essence then: the oceans are under siege on a vast range of fronts and are effectively ‘dying’. They are being stripped of everything of value to humans (ranging from its many creatures, such as fish and whales, to products such as sand, oil and minerals) while having a monumental range and quantity of garbage and pollutants (ranging from household to radioactive waste) dumped into them. All these shifts taken together, however, result in a rapid and serious decline in ocean health and this, in turn, adversely impacts all species dependent on the ocean including fish, mammals and seabirds as well as ocean plant and microscopic life.

For a comprehensive 18-point summary and extensive documentation, see ‘Our Vanishing World: Oceans’.

32. Earth’s fresh water and ground water was further depleted and contaminated. And whether in streams, rivers, lakes, wetlands or aquifers, water is being ongoingly polluted as contaminants find their way into fresh water sources wherever they occur. Moreover, once contaminated, a water source may be unusable for thousands of years. See ‘Water Pollution: Everything You Need to Know’.

The depletion of fresh water is a primary outcome of the ongoing deforestation of the planet and is manifesting in several ways including as localized droughts, which are becoming increasingly common as a number of cities and regions around the world can attest. According to the World Resources Institute, half of the surface water in some countries – mainly in Central Asia and the Middle East – was depleted between 1984 and 2015, with agriculture using an average of 70% of the water. 36 countries are ‘extremely water-stressed’ and water is now a major factor in conflict in at least 45 countries. See ‘7 Graphics Explain the State of the World’s Water’.

Separately from depletion, fresh water was contaminated by bacteria, viruses and household chemicals from faulty septic systems; hazardous wastes from abandoned and uncontrolled hazardous waste sites (of which there are over 20,000 in the USA alone); leaks from landfill items such as car battery acid, paint and household cleaners; the pesticides, herbicides and other poisons used on farms and home gardens; radioactive waste from nuclear tests (some of it stored in glaciers that are now melting); and the chemical contamination caused by hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in search of shale gas, for which about 750 chemicals and components, some extremely toxic and carcinogenic like lead and benzene, have been used. See ‘Groundwater contamination’‘Groundwater drunk by BILLIONS of people may be contaminated by radioactive material spread across the world by nuclear testing in the 1950s’ and ‘Fracking chemicals’.

In relation to thermal and hydroelectric power generation, all versions of which are highly dependent on huge quantities of fresh water to function, 47 percent of the world’s thermal power plant capacity – mostly coal, natural gas and nuclear – and 11 percent of hydroelectric capacity are located in highly water-stressed areas. See ‘Water Stress Threatens Nearly Half the World’s Thermal Power Plant Capacity’.

The good news is that renewable energy is less water-expensive, by orders of magnitude, and constitutes another compelling reason for switching to renewables. See ‘Renewable Energy Saves Water and Creates Jobs’.

Given that less than 1% of fresh water is readily available for human consumption and must be shared with the natural environment (because most fresh water is stored in glaciers, for example), and that official estimates indicate that a person needs at least 50 to 100 liters of water per day for consumption and basic hygiene and that between 2,000 and 5,000 liters of water are needed to produce a person’s daily food – see ‘7 Graphics Explain the State of the World’s Water’ – the ongoing depletion and contamination of fresh water in the context of an expanding human population constitutes a serious threat to human well-being as well as the ecological health of Earth’s biosphere.

This is particularly the case given that the production of our consumer goods – and particularly electronic items such as computers, mobile phones, cars… – uses staggering amounts of fresh water to produce each item and so curtailing individual and global demand for electronic items particularly is a crucial part of any strategy to conserve water. For example, it takes 147,971 liters to make a car and up to 30 liters of water to make a single chip for a laptop or smartphone. See ‘Thirsty business: How the tech industry is bracing for a water-scarce future’ and ‘How Many Gallons of Water Does It Take to Make…’.

And in the latest disaster and defeat for humanity and the biosphere in relation to water, on 7 December 2020 ‘blue gold’ was traded for the first time as a commodity on the Chicago Stock Exchange. See ‘Water, “The Ultimate Commodity”, (*) Has Entered the Stock Market. Poor water!’

