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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Global Pandemic

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By Cindy Sheehan

Source: Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox

“I’m a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.” HHGTTG, Douglas Adams

Now that it appears that (for at least the time being) grossly profiting from the coronavirus issue is on the decline (except if anyone buys the “4th booster for Pfizer”) and gross war profiting is once again taking the lead, I want to reflect on MY experience with the Global Pandemic™.

I am a huge fan of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG) universe that was conceived and written by the brilliant Douglas Adams who died (years ago) at a too young age from unrelated coronavirus/vax heart disease.

In reflecting on the past two years, the closest match I came up with is I felt like one of the HHGTTG’s main characters, Arthur Dent.

As written, Arthur was a mild-mannered employee of the BBC who is wrenched out of bed when a construction crew comes to his home to demolish it for a highway overpass. He rushes out of his house and lies down in front of a bulldozer in his “dressing gown.” During this scene, his best friend Ford Prefect comes to “hitchhike” him off of planet Earth which is about to be demolished by the Vogon Construction Fleet aliens who are making a way for an intergalactic bypass. In both instances of demolition, the “plans” were available for view and comment in planning offices and it was too late to change anything.

Arthur goes through most of the five books in the series in a bewildered and befuddled state of mind in his dressing gown. I felt like this during much of the past two years, myself: I spent much of the time in lounging clothes, even when I went out. What was the use of getting dressed up to head to a grocery store just to put a mask on and be in disguise?

To be clear, I wasn’t in an Arthur Dent state because I had a loss of mental, or physical capacity, it was because the propaganda for the Global Pandemic™ (let’s shorten it to GloPan for the remainder of this piece) was SO obviously conflated mis/disinformation and that those around me seemed to be capitulating to it.. I was confused by the compliance, to say the least. For example, if we were told by the GloPan Chief-operating-officer (COO) Dr. Anthony Falsie, that “masks don’t work,” the GloPanBots didn’t wear a mask; When Falsie changed to “masks are mandatory and cloth masks are fine,” that’s what the GloPanBots did. Then it was “wear a surgical mask and a cloth mask over it,” “add a face-shield.” Every seamlessly told lie was shamefully obeyed by the masses without a hint of irony, or question.

To be honest, after the “two-weeks to flatten the curve” period was over and masks were being pushed hardcore in businesses that GloPanCorp allowed to remain open, I would wear a mask into grocery stores—which was the only place I went. However, I NEVER wore one outside, in my home, or in a car. Bollocks to that. Every time I passed a Masked Wonder on the street, they would do a panicked swerve and a few almost fell over trying to avoid me. I would always ask them, “Why did you do that, I am obviously NOT sick?” One woman even retorted “How do you know?” If I had more time to respond because she was already 1/2 block away from me in her rush to avoid proximity to any human not covering their breathing holes, I would have replied, “I think I would know if I were ill—and if I were ill, I’d be home bingeing Netflix.”

DON’T PANIC

In the series, the HHGTTG is an actual, constantly updated book that gives Galactic Hitchhikers information about dining, drinking, avoiding monsters, and backgrounds on each planet. In fact, Ford Prefect, Arthur’s alien best-friend was on Earth working on Earth’s entry in the Guide. However, the only thing written in the Guide under the entry “Earth” says is, “Mostly harmless.” Printed on the cover of each HHGTTG is the advice “Don’t Panic.”

I feel like most of the human race just erased the word “Don’t” and panicked like crazy over a “Mostly harmless” pathogen. Now, don’t stop reading at this point, I will explain myself using science, not $cience.

Sars-CoV-2

“If there’s any real truth, it’s that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.” HHGTTG, Douglas Adams

A real life pandemic has the potential to be VERY frightening—with so many dying, it would be impossible to count them, let alone bury them. There would also be very little immunity to the disease that would have the ability wipe out human-life on our planet. Even though the grossly inflated Cov-19 numbers were purposely significant so you would line up for an untested inoculation, the virus never got to the level of GloPan, nor does it deserve the hysteria and profound destruction that surrounded it.

We also don’t know, and may never know, the origins of Cov-19. Was it a U.S./China lab leak from Wuhan? Did it come from a wet market there? There was early speculation that the U.S. military brought it to China during a sporting event there in late 2019.

