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The Great Climate Global Coup d’état.

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I want to get one thing straight from the outset. Until the emergence of the Covid event I, like millions of other people, was convinced of the veracity of man-made climate change. But around three years ago, I began to re-evaluate my position. After having researched the subject in great detail, I am now convinced that the purpose of the climate change narrative is to fulfill a political agenda.

As is the case with the Covid event, this agenda is about divesting more and more power away from nation states and their citizens to the bloated and corrupt United Nations bureaucracy, which is essentially controlled by the rich and powerful.

The global warming/climate change idea is a project of the (very) elitist Club of Rome, whose members have included Al Gore, Ted Warner, George Soros, Bill Gates and members of the Rockefeller and Rothschild families.

The Club of Rome is the active division of a group of entities serving a globalist agenda, which have played the major part in the establishment of the United Nations, the European Union and NATO. They include the World Economic Forum, the Committee on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission.

The global warming project enables further enrichment of the already very wealthy, through the carbon trading scheme (Al Gore was projected to become the first carbon millionaire). However, United Nations publications such as Agenda 21 make it very clear that climate alarmism has another purpose: to enable and justify expansion of UN bureaucracy, the empowerment of NGOs, inevitably controlled by the globalists, and to control and contain the populace, all in the name of the Earth and the ill-defined ‘sustainability’.

Far from being a conspiracy theory, man-made climate change is actually a proveable conspiracy enacted by a criminal cabal. In the Club of Rome’s own words:

‘‘The Global Warming debate… is a concept by the New World Order to justify the dismantling the industrial society and returning the mass of humanity to obedient serfdom.”

Descent into farce

The climate change descent into farce began around four years ago when the Guardian published a letter entitled, ‘Climate change is real. We must not offer credibility to those who deny it‘, whereby a motley crew of journalists, politicians, activists and academics announced their refusal to debate anthropogenic global warming sceptics: 

”If ‘balance’ means giving voice to those who deny the reality of human-triggered climate change, we will not take part in the debate”, they said.

The reason for this step, we are told, is that on the one hand there is an overwhelming scientific consensus and on the other, that there is a lobby, heavily funded by vested interests, that exists simply to sow doubt to serve those interests.

Apparently, scepticism represents ‘fringe views’ which should be ignored. Giving AGW sceptics a platform is said to be akin to showcasing flatearthers. This is despite the fact that the official position of the Flat Earth Society is that it supports the climate alarmist narrative. (Of course it was sceptics who first argued that the world wasn’t flat).

The purpose of the Guardian letter was to justify the already well-established practice of refusing to engage in debate on man-made climate change, by marginalising and belittling opponents, and to deplatform them.

Because of the shortage of real scientists prepared to put their names to the letter, we had the unedifying spectacle of the likes of Clive Lewis and Peter Tatchell declaring that they are above debating atmospheric physics with scientists of the calibre of  Eric Karlstrom or Nobel Laureate, Ivar Giaever.

This exercise in dishonest narcissism demeans all who have signed or lent their support to it. Academics who speak out against the globalist narrative on climate change do so at the expense of their careers.

As I will show below, counter-arguments from AGW sceptics such as Tim Ball and Mark Steyn, have never been discredited. Of the 15 or so professors who signed the Guardian letter, the majority work in unrelated fields such as economics, law or psychotherapy.

The same applies to others with impressive sounding qualifications – Dr Teresa Belton, for example, wrote her thesis on the effects of television and video on children. In the case of 90% of the signees – academics, journalist, politicians, activists – the very idea that they could sensibly debate with serious climate scientists is ludicrous.

The letter in question comes out of the University of East Anglia and was drafted by Dr Rupert Read, Green Party politician and Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. A large number of signees have connections to the University. 

The UEA is notorious as the centre of the Climategate scandal, whereby emails between scientists at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) and their colleagues around the world revealed a consistent, deliberate effort to skew, hide or destroy data.

James Taylor wrote:

”Three themes are emerging from the newly released emails: Prominent scientists central to the global warming debate are taking measures to conceal rather than disseminate underlying data and discussions. These scientists view global warming as a political ’cause’ rather than a balanced scientific inquiry; and many of these scientists frankly admit to each other that much of the science is weak and dependent on deliberate manipulation of facts and data.”

Dr Eric T. Karlstrom was far less circumspect, describing AGW as a scam:

”Man-made climate change (Anthropogenic Global Warming or AGW) is a scam and a hoax and until the average joe and jane wakes up to the truth this nonsense will continue to corrupt the scientific community, which depends on grants from those same economic and political powers, and more importantly will corrupt politicians worldwide who too are dependent upon them for campaign contributions.”

The climate change project was officially launched in the US on June 23, 1988 when NASA’s James Hansen told a Congressional committee that global warming had begun: that the then-current heat wave in Washington was caused by the relationship between ‘the greenhouse effect and observed warming.

To get the point across, Hansen and sponsor 98ii+68/Senator Tim Wirth chose what promised to be an exceptionally hot day and then sabotaged the air conditioning in the meeting room the night before.

Man-made climate change is one of those plain sight conspiracies like the Covid ‘pandemic’, where the primary movers hardly bother to conceal the contrived nature of the project, or the vast sums of money they make from it.

The Club of Rome in 1990 put out a report called The First Global Revolution saying:

”In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill…”(p. 75).

The motivation, then, was not to solve an urgent problem, but to find a threat, real or not, that would ‘unite’ people. And divert them from real issues.

The Club of Rome, founded in 1967, has been described as being at the apex of the New World Order pyramid. It drives the global climate change project as well being concerned with population control and vaccinations. Members are world leaders and captains of industry, and have included Al Gore, Tony Blair, George Soros and other people you’d buy a used car from.

Anthropogenic Climate Change: the Official Position

The International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) was founded with the task of providing the world with an objective, scientific view of climate change. Major points of its 2007 report are as follows:

  • Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level.
  • Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. Continued GHG emissions at or above current rates would cause further warming.
  • Anthropogenic warming could lead to some impacts that are abrupt or irreversible, depending upon the rate and magnitude of the climate change.

Notable achievements of the UN and its Kyoto Protocol include the creation of an international carbon market.

Scientific rejection of the IPCC’s position

The IPCC’s findings were opposed by scientists worldwide. The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, for example, slammed the IPCC report as ‘dangerous nonsense’  and produced a list of pillars of wisdom to counter the UN IPCC climate report.

Over the past few thousand years, the climate in many parts of the world has been warmer and cooler than it is now. Civilizations and cultures flourished in the warmer periods. A major driver of climate change is variability in solar effects, such as sunspot cycles, the sun’s magnetic field and solar particles. Evidence suggests warming involving increased carbon dioxide exerts only a minor influence.

Since 1998, global temperature has not increased. Projection of solar cycles suggests that cooling could set in and continue to about 2030. Most recent climate and weather events are not unusual; they occur regularly. For example, in the 1930s the Arctic experienced higher temperatures and had less ice than now. Stories of impending climate disaster are based almost entirely on global climate models. Not one of these models has shown that it can reliably predict future climate.

The Kyoto Protocol, if fully implemented, would make no measurable difference to
world temperatures. The trillions of dollars that it will cost would be far better spent on solving known problems such as the provision of clean water, reducing air pollution, and fighting malaria.

Climate is constantly changing and the future will include coolings, warmings, floods, droughts, and storms. The best policy is to make sure we have in place disaster response plans that can deal with weather extremes.

In essence, proponents of the theory of significant anthropogenic climate change need to show two things: There is significant and dangerous global warming and that said global warming is caused by human activity, ie greenhouse gas emissions, primarily co2 emissions. Whereas sceptics need only show one thing: global climate is not significantly or dangerously affected by human activity.

Like all narratives pushed by the powerful onto the masses, the global warming hoax is supported by relentless fallacious argument, so that the public are battered with endless ad hominem, cherry-picking and appeals to authority.

Much of the data is suspect, to put it mildly, and a very large part of the ‘debate’ consists of apocalyptic scenarios, with threats of doom unless the public pours more money into the coffers of those profiting from the carbon hoax.

The Data

Petition Slide01 Warming

[Source of image]

The IPCC’s position is still that there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years, increasing at an exponential rate as we pump more and more CO2 into the atmosphere. Many scientists disagree, pointing to higher temperatures in the 30s, and a cooling since 1998. 150 graphs from 122 scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals indicate modern temperatures are not unprecedented, unusual, or hockey-stick-shaped — nor do they fall outside the range of natural variability.

Data to promote the idea of runaway global warming has been questioned, for example the graphs used by NOAA ( National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and NASA have been shown to have been ‘updated’, as it were.

Temperature Graphs2

In 2015, German professor Dr. Friedrich Karl Ewert accused NASA of ‘Massive’ Temperature Alterations’, i.e. of intentionally and systematically rigging the official government record of global temperatures: ”A comparison of the data from 2010 with the data of 2012 shows that NASA-GISS had altered its own data sets so that especially after WWII a clear warming appears – although it never existed.”

In 2008, the Telegraph reported NASA as claiming October as the hottest on record, by using September figures. The name ‘hockey stick graph’ was coined for figures showing a long-term decline followed by an abrupt rise in temperature, specifically applied to the findings of ‘a little known climate scientist named Michael Mann and two colleagues’ as described here by the Atlantic Council.

HockeystickT_comp_61-90.pdf

Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick obtained part of the programme that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the programme not do conventional principal component analysis but it handles data in such a way that whatever data was fed in, it produced a hockey stick. 

Mann has queried their findings, but refused to provide necessary additional data (McIntyre and McKitrick’s adventures with Mann are described here). Michael Mann has been suing various critics for libel, including Mark Steyn, whose  A Disgrace to the Profession is a compilation of scientific commentary on Michael Mann and his work.

Steyn has also termed Mann a Big Climate huckster), and also emeritus Professor Dr. Tim Ball, who likewise suggested Mann was guilty of data fraud. Mann has been reported as being in contempt of court in the Ball case for failing to provide essential data.