33. The longstanding covert military use of geoengineering – spraying tens of millions of tons of highly toxic metals (including aluminium, barium and strontium) and toxic coal fly ash nanoparticulates (containing arsenic, chromium, thallium, chlorine, bromine, fluorine, iodine, mercury and radioactive elements) into the atmosphere from jet aircraft to weaponize the atmosphere and weather – in order to enhance elite control of human populations, continued unchecked. Geoengineering is systematically destroying Earth’s ozone layer – which blocks the deadly portion of solar radiation, UV-C and most UV-B, from reaching Earth’s surface – as well as adversely altering Earth’s weather patterns and polluting its air, water and soil at incredible cost to the health and well-being of living organisms and the biosphere. See ‘Geoengineering Watch’, including ‘Engineered Climate Cataclysm: Hurricane Harvey’.

For a discussion of the military implications of geoengineering, see ‘The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction: “Owning the Weather” for Military Use’.

And for discussions of the research, and implications of it, by Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt and Dr. Stephenie Seneff (Senior Research Scientist at MIT), which considers damage to the biosphere and human health caused by the geoengineering release of a synthesized compound of nanonized aluminium and the poison glyphosate that creates a ‘supertoxin’ that is generating ‘a crisis of neurological diseases’, see ‘World-Renowned Doctor Addresses Climate Engineering Dangers’Dr Stephenie Seneff‘Autism Explained: Synergistic Poisoning from Aluminum and Glyphosate’ and ‘Extinction is Stalking Humanity: The Threats to Human Survival Accumulate’.

34. The incredibly destructive 5G technology, which a vast number of scientists – currently totaling more than 314,000 individuals and organizations from 214 nations and territories: see ‘International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space’ https://www.5gspaceappeal.org/the-appeal – are warning will have catastrophic consequences for life on Earth, is now being rapidly introduced without informed public consultation and despite ongoing protests around the world. For a straightforward account of the enormity of what is at stake, see the recently revised and updated edition of The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life or read a review of the book: ‘Deadly Rainbow: Will 5G Precipitate the Extinction of All Life on Earth?’

The following articles and videos will also give you a solid understanding of key issues from the viewpoint of human and planetary well-being. See ‘5G Satellites: A Threat to all Life’‘5G Danger: 13 Reasons 5G Wireless Technology Will Be a Catastrophe for Humanity’‘5G Technology is Coming – Linked to Cancer, Heart Disease, Diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and Death’‘20,000 Satellites for 5G to be Launched Sending Focused Beams of Intense Microwave Radiation Over Entire Earth’‘Will 5G Cell Phone Technology Lead To Dramatic Population Reduction As Large Numbers Of Men Become Sterile?’‘The 5G Revolution: Millions of “Human Guinea Pigs” in Big Telecom’s Global Experiment’ and ‘5G Apocalypse – The Extinction Event’.

35. Genetic engineering continued in 2020, with genetically mutilated organisms (GMOs) being ongoingly released into the natural environment despite extensively documented adverse impacts, such as contamination of non-GM crops by GM crops. See, for example, ‘The GM Contamination Register: a review of recorded contamination incidents associated with genetically modified organisms (GMOs), 1997–2013’.

But the social and economic costs of GM crops have been catastrophic for many, as explained years ago by Professor Vandana Shiva in relation to the ‘epidemic of farmers’ suicides in India’ resulting from the 95% control by Monsanto (since merged with Bayer) over cotton seed supply. This meant that instead of putting aside some seed from each year’s harvest for planting the following season (as had been practiced for millennia), farmers were compelled to buy a new supply of (pesticide-dependent) GM seed – the ‘intellectual property’ of Monsanto – to plant each new crop.

Of course, among the many other problems with GMO seeds, they can only be planted as monocultures rather than as part of a mixed farming regime (particularly important for small family farmers who traditionally grow their own food) and ‘GMOs are failing to control pests and weeds, and have instead led to the emergence of superpests and superweeds.’ Since the introduction of expensive GMO seeds into India, suicides by Indian farmers have become an annual ‘epidemic’ with thousands occurring each year due to accumulated debts that are impossible to repay. As Shiva evocatively puts it: ‘No GMO seeds, no debt, no suicides.’