Was it intentionally, or unintentionally loosed on the world?

I am not in any of the above camps, but with the revelation of more than two-dozen U.S. bioweapon labs in Ukraine, the plot thickens, doesn’t it?

Coronaviruses have been with us for a long time. The disinfectant Lysol proclaims on its can that it kills 99% of coronaviruses (even before GloPan). As humans, most of us have built natural immunity to corona, but every now and then, a mutant comes to infect us. As observed with Cov-19, most of us develop mild symptoms that have the potential to be dangerous to the elderly and more vulnerable populations: Just like every flu-type pathogen that we’ve previously experienced.

Back in early 2020 when we started hearing about Cov-19, I wasn’t worried about the virus, because I had the attitude that even if I did contract it, I would more than likely be okay. I had a trip to commemorate International Working Women’s Day to several communities on the East Coast planned for early March, but I started to hear talk of quarantines (I don’t think we called it a “lockdown” yet, but prison-talk would gradually start to reveal itself) and I didn’t want to be blocked from returning home if I ventured outside of California. I mean, they forbade cruise ships from docking for days—we knew someone on one of them in the San Francisco Bay—and, then flights started to get cancelled, so I cancelled by activities and we were all hoping to reschedule soon.

“Soon,” became as long as “two-weeks to flatten the curve.” In March, 2020, I was sure that I would be able to travel for May Day; then it was the 4th of July—-Maybe Labor Day would work? It soon became apparent that 2020 was going to be a wash, but perhaps we could schedule some IWWD events for March 2021? Well, at the writing of this it’s April 2022 and I still haven’t been able to leave for the East Coast. Even though travel restrictions have loosened and it’s easier to travel, at this point, the issue for me is masking for half of a day—-I can barely wear one for 10-minutes, let alone 12-15 hours. Being fully un-jabbed is also a problem for some people and groups that I have worked with in the past.

How did my attitude develop towards Cov-19?

Why did I remain adamantly resistant to the agitprop? Why was I inherently immune to both Cov-19 and the coronaprop?

The answer is quite easy and evident: the same people/institutions that have lied and caused enormous harm to the people of this failed-state AND the world were telling me to panic. Literally. I never believed their bullshit about Global Terrorism (GloTerr), so why would I believe this (to me) obvious B.S. of GloPan?

Besides, who knows if I had Cov-19, or not? According to Dr. John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine (Stanford Prevention Research), of Epidemiology and Population Health, over 70% (in cross-age demographics) who were tested positive for Cov-19 had zero, or mild symptoms. The alarming numbers came from comparing test numbers to deaths, instead of using IFR (infection fatality rate) which would have dropped the numbers dramatically. Also, the powers-that-be, have adjusting their ghoulish-death rate down and admitted that those who died had an average of over THREE co-morbidities. Not saying I am happy, nor am I minimizing the pain these deaths caused, but, it seems most people who died of Cov-19 were well on their way to meeting the Grim Reaper, anyway. Some people (like me) work diligently to make our bodies hostile to pathogenic invaders, while most Americans create a very welcoming environment for disease and chronic conditions. This circumstance can be changed, but it takes effort, where taking drugs is practically effortless (if you can afford them).

Most people listened to the $cience of those who were paid to come up with supporting $cience and feed it to the public through the stenographer media class. One of the most egregious examples of this is when the current director of the CDC Rachel Walensky said: “I first heard of the efficacy of the Covid vaccine from CNN.” What!? Part of her job is to literally investigate the safety and efficacy of medicines and they operate the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS).

Pfizer spends millions of dollars sponsoring the legacy media and people like Bill Gates and Dr. Anthony Falsie have carte blanche to promote the propaganda that brings them fame and fortune. The $cience has become a cult of devotees called $cientism. Dr. Anthony (“If you attack me, you’re attacking science”) Falsie is the Pope of this new religion that still has a lot of fanatical adherents who pay a steep tithe for their fake sense of safety with their health and freedoms.

Recently, Pope Falsie has made another infallible (until it’s not) proclamation that the adherents of $cientism, and we heretics, now have to evaluate our own risk to viruses and proceed with our lives. Just like other religions who believe that with fear, sin can be eliminated, the High Priests of $cientism believe that viruses can also be wiped out. Neither view is healthy or productive.