HockeystickT_comp_61-90Tim Ball.pdf

When the promised global warming failed to eventuate, the phrase ‘global warming’ gave way to ‘climate change’. So when cherry-picked claims of extreme heat are met with examples of low temperatures, they are countered with, ‘there you go, extreme climate change!’.Carbon Dioxide.

The cause of ‘runaway global warming’ is, according to alarmists, the production of CO2.  Not carbon monoxide, note, the one that is poisonous (we’re not worried about that), but carbon dioxide, which is necessary for plant life, and which greenhouse owners often add to improve the growth of their vegetables.

Scientists have pointed out in vain that the level of carbon dioxide has been far higher in the past, during the Cambrian period about 18 times higher. Moreover, during the glaciation of the late Ordocivian period, CO2 concentrations were nearly 12 times higher than today, according to one report. This study has similar results.

Winter is Coming

From the early 14th to the mid nineteenth century, Europe and other parts of the world experienced what is called the Little IceAge. It led to much misery, with cold and hunger from the failure of crops, political upheaval, and the decolonisation of Greenland.

In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII recognized the existence of witches and echoed popular sentiment by blaming them for the cold temperatures and resulting misfortunes plaguing Europe. (N.b. Greenland still has not recovered from the Little Iceage). For some years, scientists have been predicting the coming of a new mini-iceage.

In 2009 Professor Henrik Svensmark, Director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Technical University of Denmark, advised that ‘global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning – enjoy global warming while it lasts‘.

The response of British institutions like the Met Office and University of East Anglia has been interesting. In 2012 they released data that showed that the warming trend ended in 1948, but insisted that cooling from natural sources will be offset by carbon emissions.

Climate Alarmism

Evidence of the Earth cooling has not given any pause to alarmist claims of dramatic warming, which have been present from the outset. In 1989 Nasa’s James Hansen was predicting that global temperatures would rise up to 9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050.

In his film An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore warned that increasing carbon dioxide emissions would spur catastrophic global warming that would cause more extreme weather, wipe out cities and cause ecological collapse. (The claims and predictions of An Inconvenient Truth were scrutinised 10 years on by Michael Bastasch in An Inconvenient Review).

In his review of the book that accompanied Gore’s film, Hansen claimed:

”As explained above, we have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions”.

To give a sense of urgency, the global warming threat has been described in the most extravagant terms. Hansen warned of a ‘global warming time bomb’ when he spoke to the Club of Rome in 2009.  The concept of a ‘tipping point’ came into vogue, the peak of climate alarmism.

Marc Morano prepared a full list of apocalyptic declarations,  exclaiming ‘Hours, days, months, years, millennium  – the Earth is serially doomed’. Here are some examples:

It is suggested that the only authentic climate ‘tipping point’ is the one proposed by New Zealand’s Augie Auer, who predicted in 2007 that it was all going to be a joke in five years time. (Auer reckoned without the powerful forces behind the climate hoax.)

The Melting of the Polar Icecaps

Poles 2018-04-10181524_shadow.png

[Source of image: Climate Science In A Death Spiral For At Least 10 Years]

Melting of the icecaps would be a truly dramatic event, a serious indication of warming. Accordingly, climate alarmists have seized on this ‘danger’, in defiance of all the evidence.  In 2007 — during his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech — Al Gore mooted that the northern icecap could be gone by 2014.

One study estimated that [the North polar ice cap] could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. In 2015 NASA data indicated that the polar icecaps were not receding, but in fact growing.

This did not deter Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics at Cambridge University from predicting in 2016 that the icecap at the North Pole would be completely melted in the next year or two, ie by the end of summer 2018 at the latest. Nearly five years on, the Polar caps are still here.

Others are sure that the icecaps will be gone by at least 2050. This view is expounded in an article by Gilbert Mercier, who is sure that by 2100, the countryside will be parched earth and major cities like London and New York will be under water.

Another catastrophist who has repeatedly been proven wrong is Dr. Guy McPherson, Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. McPherson is described in his biography as an ”award-winning scientist and the world’s leading authority on abrupt climate change.”

Recently, McPherson claimed in a podcast that ‘abrupt climate change’ will result in the extinction of humans by 2026. Six years ago, McPherson wrote an article where he made a similar dramatic catastrophic prediction. The article included a timeline for virtual human extinction within 9-33 months from the date the article in question was published.

Conveniently, McPherson deleted the article. However, in a 2018 [Video] McPherson predicted that humans would be extinct by 2028 and that the arctic would be ice-free by 2019.

Disappearing snowfalls

On March 20, 2000, the Independent reported that snowfalls were a thing of the past. ‘Global warming is simply making the UK too warm for heavy snowfalls. ”Children just aren’t going to know what snow is”, they claimed.

The source of these claims was Dr. David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, of Climategate fame. The Independent article appears to be gone from the Web, melted away as it were, but was well reported, and certainly criticised.

Similar false claims were made by arguably the world’s leading climate doomsayer, Al Gore who has reportedly made $330m as a result of advocating on behalf of the alarmist cause. Gore made his fortune when he set up a green investment firm that’s now said to be worth $36bn, paying him $2m a month.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore claimed that Kilimanjaro, Africa’s tallest peak, would be snow free within a decade. In a recent speech at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Gore’s hyperbole was off the scale. In the speech, he warned about ”rain bombs” and ”boiling oceans.”

Gore’s psuedo-scientific hyperbole and the appeals to moral authority championed by his acolytes, have rarely been critiqued by journalists. Meanwhile, catastrophic warnings about the alleged impacts of ‘runaway climate change’ and the moral imperative to act against it, have become normalized across much of the panoply of social media.

Cherry-picking

Apocalyptic predictions are supported by a relentless reporting of supposedly extraordinary events proving a trend towards global warming. The cherry-picking in many cases is both obvious and ludicrous, and often the actual facts open to question.

A few years ago, for example, it was proclaimed that Nawabshah, Pakistan, had provided the hottest shaded temperature ever recorded for a reliable weather station in April, anywhere on Earth. ”It’s only May, and this year is setting new standards in terrifying extreme temperatures”. Coincidentally, it was also recorded that 2018 had the coldest April in the US for 30 years.

At the same time New Zealand and Australia (the Daily Mail always nice pictures, if nothing else) were predicting the coldest winter on record.

Needless to say, these predictions failed to come to pass. It is probable that one could find (or contrive) an extreme temperature somewhere on the globe at any time in history.

The 97% Consensus

The claim of ‘overwhelming scientific consensus’ is long debunked. The much vaunted 97% of the world’s scientists support the AGW thesis seems to be based on a figure of 76 people. In any case, given the huge numbers of scientists who have declared climate alarmism to be a hoax (see, for example, the American petition signed by 31,000 scientists, or this list of 1000 scientists), it is hard to see where this 97% could come from. 

Nonetheless, the consensus claim is a mantra repeated over and over again in the face of unwelcome factual evidence.

One might well ask, who cares?

The argument is an appeal to authority, a red herring fallacy, and the beliefs of a claimed 97% of ‘scientists’ don’t actually change the scientific facts. As often happens with the use of fallacious argument, the premise is completely false as well. It is clear that there has been concerted and substantial opposition from scientists to the AGW narrative and the carbon fraud. Essentially the 97% claim is a bare-faced lie, designed to make sceptics look like loonies.

Over 31,000 American scientists signed a petition in response to the 1997 Kyoto Accord: There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

Attached to the petition is a summary of peer-reviewed research with 132 references. Marc Morano has given a breakdown of more than 1000 international scientists who dissented over man-made global warming claims from 2008 to 2010. Morano refers to, for example:

  • U. S. Senate Minority Report:More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims:  Scientists Continue to Debunk ‘Consensus’ in 2008 & 2009.
  • 712 Prominent scientists from 40 countries signed the Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change, sponsored by the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC). The 2008 declaration states in part, ‘Global climate has always changed and always will, independent of the actions of humans, and carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant but rather a necessity for all life’.
  • In 2009, more than 100 international scientists rebuked President Obama’s view of man-made global warming. The scientists wrote: ‘Mr. President, your characterization of the scientific facts regarding climate change and the degree of certainty informing the scientific debate is simply incorrect.’
  • December 8 2009, an Open Letter to the UN Secretary-General from 166+ scientists declared ‘the science is NOT settled’.
  • 2010, 130 German Scientists called climate fears ‘pseudo religion’ and urged the Chancellor to ‘reconsider’ her views.
  • In 2010, more than 260 scientists who are members of the American Physical
    Society (APS) endorsed the efforts of skeptical Princeton University Physicist Dr.
    Will Happer to substantially amend the APS alarmist statement on man-made
    global warming.
  • A Japan Geoscience Union symposium survey in 2008 showed 90 per cent of
    the participants do not believe the IPCC report.

The prestigious International Geological Congress, dubbed the geologists’ equivalent of the Olympic Games, was held in Norway in August 2008. It prominently featured the voices of scientists sceptical of man-made global warming fears.

This report from the conference, by someone, who does not himself appear to question the AGW narrative declares that ‘skeptical scientists overwhelmed the meeting, with ‘2/3 of presenters and question-askers hostile to, even dismissive of, the UN IPCC’ (full reports here & here ].

Professor Larry Bell of Houston University has also debunked the 97% claim, reporting.

  • A 2010 survey of media broadcast meteorologists conducted by the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication found that 63% of 571 who responded believe global warming is mostly caused by natural, not human, causes. Those polled included members of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the National Weather Association.
  • A more recent 2012 survey published by the AMS found that only one in four respondents agreed with UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims that humans are primarily responsible for recent warming. And while 89% believe that global warming is occurring, only 30% said they were very worried.
  • A March 2008 canvas of 51,000 Canadian scientists with the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysics of Alberta (APEGGA) found that although 99% of 1,077 replies believe climate is changing, 68% disagreed with the statement that ‘…the debate on the scientific causes of recent climate change is settled.’ Only 26% of them attributed global warming to ‘human activity like burning fossil fuels.’ Regarding these results, APEGGA’s executive director, Neil Windsor, commented, ‘We’re not surprised at all. There is no clear consensus of scientists that we know of.’

Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, and supervisor to James Hansen, Dr. John S. Theon has called Hansen an embarrassment, and added himself to the list of NASA scientists who dissent from man-made climate fears. Others include:

  • Aerospace engineer and physicist Dr. Michael Griffin, the former top administrator of NASA,
  • Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology, and formerly of NASA,
  • Geophysicist Dr. Phil Chapman, an astronautical engineer and former NASA astronaut,
  • Award-Winning NASA Astronaut/Geologist and Moonwalker Jack Schmitt,
  • Award-winning NASA Astronaut and Physicist Walter Cunningham of NASA’s Apollo 7,
  • Chemist and Nuclear Engineer Robert DeFayette was formerly with NASA’s Plum Brook Reactor,
  • Hungarian Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA’s Ames Research Center,
  • Climatologist Dr. John Christy,
  • Climatologist Dr. Roy W. Spencer,
  • Atmospheric Scientist Ross Hays of NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility].

Rather than there being a consensus of 97% of scientists who believe in climate alarmism, the opposite is more likely to be true: that 97% of scientists of integrity and without a financial interest believe that AGW alarmism is fraudulent.

The World Climate Declaration

The alarmist narrative took a huge hit in August last year when over 1,100 scientists and professionals put their names to the ‘World Climate Declaration (WCD). The authors, drawn from across the world, led by the Norwegian physics Nobel Prize laureate Professor Ivar Giaever, reject the claim that there is a ‘climate emergency’.

The WCD posit that the ‘scientific consensus’ on man-made climate change is part of a politically-driven media agenda and that grant-dependent academics have degenerated the discipline into a discussion based on beliefs, rather than sound self-critical science.

In particular, the WCD are critical of climate models, noting that they ”are not remotely plausible as global policy tools.” The WCD contend that these models exaggerate the negative effects of carbon dioxide. They instead emphasize that the gas is beneficial for nature and agriculture; that it increases global crop yields, promotes growth in plant biomass and is essential to all life on Earth.

It is also the contention of the WCD that historic climate models have overstated the projected negative impacts of climate change compared to real world events and note that insufficient emphasis is placed on the empirical scientific method. In addition, the WCD declare that there is no statistical evidence that climate change is intensifying hurricanes, floods and droughts, or making them more frequent.

Intimate ties

Investigative journalist and researcher, Whitney Webb, argues that the prevailing AGW consensus is intimately tied to corporate interests embodied in the UN’s annual ‘COP’ gatherings.

Commenting on the recent COP26 event in Glasgow, Webb said:

”COP is about setting up the financial infrastructure for a completely new economic system based on CBDCs and the financialization of ‘natural capital’ and ‘human capital’ into new asset classes. It’s about complete economic domination of the planet, not about ‘saving’ it.”

What Webb evokes is the endless corporate drive to privatise the planet , the tendency for capitalists to seek control of ecosystems as ‘financial assets’, and deny the rights of people around the world to benefit from nature.

Webb highlights how legitimate ecological and environmental concerns are being usurped by a nefarious decades-long Malthusian climate change agenda in the pursuit of profits and population control.

This agenda, identified in the Club of Rome’s The First Global Revolution report, draws parallels with the way in which the Covid event, as Dr Mike Yeadon recently pointed out, has been politically weaponized to engineer societal instability and economic crisis.

Dr Yeadon’s credentials are impeccable. He has a degree in biochemistry and toxicology and a research-based PhD in respiratory pharmacology. He has spent over 30 years leading new medicines research in some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, leaving Pfizer in 2011 as Vice President & Chief Scientist for Allergy & Respiratory, the most senior research position in this field in Pfizer.

Dr Yeadon argues the main reason for the lies about the novel virus is a desire for total predictability and control, with the clearly articulated intention of transforming society.

Yeadon says the intention is to:

”dismantle the financial system through lockdowns and furlough, while the immediate practical goal of lockdown was to provide the causus belli for injecting as many people as possible with materials designed not to induce immunity, but to demand repeat inoculation, to cause injury and death, and to control freedom of movement.”

Yeadon added:

”It’s a huge crime, extensively planned…. I believe that the perpetrators (who could be all or any of Gates, Fauci, Farrar, Vallance, CEPI, EcoHealth Alliance, DARPA and numerous others) planted the controversy about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 .”

Both the climate change and Covid hoaxes are best understood as joint coordinated criminal conspiracies enacted by governments’ who have imposed the policy agenda’s of their private-public policy-making partners. Their purpose is to engender a global coup d’état.

Thanks to Dr Barbara McKenzie at https://barbaramckenzie.wordpress.com/ for her wisdom and courage.

The Mexican Fisherman and the Investment Banker

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Whenever I feel a little low and disillusioned with the world, I often re-read the following parable, the clarity of vision of which seems to put everything neatly into perspective.

Enjoy:

Author Unknown

An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, “only a little while.”

The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish?

The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.

The American then asked: ”But what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The Mexican fisherman said: “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, and stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”

The American scoffed: “I have an MBA from Harvard, and can help you,” he said. “You should spend more time fishing, and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, and eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middle-man, you could sell directly to the processor, eventually opening up your own cannery. You could control the product, processing, and distribution,” he said.

The American added: “Of course, you would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles, and eventually to New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked: “But, how long will this all take?”

To which the American replied: “Oh, 15 to 20 years or so.”

“But what then?” asked the Mexican.

The American laughed and said: “That’s the best part. When the time was right, you would announce an IPO, and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions!”

“Millions – then what?”

The American said: “Then you could retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you could sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play guitar with your amigos.”

Covid and the Re-emergence of Eugenics

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By Daniel Margrain

Nicky Clough visits her mother Pam Harrison in her bedroom at Alexander House Care Home for the first time since the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) lockdown restrictions begin to ease, in London, Britain March 8, 2021. REUTERS/Hannah Mckay

Years before moving towards explicit racial genocide, the Nazis developed the notion of ‘useless mouths’ or ‘life unworthy of life’ to justify the state’s killing of ‘low hanging fruit’ as part of its programme of ‘involuntary euthanasia’. Theorists argued that certain categories of people were nothing but a burden on society and therefore had no ‘right’ to life.

These ideas were a variant of nineteenth century ‘Social Darwinism’ and eugenicist theories, which adapted Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest to describe relationships within society or between nations and races as a perpetual evolutionary struggle in which the supposedly weaker or defective elements were weeded out by the strongest and the ‘fittest’ by natural selection.

Of course there was nothing ‘natural’ about these ideas, or the malignant ways that the Nazis made use of them. In Nazi ideology, the state killing of the disabled, the sick and the mentally-ill was the beginning of a conveyor belt that led to the wholesale extermination of the Jews and ‘inferior races’ during World War II.

Canada

In a shocking recent development, the Canadian government under Justin Trudeau, have explicitly resurrected the involuntary euthanasia idea within the body-politic. The country’s parliament.recently enshrined Medically Assisted Dying (MAID) into Canadian law.

In November last year, Canadian clothes retailer, ‘Simons’, even went as far as to market suicide to sell their products as part of a sweeping effort to introduce medically assisted suicide as a treatment for mental illness and PTSD. In April last year, The Spectator asked why Canada is euthanizing its poor?

“…when the Canadian parliament enacted Bill C-7, a sweeping euthanasia law which repealed the ‘reasonably foreseeable’ requirement – and the requirement that the condition should be ‘terminal’. Now, as long as someone is suffering from an illness or disability which ‘cannot be relieved under conditions that you consider acceptable’, they can take advantage of what is now known euphemistically as ‘medical assistance in dying’ (MAID for short) for free. Soon enough, Canadians from across the country discovered that although they would otherwise prefer to live, they were too poor to improve their conditions to a degree which was acceptable.”

The criteria Canada has used to legalize euthanasia is particularly problematic. It’s no longer required for people in Canada to be in debilitating pain to end their life, but be living in ‘unacceptable conditions’. This doesn’t take into account the fact that many people can’t afford to care for themselves to a standard that’s acceptable.

The UK

Disturbingly, the resurrection of eugenics as state policy is not restricted to Canada. In the UK these kinds of policies began to re-emerge during the Covid era. Increasingly the UK has become a society in which certain categories of people are regarded in principle, if not in practice, as ‘useless eaters’ whose value to society is measured in economic terms on the basis of how ‘productive’ they are and whether they are considered to be an unnecessary and unfair burden on the tax payer.

The main group of people the state have attributed economic value as a category to denote ‘quality of life year‘ needs, are the elderly. The state uses crude mathematical and economic cost-benefit calculations as a formula to determine the value to society of keeping the eldery and others in care alive.

It’s important to understand that the priority of the health care system in the UK is not to prolong life but to maximize profits.

In this sense, the National Health Service bureaucracy is fundamentally no different to a corporation. The purpose of the health care entity is to achieve the financial targets set for it by its political masters in government.

Increasingly, the paradigm of the UK health care system is shifting from a focus on ensuring patients are kept alive as long as possible, to how many patients can be saved on the basis of cost-effectiveness.

Care has become less about providing a service to those in need based on the notion of reciprocity, to one based upon the ability to pay for it. Those in care, in other words, are viewed less as ‘patient’s’ but more as ‘customers’ or ‘commodities’.

Psychopathic

The NHS bureaucracy, like the corporation, functions in a systematic way without empathy in much the same way a psychopath does.

So if the health care bureaucracy of the UK state does not provide an unconditional duty of care to citizens in need at the end of their life, what basis, if at all, is it obliged to do so?

