Abnormalize The Status Quo

Posted on August 26, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

If we’d been living in a healthy society and then suddenly had this society’s sick, insane status quo thrust upon us by powerful people, we’d have all been out in the streets making life very hard for those powerful people in an instant.

We are in the same situation now. We are having a wildly insane status quo thrust upon us by the powerful and for the benefit of the powerful. Only difference is we’re not all out in the streets, and instead of thrusting this horrible situation upon us suddenly, they’ve been doing it this entire time.

Which is precisely why we’re not out in the streets. We were born into this mess, so we assume it’s normal and that things are supposed to be this way. But it isn’t, and they aren’t.

What is normal is health. Health is the normal default condition. If you wake up with a fever and stabbing pain in your abdomen you don’t say “Ah well I guess that’s normal now, you can’t expect to just not have a fever and stabbing abdominal pain,” you recognize that there’s an urgent problem and you take action to fix it.

Even if you’d been sick your entire life, you would understand that your situation is not normal. You would understand that the basic default condition is health, but some dysfunction in your specific system has deprived you of that normal state of being.

In order for us to begin pushing back on the dysfunction of our current system, we need to begin looking at it in the same way. We need to clearly come to see how spectacularly divergent it is from the basic default condition of health. How sick it is. How abnormal it is.

We need to see clearly that health is normal and sickness is abnormal, whether you’re talking about an individual or a society.

It’s not normal for a civilization to be dominated by plutocrats and secretive government agencies and to only get offered the choice between two authoritarian corporate warmongers in a pretend election to a position of leadership that is almost entirely fake.

It’s not normal for there to be enough wealth to feed and care for everyone and yet instead have people with unfathomable amounts of money while others die of lack.

It’s not normal for a globe-spanning empire to dominate our species with endless military violence and starvation sanctions for the sole purpose of maintaining and expanding the unipolar hegemony of a few sociopathic manipulators.

It’s not normal for us to be destroying our ecosystem in order to grow an economy that is ultimately an imaginary construction in our minds instead of learning to collaborate harmoniously with that ecosystem.

It’s not normal for us all to be competing against each other at the expense of the entire world instead of collaborating with each other for the good of the entire world.

We need to get crystal clear that these things are not normal, because our entire society is completely saturated with skilful manipulations telling us that they are.

I write a lot about the more egregious, incendiary lies that the mass media have notoriously promulgated like WMDs in Iraq, Russiagate, the imaginary Labour antisemitism crisis etc. But the most destructive lies the mass media tell us are not the ones that stand out the most in our collective memory. The most damaging lies they tell us are the little ones they tell us many times every single day by way of spin, omission, half-truth and distortion in order to give us the impression that this status quo is normal and inescapable.

You see it in the way they talk about politicians who stand even a tiny bit outside the warmongering oligarchic beltway consensus like they are radical extremists. You see it in the way they’ll focus on protests in Belarus or Hong Kong while ignoring them in Bolivia or France. You see it in the way they ignore Yemen when it’s the single most horrific thing happening on our planet right now. You see it in all the sitcoms and movies where debt and low wages and other symptoms of status quo dysfunction are almost never a featured concern.

You see it in innumerable other ways, day in and day out, and they add up. They add up for someone who was born into a gravely dysfunctional system and has never known anything resembling health to compare it to. They’re like someone who has always been sick, who has also never known or heard about anyone who is healthy.

You can tell me we’ve never had a healthy society since the dawn of civilization all you want. All you are telling me is that we have always been sick. Being sick all your life doesn’t mean health isn’t normal or that health shouldn’t be urgently sought; if anything it means it should be sought more urgently.

It is not human nature to be this sick, and anyone who tells you it is is lying. Anyone who tells you it’s human nature to be greedy, violent, domineering and abusive isn’t telling you about humanity’s nature, they’re telling you about their own nature. And it’s probably a bad idea to turn your back on them.

We can have health. We can have normality. But just as you won’t return to health by pretending that your fever and abdominal pains are normal, we can’t create a healthy society as long as we allow ourselves to be manipulated into the belief that our backwards, insane status quo is what normality looks like.

So abnormalize the status quo. Abnormalize it every chance you get. Abnormalize it by holding a clear idea in your mind of what a healthy society would look like, then point out all the bizarre deviations from that vision at every opportunity. Remind people that this is crazy. Assure them that it doesn’t have to be this way. That the only thing keeping it this way is the fact that the powerful keep pouring vast troves of wealth into manipulating us into thinking that we should.

Help people see what health is so that they can see what sickness is. Interrupt conversations about which flavor of sickness would be preferable this election season to point to what real health would look like. Disrupt all attempts to normalize our status quo, and use whatever reach you have to help abnormalize it.

The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup: Fighting for our Humanity, Our Liberty and Our Future

Posted on May 29, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

We are being utterly transformed. And the world is being utterly transformed around us.

Ostensibly, this is to tackle a simple virus. In reality, it is to achieve an elite design at staggering cost to humanity and to life generally.

If you have not been carefully following what is taking place, let me highlight some recent developments and what we can do about them.

On 26 March 2020, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) granted Microsoft a world patent. Titled ‘1. WO2020060606 – Cryptocurrency System Using Body Activity Data’, this patent gives Microsoft (that is, Bill Gates) extraordinary power over our lives.

As Professor Vandana Shiva evocatively explains in her latest article, ‘My Earth Journey in defence of Biodiversity, Life and Freedom over 5 decades’, this development is ‘robbing us of our deep humanity’:

The patent is dramatically changing the meaning of being human.

Firstly, it is redefining us as ‘mines’ for data – robbing us of our autonomy, our sovereignty, and control over our bodies and minds…. And just being connected through their ‘server’ is giving consent….

Secondly, 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.

Thirdly, the patent is redefining human values, and the value of being human. Human values include ethical, ecological, spiritual values….

Patent 060606 is aimed at robbing us of our deep humanity. We are being transformed from self organised, conscious, creative, autopoetic beings, into external input “users” whose value will be assigned in cryptocurrency through algorithms, by the very machine that gave us the task in the first place.

But it is not just our humanity that is at stake, horrific though this may be. The world, too, is being transformed so that the humanoids who are not killed off or marginalized into extreme poverty and desperation will perform their assigned roles to serve the global elite within the new techno tyranny that is being created around us.

For just a taste of the evidence in this regard, see ‘Global Capitalism, “World Government” and the Corona Crisis’, ‘The Farce and Diabolical Agenda of A “Universal Lockdown”’ and ‘Techno-Tyranny: How The US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision ’.

And if you would like greater insight into the role that individuals like Bill Gates are playing in all of this, see these three recent documentaries produced by James Corbett: ‘How Bill Gates Monopolized Global Health’, ‘Bill Gates’ Plan to Vaccinate the World’ and ‘Bill Gates and the Population Control Grid’. In addition, this article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is instructive: ‘Gates’ Globalist Vaccine Agenda: A Win-Win for Pharma and Mandatory Vaccination’.

Given the monumental undertaking for global control that this represents, you might wonder how this transformation can be achieved. And, unfortunately, the answer is ‘very simply’. This is because the bulk of the human population has been terrorized into a state of being submissively obedient. And this state is effectively permanent. As a result, mobilizing strategic resistance to what is happening is very difficult.

Why do I write this?

Because the evidence that COVID-19 is a minor health risk, particularly if dealt with appropriately, is overwhelming and extensively documented: ‘According to data from the best-studied countries and regions, the lethality of Covid19 is on average about 0.2%, which is in the range of a severe influenza (flu) and about twenty times lower than originally assumed by the WHO.’ See ‘A Swiss Doctor on Covid-19’.