I listened to the science of epidemiologists, MDs, virologists, and other researchers that not only didn’t profit from their truth-spreading, but got banned from social media, ridiculed by the profiteers, and, in some cases lost their jobs or their licenses to practice medicine. If you know the way propaganda works, you know that the voices of those who lie are most often elevated and the ones that go against those lies are silenced.

9/11 and GloPan

Were four buildings (three WTC and one Pentagon) hit by airplanes on 9/11/2001?

There are many narrative discrepancies with the official story that day. In the midst of the terror, confusion and manufactured nationalism, the Bush regime was already busy with its ultimate goal of invading Iraq (for the oil), by way of Afghanistan. Of course, neither country/leader had anything to do with the awful events of that day, but that didn’t matter to the oil-garchy. One ironic difference between the GloTerr response and GloPan was that Bush told us to travel and shop until we drop. During GloPan we could buy groceries, but all of our other purchases needed to come from Amazon, or other online options. So, while Bezos was hoarding enormous wealth and building space rockets during that time period, Main Street businesses struggled and a couple hundred-thousand of them were collateral damage.

Despite how Cov-19 came to the world and no matter what you believe: Deadly pandemic, or mostly bullshit, I think most of us can recognize that the PTB used it to deliver unbelievable and unconscionable profits to a very few. As the diminutive Rahm Emanuel famously said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” We can argue “Made it happen,” or “Let it happen” all day for the rest of our lives, but the bottom line is, whether we speak about 9/11 or GloPan, anyone with two-eyes can see that the response was destructive to the majority, and profitable for the few.

The Effects of GloPan on Children

The initial decision to close schools came as a not unwelcome measure to my grandchildren who were happy for a break. If they, and most other students, had known that the closures would extend to over a year and that the horrors of Zoom “learning” would be in their future, I am not sure they would have been so happy.

From the beginning of this “pandemic” we were hearing that Cov-19 did not affect children the same way that it was affecting adults. However, as the closures extended, we were hearing from studies in places like Sweden that decided to take a more measured (and more successful) response to Cov-19, that even if children tested positive, they were not ill, nor were they infecting other children or adults. In fact, the children acted like a sponge, soaking up the virus without it going anywhere else. If things were done naturally here, the students could have put a brake on infection rates.

Yet, the lockdowns and school closures dragged on, month after month. It seemed to my grandchildren and other students that no one in the government, or at their schools, cared much for their mental or physical health. Suicides and attempted suicides skyrocketed in this time period to a level which was a legitimate health emergency.

Recently, a survey delivered the sad news that 44% of teenagers report being depressed, or hopeless. If this stat doesn’t damn the management of GloPan straight to the burning depths of hell, I don’t know what does (maybe the Eldercide).

Milestone activities like prom, graduations, and sports were also taken away from the unlucky ones who happened to be of that age. Playgrounds were illogically and tragically roped off and beaches were closed. Anything that could actually enhance the natural immunity of children (and others) like fresh air, sunshine, sand, salt water, sports, and socialization were taken away. Instead of prescribing more vitamin C, zinc, and vitamin D, we were told to isolate and quarantine. Here in California, to the credit of some Democratic lawmakers, they forced the lockdown fascist Newsom to reopen playgrounds making the correct claim that lower-income families and children suffered most from this misguided policy.

One thing the diseased ruling-class knows, and WE need to understand is that life is more than about avoiding germs (which is a ridiculous notion, anyway), but it’s about connections and health. The health of our children was negatively impacted by the Stasi-like measures that never made any sense from a logical or even public health standpoint.

Take two neighboring countries that took two different approaches, Sweden and Finland.

Sweden did not close schools, and Finland did. The infection rate of children 1-19 years of age were exactly the same: 0.005% The closures had zero affect on the children of either country.

The Hidden Tragedy of Eldercide

“They claimed it was for the sake of their grandparents and grandchildren, but it was of course for the sake of their grandparent’s grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandparents.” HHGTTG, Douglas Adams

As stated above, the justification for the flatten the curve bullshit was also put on the backs of the elders.