Furthermore, who decides what patients doctors and nurses continue to persevere caring for and who makes the call about which patients to give up on?

Could a possible clue to the conundrum be established in the contents of an NHS clinical score-card called a Frailty Toolkit?

The Frailty Toolkit which states that ”people with severe frailty can be moving towards the end of life”, is one basis upon which a judgement to end a patients life is made. But who is being scored and for what reason, is not made clear in the NHS documentation.

The Frailty Toolkit, it would appear, has the ability to trigger a Anticipatory Care Planning (ACP) Pathway for elderly people who might of, for example, become frail as a result of an accident or fall.

ACP appear to be a mechanism for doctors to initiate do-not-resuscitate orders against patients or to push them into end of life care pathway’s.

These kinds of decisions are no longer made by spouse, parents or siblings. On the contrary, if it is deemed the patient is reaching the end of their life, it is solely a doctor who ultimately makes the final decision whether a patient lives or dies.

Ending a patient’s life is predicated, not on any concern the doctor has for the feelings, needs or demands of the patient or their loved ones, but from the perspective of the patient as a customer.

This is not to suggest that doctors who work within a bureaucratic system like the NHS are necessarily psychopathic, but rather, to recognise that the only reason they command such a position of responsibility and power is because of their willingness to enforce harmful government protocols against patients in their ‘care’.

But it’s not only employees of the health care bureaucracy who enforce the dictats of the state. Governments’ are also subject to imposing the policy agenda’s of their private-public policy-making partners at the top of the global chain.

During the Covid era, the health policy agenda’s of these private-public policy-making partners were distributed to the UK government and others by transnational institutions like the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organisation.

These health policy agenda’s are formulated into policy-specific protocols which, in the case of the UK health care system, determine the life and death decisions of patients. These protocols are based on economic ‘quality of life years‘ and other factors such as how many beds are needed and what the overall government policy is towards death at any given moment.

It is now indisputable that the private-public agenda at the top that guided socially and economically damaging Covid policy was based on a series of falsehoods and fear-mongering exaggerations.

For example, highly innaccurate catastrophic Covid death toll projections by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Neil Ferguson at Imperial College, London, were used as justifications by the UK government to introduce lockdown restrictions. These measures resulted in a decline in the educational attainment levels of the most disadvantaged children, the exacerbation of many pre-existing medical conditions and the closure of numerous small and medium-sized businesses.

All of this damage to the fabric of society was totally unnecessary because Covid was no more deadly than the flu. As the most reliable, robust meta analyses on Covid infection fertality rates conducted by Stanford medicine professor Dr. John Ioannidis confirms, the median infection fatality rate (IFR) is 0.035 per cent for those aged 0-59. This cohort represent 86 per cent of the global population. In other words, the survival rate for 6.8 billion people across the world who were infected with Covid in 2021 was 99.965 per cent.

We also know that the ‘vaccines’ are doing more harm than good.to the point that Denmark have suspended them all for under forties and that the UK suspended Astra Zenica for under thirtees.

Hastening of deaths

From a UK government perspective, a key aim of the Covid agenda created by global private-public policy-makers, through protocol’s, is to ensure the hastening of deaths of ‘unworthy’ patients in hospitals and care homes.

Former Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, oversaw this process on mass during the Covid era in the wake of the state’s implementation of mandates. These mandates meant that people were forbidden to visit their elderly loved ones in hospitals and care homes.

All mandates were a violation of fundamental civil liberties and.based on falsehoods sold to the public as ”the science”.

As Health Secretary, Matt Hancock was directly responsible for thousands of deaths in care homes. On the 19th March 2020, a directive was sent out to the NHS, with Hancock’s authorisation, instructing hospitals to discharge all patients into care homes who were deemed to not require a hospital bed.

In the same month, Hancock oversaw the procurement of two years’ worth of the death-row drug, Midazolam from France that were administered to patients in these homes.

It is clear that Hancock displayed gross negligence after formulating these policies.

Data taken from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows us that during April 2020 there were 26,541 deaths in care homes, an increase of 17,850 on the five-year average.

This litany of tragedies appear less like ‘mistakes’ and more like ‘deliberate killings’ by the state.

The Liverpool Care/Gosport End of Life Care Pathway’s

Another example of systematic killing by the state that preceded the Hancock scandal, but is very much tied in with it, were the deaths resulting from the Liverpool Care Pathway programme. The LCP was set up precisely to facilitate state employee enforcement of whatever policies or protocols psychopaths in government such as Hancock decide to adopt at any given time.

The LCP was banned after it was discovered that doctors and nurses responsible for enforcing the LCP protocol were killing their patients.using a combination of Madazolam and Morphine. The former acts as a respiratory repressant, induces amnesia and increases suggestibility, whilst the latter suppresses the pain of being unable to breath as patients slowly die.

Despite this scandal, however, the protocol effectively remains in place, having been adopted in every hospital throughout the UK and enforced as policy by employees of the state.

Doctors and nurses continue to administer a similar combination of drugs on vulnerable patients that restrict breathing.

Four years ago, a criminal inquiry was launched into into the deaths of hundreds of patients at Gosport War Memorial hospital in Hampshire between 1987 and 2001. The re-branded end of life care pathway protocol at Gosport which also involved state employees administering death-row drugs to vulnerable patients, resulted in 456 deaths.

Given what we know happened at the LCP, is the Gosport ELCP scandal part of a much wider pattern of systematic killing of end of life patients happening in hospitals throughout the country as yet unreported?

This seems likely. The implementation of national protocols that came into force during the early days of Covid, recommend that nurses and doctors administer at least five times the amount of Midazolam and Morphine than was previously recommended.

Every single patient in the UK, including disabled children, who are put on a ELCP DNR order, written by a doctor, are given this high dosage Midazolam and Morphine combination.

NHS documentation confirms that a DNR, or otherwise known as a DNACPR order, can be made by a doctor without the patient’s agreement. The sole purpose is to illegally hasten the patient’s death.

Other dangers

There is further disturbing evidence that blanket DNRs are being issued to patients by doctors including to those with learning difficulties. There is also anecdotal evidence which suggests that the issuing of blanket DNRs more broadly to other groups could be standard practice among doctors.

Recently, a viewer to UK Column, called Kelly, discovered that a DNR order had been slapped on her grandmother. Kelly said that neither her grandmother or any other family members had been informed of the decision to issue her with a DNR which happened after the latter was discharged from a short-stay hospital visit.

Kelly claimed that the doctor who signed the DNR hadn’t seen, or examined, her grandmother in over two years and that the DNR was predicated on a false diagnosis of her condition. There appeared to have been no communication or checks and balances in place or any indication that the doctor had abided by any of the obligations to the patient stated in the NHS DNR guidance information.

Although thankfully, the DNR decision was eventually rescinded, the issue does raise some serious questions, not least in relation to the lack of transparency between the bureaucracy of the state and the public who fund it. But most shocking of all, is the indifference of the medical profession to questions around euthanasia and eugenics in the post-covid world.

Since the Covid event there has been a noticeable increase in the corporate media’s endorsement of euthanasia and their lobbying for change to legalize the practice. The Canadian case study illustrates the potential dangers that result from legalization where all manner of social inequalities come into effect.

What happens, for example, in a situation in which poverty leads to mental illness in a context where the state uses economic calculations to determine whether people are no longer deemed to be worthy of life?

If, according to the state, the only value people bring to society is economic value, then those who don’t conform to that specific notion, can be determined by the aformentioned state to be unworthy of life.

There is a huge concern about the ability of the state to use this kind of crude quality of life calculation to legitimize the deliberate killing of huge amounts of people in a way that, as I have stated, is arguably already happening in hospitals and care homes throughout the country.

The Canada and UK examples act as a timely reminder that Nazi Germany was not the only country to categorize certain peoples according to strictly utilitarian notions of their perceived usefulness to society.

The Scorpion and the Frog

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By Daniel Margrain

Image result for scorpion and the frog, pics

In the famous anti-capitalist fable, a scorpion, eager to get to the other side of a stream and unable to swim, pleads with a frog to allow him to ride on his back, across the stream.“Certainly not,” said the frog. “You would kill me.”

“Preposterous!,” replied the scorpion. “If I stung you, it would kill the both of us.”

Thus assured, the frog invited the scorpion to climb aboard. Sure enough, halfway across, the scorpion delivered the fatal sting.

“Now why did you do that?” said the frog. “You’ve just signed our death warrants.”

“I am a scorpion,” he replied, “this is what I do.”

Bukharin

A century ago, the Russian Nicolai Bukharin argued that the growth of international corporations and their close association with national states hollows-out parliaments. The power of private lobbying money draws power upwards into the executive and non-elected parts of the state dominated by corporations.

The growing concentration and internationalization of capital causes economic rivalries among firms to spill over national borders and to become geopolitical contests in which the combatants call on the support of their respective states.

As professor Alex Callinicos put it:

“The… system embraces geopolitics as well as economics, and…the competitive processes….involve not merely the economic struggle for markets, but military and diplomatic rivalries among states.”

In refining Bukharin’s classical theory, Callinicos argues that capitalist imperialism is constituted by the intersection of economic and geopolitical competition which, if left unchallenged, will lead to the death of democracy and, ultimately, the capitalist system itself.

What corporations do is strive to maximize the returns on the investments of their shareholders.

As Milton Friedman put it:

“The social responsibility of business is to increase profits.”

If corporations are unconstrained by law or regulation, they can, by simply “doing what they do”, suck the life out of the economy that sustains them. Like cancer cells, lethal parasites, and the scorpion, unconstrained corporations can destroy their “hosts,” without which they cannot survive, much less flourish.

Society and the environment to the corporations are what the frog is to the scorpion. Corporate CEOs, together with governments, compete against each other, globally, for the limited resources of the planet.

While the actions of the corporations are beneficial to their CEOs and shareholders, they have detrimental impacts for humanity and society as a whole.