Having noted that, however, if you want to watch a thoughtful and detailed explanation of why COVID-19 is a ‘fake virus’, try watching molecular biologist Dr Andrew Kaufman’s two hour interview by Brian Rose: ‘Unmasking the Lies Around COVID-19: Facts vs Fiction of the Coronavirus Pandemic’. In this interview, Dr Kaufman carefully explains:

The scientific procedures that have been utilized in all of these scientific studies… it wouldn’t be possible using those techniques to isolate the virus and purify it and prove that it exists…. Taking into account all of the evidence I have looked at which has been almost entirely from peer-reviewed scientific papers and official government websites, my opinion is that this entire pandemic is a completely manufactured crisis. In other words there is no evidence of anyone dying from any novel illness…. And so what I think is going on… is in line with what might be known as a globalist agenda…. All of these things seem to be moving towards control of the people.

There is not very much about vaccines that makes a lot of sense because if you actually go back and look for the evidence that vaccines have prevented disease you are not going to find any…. Smallpox is an interesting example…. In the mainstream history books the smallpox vaccine has been touted as a major success but that’s not really accurate. If you go back and look at data from the Royal Academy of Sciences what you will see is that the mortality increased substantially while these vaccines were widely used and then when they stopped being used the numbers went back down again.

So it is really difficult to trust what is in a general textbook or mainstream history book without going and looking at the actual data yourself because all of the textbooks that were in medical schools say that vaccines are responsible for preventing many of these major illnesses that people were suffering from and worried about in the first part of the twentieth century. But if you look at some of the same diseases that did not have a vaccine, such as scarlet fever for example, you will find that scarlet fever also went away with all of the other diseases even though there was no vaccine for it.

And when you look at the number of cases of the various illnesses like polio or measles or diphtheria, you’ll see that the prevalence or incidence of those diseases and mortality from those diseases, which in some was substantial, went down almost to the current levels before a vaccine was even available for use so you couldn’t possibly attribute a vaccine for causing that reduction in the illness if it wasn’t even around at the time that the illness was reduced….

If you create a vaccine for an illness [such as COVID-19] that has not been proven to even exist, then the vaccine couldn’t possibly work. But if you do a clinical study and have an imaginary disease and give the vaccine to people and then they never get the imaginary disease it would give the appearance that its very successful.

So this is a real win-win strategy for anyone making these vaccines and which is why there have been companies all over the world racing to be the first one to have a vaccine that’s been proven to be safe or effective using the limited criteria that they require. Because whoever gets there first, according to the plans or proposed policies, they’re going to be selling billions of vaccines. Billions! So they’re going to make billions of dollars as a result of this. So there is such a strong financial incentive.

Some of the technological strategies that they are using to make these vaccines are quite scary and unprecedented…. But obviously it couldn’t prevent a disease that doesn’t exist so there must be some other purpose for it.

Remember, the words quoted above are taken from a two hour interview. If any of these words leave you wondering, watch the interview to consider the evidence that Dr Kaufman cites or check his website: Dr Andrew Kaufman.

In another video Dr Kaufman explains how early scientific papers on the subject suggested an association (not causation) between a novel coronavirus ‘with human to human transmission and severe human infection’ whereas a subsequent key ‘scientific’ paper that made a claim which helped drive the global response to COVID-19 ‘flat out lied’ about their results: ‘Following the first outbreaks of unexplained pneumonia in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, a new coronavirus was identified as the causative agent in January 2020.’ See ‘Identification of Coronavirus Isolated from a Patient in Korea with COVID-19’. In fact, Dr Kaufman points out: ‘they cannot reference any science to back that up whatsoever’. Moreover, subsequently to this paper, another article – see ‘I study viruses: How our team isolated the new coronavirus to fight the global pandemic’ – declared ‘The emergence of a new coronavirus in a market in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 set in motion the pandemic we are now witnessing in 160 countries around the world’. But again, Dr Kaufman counters, ‘no evidence was provided at all’ to support this claim: ‘just flat out lies’. For the details and citation of all the scientific sources for this explanation of how the COVID-19 ‘rumour mill’ got started, see ‘The Rooster in the River of Rats’.

If you wish to watch a more scientifically-oriented lecture, explaining more of the technical detail of what Dr Kaufman argues ‘is really going on’ and which is consistent with the evidence, then you can view it here: ‘Special Report: Humanity is NOT a virus!’

So while the evidence that there is neither a virus nor a pandemic is grounded firmly in the science, the evidence that the global elite is using COVID-19 as ‘cover’ to implement its coup against humanity is rather overwhelming. In addition to the articles cited above, see these two articles which cite many other extensively-documented sources as well: ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’ and ‘COVID-19: Breaking the Lockdown, Defeating the Coup, Averting Extinction’.

But while this evidence is readily available, it requires someone who has not lost the capacity to investigate and think for themself. And that is a huge problem.

Of course, little of the evidence in these regards is available through education systems or the corporate media, given that the purpose of these institutions is to serve elite interests. And controlling access to, and manipulating perception of, the evidence is vital in both regards.

So if, for example, you believe that the corporate media is reporting the ‘news’, you might like to reflect on these words of David Rockefeller spoken at the highly secretive elite Bilderberg meeting held in Germany in 1991 but subsequently leaked:

‘We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government…. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.’ See ‘David Rockefeller at Bilderberg meeting in Baden 1991’ and ‘David Rockefeller’s Chilling 1991 Speech at a Bilderberg Meeting’.

The motto of The Washington Post is ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’. What it does not proclaim is that the Post, along with the other corporate media outlets, has long played its part in the global elite’s program to ensure that democracy – and hence any meaningful role in how we are governed – cannot flourish. But for a detailed critique of the corporate media exposing its role in perpetrating elite power by distributing elite propaganda as ‘news’, see Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.

Hence, while increasing numbers of people are lamenting the submissive response to elite initiatives to imprison us in our own homes (and strip us of rights and freedoms that it took centuries to win) – see, for example, ‘A Nation of Sheep’ and ‘To All Cowards Who Meekly Succumbed To the Unlawful Lockdown… Hang Your Heads In Shame’ – and some authors have written commentaries illustrating and explaining the ways in which people’s fear is manifesting in response to a simple virus – see Dr. Rudolf Hänsel’s explanation in ‘The Diabolical “Game” with Fear as an Instrument of Domination. The Reflex of Obedience’ and Dr. Pascal Sacré’s thoughts in ‘COVID-19: An Ocean of Fears and Lies’ – my own interest lies in explaining why people are fearfully and submissively obedient in the first place and how we can go about restoring agency to the individual’s life so that they can use their own investigatory and analytical capacities to track down and consider the evidence, and to then act sensibly and powerfully in response.

While, regrettably, this cannot be done quickly, it is an essential component of any strategy to effectively resist elite encroachments on our rights, freedoms and economic security while also acting powerfully to deal with the genuine threats to human survival such as those posed by war, the environmental and climate catastrophes, biodiversity loss and the deployment of 5G, among others. See ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’ and, for astute insight into the disastrous impact that the global industrial shutdown is having on the aerosol masking effect and hence the global climate, see ‘Will COVID-19 Trigger Extinction of All Life on Earth?’

This is because fear suppresses (other) emotional responses (including the anger that would mobilize resistance), distorts sensory perception (so that people disbelieve, rather than consider carefully, evidence that contradicts the elite-driven narrative), inhibits analytical capacity, falsifies memory (to conform with explanations that are less frightening) and thwarts powerful behavioural responses. As a consequence of being victims of their own fear, most people live in a world of delusion and projection and are quite incapable of being anything but submissively obedient.