Andrew Cuomo of New York was one of the first governors to institute a policy of putting ill people in nursing homes, after first absolving said nursing homes from any legal liability if anything went wrong. Of course, this was for a price and an already greedy and shady businesses agreed to take in sick people to further put their elders at risk.

Cuomo is in some hot water now for hiding the nursing home deaths in his state. As of this writing over 15, 000 residents of nursing homes have allegedly died of C19, many due to Cuomo’s policies. But how awful it must be to die alone gasping for breath while no family members are allowed to visit? What? Sick people could be admitted to your family member’s room, but you can’t go visit your grandma?

Cuomo was not the only governor/health officer that took the “crisis” of GloPan to kill its elderly citizens. We identified at least a dirty-half dozen that did so: Newsolini of my state, California; and the governors of: Pennsylvania; New Jersey; Minnesota; and the liberal Republican in Massachusetts. Interestingly, DeSantis of Florida refused to do this and he is under fire for having a more measured response to GloPan.

Who or what were really “killing Meemaw?” Obviously, the policies of the lockdown regime, not your family members. There are many state governors, public health officials and random bureaucrats that need to be tried, convicted, and punished for crimes against humanity!

Alternate Realities

“Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?” HHGTTG, Douglas Adams

In about June of 2020, I began to see a very disturbing trend among my anti-capitalist/empire colleagues, friends, and comrades: they were uncritically following and promoting the establishment lockdown policies and propaganda. Not only were they mesmerized by propaganda, many of them began to attack people who had legitimate questions.

Even though I have had heaps of shit piled on me for not supporting the criminal likes of Obama, Clinton, or Biden, I was surprised by the vitriol heaped on me when I started to question the obvious lies and contradictions of the Cov-19 narrative. I thought that if someone was a friend of mine by the GloPan, they would have more trust in me. I went from being a principled critic of US Empire to being a “Qanon, proud-boy, Trumper.” It was hurtful because I thought my remaining friends were more high-quality than to become uncritical supporters of the media and government.

“The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.” HHGTTG, Douglas Adams

Suddenly, I (and many like me) were ridiculed and even being wished death from the GloPan. These virtue-signaling, do-gooders were all about no one dying from Cov-19, but it was apparently fine and dandy for people to die from being incarcerated in a nursing home with ill patients, or from having other health conditions deferred or denied. For two years (before “I Stand With Ukraine” became THE thing), “Covid” deaths were the only deaths that literally counted: EVERY DAMN DAY by the ghouls in the media and governments.

Professor Christian Parenti stated it much better in his article (original link), How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy

The socialist left, which wants to use state power to discipline capital has instead accepted the negative image of its goal: state power used to bully, harass, and discipline workers. The left’s embrace of Covid hysteria makes a mockery of the left’s goals of planning, industrial policy, economic redistribution, worker empowerment, and environmental sustainability. This leftwing self-harm will have deleterious consequences for years to come. Indeed, the situation is worse than a mere political fumble. The left is now actively helping its own enemies. In its unwavering support for mandates, passports, punitive lockdowns, and censorship, the organized left has sided with technocratic elites, the one percent, and the repressive state apparatus everywhere. 

The Aftermath

Children are suffering the most of the policies of a government that have never given any shits about your health—or the well-being of its children. We can’t let our guard down now because this episode was just too profitable, even though it seems like we are getting back to “normal.” You know, that normal where gas is almost $6/gallon and you have to get a payday loan to buy groceries—FYI, despite what CNN and MSNBC say, this is not Putin’s doing, it’s the hyper-inflation from lockdowns and creating trillions in “wealth” backed up by nothing.

The future is bleak, but we are still here. Whether we are jabbed, or not; whether we bought the BS, or not; we are all in the same boat; and that boat is sinking.

The Future

There is a moment in ever dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath.” HHGTTG, Douglas Adams

My dream would be for people to never forget that the establishment is always at war with the working-class: their wars and pandemics and distractions are designed to divide us so we fight each other and not them. Why would anyone figuratively sign up to do the bidding of diseased capital? Especially those who understood this before GloPan?

Big pHARMa (reaping tens of billions of dollars in profit) and the Imperialists do not need your uncritical support when that support is detrimental to life on this planet.

For Bob’s sake, DON’T PANIC!

Never again!