Marx and the contradictions of capitalism

In his analysis of the capitalist system over a century-and-a half ago, Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto articulated the processes that were to lead to the growth of the corporations:

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere” he said.

Marx describes, insightfully and powerfully, the workings, impulses and aggressive dynamism of an economic system in which the units of production increase in size and where their ownership becomes increasingly concentrated.

It takes an effort on the reader’s part to remember that the passage quoted above was written before the search for oil absorbed the Middle East transforming it into a contemporary battlefield, or that globalization began stamping its mark on a thousand different cultures. 

Marx described the ruling class as a “band of warring brothers” in constant competition with each other – giving the system a relentless drive to expand.

As Marx wrote in Capital:

“Fanatically bent on making value expand itself, he (the capitalist) ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake.”

Marx’s dialectical understanding of how the capitalist system works, has contemporary relevance in terms of his explanation of the growth of the corporation and its competitive drive to extract resources. Left to it’s own devices, the corporation under capitalism, like the scorpion, will ultimately end up destroying its host.

‘Foolish’ altruism

In the frog/scorpion fable, the frog had absolutely nothing to gain by carrying the scorpion to safety. From the perspective of the cynical outsider, the frog’s altruism is foolish because he would have lived had he not assisted the scorpion. Similarly, society, the environment and, indeed, the planet have nothing to gain by being accommodating to the corporation.

To some, altruistic acts are consistent with the adage, “No good deed goes unpunished.” But this cynical perspective is predicated on a lack of mutual trust between two parties. Because the frog believed the scorpion when he said it was irrational to kill him, any intention to find a way to defect earlier than the scorpion, hadn’t formed a part of the frogs reasoning.

The frog’s actions were based purely on good faith and the acceptance of basic norms of behaviour. A rational approach in which both parties were set to benefit was understood by the frog to be a given. The frog hadn’t accounted for the fact that the scorpion was compelled to act in the way he did.

Just as the scorpion is compelled to kill the frog, there is a compulsion for corporations under capitalism to ‘externalize’ their costs onto the environment and society in order to maximize profits.

Prisoner’s Dilemma

The frog and scorpion fable is sometimes portrayed as a Prisoner’s Dilemma. In international political theory, the Prisoner’s Dilemma is often used to demonstrate the coherence of strategic realism. This holds that in international relations, all states (regardless of their internal policies or professed ideology), will act in their rational self-interest given international anarchy.

A classic example is an arms race like the Cold War. During the Cold War the opposing alliances of NATO and the Warsaw Pact both had the choice to arm or disarm. From each side’s point of view, disarming whilst their opponent continued to arm would have led to military inferiority and possible annihilation.

Conversely, arming whilst their opponent disarmed would have led to superiority. If both sides chose to arm, neither could afford to attack the other, but at the high cost of developing and maintaining a nuclear arsenal. If both sides chose to disarm, war would be avoided and there would be no costs.

This kind of reasoning in international relations also applies, for example, to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine of ‘pre-emptive retaliation’. This concept expresses nothing other than a strategy based on defecting early and decisively, even though such an action is highly irrational.

Zelensky’s recent provocation in which he urged NATO to pre-emptively attack Russia with nuclear weapons is an illustration of extreme irrational, psychopathic and narcissistic behaviour. Rather than indicating any willingness to negotiate a peaceful settlement, Zelensky appears compelled to want to destroy humanity.

Is Portugal’s ‘White Card Initiative’ Set to Become Another Psy-Ops?

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By Daniel Margrain

Fans of women’s football in Portugal would have been aware that the attendance at the recent Benfica-Sporting Lisbon match was the highest in the history of the game in that country.

But the match was also significant in another way. Those who saw the game would likely to have witnessed medical personnel running to the aid of a fan who had collapsed in the stadium in Lisbon. After the medics attended to the fan, the referee proceeded to brandish them with a white card.

For all those directly involved, the incident was undertaken in the spirit of comradeship and good will for which it was intended. Fans and players alike applauded and cheered the actions of the referee and medical staff after the white card was brandished.

In conjunction with the more traditional red and yellow cards, white cards have been embraced by the Portuguese Football Federation (FPF) in their tournaments. If ‘successful’, the white card initiative could eventually be rolled-out globally.

The use of white cards denote acts of fair play during games. By contrast, yellow and red cards are used by referees to discipline players and coaching staff for varying degrees of misconduct.

On the surface it would appear that the addition of the white card in the armoury of the referees toolkit can only be a good thing.

But when you dig deeper, and understand the history of psychological operations utilized by nation states against their domestic populations, and the fact that football commands a phenomenal global audience, it is possible to envisage that the Portugese experiment could potentially lead to something much more sinister.

The public is being gaslighted into believing that the natural human reaction of coming to the assistance of somebody in distress now needs to be sanctified by a white card to denote virtue.

For anybody who has nefarious intent, there is arguably no better vehicle with which to sell an agenda than professional football. We can already see, through ostensibly anti-racism initiatives in football like the ‘Black Lives Matter‘ and ‘Taking the Knee‘ phenomena, the processes by which the state uses sophisticated psychological techniques to drive wedges between communities in order to control them.

Professional football players know that the consequences of refusing to participate in these kinds of ‘group-think’ actions would result in them being ostracized by their clubs and the media. We have already witnessed similar kinds of social pressures to comply to the dictates of the state during the Covid period.

Could the white card initiative be the latest in a long line of globalist-led psy-ops intended to manipulate the public into complying to their nefarious demands?

If that is indeed the case, then the psychology underpinning the initiative in Portugal would essentially be similar to what we now know was the UK strategy adopted during the Covid event.

This is how the psy-ops works:

The red card denotes ‘exceptionally bad’ behaviour resulting in a players dismissal from the field of play. The yellow card denotes ‘bad’, but less serious, behaviour. By contrast, the white card denotes ‘good’ behaviour worthy of a ‘reward’.

It is not difficult to see how the psychology that underlies the use of the three cards described above, currently plays out in relation to the authoritarian Chinese-style digital social credit system.

For example:

‘Exemplary behaviour’ agreeable to the state would be advantageous to ones credit score, the equivalent of receiving a white card. 

Undertaking an action that the state regards as disagreeable, serious enough to reduce ones credit score, would be the equivalent of a yellow card.

Activities that the state regards as ‘criminal’ and worthy of a loss of social credits limiting the ability to access money and public services, would deemed to be the equivalent of a red card. 

In the UK, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) influences the government in terms of its behavioural strategies. During the Covid ‘pandemic’ the group engaged in unethical behavioural ‘nudge’ techniques to persuade millions of people to wear ineffective masks, abide by damaging lockdowns and inject potentially lethal toxins into their bodies.

SAGE managed to achieve this feat under the guise that it was in societies ‘best interests’ for it to do so, and that the ‘reward’ for complying would be a re-establishment of the public’s freedoms and liberties, equivalent to being issued with a white card.

The notion that the state ‘rewards’ what it considers to be ‘good’ behaviour, whilst punishing what it regards as ‘bad’ behaviour, raises ethical questions about how far nation states, more broadly, are prepared to go in terms of their ability to psychologically ‘nudge’ people in certain nefarious directions that they nonetheless regard as desirable.

Given the context described, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the psychological weaponization of the white card initiative is the latest example of a ‘nudge’ technique designed to engender social conformity and obedience to authority.

More specifically, it’s also reasonable to assume that the UK state might want to psychologically exploit the use of white cards as a tool of compliance in preparation for their proposed implementation of the kind of authoritarian Chinese-style digital social credit system highlighted previously.

From the perspective of power, what better way to psychologically manipulate the public than through the ‘bread and circus’ prism of the world’s most popular spectator sport? 

My argument is not that positive reinforcement can be a good thing for society. On the contrary, it certainly can be. But I don’t believe for one second that a government that locked us down for no good reason, nudged us to wear masks for no good reason and coerced us into taking an experimental injection for no good reason, is a government motivated by altruism.

No Time to Wait: The Climate Apocalypse Illusion

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By Daniel Margrain

Climate activist, Mike Hudema, recently tweeted the following in response to a CNN report:

”An iceberg the size of London has broken off the Antarctic ice shelf. There is no time to wait. We must #ActOnClimate.”, he said. 

Another activist commenting on the CNN report, remarked:

”This is a grave reminder that climate change is happening now, and it’s happening faster than we anticipated. We must take meaningful action to reduce our emissions and limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

What both activists failed to acknowledge is that the article went on to state:

”This calving event has been expected and is part of the natural behavior of the Brunt Ice Shelf. It is not linked to climate change.’‘

The natural event described was confirmed by Glaciologist, Dominic Hodgson, who said that ”Ice separation naturally occurs in this part of Antartica.”

On the same day, Dr. Guy McPherson, Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, who is described in his biography as an ”award-winning scientist and the world’s leading authority on abrupt climate change,” claimed in a podcast that ”abrupt climate change will result in the extinction of humans within three years.”

Six years ago, McPherson wrote an article where he made a similar dramatic catastrophic prediction. The article included a timeline for virtual human extinction within 9-33 months from the date the article in question was published. Conveniently, the professor has since deleted the article.

According to McPherson, then, humanity should have been extinct three years ago at the latest. Apparently, it hadn’t occured to this ‘expert’ on human extinction, that researchers wouldn’t have had the temerity to recall his previous fearmongering claim.

Heads above the parapet

Thankfully, scientists in increasing numbers have been prepared to stand up against the prevailing climate narrative in a similar way that the Great Barrington Declaration declared a challenge to the scientific consensus about lockdowns, and the flawed modelling that was used by governments’ to justify them.

The alarmist narrative began to collapse in earnest from August last year when over 1,100 scientists and professionals put their names to the ‘World Climate Declaration (WCD). The authors, drawn from across the world, led by the Norwegian physics Nobel Prize laureate Professor Ivar Giaever, reject the claim that there is a ‘climate emergency’.