In brief, fear makes people want to believe, and hence to actually believe, that there is ‘nothing wrong’ with elite directives distributed by international organizations (such as the World Health Organisation), governments, the medical industry, education systems and the corporate media. This means that they do not have to feel and think for themselves, consult their conscience or change their own behaviour, each of which is particularly frightening when their fear and the (unconscious) imperative to obey already have them paralyzed.

So how have we ended up with a population of ‘individuals’ who are so devoid of any sense of Selfhood that they are submissively obedient as Drs Hänsel and Sacré discussed above and which we are now witnessing on a global scale as people are imprisoned in their own homes?

Fundamentally, this has occurred because our parenting and education models are based on terrorizing children into obedience using a combination of ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence. For the details of how we do this, see ‘Why Violence?’, ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’ and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

Hence, while we pay lip service to the notion of ‘the individual’, the reality is that we prefer ‘individuals’ who follow the orders of ‘the authorities’, whether at home, school, work, in the military, at a religious gathering or as ‘citizens’ in society generally. After all, our definition of ‘individuality’ long ago ceased to mean any more than that the person clothes themself differently and has their own combination of interests to while away their spare time.

The genuine individual who has an integrated mind, trusts their own (emotional and intellectual) judgment, articulates the truth and behaves powerfully in accord with their conscience, whatever the cost, is only supposed to appear as a fictional character in novels or films. We certainly do not want them in real life. Just ask Mahatma Gandhi, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, for example. Shot dead or imprisoned for having the qualities of a genuine individual.

For further explanations of how we systematically destroy the individuality in our children, see ‘The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth’, ‘Most Attitudes and Beliefs are Outcomes of Fear’ and ‘The Psychology of Projection in Conflict’.

So here we are at the most important moment in human history. At the brink of precipitating our own extinction – again, see ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’ and ‘Will COVID-19 Trigger Extinction of All Life on Earth?’ – and now imprisoned in our own homes (for those who have them) while the global elite implements more of its plan to reduce us from human individuals to digital identities that are readily tracked and controlled while playing our robotic role in the techno tyranny that is almost upon us.

Even those two writers of the classic dystopian novels of the twentieth century, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, would be horrified that we participated so obediently, so submissively, in the destruction of our ‘free’ world (whatever its limitations). And I doubt they would get any solace from knowing just how well they truly understood the terrified and submissive nature of the human condition.

So with virtually everyone ‘distracted’ from the ‘main game’ – the coup in which the global elite is taking vastly greater control of our lives and even dramatically increasing the risk of imminent human extinction – while we sit back, or even ask for, greater restrictions on our rights and freedoms, the only important question remaining is this:

Can we mobilize sufficient people, even at this late moment, to strategically defend our humanity, defeat the elite coup and avert the imminent threats to human survival?

Unfortunately, as recent evidence clearly indicates, with even most activists obviously deceived by the use of COVID-19 as ‘cover’ for the coup and oblivious to its catastrophic environmental consequences, this is proving far more difficult than I originally hoped.

Nevertheless, in the hope that we can build on the existing resistance, such as that being documented by Professor Chenoweth and her colleagues – see ‘The global pandemic has spawned new forms of activism – and they’re flourishing’ – while sharpening its focus for greater strategic impact, let me reiterate a previously outlined strategy below, particularly taking into account the insanity of the global elite – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – and the emotional health issues (including anxiety and depression) that are arising during the lockdown that are now complicating people’s existing compulsion to be obedient in the belief that compliance with COVID-19 (that is, coup) measures will make them ‘safe’.

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

So, if you wish to address your own emotional health issues arising during the COVID-19 coup, consider ‘Putting Feelings First’ and/or, if you wish to support others, including children, to do so effectively, see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

In relation to the coup itself, I have identified the appropriate political purpose – obviously ‘To defend humanity against a political/military coup conducted by the global elite’ – and set out a basic list of (now) 28 strategic goals for achieving this purpose (which will also play a vital role in tackling key threats to human survival). The first thirteen of these strategic goals are as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And for those nonviolent activists concerned about tackling the climate and/or other threats to human survival – including those in relation to the environment and war – you can read about nonviolent strategy, including strategic goals to focus your campaigns, from here: Strategic Aims.

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

The Earth Pledge

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

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

Conclusion

Using COVID-19 as ‘cover’, the global elite is conducting a coup to take vastly greater control of our lives and, in fact, to neutralize our humanity. This is being made very easy by the compulsion to obey that most people acquire in response to the ‘socialization’ experience they suffered as a child.

As a result, there is very little resistance to the coup, and none of which I am aware that is strategically focused. Consequently, the coup is readily measured by the destruction of our rights, freedoms, emotional health, political participation and economic security as well as its devastating impact on the Earth, further complicating the already grave series of interrelated threats to our survival and that of vast numbers of other species with which we share this planet.

As you ponder your response to this coup and the vastly increased threat to our survival, it might be worth remembering the words of David Rockefeller in his autobiography Memoirs, published in 2003:

Some even believe [the Rockefeller family is] part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as “internationalists” and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.

If you believe that Rockefeller’s vision is benign from the viewpoint of people like you and me, it might be worth reading more about the Rockefeller family’s interests in our well-being, starting with the report from 2010 titled ‘Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development’ which discusses four scenarios for the human future in which one is based on ‘Lock Step’ following a pandemic: ‘A world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback’.

Hence, if you share my concern that the time to act powerfully in defence of our humanity, to defeat this elite coup and to fight vigorously and strategically on the many interrelated crises that threaten human extinction, then you are welcome to become involved in one or more of the ways suggested above.

Whatever we do, however, it is vitally important that we do not submissively obey the global elite and its agents such as international organizations, governments, corporations and the mainstream media. The elite and its agents might wear a benign smile at times but their loyalty is not to us or to the Earth. They are too insane to have loyalty to either; their loyalty is to themselves exclusively and we are expendable.

So I gently encourage you to have a good look at the evidence for yourself and to act while we still have some personal autonomy and political space to do so. If we do not act now, we will not have this autonomy and space for much longer and human extinction will follow imminently.

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.

TURN SELF ISOLATION INTO SELF LIBERATION

Posted on May 3, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Julian Rose

Source: Waking Times

One of the most famous paradoxes of this blessed experience called Life, is known as ‘the law of unintended consequences’; and we are at this very moment of time, in the midst of a manifestation of cosmic Lila which exactly fits this paradox.

Under the unprecedented blanket regulatory lock-down imposed by governments all over the planet, a highly unlikely opportunity has arisen to fundamentally redress our life circumstances. An opportunity which will positively equip those who need to become aware, to face the uncertainties that lie ahead with courage and fortitude.

The number one opportunity which being stuck in one’s home for most of the working day presents, is to do some long overdue thinking; the kind that taps into that region of ourselves which has been/is particularly starved due to being heavily preoccupied by the daily chores of the standard working week. That part of ourselves which gives genuine direction to our lives, and brings us face to face with the plethora of superficial activities that preoccupy us, most of which we have, up until recently, taken as gospel.

We are being supported in this vital pursuit by changes underway in the natural environment which surrounds us. Changes for the better that result from a sudden flux of a high percentage of the frenetic hustle and bustle which forms the basic daily pattern of our materialistically centred life, and which brings with it a heavy load of pollution, noise and stress, choking both our planet’s natural environment and our own health and welfare.

Pause to consider, how remarkable it is that the impositions imposed by mostly clueless governments, would have the unintended consequence of enabling much of nature to finally take some decent deep breaths! Enable her sinews to be at least temporarily cleansed from the antithetical materialistic pursuits of the modern world. Pursuits so misguidedly hailed as ‘progress’ and so crassly utilised for achieving the bloated ambitions of corporate giants.