In essence, genetic engineering is a highly profitable means ‘to control seed and the food system through patents and intellectual property rights’. See ‘The Seeds Of Suicide: How Monsanto Destroys Farming’.

But it goes well beyond that with control of nature the ultimate goal.

Notwithstanding the massive problems generated by GMOs just explained, the monstrous control exercised by the major agrochemical and biotech corporations has ensured that governments are ongoingly approving one disastrous move after another. For example, approval has recently been given to release 750 million GMO mosquitoes – created to ‘eradicate mosquito populations’ – into the wild to destroy the mosquito population in the Florida Keys in the USA. Apart from its obvious adverse impact on the food supply of insect-eating birds and amphibians, this will generate a host of other problems. See More than 750 million GMO mosquitoes to be released over Florida Keys – what could go wrong?’

Of course, government approval is not difficult to obtain. In fact: ‘The GMO agritech industry’s strategy has been to first spread seeds illegally or contaminate supplies and then obtain regulatory approval.’ See ‘GM Food Crops Illegally Growing in India: The Criminal Plan to Change the Genetic Core of the Nation’s Food System’.

And if you thought that the mosquito experiment just mentioned is extreme, consider the implications of ‘gene drives’. So what are gene drives? ‘Imagine that by releasing a single fly into the wild you could genetically alter all the flies on the planet – causing them all to turn yellow, carry a toxin, or go extinct. This is the terrifyingly powerful premise behind gene drives: a new and controversial genetic engineering technology that can permanently alter an entire species by releasing one bioengineered individual.’

How effective are they? ‘Gene drives can entirely re-engineer ecosystems, create fast spreading extinctions, and intervene in living systems at a scale far beyond anything ever imagined.’ For example, if gene drives are engineered into a fast-reproducing species ‘they could alter their populations within short timeframes, from months to a few years, and rapidly cause extinction.’ This radical new technology, also called a ‘mutagenic chain reaction’, combines the extreme genetic engineering of synthetic biology and new gene editing techniques with the idea ‘that humans can and should use such powerful unlimited tools to control nature. Gene drives will change the fundamental relationship between humanity and the natural world forever.’

The implications for the environment, food security, peace, and even social stability are breathtaking, particularly given that existing ‘government regulations for the use of genetic engineering in agriculture have allowed widespread genetic contamination of the food supply and the environment.’ See ‘Reckless Driving: Gene drives and the end of nature’.

Consistent with their track records of sponsoring, promoting and using hi-tech atrocities against life, the ‘Gene Drive Files’ reveal that the US military (that is, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) – which ‘appears to be the largest single funder of gene drive research on the planet’ – and individuals such as Bill Gates have been heavily involved in financing research, development and promotion of this grotesque technology. See ‘Military Revealed as Top Funder of Gene Drives; Gates Foundation paid $1.6 million to influence UN on gene drives’ and the ‘Gene Drive Files’.

‘Why would the US military be interested?’ you might ask. Well, imagine what could be done to an ‘enemy’ race with an extinction gene drive.

36. Incalculable amounts of waste of every conceivable kind – including antibiotic waste, military waste, nuclear waste, nanowaste and genetically engineered organisms, including ‘gene drives’ (or ‘mutagenic chain reactions’) – were released into Earth’s biosphere, with an endless series of adverse consequences for life. See ‘Junk Planet: Is Earth the Largest Garbage Dump in the Universe?’

Not content to dump our junk on Earth, an incalculable amount of junk was also dumped in Space which already contains 100 trillion items of orbiting junk. See ‘Junk Planet: Is Earth the Largest Garbage Dump in the Universe?’ and ‘Space Junk: Tracking & Removing Orbital Debris’.

37. As one outcome of our dysfunctional parenting model and political systems, fascism continued to rise around the world. See ‘The Psychology of Fascism’.

38. Despite the belief that we have ‘the right to privacy’, privacy (in any sense of the word) was ongoingly eroded in 2020 and, as reported last year, is now effectively non-existent, particularly thanks to Alphabet (owner of Google). Taken together, ‘Uber, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Tinder, Apple, Lyft, Foursquare, Airbnb, Spotify, Instagram, Twitter, Angry Birds… have turned our computers and phones into bugs that are plugged in to a vast corporate-owned surveillance network. Where we go, what we do, what we talk about, who we talk to, and who we see – everything is recorded and, at some point, leveraged for value.’