The WCD posit that the ‘scientific consensus’ on man-made climate change is part of a politically-driven media agenda and that grant-dependent academics have degenerated the discipline into a discussion based on beliefs, rather than sound self-critical science.

In particular, the WCD are critical of climate models, noting that they ”are not remotely plausible as global policy tools.”

The WCD contend that these models exaggerate the negative effects of carbon dioxide. They instead emphasize that the gas is beneficial for nature and agriculture; that it increases global crop yields, promotes growth in plant biomass and is essential to all life on Earth.

It is also the contention of the WCD that, historically, climate models have overstated the projected negative impacts of climate change compared to real world events and note that insufficient emphasis is placed on the empirical scientific method.

In addition, the WCD declare that there is no statistical evidence that climate change is intensifying hurricanes, floods and droughts, or making them more frequent.

Gore and Greta

Arguably, the world’s leading climate doomsayer and establishment critic of the WCD thesis, is Al Gore. The former US vice president has reportedly made $330m as a result of advocating on behalf of the alarmist cause. Gore made his fortune when he set up a green investment firm that’s now said to be worth $36bn, paying him $2m a month.

In a recent speech at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Gore’s hyperbole was off the scale. In the speech, he warned about ”rain bombs” and ”boiling oceans.”

Much of what Gore had to say is indicative of the kind of moral posturing synonymous with ‘climate justice’ often expressed by delegates at COP climate summits.

Gore’s psuedo-scientific hyperbole and the appeals to moral authority championed by his acolytes, have rarely been critiqued by journalists. Meanwhile, catastrophic warnings about the alleged impacts of ‘runaway climate change’ and the moral imperative to act against it, have become normalized across the entire panoply of social media.

Climate activist, Greta Thunberg has become the leading moral crusader and public face of a fear-based climate cult whose disciples have become besotted by her every utterance and stage managed media appearance.

In September, 2019, Greta announced to the world, that ”We are at the beginning of a mass extinction.”

This was probably the moment when the idea of catastrophic climate change became cemented into the public consciousness and when fear and emotion overrode rationality and reason.

Almost certainly, her speech marked an emotional call to action of a kind that had never been heard up until this point.

Greta won’t be the last celebrity to utilize a narrative of fear in this way. But it’s unlikely that others following in Greta’s footsteps will be able to successfully galvanize young people in the furtherance of a nefarious global political agenda the way Greta has.

The key question, is what lies behind the alarmist agenda?

Ehrlicht and Malthus

Essentially, climate change ‘science’ has morphed into a political project, underpinned ideologically by Malthusian eugenics and the science of control. The aim of those who support this agenda is to reduce the global population under the guise of saving the planet.

While much of the public are now familiar with the manipulation of predictive modelling during the Covid event, Malthusian ideology has been the catalyst driving the agenda of elite power for the better part of a century.

Biologist, Paul Ehrlich, has been a historically key figure in helping to spearhead and popularize the man-made global warming hypothesis. Even though his dire anti-humanist prophecies that underpin it have been repeatedly proven wrong, Ehrlich, regularly gets invited on to mainstream TV programmes to promulgate his nonsense as if he was an expert.

Last month, Ehrlicht appeared on the US show, ‘Sixty Minutes’ where he made the bold claim that ”Humanity is not sustainable.”

Fifty eight years ago, the same Ehrlicht exclaimed, ”We are very close to a famine disaster in the United States”…and…”in the next fifteen years the end will come.”

Ehrlicht added, ”And by that I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

If this wasn’t embarrassing enough, the biologist also claimed that by the end of the last century, ”England will not exist because of climate change.”

The editor of Human​Progress​.org, Marian Tupy, has posited the reason why Ehrlicht has been able to pursuade a huge swath of the public that his dire prophecies have legitimacy:

”If you sell the apocalypse”, says Tupy, ”people feel you are deep and that you care. But if you are selling rational optimism, you sound uncaring.”

According to Tupy, Ehrlicht underplays the capacity for human beings to innovate, viewing them as a hinderence to nature rather than being part of a potentially holistic solution to an environmentally-degredated planet. The truth is, the positive notion that humans are helping nature isn’t consistent with a message predicated on panic that has culminated in the fact that four in ten young adults fear having children.

Super Abundance

Tupy’s book, ‘Super Abundance‘, shows that, counter-intuitively, population growth is beneficial for both humanity and the environment. Humans grow stuff. They don’t only consume it.

”What matters is new knowledge. Think about something as simple as sand. When we started melting down sand to create glass, we used it for glass beads or jars. But now we are using glass in fibre optic cables and microchips. Similar innovations occur in farming, transportation and genetic engineering”, says Tupy. This has resulted in an abundant natural world.

Take forests as an example. Tupy points out that, contrary to alarmist propaganda, ”forests have grown by thirty-five per cent in North America and Western Europe over the last twenty years.” Consequently, populations have found new and innovative ways to produce more food on less land.

Autonomous humans who are encouraged to make genuinely democratic and rational decisions will enhance the environment because they are an integral part of, not separate from, other species in nature who inhabit the same planet.

Climate fatalists, like Ehrlich, Gore and Thunberg, on the other hand, take the opposite view, positing that the planet is in danger and needs to be saved from humanities inherently destructive and ‘intruding’ overpopulating footprint.

Japan

These harbingers of doom and gloom must of been deliriously happy at news eminating from Japan last week. Time Magazine reported Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s claim that his country is on the brink of catastrophe due its contracting workforce, ageing population and low birth rates.

“Our nation is on the cusp of whether it can maintain its societal functions,” Kishida said as he announced last-ditch policy measures to increase the birth rate. He added, “It is now or never.”

The fatalists are hoping for the latter. They view any form of societal collapse as a price worth paying to ‘save the planet.’

The author of the Time Magazine piece, Ciara Nugent, is ‘on message’ with the alarmist perspective. ”Never, might be best,” she said.

Nugent’s sentiment is expressed more widely within the legacy liberal-left media and political establishment. These bulwarks of anti-humanism were also complicit in ensuring that governments’ implemented Covid lock down policies and, by extension, the inevitable societal destruction that developed in their wake.

It is surely no coincidence that liberal-left website, Medialens, who claim to ”correct for the distorted vision of the corporate media,” but who are nonetheless sympathetic to the prevailing alarmist orthodoxy, have remained silent with regards to the societal damage that the political response to Covid is causing.

The role played by climate activists and their media and political adjuncts in perpetuating fear is a crucial part of the armoury of the global powers to ‘sell’ their Malthusian and population control agenda to the public in a more palatable form. A key way that this is achieved is by couching climate in the language of ‘sustainable development’.

This strategy, however, has all the hallmarks of a new form of colonialism. Positive responses to climate action create relationships of dependency, that undermine the true interests of the colonized.

The Club of Rome

Commentator Hugo Kruger, points out that the Malthusian depopulation concept, promoted by The World Economic Forum, under the leadership of Klaus Schwab, is deep rooted in the colonialist project, manifested most recently as the ‘climate crisis.’

‘The Club of Rome, founded by the Italian Peccei Family in 1968 in David Rockefeller’s Italian Estate. Peccei was invited by Schwab to make the keynote speech at the 1973 World Economic Forum. After their “Limits to Growth Scenario” prediction that the world will be overpopulated and run out of resources failed, the focus shifted to emissions.’

Kruger continues:

In 1992, the Club of Rome released its book ‘The First Global Revolution’, which says:

“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.”

To this extent, groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, as well as prominent activists like Greta Thunberg, Naomi Klein and George Monbiot, have failed to grasp the dark side of the movement and what drives it.

Hugo Kruger, writes:

”Western intellectuals, with a few exceptions, have been blind spotted into giving the IPCC their unconditional support for the ‘Global Warming Alarm’. As the physicist Denis Rancourt argued in 2010, they look for comfortable lies so that they can settle into and feel good about themselves while ignoring actual environmental problems. Climate Change is the elite’s ‘Opium of the Masses’ and, as occurs all too often with religion, hucksters, fraudsters, tyrants and the ring leaders are quick to exploit the naivety of those with sincere convictions.”

Predicated on ludicrous armageddon forecasts and the unwitting actions of climate activists, the media and political establishment are exploiting the legitimate concerns the public have over environmental issues to weaponize and help push through a nefarious global societal command and control agenda.

Propaganda In the Age of Eternal War and ‘Pandemics’

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By Daniel Margrain

The rolling media coverage of major events, including wars, are often accompanied by predictable rhetorical flourishes across what passes for the ‘mainstream’ political and media spectrum. Politician’s, newspaper editors and media pundits invariably invoke war in a jingoistic way in an attempt to garner popularity and to sell copy, especially if the justification given to go to war is to ‘defeat terrorism’.

The relationship between war and terrorism is actually symbiotic only made distinguisable by the uneven relations of power that these different terms imply. Actor Peter Ustinov’s famous remark: ‘Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich’, highlights this uneven power relationship.

Following every terrorist atrocity or war crime committed by ‘official enemies’ the same words of condemnation are wheeled out time and time again by media pundits and politician’s. ‘Terrorism must be defeated’. they say. Warfare, they almost always assert will defeat it as if it’s possible for ideologies to be defeated at the point of a gun.

If the intention of the security services is to prevent terrorism, and the aim of politician’s and journalists is to end wars that are often their catalyst, then all three have utterly failed.

Even though these failures are undeniable and obvious to everybody with a functioning brain, the global slump of the security services have set a net so wide that millions of names have been added to their digital database.

The purpose of creating a wide net in this way is essentially two-fold: to create the illusion that something substantially significant is being done to combat it and to exaggerate, and give credence to, perceived threats.

Indeed, from the perspective of politicians and legacy media, terrorists, particularly Islamists, are deemed to constitute an ubiquitous presence in a society where ‘civilizing’ and democratic values are characterized as being at the heart of the fight against the forces of reaction and irrationality.