Nature can breathe because motorways are largely free of the noise and pollution caused by rushing cars and trucks, and the air largely free from the constant passage of disruptive commercial jet airlines. The sky is blessedly blue and the sweeter that usual air is full of the sound of Spring inspired birds. It is generally calm – even peaceful. I remember a state like this from my childhood.

Something is happening. Something unusual. And it is coming about due to the ‘law of unintended consequences’ which is actually a cosmic/universal law and not unintended at all, but a direct reflection of Divine Lila. It has provided us with this opportunity – right in the midst of an unprecedented deep-state engendered global crisis – to join in this natural healing process so as to recharge our spiritual batteries and shed our worn-out life styles in favour of a more integrated and conscious sense of purpose.

Listen carefully: the circumstances facing all of us in the immediate two to three years ahead are going to present a quite unique challenge. Not least because they are being conducted by people either ludicrously unfit for the tasks they find themselves responsible for – or who wish to deceive and exploit us so as to acquire powers to control events which they have no legal right to control.

This means that the first call on our meditations about our immediate futures will be to raise and appraise some very practical considerations; the first of which involves taking a big step towards a much more robust and self-sufficient life style. Bear in mind that a return to typical easy access to the ‘daily conveniences’ many have become accustomed to, is no longer a secure bet. Even if governments might make it appear that ‘everything is under control’ and/or ‘things will soon return to normal’. Clearly it is not – and they will not, as by now we are surely well aware – and wishful thinking will not change this situation.

As I mentioned above, we must use this brief open window to shift ourselves towards a much more self-sufficient and simple life style. A largely self-sufficient life style involves knowing how to cultivate the ground so as to grow our own basic food requirements. And/or if not doing this directly, making sure to be closely associated with supporting colleagues who do – and who are willing to share the harvests that result.

This is not going to be possible within an urban environment at this point in time, given not only that there is insufficient cultivatable land available, but that urban environments are largely unconducive to mental, spiritual and physical health. They do not enhance one’s immune system and ability to build the inner and outer strength vital to staying strong throughout the challenges in store for us.

So to make best use of this period solitary confinement, plot the course that will provide a practical way of taking control of your – and your family’s – destiny. Recognising, of course, that under the imposition of a quasi dictatorship there is only ‘x’ amount of room in which to move.

In this article I am taking a deliberately positive line concerning making maximum use of our largely untapped potentials as creative beings. So let’s recognise this as exactly the moment to tap these blessed creative powers – since many have been far too preoccupied with selfish pursuits instead of dealing with necessities. ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ so use this one in a million opportunity to meditate on exactly what your key necessities are and how to best manage them.

This should not be an anxiety based exercise. On the contrary, we are in a time of great energetic cosmic support due to the Earth now being in a particularly powerful alignment with the centre of our galaxy, resulting in the rapid growth of heart based empathetic instincts throughout humanity. It is because dark directed forces know about this, that such an intense effort is being made to block the rising-up which is already well underway in us.

Draw upon this gift we are being sent. It is to strengthen the heart beat of mother Earth and human kind.

If you are not already doing so, start each day with Yoga. Hatha yoga exercises, for example, that have been honed over millennia to bring nourishment to every part of the body and mind. This practice, by co-ordinating breathing and movement, revitalises the chi (energy) of one’s whole being and provides a clearer insight into what is the best and most true action to take each day. A Theseus thread to guide one through the chaos which has been deliberately invoked on this planet.

Couple such practice with a diet rich in immunosupportive foods, preferably direct from the farm.

Yes, the farmers you have linked-up with and offered your support. Hands in the soil and the company of (farm) animals is immensely curative. For millions, it is the life-line to earthed, reawakened health. The forces intent upon pulling us down cannot do so once our spiritual and physical energies are awakened and maintained. Truly vital right now.

This means, for example, we can devote our new-found ‘freedom’ into actions specifically targeted at stopping the roll-out of the microwave radiation 5G weapon. A brutal technology of human paralysis and planetary ecocide, increasingly implicated in playing a covert role in the current ‘Corona Virus’ scam.

The family of man is ONE family. Our fate is inextricably linked to the fate of all others, as theirs is with ours. Selfishness is a disease far more deadly than any Corona Virus. Make use of your period of isolation to rid yourself of narcissistic tendencies, as the ‘Real I’ in each one of us is not the one that seeks self-satisfaction or indulgence in vanities. It is the one that liberates us into recognising our oneness with all life and all peoples, regardless of colour, race or creed.

Treat the domestic imprisonment being forced upon us – as an opportunity – not as cause for fear. In fact see it as a hurdle being placed in front of you so as to make you reach deeper into yourself for the solution! Because that’s what it actually is: a wake-up call without which you might never have the opportunity to discover your divine eternal flame of greatness, of Godliness.

Toxic Agriculture and the Gates Foundation

Posted on April 14, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Colin Todhunter

Source: Dissident Voice

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was launched in 2000 and has $46.8 billion in assets (December 2018). It is the largest charitable foundation in the world and distributes more aid for global health than any government. One of the foundation’s stated goals is to globally enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty.

The Gates Foundation is a major funder of the CGIAR system (formerly the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research) — a global partnership whose stated aim is to strive for a food-secured future. Its research is aimed at reducing rural poverty, increasing food security, improving human health and nutrition and ensuring sustainable management of natural resources.

In 2016, the Gates Foundation was accused of dangerously and unaccountably distorting the direction of international development. The charges were laid out in a report by Global Justice Now: ‘Gated Development – Is the Gates Foundation always a force for good?‘ According to the report, the foundation’s strategy is based on deepening the role of multinational companies in the Global South.

On release of the report, Polly Jones, the head of campaigns and policy at Global Justice Now, said:

The Gates Foundation has rapidly become the most influential actor in the world of global health and agricultural policies, but there’s no oversight or accountability in how that influence is managed.

She added that this concentration of power and influence is even more problematic when you consider that the philanthropic vision of the Gates Foundation seems to be largely based on the values of ‘corporate America’:

The foundation is relentlessly promoting big business-based initiatives such as industrial agriculture, private health care and education. But these are all potentially exacerbating the problems of poverty and lack of access to basic resources that the foundation is supposed to be alleviating.

The report’s author, Mark Curtis, outlines the foundation’s promotion of industrial agriculture across Africa, which would undermine existing sustainable, small-scale farming that is providing the vast majority of food across the continent.

Curtis describes how the foundation is working with US agri-commodity trader Cargill in an $8 million project to “develop the soya value chain” in southern Africa. Cargill is the biggest global player in the production of and trade in soya with heavy investments in South America where GM soya monocrops (and associated agrochemicals) have displaced rural populations and caused health problems and environmental damage.

According to Curtis, the Gates-funded project will likely enable Cargill to capture a hitherto untapped African soya market and eventually introduce GM soya onto the continent. The Gates foundation is also supporting projects involving other chemical and seed corporations, including DuPont, Syngenta and Bayer. It is effectively promoting a model of industrial agriculture, the increasing use of agrochemicals and patented seeds, the privatisation of extension services and a very large focus on genetically modified crops.

What the Gates Foundation is doing is part of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) initiative, which is based on the premise that hunger and malnutrition in Africa are mainly the result of a lack of technology and functioning markets. Curtis says AGRA has been intervening directly in the formulation of African governments’ agricultural policies on issues like seeds and land, opening up African markets to US agribusiness.

More than 80% of Africa’s seed supply comes from millions of small-scale farmers recycling and exchanging seed from year to year. But AGRA is promoting the commercial production of seed and is thus supporting the introduction of commercial (chemical-dependent) seed systems, which risk enabling a few large companies to control seed research and development, production and distribution.