America’s Future is Liberal Fascism Sporting a Smiley Shirt and Armed With a Syringe

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The globalists responsible for engineering a medical tyranny across much of the Western world have something valuable to teach right-wing nationalists and would-be fascists, and that is you don’t sell your damaged product out of the barrel of a machine gun, but rather dripping from the end of a syringe that promises to end all pain and misery.

By Robert Bridge

Source: Covert Geopolitics

Patrick Henry, one of America’s more outspoken Founding Fathers, famously remarked “give me liberty or give me death” when the life of his nation was on the line. Today, America’s famous battle cry has been replaced by a masked and muffled gasp that advises, without hope of a second opinion, “give me lockdowns and keep me safe.” So terrified is the American public of catching a virus that comes with a 99 percent survival rate that they are willing to forego Thanksgiving, the great national holiday commemorating – with no loss of irony – their Pilgrim ancestors’ collective courage to overcome the wild, hostile conditions of their new land.

It must be said that no fascist party has ever been so adept when it came to sealing the collective fate of their people to a common enemy. That’s because the threat facing mankind today, or so we are told, is not some nefarious ideology, like communism, or even a terrorist organization that the masses can be rallied to fight. Rather, the threat is a microscopic contagion that is capable of invading every nook and cranny of our lives. Already the age of manly handshakes is over, replaced by an emasculated majority, while an entire generation of youth now looks at their fellow human beings as infernal germ factories.

And unlike a traditional enemy that can be seen, attacked and eventually defeated, the coronavirus – we have been oddly forewarned – will make landfall again and again, while regularly morphing with comic book abilities into an increasingly deadlier villain. In this landless battle, only the medical authorities are decorated as heroes, while the people, lacking the professional credentials, are forced to be passive and helpless onlookers, their freedom of movement severely constrained. More importantly, the forces of nationalism have become irrelevant; only a globalist, one-world-order response can defeat this pandemic.

There is very good reason to suspect, however, that either the science on all of this is half-baked, or we the people are being intentionally duped on a grand scale. In fact, it’s probably a little bit of both. First, relying on nothing more than empirical evidence, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that there is no existential emergency confronting mankind. If there were, we would expect to see decomposing bodies piling up in the streets, like in the medieval times during the Black Plague. This would be especially the case among the homeless population, which is certainly not practicing social distancing etiquette as they pass around open containers on street corners.

Nor does there seem to be any massive queuing up at hospitals for emergency treatment. In fact, as early as April, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told President Trump that the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort deployed to New York City by the federal government to help fight the coronavirus outbreak was “no longer needed”. Cuomo said the need for the support vessel “didn’t reach the levels that had been projected.” And I am certainly not the only one who has noticed that Covid cases seem to fluctuate curiously with the political climate.

Plenty of hospital rooms. You’ve got that right! https://t.co/lg0Bb2Ai9j

— Richard citizen journalist (@DPotcner) October 28, 2020

Let’s not forget that the overwhelming majority of Covid ‘victims’ recover nicely at home, according to no less of an authority than Anthony Fauci. At the same time, many people who acquire the disease are asymptomatic and never even knew they were infected. Children, meanwhile, seem amazingly impervious to the virus. That is not to say that there has been no sign of a virus this winter season. Of course there has been, just like every year. But while Covid cases may be on the rise in some places, and invisible in others, the death rate from this illness remains low and tumbling, predominantly hitting elderly people already suffering from comorbidities.

There are other reasons to be suspicious that what we are dealing with is not a first-class medical emergency, but rather something much more sinister. Like maybe an excuse for rolling out a Western-made vaccine that carries a microchip implant with tracking technology? Such a claim will sound less fantastic when it is realized that it has already been developed.

It is no secret that just one month before Covid-19 made its dramatic landfall in the United States, purportedly from Wuhan, China, MIT researchers announced a new method for recording a patient’s vaccination history: storing the smartphone-readable data under the skin at the same time a vaccine is administered.

“By selectively loading microparticles into microneedles, the patches deliver a pattern in the skin that is invisible to the naked eye but can be scanned with a smartphone that has the infrared filter removed,” MIT News reported. “The patch can be customized to imprint different patterns that correspond to the type of vaccine delivered.”