But given that this notion ignores an important historical context, it reflects only a partial truth. The concept that underpins perpetual warfare invoked, for example, by the Project for the New American Century is the catalyst for both the US-led slaughter in Iraq from which emerged al-Qaeda and ISIS, and the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York that preceded it.

The PNAC eternal warfare rhetoric took a new turn more recently during a speech given at Davos by NATO Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg. During the WEF panel discussion Stoltenberg incredulously intimated that the creation of a wilderness in Russia resulting from NATO bombs was the potential precursor to ‘peace’.

Stoltenberg’s reference to the subjugation of a version of Russia that the public have been propagandized to fear, primarily at the behest of US geopolitical strategic interests, is a key factor behind NATO’s war drive against that country.

The Western media’s demonization of independently-funded commentators who question war narratives, particularly in relation to the geopolitical imperatives that drive them, and the extent to which the concentration/centralisation and integration of corporate and state power transform into military rivalries among nation-states, represents another component in the psy-ops used against the public.

A third dimension in this psychological operation, relates to the efforts of the state to engender a climate of fear around the alleged ‘threat’ to public health caused by the Covid ‘pandemic’. In reality no such threat existed.

It was confirmed in the UK as early as March ’20, for example, that Covid-19 was no longer considered a high consequence infectious disease. The most reliable, robust meta analyses on Covid IFR, conducted by Stanford medicine professor Dr. John Ioannidis, reports a median IFR of 0.035 per cent for those aged 0-59, which represent 86 per cent of the global population.

The events thus described, when taken together, are indicative of attempts by governments’ and their institutions to engender fear and curtail fundamental civil liberties and freedoms of expression. These attacks by the state are indicative of a transnational technocratic system of authoritarianism and neo fuedal control. Transhumanism, eugenics, social credit scoring and Central Bank Digital Currencies are the embodiment of this authoritarianism and control.

Whether it’s questioning the ‘scientific’ premise on which Covid policy is formulated, challenging assumptions as to why terrorists commit their heinous acts or questioning the actions of Zelensky in Ukraine, expressing ‘uncomfortable’ ideas is becoming increasingly ‘out of bounds’.

The focus of the state appears to be more about targetting people on the assumption that a crime will be committed based on certain thought processes, rather than getting to the truth or uncovering evidence of events as they unfold.

Indeed, under the specious pretext of preventing harm to children and others, the intention of the UK government’s proposed on-line safety legislation and Police Bill is to arrest people, not only for forms of public protest that fail to meet the limited strictures set down by the state, but also for perceived ‘thought crimes’. The underlying purpose of this oppressive legislation is to ultimately criminalize free thought and to de-platform, ban and censor prominent dissenting voices.

The truth is that one of the key wars currently being fought is not against some bogeyman and a useful distraction in the form of Vladimir Putin, but against non-complying domestic populations, whether that be through the rubrick of questioning the narrative around the Russia-Ukraine conflict, challenging the ‘science’ that underpins the Covid narrative or expressing support for Dutch farmers and Canadian truckers actively resisting the tyranny of their respective nation states’.

In his book, ‘Tell Me No Lies’, veteran investigative journalist, John Pilger quotes the writer Simon Louvish’s recounting of a story about a group of Soviets touring the United States before the age of glasnost. After reading the newspapers and watching TV, they were amazed to find that, on the big issues, all the opinions were the same. “In our country,” they said, “to get that result we have a dictatorship, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. So what’s your secret? How do you do it?” 

It’s a good question. If modern, professional journalism in the West is genuinely free and diverse as its apologists claim, the similarities between Soviet-era media and Western media should be few and far between. Questioning Soviet-era media such as Pravda (meaning, ironically, “The Truth”), invariably meant that dissidents were subject to the demands of a formal dictatorship that imprisoned and tortured them.

Within most of the formal democracies of the modern West, however, the preferred authoritarian weapon of war of the tyrants is primarily not violent oppression or imprisonment and torture, but psychological nudging operations, censorship by omission, demonetization and control by a structurally-embedded sociopathic state-media propaganda machine.

My tribute to David Crosby

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By Daniel Margrain

In ‘Revolution Blues’ from his 1974 album, ‘On The Beach’, Neil Young famously spews vitriol on the fake tinsel town celebrity life-styles of the wealthy residents of Laurel Canyon many of whom lionized the killer, Charles Manson:

 “Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars, but I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars,” sang Young.

Forming part of his ‘Ditch trilogy’ this was Young at his most angriest and bitter. It’s probably the Canadian artists greatest song from one of his best albums that reflected his disillusionment with the idealism of the hippies as the realism of the 1970s began to take hold.

Three years earlier, one of Young’s contemporaries, former Byrds member and long-time collaborator, David Crosby, released the album, If Only I Could Remember My Name, a far more cerebral, and to my mind, devastating critique on the pessimism of the age.

Indeed, with this record, Crosby created a tonal, harmonic and semi-baroque masterpiece. The recording remains, more than half a century since its release, one of the most absorbing and moving experiences in the history of rock music.

Among the seminal musician’s of the period who worked alongside Crosby on the album included Kaukonen, Slick, Casady and Kantner of Jefferson Airplane, Garcia, Leisha, Kreutzmann and Hart of Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash.

The creative influence of these brilliant musician’s is tangible, but the sound created is nevertheless incomparable to anything recorded before or since. Deeply philosophical and existential, the music and vocals exude a sad poignancy, a yearning for some kind of spiritual redemption and lamentation of a world lost in the mists of time.

Mainstream obituaries of Crosby are likely to focus on his vocal ability and the contributions he made with the Byrds and Stills, Nash and Young. This, of course, is warranted. But his best ever work, arguably one of the greatest albums of all-time, will of passed many of the obituary writers by.

Crosby was a provacteur who went against the grain. His uncompromising counter-cultural outlook meant he had many enemies. But ultimately he was true to himself and the spirit of love and peace that his music embodied. Rock music has lost one of its greatest figures. A huge flame has been extinguished.


The Ghost of Fursac and other Bizarre Happenings

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By Daniel Margrain

Towards the end of last summer, I finally achieved my dream of living in the French countryside. To this end, I followed in the foot-steps of my sister Lydia, her partner, Pete, and their young daughter, Milly. Although things haven’t gone quite as smoothly as expected, I haven’t regretted for one second my decision to leave London, the city where I had spent the last thirty-six years of my life.

Over the past five months, I’ve become pretty adept at wall paper stripping, sanding and painting. My sister, Lydia and her partner, Pete, have two acres of land so I’ve been busy with the strimmer. The grass here grows like crazy and everything’s bigger, from the blades of grass to spiders, ants, bats, snakes, lizards and wildlife/flora/fauna in general.

We have chestnut, walnut, apple, pear trees and a plum tree. More about the latter in due course. Much of this produce is staple here. Meat and vegetables are, of course, locally sourced. Lydia and Pete intend to grow their own vegetables when everything is settled.

We’re in the commune of Fursac, Creuse in central France roughly between Toulouse and Paris about four hours train journey from each. The countryside is beautifully idyllic. There are horses and cows in adjoining fields and a border collie that follows us around everywhere.

Huge bats nestle in the crevices of a nearby barn and eagles and herons glide majestically overhead. Claude Chabrol’s, Le Boucher and Claude Berri’s, Manon des sources, are accurate cinematic representations of what rural life is like here. It’s pretty remote but not too much so.

I don’t drive and there are no buses so my bike has been a God-send. The nearest town of any note is La Souterraine about fifteen kilometres away. Our commune consists of five properties all of which, encouragingly, are lived in. We’ve made friends with our French neighbours. The only person we’ve had a problem with is our electrician who happens to be English.

The village of Fursac proper has a two Tabac’s and a Michelin star restaurant/hotel. It’s a great region to cycle, not too hilly with plenty of picturesque communes, lakes and forests dotted throughout the undulating countryside. Every summer the town plays host to a music and arts festival that attracts visitors from all over France.

But it’s not all rosy. The region also has an extremely dark history. On August, seventy years ago in the nearby commune of Chabannes, six Jewish children were rounded up by the Nazi collaborators, the Vichy, where they were deported to Auschwitz as part of a wider sweep of the Jewish community. 

These historical events provide the backdrop to some extremely bizarre recent happenings that I will endeavour to explain. My sister, brother-in-law and young niece have all experienced some very strange and unexplained events here. Since my sister moved to the commune she has experienced doors randomly opening and closing, the sudden movement of household objects which have fallen from surfaces and the clear sounds of footsteps.

One might argue that these events could be rationally explained by the fact that the house is old and draughty. But my sister assures me that when these things happened, the air was still and there were no breezes or gusts of wind present.

Events get far stranger. On a clear August afternoon two years ago, after my sister first arrived, my brother-in-law, Pete, was sitting in the garden when suddenly, about twenty metres away, a middle-aged man appeared next to a solitary plum tree. The man, who was standing upright, stared directly at Pete. The figure was solid in form and Pete could clearly identify this persons features and attire.

Pete described the man in question as ‘white of medium height and build’. He was dressed in ‘old fashioned working clothes and wore a cap’. After a few moments, Pete claims the figure ‘dissolved into thin air’. He said it reminded him of the old Star Trek episodes when the characters get teleported from one place to another. Pete hadn’t been drinking alcohol or taken drugs of any kind. He wasn’t feeling tired and was fully conscious when this happened.

None of the scientific explanations outlining the possible reasons why people think they see ghostly apparitions applied in this instance. Pete is the type of person who would ordinarily scoff at any suggestion of the existence of ghosts or paranormal phenomena.

If you were to meet Pete, you would conclude that he would be the last person on earth who would believe in supernatural happenings and in the past has expressed outright cynicism towards anybody who purports to having experienced such happenings.

This makes subsequent events appear all the more strange. Over the months that followed, things went from strange to the outright weird. The first of these events began last February. While sitting in the kitchen drinking a cup of tea, the same male figure – again in solid form – appeared, this time only three metres away from where Pete was sitting.