The report notes that over the past two decades a long and slow process of national seed law reviews, sponsored by USAID and the G8 along with Bill Gates and others, has opened the door to multinational corporations’ involvement in seed production, including the acquisition of every sizeable seed enterprise on the African continent.

Gates, pesticides and global health

The Gates Foundation is also very active in the area of health, which is ironic given its promotion of industrial agriculture and its reliance on health-damaging agrochemicals. This is something that has not been lost on environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason.

Mason notes that the Gates Foundation is a heavy pusher of agrochemicals and patented seeds. She adds that the Gates Foundation is also reported to be collaborating in Bayer’s promotion of “new chemical approaches” and “biological crop protection” (i.e. encouraging agrochemical sales and GM crops) in the Global South.

After having read the recent ‘A Future for the World’s Children? A WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission’, Mason noticed that pesticides were conspicuous by their absence and therefore decided to write to Professor Anthony Costello, director of the UCL Institute for Global Health, who is the lead author of the report.

In her open 19-page letter, ‘Why Don’t Pesticides Feature in the WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission?’, she notes in the Costello-led report that there is much talk about greater regulation of marketing of tobacco, alcohol, formula milk and sugar-sweetened beverages but no mention of pesticides.

But perhaps this should come as little surprise: some 42 authors’ names are attached to the report and Mason says that in one way or another via the organisations they belong to, many (if not most) have received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation is a prominent funder of the World Health Organization and UNICEF. Gates has been the largest or second largest contributor to the WHO’s budget in recent years. His foundation provided 11% of the WHO’s entire budget in 2015, which is 14 times greater than the UK government’s contribution.

Perhaps this sheds some light on to why a major report on child health would omit the effects of pesticides. Mason implies this is a serious omission given what the UN expert on toxics Baskut Tuncak said in a November 2017 article in the Guardian:

Our children are growing up exposed to a toxic cocktail of weedkillers, insecticides, and fungicides. It’s on their food and in their water, and it’s even doused over their parks and playgrounds. Many governments insist that our standards of protection from these pesticides are strong enough. But as a scientist and a lawyer who specialises in chemicals and their potential impact on people’s fundamental rights, I beg to differ. Last month it was revealed that in recommending that glyphosate – the world’s most widely-used pesticide – was safe, the EU’s food safety watchdog copied and pasted pages of a report directly from Monsanto, the pesticide’s manufacturer. Revelations like these are simply shocking.

Mason notes that in February 2020, Tuncak rejected the idea that the risks posed by highly hazardous pesticides could be managed safely. He told Unearthed (GreenPeace UK’s journalism website) that there is nothing sustainable about the widespread use of highly hazardous pesticides for agriculture. Whether they poison workers, extinguish biodiversity, persist in the environment or accumulate in a mother’s breast milk, Tuncak argued that these are unsustainable, cannot be used safely and should have been phased out of use long ago.

In his 2017 article, he stated:

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most ratified international human rights treaty in the world (only the US is not a party), makes it clear that states have an explicit obligation to protect children from exposure to toxic chemicals, from contaminated food and polluted water, and to ensure that every child can realise their right to the highest attainable standard of health. These and many other rights of the child are abused by the current pesticide regime. These chemicals are everywhere and they are invisible.

Tuncak added that paediatricians have referred to childhood exposure to pesticides as creating a “silent pandemic” of disease and disability. He noted that exposure in pregnancy and childhood is linked to birth defects, diabetes, and cancer and stated that children are particularly vulnerable to these toxic chemicals: increasing evidence shows that even at ‘low’ doses of childhood exposure, irreversible health impacts can result.

He concluded that the overwhelming reliance of regulators on industry-funded studies, the exclusion of independent science from assessments and the confidentiality of studies relied upon by authorities must change.

However, it seems that the profits of agrochemical manufacturers trump the rights of children and the public at large: a joint investigation by Unearthed and the NGO Public Eye has found the world’s five biggest pesticide manufacturers are making more than a third of their income from leading products, chemicals that pose serious hazards to human health and the environment.

Mason refers to an analysis of a huge database of 2018’s top-selling ‘crop protection products’ which revealed the world’s leading agrochemical companies made more than 35% of their sales from pesticides classed as “highly hazardous” to people, animals or ecosystems. The investigation identified billions of dollars of income for agrochemical giants BASF, Bayer, Corteva, FMC and Syngenta from chemicals found by regulatory authorities to pose health hazards like cancer or reproductive failure.

This investigation is based on an analysis of a huge dataset of pesticide sales from the agribusiness intelligence company Phillips McDougall. This firm conducts detailed market research all over the world and sells databases and intelligence to pesticide companies. The data covers around 40% of the $57.6bn global market for agricultural pesticides in 2018. It focuses on 43 countries, which between them represent more than 90% of the global pesticide market by value.

While Bill Gates promotes a chemical-intensive model of agriculture that dovetails with the needs and value chains of agri-food conglomerates, Mason outlines the spiraling rates of disease in the UK and the US and lays the blame at the door of the agrochemical corporations that Gates has opted to get into bed with. She focuses on the impact of glyphosate-based herbicides as well as the cocktail of chemicals sprayed on crops.

Mason has discussed the health-related impacts of glyphosate in numerous previous reports and in her open letter to Costello again refers to peer-reviewed studies and official statistics which indicate that glyphosate affects the gut microbiome and is responsible for a global metabolic health crisis provoked by an obesity epidemic. Moreover, she presents evidence that glyphosate causes epigenetic changes in humans and animals – diseases skip a generation then appear.

However, the mainstream narrative is to blame individuals for their ailments and conditions which are said to result from ‘lifestyle choices’. Yet Monsanto’s German owner Bayer has confirmed that more than 42,700 people have filed suits against Monsanto alleging that exposure to Roundup herbicide caused them or their loved ones to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma and that Monsanto covered up the risks.

Mason says that each year there are steady increases in the numbers of new cancers and increases in deaths from the same cancers, with no treatments making any difference to the numbers; at the same time, she argues, these treatments maximise the bottom line of the drug companies while the impacts of agrochemicals remains conspicuously absent from the disease narrative.

She states that we are exposed to a lifetime’s exposure to thousands of synthetic chemicals that contaminate the blood and urine of nearly every person tested – “a global mass poisoning.”

Gates Foundation in perspective

As part of its hegemonic strategy, the Gates Foundation says it wants to ensure global food security and optimise health and nutrition.

However, Rosemary Mason alludes to the fact that the Gates Foundation seems happy to ignore the deleterious health impacts of agrochemicals while promoting the interests of the firms that produce them, but it facilitates many health programmes that help boost the bottom line of drug companies. Health and health programmes seem only to be defined with certain parameters which facilitate the selling of the products of the major pharmaceutical companies which the foundation partners with. Indeed, researcher Jacob Levich argues that the Gates Foundation not merely facilitates unethical low-cost clinical trials (with often devastating effects for participants) in the Global South but also assists in the creating new markets for the “dubious” products of pharmaceuticals corporations.

As for food security, the foundation would do better by supporting agroecological (agrochemical-free) approaches to agriculture, which various high-level UN reports have advocated for ensuring equitable global food security. But this would leave smallholder agriculture both intact and independent from Western agro-capital, something which runs counter to the underlying aims of the corporations that the foundation supports – dispossession and market dependency.

And these aims have been part of a decades-long strategy where we have seen the strengthening of an emerging global food regime based on agro-export mono-cropping linked to sovereign debt repayment and World Bank/IMF ‘structural adjustment’ directives. The outcomes have included a displacement of a food-producing peasantry, the consolidation of Western agri-food oligopolies and the transformation of many countries from food self-sufficiency into food deficit areas.