Would it surprise anyone to know that the research was funded largely by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the same family venture that now provides the bulk of funding to the World Health Organization?

In a new interview, Bill Gates authoritatively states that mass public gatherings will not come back “at all” until we have mass vaccination. Who made him king of the world? https://t.co/siW7bZ9yGc … https://t.co/ivaCI8eAEl

— Alternative News (@NewsAlternative) April 4, 2020

Then, in September 2019, ID2020, a San Francisco-based biometric company that counts Microsoft as one of its founding members, announced a new project that involves the “exploration of multiple biometric identification technologies for infants” that is based on “infant immunization.”

We could continue here with a long list of other disturbing technologies that would effectively turn people into walking antennae for the rest of their lives, but the point is hopefully clear: although many people might be willing to accept a vaccine against Covid-19, they probably do not want the extra technological add-ons that people like Bill Gates, a man with zero medical qualifications, seem extremely anxious to include.

“The food supply chain is breaking,” Tyson Foods warns in a full page ad in NYT today pic.twitter.com/5cyusH6L9V

— Ana Swanson (@AnaSwanson) April 26, 2020

So what can Americans expect next? How about ‘Freedom Passes’ that Britons may need before they are able to return to some semblance of normalcy?

According to the Daily Mail, “Britons are set to be given Covid ‘freedom passes’ as long as they test negative for the virus twice in a week, it has been suggested…To earn the freedom pass, people will need to be tested regularly and, provided the results come back negative, they will then be given a letter, card or document they can show to people as they move around.”

And this is what they call a “return to normalcy.”

Personally, I call those plans the approach of fascism. And for those who doubt that it could not happen in America should heed the words of the late sagacious comedian George Carlin, who once quipped that “when fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jackboots. It will be Nike sneakers and smiley shirts.” Had Carlin been alive today to see the tremendous mess we’ve inherited, he would most likely have included a syringe in the neo-fascist’s toolkit.

Bill Gates’ Global Agenda and How We Can Resist His War on Life

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By Vandana Shiva

Source: resilience

The following excerpt is from Vandana Shiva’s new book Oneness vs. the 1% (Chelsea Green Publishing, August 31, 2020) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.

In March 2015, Bill Gates showed an image of the coronavirus during a TED Talk and told the audience that it was what the greatest catastrophe of our time would look like. The real threat to life, he said, is ‘not missiles, but microbes.’ When the coronavirus pandemic swept over the earth like a tsunami five years later, he revived the war language, describing the pandemic as ‘a world war’.

‘The coronavirus pandemic pits all of humanity against the virus,’ he said.

In fact, the pandemic is not a war. The pandemic is a consequence of war. A war against life. The mechanical mind connected to the money machine of extraction has created the illusion of humans as separate from nature, and nature as dead, inert raw material to be exploited. But, in fact, we are part of the biome. And we are part of the virome. The biome and the virome are us. When we wage war on the biodiversity of our forests, our farms, and in our guts, we wage war on ourselves.

The health emergency of the coronavirus is inseparable from the health emergency of extinction, the health emergency of biodiversity loss, and the health emergency of the climate crisis. All of these emergencies are rooted in a mechanistic, militaristic, anthropocentric worldview that considers humans separate from—and superior to—other beings. Beings we can own, manipulate, and control. All of these emergencies are rooted in an economic model based on the illusion of limitless growth and limitless greed, which violate planetary boundaries, and destroy the integrity of ecosystems and individual species.

New diseases arise because a globalized, industrialized, inefficient agriculture invades habitats, destroys ecosystems, and manipulates animals, plants, and other organisms with no respect for their integrity or their health. We are linked worldwide through the spread of diseases like the coronavirus because we have invaded the homes of other species, manipulated plants and animals for commercial profits and greed, and cultivated monocultures. As we clear-cut forests, as we turn farms into industrial monocultures that produce toxic, nutritionally empty commodities, as our diets become degraded through industrial processing with synthetic chemicals and genetic engineering, and as we perpetuate the illusion that earth and life are raw materials to be exploited for profits, we are indeed connecting. But instead of connecting on a continuum of health by protecting biodiversity, integrity, and self-organization of all living beings, including humans, we are connected through disease.