Moreover, given Google’s integrated relationship with the US government, the US military, the CIA, and major US weapons manufacturers, there isn’t really anything you can do that isn’t known by those who want to know it. In essence, Google is ‘a powerful global corporation with its own political agenda and a mission to maximise profits for shareholders’ and it partly achieves this by expanding the surveillance programs of the national security state at the direction of the global elite. But Google isn’t alone and it isn’t just happening in the USA. See ‘Everybody’s Watching You: The Intercept’s 2019 Technology Coverage’‘Google’s Earth: How the Tech Giant Is Helping the State Spy on Us’, the articles by John W. Whitehead on ‘Surveillance’ and the documentary ‘The Modern Surveillance State’.

39. The right to free speech, accurate information and conscience-based nonviolent activism was dramatically eroded in 2020 as agents of the global elite (such as national governments, the medical industry and major corporations such as those in the pharmaceutical, tech and media industries), under ‘cover’ of the non-existent Covid-19 pandemic, routinely censored efforts to publish the truth, dramatically expanded official output of propaganda (particularly in relation to the non-existent SARS-CoV-2) and clamped down on political action.

Moreover, both in direct response to and separately from the elite coup, ‘governments around the world have been taking a wave of measures to close down the space for peaceful protest’: censorship, restrictions on access or violent acts directed against those whose views or actions were seen as dangerous or wrong in many contexts continued. Global Witness, Human Rights Watch and other organizations documented an endless series of setbacks for free speech and political activity in a wide variety of countries around the world with individuals suffering smear campaigns or being subjected to spurious criminal charges to silence them, activists and journalists being imprisoned for telling the truth, nonviolent activists being assaulted and killed, critics being silenced by defamation laws or ‘disappearance’, and the closure of newspapers, television stations and the internet to prevent rapid promulgation of information, among other infringements. See, for example, ‘Free Speech’‘The supply chain of violence’ and ‘Defending Tomorrow’.

In addition, according to Global Witness, a record number of people (40% of whom were indigenous) were killed last year, averaging four each week, for defending their land and environment particularly against extractive industries. Predictably: ‘The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown have intensified the problems land and environmental defenders face. Governments around the world – from the US to Brazil and Colombia to the Philippines – have used the crisis to strengthen draconian measures to control citizens and roll back hard-fought environmental regulations.’ See ‘Defending Tomorrow’. There is also ‘growing evidence of opportunistic killings during the Covid-19 lockdown in which activists were left as “sitting ducks” in their own homes’. See ‘Record Land and Environmental Activists Killed Last Year’.

Of course, the most public evisceration of human rights in 2020 was that inflicted on Julian Assange whose only ‘crime’ was to expose the truth about elite atrocities and war crimes inflicted by US military forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, among other truths. See Wikileaks‘Assange wins. The cost: Press freedom is crushed, and dissent labelled mental illness’ and ‘The US and UK may not will Assange’s death, but everything they are doing makes it more likely’.

40. Ongoing ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence against children – see Why Violence? and Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice – ensured that more people will grow up accepting (and quite powerless to challenge) our dysfunctional and violent world, as described above.

41. The global elite’s corporate media, schooling and film/television industries continued to distract vast numbers of people from reality with an endless barrage of propaganda respectively labeled, depending on the context, ‘news’, ‘education’ and ‘entertainment’ ensuring that most people remain oblivious to our predicament, devoid of the capacities to investigate, comprehend and analyze this predicament as well as their own role in it, and to respond to this predicament powerfully. See, for example, Media’s Deafening Silence on Latest from WikiLeaks about the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons Fake Douma Report Blaming Syria‘Do We Want School or Education?’ and ‘Why Do Most People Believe Propaganda and False Flag Attacks?’

42. Finally, as a direct outcome of these last two points but most tragically of all, virtually all of the individuals who self-identify as ‘activists’ continued to waste their time begging the global elite (or their government agents) to fix one or other of our crises, despite the overwhelming evidence that the global elite will not take action to ‘fix’ any of these crises. See ‘Why Activists Fail’. And, for more detail in two key contexts, see ‘The Global Climate Movement is Failing: Why?’ and ‘The War to End War 100 Years On: An Evaluation and Reorientation of our Resistance to War’.