While Bill Gates is busy supporting the consolidation of Western agro-capital in Africa under the guise of ensuring ‘food security’, it is very convenient for him to ignore the fact that at the time of decolonisation in the 1960s Africa was not just self-sufficient in food but was actually a net food exporter with exports averaging 1.3 million tons a year between 1966-70. The continent now imports 25% of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer. More generally, developing countries produced a billion-dollar yearly surplus in the 1970s but by 2004 were importing US$ 11 billion a year.

The Gates Foundation promotes a (heavily subsidised and inefficient – certainly when the externalised health, social and environment costs are factored in) corporate-industrial farming system and the strengthening of a global neoliberal, fossil-fuel-dependent food regime that by its very nature fuels and thrives on, among other things, unjust trade policies, population displacement and land dispossession (something which the Gates Foundation once called for but euphemistically termed “land mobility”), commodity monocropping, soil and environmental degradation, illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, water shortages, pollution and the eradication of biodiversity.

At the same time, the foundation is helping powerful corporate interests to appropriate and commodify knowledge. For instance, since 2003, CGIAR (mentioned at the start of this article) and its 15 centres have received more than $720 million from the Gates Foundation. In a June 2016 article in The Asian Age, Vandana Shiva says the centres are accelerating the transfer of research and seeds to corporations, facilitating intellectual property piracy and seed monopolies created through IP laws and seed regulations.

Besides taking control of the seeds of farmers in CGIAR seed banks, Shiva adds that the Gates Foundation (along with the Rockefeller Foundation) is investing heavily in collecting seeds from across the world and storing them in a facility in Svalbard in the Arctic — the ‘doomsday vault’.

The foundation is also funding Diversity Seek (DivSeek), a global initiative to take patents on the seed collections through genomic mapping. Seven million crop accessions are in public seed banks.

Shiva says that DivSeek could allow five corporations to own this diversity and argues:

Today, biopiracy is carried out through the convergence of information technology and biotechnology. It is done by taking patents by ‘mapping’ genomes and genome sequences… DivSeek is a global project launched in 2015 to map the genetic data of the peasant diversity of seeds held in gene banks. It robs the peasants of their seeds and knowledge, it robs the seed of its integrity and diversity, its evolutionary history, its link to the soil and reduces it to ‘code’. It is an extractive project to ‘mine’ the data in the seed to ‘censor’ out the commons.

She notes that the peasants who evolved this diversity have no place in DivSeek — their knowledge is being mined and not recognised, honoured or conserved: an enclosure of the genetic commons.

This process is the very foundation of capitalism – appropriation of the commons (seeds, water, knowledge, land, etc.), which are then made artificially scarce and transformed into marketable commodities.

The Gates Foundation talks about health but facilitates the roll-out of a toxic form of agriculture whose agrochemicals cause immense damage. It talks of alleviating poverty and malnutrition and tackling food insecurity but it bolsters an inherently unjust global food regime which is responsible for perpetuating food insecurity, population displacement, land dispossession, privatisation of the commons and neoliberal policies that remove support from the vulnerable and marginalised, while providing lavish subsidies to corporations.

The Gates Foundation is part of the problem, not the solution. To more fully appreciate this, let us turn to a February 2020 article in the journal Globalizations. Its author, Ashok Kumbamu, argues that the ultimate aim of promoting new technologies – whether GM seeds, agrochemicals or commodified knowledge — on a colossal scale is to make agricultural inputs and outputs essential commodities, create dependency and bring all farming operations into the capitalist fold.

To properly understand Bill Gates’s ‘philanthropy’ is not to take stated goals and objectives at face value but to regard his ideology as an attempt to manufacture consent and prevent and marginalise more radical agrarian change that would challenge prevailing power structures and act as impediments to capitalist interests. The foundation’s activities must be located within the hegemonic and dispossessive strategies of imperialism: displacement of the peasantry and subjugating those who remain in agriculture to the needs of global distribution and supply chains dominated by the Western agri-food conglomerates whose interests the Gates Foundation facilitates and legitimises.

The full text of Rosemary Mason’s 19-page document (with relevant references) — ‘Why Don’t Pesticides Feature in the WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission?’ — can be accessed via the academia.edu website)

Coronavirus reminds us we are organisms in an environment

Posted on March 15, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Kurt Cobb

Source: Resilience

A close friend of mine, a professor of English literature, has been researching American philosopher John Dewey, whose book Quest for Certainty captivated me so much many years ago that I read it again right after I had finished it the first time. My friend has been reminding me why I found Dewey so profound while shedding new light on the philosopher’s thinking.

Dewey, it turns out, is one of the few thinkers in American life who absorbed the true import of the work of Charles Darwin. Dewey reminds us that, quite simply, Darwin posited that we humans are organisms in an environment just like every other organism. Dewey’s star faded after World War II. American and world society have since lapsed into a narrative that puts humans above and outside nature, protected by technological advancements that supposedly shield us from nature’s demands and vicissitudes. The general narrative is that we are heading into a push-button, voice-activated technocratic paradise. (I think of the various Star Trek television series as popular cultural reflections of this view.)

But, the first pandemic in a century is forcefully and sadly reminding all of us that Darwin was right about our place in the natural world, more specifically, that we will never be outside of it.

That the world is “wildly unprepared” for this pandemic is in part a result of our belief the we are on a separate journey from the rest of the natural world, headed toward a perfected existence in which nature obeys all of our commands and bothers us not at all. Why prepare for something that is merely a product of nature? We have the technology to overcome it, don’t we? There must be a pill, right? Actually, wrong.

Those who understand human vulnerabilities have been sounding the alarm for years. But the idea that our entire way of life could be dramatically disrupted worldwide simultaneously simply was not on the radar of most governments—at least not enough to get them to stockpile even the most basic medical supplies; face masks come to mind.

There is much talk of creating a vaccine and doing it quickly. But such an endeavor can take more than a year and even more time to manufacture and distribute. There is less talk about the unhealthy lifestyles and chronic disease such as heart disease and diabetes that result from that lifestyle which might need to be addressed if we are going to cope better with the world of microorganisms we inhabit. There is even less talk that those at the bottom of the economic ladder are the most vulnerable and that the wealth gap and the gap in access to health care it implies are actually a huge public health problem for all of us.

The very way in which we live—constantly pressing on the edge of wilderness to develop it and exploit it—puts humans potentially in contact with millions of viruses from which will come the next pandemic. And, the next one will likely come much sooner than 100 years from now.

If we continue to think of health as the absence of illness, of illness as something that is prevented by a pill or a shot—and if not ultimately prevented, treated by a pill or a shot—we humans won’t make the necessary changes as a global society to better withstand more frequent pandemics.

Robust health, not techofixes, is the best way to confront the biological perils of the natural world in which we participate. Such a focus would, however, take a complete rethinking of who we humans are, namely, organisms in an environment. Will the coronavirus awaken any more of us to this fact?

Why this Draconian Response to COVID-19?

Posted on March 11, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Jeffrey A. Tucker

Source: Activist Post

Imagine if you are the organizer of a major arts and tech event that attracts a quarter-million attendees. One week out from the conference, the mayor cancels your event. Your event is not named specifically, just that all events involving more than 2,500 people are officially banned. He does this using emergency powers, justified in the name of containing a virus.