The male figure, who was dressed in the same working clothes and wore the same cap, raised both arms, bending them at the elbow, pointing both thumbs upwards towards Pete. Visibly shaken, my brother-in-law ran into the living room a few metres away where my sister, Lydia, and my niece, Milly, were watching TV.

Milly started to cry due to upset this weird event caused. After a few minutes, Pete, rather gingerly, returned to the kitchen. The man had disappeared. Again, none of the scientific explanations outlined above applied.

What is particularly strange are the events that occured in the following days. Unbeknown to Lydia and Pete, the former owners of the house, an elderly couple, called round unexpectedly, ostensibly as a courtesy call. Lydia answered the front door and invited the couple in for a chat. Pete was out at the time, food shopping. 

The couple asked Lydia if they could look around the house to see what work had been done. Lydia obliged. The couple then inquired what the renovation plans were for the property. The previous owners had taken great pride in the house and at one time the woman’s family had apparently owned a large amount of land in the vicinity. The couple seemed pleased that the property was being looked after and that it’s essential character was being maintained.

Then almost out of the blue, the woman asked Lydia whether she had, ‘experienced the presence of my grandfather who built the house?’ Taken aback, my sister replied that she hadn’t ‘but there is a possibility that my partner has’. With this, the woman became very emotional and tears began to form in her eyes. 

The woman explained to my sister that she had seen her grandfather in the house on numerous occasions after his death. She then relayed the following story about her grandfather to my sister:

Her grandfather, she said, had been active in the community and had fought in the trenches during World War One. The former owner reminisced how, many years later, her grandfather would regularly poke fun at the Vichy Nazi’s whenever they passed through the commune.

The woman said that on returning to the house her grandfather had built in Fursac – what is now Lydia’s, family home – he had packed some plum seeds in his bag which he subsequently planted in the garden of the house.

The woman pointed to the spot in the garden where those seeds had developed into the existing plum tree, beside which Pete had seen the male figure dressed in the old fashioned clothing and cap.

Why did the male figure appear in front of Pete at the exact spot in the garden where the previous owners grandfather had planted the plum seeds? 

Moreover, why did this male figure put his thumbs up towards Pete in the kitchen as if it was a friendly gesture? 

Could it have been that the figure in question was the grandfather of the previous owner and that the gesture was intended as a sign of his gratitude in relation to the restoration work Pete was undertaking on the house?

In relaying this account of events, both my sister, Lydia, and my brother-in-law, Pete, wanted to make clear to me that they knew nothing of the families history prior to Lydia’s meeting with the previous owners.

One of our French neighbours in the village, who we are particularly friendly with, has in his possession an old black and white family photograph that includes the grandfather pictured as a boy. Pete has seen the photograph but is unable to confirm whether the boy in question is the same person he saw in the garden and kitchen. 

Although these series of unexplained events are strange, the third major happening is arguably the most bizarre of all, not least because my sisters daughter, Milly, had also witnessed it. Four months had passed since the previous ‘ghostly’ siting. It was now a warm Tuesday evening in mid-June. Dusk had just began to emerge.

During this time of the evening, Lydia usually puts the bins out for the next morning collection as part of the weekly routine of chores. But on this one occasion – much to my sister’s subsequent regret – Pete took it upon himself to put them out. The idea was to show Milly what was involved in wheeling the bins from the barn to the collection point by the roadside outside the house.

As they approached the barn, their attention was immediately drawn to the sky directly above them. What Pete described as a ‘huge, silent and liquid-looking undulating black mass’ appeared at low altitude above them in what was previously a clear sky just as dusk was beginning to set in. The nearby houses in the commune had turned their lights on moments earlier. However, upon the appearance of this strange object in the sky, all the lights in the village momentarily went out simultaneously, including the one solitary street light.

I have since suggested to Pete the possibility that this peculiar experience could of been the result of some kind of weather or atmospheric event. But both he and Milly were ‘one hundred per cent positive’ that what they saw was an actual physical object. 

Pete said the object was ‘undulating but solid, rather like a huge Perspex sheet, the mass of which ‘covered the entire commune and the immediate visible sky.’  Milly, who was nine years of age at the time, described the object as ‘like a giant wobbly black sheet that flapped about’.

Moments later, the strange craft disappeared into the distance, beyond the horizon, after which time all the lights of the houses in the commune came back on. Both Pete and Milly then ran nervously, but excitedly, back into the house. They recounted to Lydia what they had witnessed. All this happened, Pete said, ‘within a matter of around twenty seconds.’

I asked Pete if any of the neighbours in the commune had seen anything. He replied that he hadn’t mentioned it to anybody else and that nobody, to his knowledge, had reported the event.

The Ruination of the Beautiful Game

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By Daniel Margrain

There is something extremely rotten at the heart of professional football in the English game. High-profile managers are chiefly among those complicit in this sorry state of affairs. I believe most, if not all, are charlatans and spivs. It is perplexing to me why so many commentators, fans and even owners, glorify and fetishize them.

It is perhaps understandable why players who depend on them for their career development, have been reluctant to challenge the God-like status of managers. It would take a very brave player to speak out.

The bigger conundrum is the relationship between managers and owners of football clubs. Manager, Claudio Ranieri has managed more clubs than anyone else. His most recent managerial job in England for Watford which ended in January last year, was the 12th time he’s been revealed at a UK press conference.

Nigel Pearson is not far behind, having managed 10 clubs throughout his career. He has lasted an average of under a year at each one.

In the Premier League as a whole, the average tenure for a manager is around one year, nine months.

So, clearly there is a tacit understanding between owners and managers that the formers sacking of the latter is an inevitability.

Managers have as much of a long-term investment in a football club as professional politicians have in the welfare of the vast majority of the population, that is to say, zilch.

Given that managers are not incentivized to help ensure the long-term success of football clubs, why do owners employ managers multiple times on huge salaries in the first place?

Con trick

I have long suspected that the institution of managers is nothing but a con-trick. This suspicion is supported by the evidence. Stefan Szymanski, economics professor at Cass Business School, for example, has studied the spending of 40 English clubs and found that their spending on salaries explained 92 per cent of their variation in league position. The team that pays most, wins. Szymanski’s conclusion is that players’ salaries alone almost entirely determine football results.

In addition, research by Sue Brigewater shows that after the initial period following a managers appointment, any improvement in performance disappears and that on average, managerial changes at football clubs do not improve long-term results. There is no evidence, in other words, of a causal link between the appointment of a manager and success on the field.

Who could reasonably disagree with the FT who stated that ‘managers could probably be replaced by stuffed teddy bears without their club’s league position changing?’

Football journalists and fans appear to be oblivious to these truths. To my knowledge none have ever addressed these issues or why Premier League managers frequently move from club to club as part of an endless ‘merry-go round’ of sackings and re-appointments. Nor do they question the systemic culture of inverse financial incentives which result in managers being rewarded for failure with new, extremely lucrative contracts at other clubs – often in conjunction with substantial pay-offs – in a way that rarely happens in other professions outside of banking.

So why do owners of Premier League clubs repeatedly sack and re-employ football managers on salaries that are, in many cases, higher than CEOs of huge corporations?

My explanation is that owners are unwilling to devote the time to undertaking a job they are capable of doing themselves because any failings on the pitch would inevitably rebound on them. Better to employ a high-profile manager as a ‘deflector shield’. TV executives adopt a similar rationale by employing high-profile presenters as a strategy to divert the media spotlight away from them in the event of ratings failures.

Buffer

The manager serves chiefly as a buffer between investors and fans. He is a marketing tool and is the club spokesman for the media and sponsors. Although totemic faith is invested in his alleged powers, the reality is that there isn’t much he can do to influence events on the field of play. Nevertheless, it’s a price owners’ are seemingly willing to pay as a way of shirking their own responsibilities for the failings of their clubs. Far better to be part of a huge financial gravy train.

Premier League manager, David Moyes, is very much a part of this gravy train. Moyes is an example of a high-profile figure who has been employed, and yet failed, at numerous clubs. At the time of writing, Moyes’ current team, West Ham United, sit in the bottom three of the Premier League table.

Most recently, the team lost an important league game to fellow strugglers, Wolverhampton Wanderers. Inexplicably, Moyes failed to play two of his most in-form and highest-scoring players in the starting line-up. This strange decision was picked up on by both fans and football journalists.

Why would a manager refuse to play his leading two goalscorers in a crucial relegation battle?

Could it conceivably be the case that Moyes wanted to lose the match in order to increase his chances of getting the sack, thereby guaranteeing a huge financial pay-off and almost certain re-employment at another club?

At the very least, the incident in question emphasizes the fact that high-profile managers like Moyes know they hold many of the financial cards.

It’s not just managers who call the shots. Players do too. Many of them who lack confidence or otherwise find it hard to maintain form, often want to leave struggling clubs as opposed to acknowledging their collective responsibility to the people who pay their wages – the fans.

Fans are the lifeblood of football. They are their for the long-haul, through good times and bad. Managers, players and even owners on the other hand, are here today, gone tomorrow fly-by-nights.

It’s the fans who are the people that invest a great deal of their time and hard-earned income on their favourite football clubs. They are also the ones, however, who end up picking up the pieces of a broken system deeply embedded in the body politic.

This is a situation that cannot continue forever. Increasingly, I believe, fans are seeing through the facade.

Ultimately, we need far more democracy and transparency in the game otherwise we’ll all end up paying the price for this profigacy.

References:

https://www.olbg.com/blogs/football-manager-merry-go-round

https://www.onlinebetting.org.uk/betting-guides/football/football-manager-lifespan.html

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/money-management/management/business-studies/stefan-szymanski-on-the-business-football https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2014/03/szymanski.htm.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269929357_What_is_the_Impact_of_Changing_Football_Manager Bridgewater (2009).

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/do-football-managers-make-a-difference/.