Moreover, even if it was inclined, the elite is now powerless to avert extinction given that, if we are to have any chance given the advanced nature of the crisis and the incredibly short timeframe, we must plan intelligently to mobilize a substantial proportion of the human population in a strategically-focused effort. Nothing else can work.

Highlights of 2020

But so that the picture is clear and ‘balanced’: were there any gains made against the onslaught outlined above, particularly given we were driven inexorably closer to extinction?

Of course, there was considerable effort made to improve the state of the world. See, for example, ‘What went right in 2020: the top 20 good news stories of the year’‘World: Positive news in the difficult year of the pandemic’ and ‘We Won’.

Separately from this, there have been some minor activist gains: for example, some western banks and insurance companies are no longer financially supporting the expansion of the western weapons industry and the western coal industry, some superannuation (pension) funds have divested from weapons and fossil fuels, some rainforest groups have managed to save portions of Earth’s rainforest heritage, and activist groups continue to work on a variety of issues sometimes making modest gains.

Moreover, there are many ongoing struggles, notably including efforts to resist the elite coup – see, for example, the ‘World Freedom Alliance’ – and local campaigns such as that by India’s farmers and their allies to secure justice against the draconian measures being implemented by the Modi national government. See ‘The year that was… India’s people fight back a hostile government’.

However, none of these (limited) gains or ongoing campaigns have directly addressed elite power. That is, none of these initiatives seriously considered how the global elite has spent centuries consolidating its power and is now very close to acquiring the worldwide control it has long worked to achieve. Therefore, of course, none of these groups has developed strategies to functionally undermine elite power; a serious shortcoming given that the global elite’s technotyranny is now imminent.

Responding Powerfully

If we are to defeat the elite coup, effectively tackle other manifestations of violence and avert the primary paths to human extinction, we must do many things.

Importantly, if you would like to be part of the campaign to undermine elite power, defeat the elite coup and prevent implementation of the transhumanist agenda, see the list of strategic goals necessary to achieve these outcomes here: Coup Strategic Aims. Other pages of this website outline how to develop and implement a comprehensive nonviolent strategy to achieve these outcomes (which can be readily adapted for local campaigns).

If you wish to nurture children to become powerful individuals capable of acting strategically to prevent and respond to violence while able to critique society and elite propaganda, see ‘My Promise to Children’.

If you wish to focus on strategically resisting one of 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: Campaign Strategic Aims.

Importantly, as well, you can both resist the above ‘extinction threats’ while also reducing your vulnerability to elite control by joining those who recognize the critical importance of reduced consumption and greater self-reliance 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 Peoples Charter to Create a Nonviolent World.

Finally, if you want a better fundamental understanding of how we reached this point, see Why Violence?Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice and ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

Or, if the options above seem too complicated, 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

To summarize the evidence presented above: as a result of the elite coup being conducted against humanity, human beings stand on the verge of becoming ‘techno-slaves’ devoid of their unique identity, stripped of the human rights to privacy as well as freedom of speech, assembly and movement (among others), and minus the free will to act out their own volition and conscience.

Moreover, cumulative actions by the global elite over past centuries combined with the submissive complicity of most of the human population, have enabled a vast list of violent atrocities in many forms (but touched on above) to destroy or impair the lives of most human beings and largely destroy Earth’s biosphere.

In addition, key actions taken by the global elite in 2020 have accelerated the four primary paths to human extinction.

Hence, very soon now, the overwhelming evidence is that Homo sapiens will join other species that only exist as part of the fossil record.

Our chance of escaping this fate is now remote, essentially for two reasons. Most people have been terrorized into not seeking out the evidence for themselves (and into simply believing what elite agents, such as governments and the corporate media, tell them) and most of those struggling to resist our fate (in one context or another) do not act to strategically undermine elite power (both now and in the future).

Therefore, the global elite continues to exercise enormous power to determine our fate and only a strategic response, encompassing the various components noted above, has any genuine prospect of defeating the elite coup to defend our identity, freedom and volition, while averting each of the primary paths to human extinction.

‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls.’

 

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.