And that’s it. This is what happened to South by Southwest, one of the most important events in the world in Austin, Texas, which has thus far not reported a single case of COVID-19. Based on last year’s numbers, It’s the end for:

73,716 conference attendees and 232,258 festival attendees;
4,700 speakers
4,331 media/press attendees
2,124 sessions
70,00 trade show attendees occupying 181,400 square feet of exhibit space
351 official parties and events
612 international acts
1,964 performance acts

Local merchants are devastated. All hotel and flight reservations are lost. It’s a financial calamity for the city (last year brought half a billion dollars for local merchants) and for untold millions of people affected by the abrupt decision.

Draconian, to say the least.

Making matters worse, a vicious and completely false report published by Variety said that the festival was aching for the city to make the call so that the festival could collect insurance money. This turns out to be entirely wrong: South by Southwest had no insurance against infectious disease. It was a smear and response to mass frenzy. After all, a petition on Change.org signed by 55,000 people had demanded the cancellation.

The city acquiesced to the mob. A grand and glorious conference was destroyed – the first of many this season.

Italy now has 16 million people under quarantine, which is to say that they are prisoners.

Anyone living in Lombardy and 14 other central and northern provinces will need special permission to travel. Milan and Venice are both affected. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte also announced the closure of schools, gyms, museums, nightclubs and other venues across the whole country. The measures, the most radical taken outside China, will last until 3 April.

Americans have been quarantined on cruise ships and then forced to pay for their later hospitalization. The government that quarantines you has zero intention to pay the costs associated with your care, to say nothing of the opportunity costs of missing work.

The press isn’t helping. The New York Times has cheered it all on, aggressively advocating that governments go Medieval on this one.

In six months, if we are in a recession, unemployment is up, financial markets are wrecked, and people are locked in their homes, we’ll wonder why the heck governments chose disease “containment” over disease mitigation. Then the conspiracy theorists get to work.

The containment strategy was never debated or discussed. For the first time in modern history, governments of the world have taken it upon themselves to control population flows in the hopes of stemming the spread of this disease – regardless of the cost and with scant evidence that this strategy will actually work.

More and more, the containment response is looking like global panic. What’s interesting, Psychology Today points out, is that your doctor is not panicking:

COVID-19 is a new virus in a well-known class of viruses. The coronaviruses are cold viruses. I’ve treated countless patients with coronaviruses over the years. In fact, we’ve been able to test for them on our respiratory panels for the entirety of my career.

We know how cold viruses work: They cause runny noses, sneezing, cough, and fever, and make us feel tired and achy. For almost all of us, they run their course without medication. And in the vulnerable, they can trigger a more severe illness like asthma or pneumonia.

Yes, this virus is different and worse than other coronaviruses, but it still looks very familiar. We know more about it than we don’t know.

Doctors know what to do with respiratory viruses. As a pediatrician, I take care of patients with hundreds of different viruses that behave similarly to this one. We take care of the kids at home and see them if the fever is prolonged, if they get dehydrated, or if they develop breathing difficulty. Then we treat those problems and support the child until they get better.

Meanwhile, the New England Journal of Medicine reports as follows:

On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%. In another article in the Journal, Guan et al. report mortality of 1.4% among 1,099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.

Slate’s piece on this topic offers more perspective:

This all suggests that COVID-19 is a relatively benign disease for most young people, and a potentially devastating one for the old and chronically ill, albeit not nearly as risky as reported. Given the low mortality rate among younger patients with coronavirus—zero in children 10 or younger among hundreds of cases in China, and 0.2-0.4 percent in most healthy nongeriatric adults (and this is still before accounting for what is likely to be a high number of undetected asymptomatic cases)—we need to divert our focus away from worrying about preventing systemic spread among healthy people—which is likely either inevitable, or out of our control—and commit most if not all of our resources toward protecting those truly at risk of developing critical illness and even death: everyone over 70, and people who are already at higher risk from this kind of virus.

Look, I’m obviously not in a position to comment on the medical aspects of this; I defer to the experts. But neither are medical professionals in a position to comment on the political response to this; mostly they have assiduously declined to do so.

Meanwhile, governments are willy-nilly making drastic decisions that profoundly affect the status of human freedom. Their decisions are going to affect our lives in profound ways. And there has thus far been no real debate on this. It’s just been presumed that containment of the spread rather than the care of the sick is the only way forward.

What’s more, we have governments all-too-willing to deploy their awesome powers to control human populations in direct response to mass public pressure based on fears that have so far not been justified by any available evidence. For this reason, we have every reason to be concerned.

Are we really ready to imprison the world, wreck financial markets, destroy countless jobs, and massively disrupt life as we know it, all to forestall some uncertain fate, even as we do know the right way to deal with the problem from a medical point of view? It’s at least worth debating.

It’s better to focus on where you are going than how you are feeling

Posted on March 1, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Christian Jarrett

Source: aeon

The notion that emotional pain and suffering reflect a deviation from a default happy baseline has been referred to as the ‘assumption of healthy normality’. But it’s a mistaken assumption. Estimates of the lifetime prevalence of psychiatric disorders indicate that around one in two adults will meet the criteria for a mental-health condition at some point in their lives. Given that psychological pain is so ubiquitous, we should focus less on what might make us happy, and more on achieving a sense of meaning, regardless of how we’re feeling. Psychotherapy should help people manage effective functioning while they are distressed, above and beyond aiming to reduce symptoms such as difficult thoughts, emotions and sensations. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) takes this approach, using mindfulness, acceptance and other behavioural strategies to promote more flexible and value-driven behaviours. The goals in ACT are not necessarily to change or reduce one’s problematic thoughts or emotions, but to foster meaningful and effective behaviours regardless of mood, motivation or thinking. In other words, the primary goal is to promote what therapists call ‘valued living’.

Think of valued living as going about your daily life in the service of values that you find important, whereby engaging in these actions creates a sense of meaning and purpose. From an ACT perspective, symptoms of psychiatric disorders, and psychological suffering more broadly, are problematic when they are linked to rigid behaviours that pull us away from valued living. We might not have any control over the pain we experience – in fact, our emotional pain is profoundly human – but one area where we can exert some control is what we do in response to that suffering. Many common responses to difficult thoughts and emotions – such as avoidance, substance abuse, withdrawal and aggression – can alleviate distress in the short term, but also lead to long-term damage in our relationships, our jobs, our freedom and our personal growth – the very areas that provide that sense of meaning and purpose. By letting go of an agenda guided by minimising pain, and recalibrating toward a more value-driven agenda, our choices can be based on who we want to be, rather than how we want to feel.

In their 2013 study, the psychologists Todd Kashdan and Patrick McKnight of George Mason University in Virginia examined the day-to-day relationships between valued living and wellbeing in a sample of individuals with social anxiety disorder. This is a common but debilitating condition that’s marked by intense fear of social situations that might involve being negatively judged by others. People with social anxiety disorder often want and value positive relationships but considerable distress makes them avoid social interactions, so this is an excellent group in which to examine values and meaning.

In the study, participants began by identifying their central aim or purpose in life (eg, ‘trying to be a good role model to others’). Then, each day over the next two weeks, they rated their daily efforts and progress toward this goal, and provided daily ratings of their self-esteem, meaning in life, and experience of positive and negative emotions. On days when they reported investing greater effort toward their main life goal, they also tended to enjoy greater wellbeing: they said their life had more meaning, and they scored higher on self-esteem and the experience of positive emotions. Importantly, support was not found for the reverse path – greater wellbeing did not predict greater effort or progress toward strivings. This study highlights that sometimes we need to make the value-guided choice, regardless of how we feel.

If only it were so easy, though. For this reason, in ACT-based treatments, there is substantial focus on skills and techniques that can assist one in cultivating a more aware, willing and tolerant stance toward difficult feelings and other internal experiences. This stands in explicit contrast to a ‘do X and your distress will alleviate’ approach. The ACT techniques are not in the service of changing emotional states – they are in the service of facilitating valued action.