According to the International Labour Organization, ‘1.6 billion informal economy workers (representing the most vulnerable in the labour market), out of a worldwide total of two billion and a global workforce of 3.3 billion, have suffered massive damage to their capacity to earn a living. This is due to lockdown measures and/or because they work in the hardest-hit sectors.’ According to the World Food Programme, a quarter of a billion additional people will be pushed to hunger and 300,000 could die every day. These, too, are pandemics that are killing people. Killing cannot be a prescription for saving lives.

Health is about life and living systems. There is no ‘life’ in the paradigm of health that Bill Gates and his ilk are promoting and imposing on the entire world. Gates has created global alliances to impose top-down analysis and prescriptions for health problems. He gives money to define the problems, and then he uses his influence and money to impose the solutions. And in the process, he gets richer. His ‘funding’ results in an erasure of democracy and biodiversity, of nature and culture. His ‘philanthropy’ is not just philanthrocapitalism. It is philanthroimperialism.

The coronavirus pandemic and lockdown have revealed even more clearly how we are being reduced to objects to be controlled, with our bodies and minds as the new colonies to be invaded. Empires create colonies, colonies enclose the commons of the indigenous living communities and turn them into sources of raw material to be extracted for profits. This linear, extractive logic is unable to see the intimate relations that sustain life in the natural world. It is blind to diversity, cycles of renewal, values of giving and sharing, and the power and potential of self-organising and mutuality. It is blind to the waste it creates and to the violence it unleashes. The extended coronavirus lockdown has been a lab experiment for a future without humanity.

On March 26, 2020, at a peak of the coronavirus pandemic and in the midst of the lockdown, Microsoft was granted a patent by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Patent WO 060606 declares that ‘Human Body Activity associated with a task provided to a user may be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system….’

The ‘body activity’ that Microsoft wants to mine includes radiation emitted from the human body, brain activities, body fluid flow, blood flow, organ activity, body movement such as eye movement, facial movement, and muscle movement, as well as any other activities that can be sensed and represented by images, waves, signals, texts, numbers, degrees, or any other information or data.

The patent is an intellectual property claim over our bodies and minds. In colonialism, colonisers assign themselves the right to take the land and resources of indigenous people, extinguish their cultures and sovereignty, and in extreme cases exterminate them. Patent WO 060606 is a declaration by Microsoft that our bodies and minds are its new colonies. We are mines of ‘raw material’—the data extracted from our bodies. Rather than sovereign, spiritual, conscious, intelligent beings making 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 ‘users.’ A ‘user’ is a consumer without choice in the digital empire.

But that’s not the totality of Gates’ vision. In fact, it is even more sinister—to colonise the minds, bodies, and spirits of our children before they even have the opportunity to understand what freedom and sovereignty look and feel like, beginning with the most vulnerable.

In May 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York announced a partnership with the Gates Foundation to ‘reinvent education.’ Cuomo called Gates a visionary and argued that the pandemic has created ‘a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’] ideas…all these buildings, all these physical classrooms—why with all the technology you have?’

In fact, Gates has been trying to dismantle the public education system of the United States for two decades. For him students are mines for data. That is why the indicators he promotes are attendance, college enrollment, and scores on a math and reading test, because these can be easily quantified and mined. In reimagining education, children will be monitored through surveillance systems to check if they are attentive while they are forced to take classes remotely, alone at home. The dystopia is one where children never return to schools, do not have a chance to play, do not have friends. It is a world without society, without relationships, without love and friendship.

As I look to the future in a world of Gates and Tech Barons, I see a humanity that is further polarized into large numbers of ‘throw away’ people who have no place in the new Empire. Those who are included in the new Empire will be little more than digital slaves.

Or, we can resist. We can seed another future, deepen our democracies, reclaim our commons, regenerate the earth as living members of a One Earth Family, rich in our diversity and freedom, one in our unity and interconnectedness. It is a healthier future. It is one we must fight for. It is one we must claim.

We stand at a precipice of extinction. Will we allow our humanity as living, conscious, intelligent, autonomous beings to be extinguished by a greed machine that does not know limits and is unable to put a break on its colonisation and destruction? Or will we stop the machine and defend our humanity, freedom, and autonomy to protect life on earth?