The effectiveness of ACT across different diagnoses and problem areas shows that committing to the benefits of valued living transcends traditional diagnostic categories. In addition to anxiety disorders, in studies of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and resilience, chronic pain, suicidal ideation and many more, engaging in behaviours consistent with personally held values has been linked to a range of positive outcomes.

Which brings me back to my work as a therapist. While the breadth of exercises and techniques employed in ACT is beyond the scope of this article, there is one exercise I’d like to share that has helped some of my clients see the inextricable link between valued living and painful experiences. In this activity (of which there are different variations), the therapist first asks the client to write on an index card some of the internal experiences they are struggling with most – difficult thoughts and judgments, emotions, memories.

I ask them, what do you notice when you read that index card? I feel awful, I don’t want this. What do you want to do with the card? I want to throw it in the trash. Then the client flips the card over, and I ask them to write out some of the things that are most important, most meaningful to them – being a parent, caring and supporting others, learning, growing, etc. What do you notice when you read this side? Warmth, it feels right, this is who I want to be. Where is the pain, where is the other stuff? Still here, on the other side of the card. What happens if you push that pain away, escape or avoid it? I push the meaningful stuff away too. In your heart of hearts, what does your experience tell you right now? If I’m going to do the things that are important to me, be the person that I want to be, I also have to make room for the painful stuff.

In my experience, this is both an emotionally difficult exercise and also one that helps a person grasp that it’s impossible to disentangle pain and valued living. Sometimes it is hard to engage with those struggles in session, but we regularly return to the rationale of the approach – that maybe a different stance toward pain is necessary. And that is the crux of the work in ACT – opening up to the demons, judgments and suffering that lie underneath, all for the purpose of moving toward that which is meaningful.

The valued path is not necessarily the happy path. Social connectedness sometimes brings us in contact with memories of abuse and trauma. Being a parent stirs up doubts, uncertainty and feelings of anxiety, fear, anger and shame. Advocating for social justice requires repeated exposure to the inequities in our societies and the feelings of helplessness that can come from fighting for an equality that might not exist until after you’re gone. But a growing body of psychological research suggests that the valued path is the more workable one, whereas the happy path can be more of an illusion.

For readers who would like to find out more, I recommend the book Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life (2005) co-authored by the founder of ACT, Steven Hayes, and also Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong (2010) co-authored by another ACT pioneer, Kelly Wilson. And here is the international directory of ACT therapists, maintained by the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science.

Snakes In Suits: Are Psychopaths Running The World?

Posted on February 3, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Alanna Ketler

Source: Collective Evolution

Often when we think of the word psychopath, we think of deranged serial killers that are hopefully locked up in prison for life. While there are many psychopaths who kill for reasons that are unfathomable to most of us and who are indeed in prison, there is an even greater number roaming free in our society and often using their condition to their advantage in any way possible. In fact, it is very likely that you know some–they might even be your colleagues.

Most of us do not know or work with any serial killers, at least not that we are aware of. So, what exactly is a psychopath and how can we define them? The dictionary definition is as follows:

“A person suffering from a chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behavior.”

As you can probably tell, a lot more than just serial killers will fit into this broad definition. In fact, according to Canadian psychologist Dr. Robert Hare, a world-renowned expert on psychopathy, an estimated 1% of the Earth’s population is psychopathic and around 25% of the population of male inmates at federal correctional facilities are psychopathic.

Psychopathic Traits

It is important to note that, in contrast with the popular image of the ‘deranged psycho,’ psychopaths tend to be very well composed, take good care of their appearance and are very charming (think of Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho). Because of this you may have a difficult time spotting them out, as they are masters of deception and are able to fake a lot of the qualities that define regular people. Some other psychopathic traits, according to Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist, are as follows:

Glib and superficial charm
Grandiose estimation of self
Need for stimulation
Manipulative and cunning
Complete lack of remorse or guilt
Pathological lying
Have a parasitic lifestyle, often latching onto and taking from others
Have a history of early behavioral problems
Overly impulsive
Are very irresponsible
Unable to accept responsibility for actions
Unable to commit to long-term relationships
History of juvenile delinquency
Display criminal versatility
Experienced a “revocation of conditional release”
Lacks realistic long term goals
History of promiscuous sexual behavior
Have poor behavioral controls
Are callous and lack empathy
Have a “shallow affect” (psychopaths show a lack of emotion when an emotional reaction is appropriate.)

You can actually rate yourself to find out if you are psychopath. On each criterion, the subject is ranked on a 3-point scale: (0 = item does not apply, 1 = item applies somewhat, 2 = item definitely applies). The scores are summed to create a rank of zero to 40. Anyone who scores 30 and above is most likely a psychopath. Hare has used this test and checklist to detect which inmates are psychopaths.

Snakes In Suits

What many of us may not realize is that psychopaths actually thrive in the corporate world. Hare has actually co-authored a book with Dr. Paul Babiak on this topic entitled, Snakes In Suits: Understanding and Surviving the Psychopaths in Your Office. Psychopaths manipulate others to accrue power, sometimes pitting them against each other in an attempt to divide and conquer. They are often attracted to bigger, dynamic corporations with very little structure or supervision. They generally don’t work well in teams because they don’t like to share information or skills and it brings them joy to watch others fail. They are addicted to power, status and money. Sound familiar?

The corporate world is set up to favor psychopathic traits such as fearlessness, dominant behavior and immunity to stress. Because of this, psychopaths often find themselves in these types of positions, and then have an easier time climbing the corporate ladder and obtaining positions of great power. This is where they can do real damage to society as we see it today.

Are Psychopaths Running The World?

Not only as corporate heads do psychopaths find success in our modern-day society, but also within our governments and political system — often as front-line politicians. This may come as a shock to you, but when you really look at some of the atrocities that are taking place on our planet, and if you’ve ever wondered how things that are so inhumane could actually be happening, well, therein lies part of your answer.

When you consider the war, genocide, senseless murder of civilians, treatment of the indigenous cultures of the world, chemicals in our food, air and water supply, acts of “terrorism”, war crimes and so many other unjust and cruel actions which are often instigated by our political leaders, it becomes easy to see how psychopaths actually fit the requirements for these types of roles quite well. As mentioned before they are masters of deception, pathological liars and often quite charming.

Many soldiers go to war and because they are conditioned to believe that they are fighting an enemy in the name of peace. They do as they are told and commit these heinous acts against other human beings. The reason why so many soldiers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder is because it is not within human nature to murder other humans, and especially innocent civilians.

We already know how many politicians are crooked, but perhaps its time to start looking at them with the psychopath checklist in mind so that we can be better equipped to protect not only ourselves but our society from their malicious acts.

But Can’t We Help Them?

It is natural for anyone who is involved in spiritual work to have compassion for these individuals and feel compelled to help them overcome their psychopathic behavior. However, most research has pointed towards the understanding that psychopaths are born, not made and therefore cannot be cured. This is one of the main differences that separates sociopaths from psychopaths. Another is that sociopaths have a conscience, albeit a weak one, and will often justify something they know to be wrong. By contrast, psychopaths will believe that their actions are justified and feel no remorse for any harm done. Sociopaths are made, and have a higher likelihood of overcoming their current condition. However, many of those with sociopathic behavior will find themselves in similar corporate positions.

Hare’s research discovered that by attempting to heal or help a psychopath, you might actually be strengthening their cunning abilities, as they will find a way to manipulate you into believing that they are remorseful and understand how their actions were wrong.

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