Groups of young parents huddle in a hallway, making plans. Old men nap on couches, waiting for dessert. It’s the extended family in all its tangled, loving, exhausting glory.
This particular family is the one depicted in Barry Levinson’s 1990 film, Avalon, based on the film directors own childhood in Baltimore. But it’s also one that could equally be played out in any post-war town or city in a smog drenched Keyensian Britain.
Battle-fatigued young men who fought for God and country were in no mood for the platitudes of politician’s who had sent many of their comrades to the battlefields where the stench of death still lingered. Hitler fascism, although defeated had, through the passing of time, left indelible scars on the faces of generations of young men ravaged by its consequences.
The fraternity among men who returned to Blighty from war in the hope that society back home could be transformed for the better, was a hope not lost on the ruling class. The establishment were to suffer the torment of a disillusioned nation tired of being used as cannon fodder for the interests of Whitehall pen-pushers.
‘No more war’ was the cry of the huddled, restless, masses. Churchill had underestimated the level of the nations discontent. The epithet ‘war hero’ would have to wait for the writings of historians as the war statesman was rejected at the polls by the very people who had put him into power seven months after Germany’s fascists invaded Poland.
By 1945 it was widely understood by the ruling class that the amelioration of the antagonistic relations between capital and labour was a necessary price to pay to stave off revolutionary levels of proletarian discontent. Churchill, considered by many to be an historical footnote by the working classes who fought a war ostensibly for the vanity of others, were now in a position to force the hand of their rulers.
The Red Army paid the heaviest price for fascisms defeat. Russian revolutionary sentiment still lingered in the air on the streets of London, Birmingham and Belfast. The British working class hadn’t forgotten the toll the war had on the Soviet people, nor had generations before them forgotten the gains of the bolshevik revolution. British prols were in no mood to genuflect at the feet of their ‘betters’.
Perhaps, somewhat ironically, it was the poetic realism of the film, Brief Encounter, that managed to unify a nation distraut by war. David Lean’s 1945 masterpiece about a middle-class woman’s imagined confession of a extramarital love affair, was an allegory for a society in a state of flux, hamstrung by conformity.
The key message of the film was that the ‘free time’ available to the films protaganists, Laura and Alec, that involved their chance encounters at Boots chemist, the Palladium cinema and at a railway station refreshment room, represented newly formed spaces in the public imagination that only an immediate post-war world borne out of servitude was capable of filling. Underlying the poetic sense of realism was a quest for balance and harmony in an otherwise fractured world.
In post-war Britain, nothing less than fair play was acceptable to the masses. Brits weren’t demanding the best cut steak, caviar or smoked salmon but neither were they content with the breadcrumbs from their rulers banquetting table. People needed and demanded homes. Not dilapidated, damp-ridden, rat infested hovels, but ‘homes fit for heroes’. And they got them, three hundred thousand of them, year on year.
But widespread access to post-war housing and the consumerism that followed in its wake, marked the beginning of a societal shift. Family bonds, once close and extended, began to split apart as the desire for more convenience, privacy and mobility represented a shrinking of time and space within the newly booming capitalism.
The time-piece which was popularized at least a generation before, was now a means by which the ruling class would attempt to remind British workers that showing up at the factory gates on time was the necessary price to be paid in order for them to enjoy the exuberent excesses experienced by their counterparts across the Atlantic.
”You’ve never had it so good” was the cry of the Westminster hordes. The young had time on their hands and money with which to spend it. Full employment and ‘jobs for life’ weren’t merely the mantras of dinner partying socialists, but were the realities for millions of working class people. It wouldn’t be long before the public’s appetite for convenience and increasing levels of consumption that money and time implied, would feed into the realm of leisure.
The young bedraggled by war became increasingly hungry for entertainment. They found it in the restaurants, football terraces, shopping malls and movie theatres. American consumerism in all of it’s unbridled excesses was depicted in the latter and Brits demanded some of the action.
Food, entertainment and their corollary, leisure time, perfectly encapsulated the rapid pace of change that was beginning to take hold amid the rubble of bombed neighbourhoods. These shifts in society gave way to new antagonisms across dinner tables the length and breadth of the country as family loyalties began to be questioned.
The violation of well-established protocols was not only seen as a sign of disrespect but more broadly as a metaphor for the beginning of the collapse of the entire family structure and the speeding-up of the pace of life.
As the 1960s beckoned, the extended family began to play an ever diminishing role. In his film, Avalon, Levinson depicts the total destruction of the extended family. What we witness is a young father and mother and their son and daughter eating turkey off trays in front of the television.
In the final scene, the main character is living alone in a nursing home, wondering what happened. “In the end, you spend everything you’ve ever saved, sell everything you’ve ever owned, just to exist in a place like this.”
The scene Levinson depicts is reminscent of the famous parable about materialism and contrasting values in which an American investment banker sits at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village. After meeting a local fisherman, the banker begins to reflect on the meaning of his life, and starts to question notions of success and capitalist values to which he had become accustomed. The American begins to understand that a simpler, slow paced life experienced by the fisherman was far more enriching and fullfilling than his own urban ‘rat race’ life as a banker.
The author, Milan Kundera, said:
”To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring – it was peace.”
Kundera’s evocation of being at peace with life is like a dream in time and space. It’s akin to the days where people told family stories, of the stable, centralized, family and the dense cluster of many siblings and extended kin. It’s like the phantasmagorical experience when watching a colourized film clip of an early twentieth century Paris street scene and a sense of stepping into that world.
The serenity of time and place thus imbued is intensified by the imagination, prolonged by a multitude of echoes. But imagination is also an expression of pain for that which has been lost and can never be recaptured. Today, such visions of historical memory are routinely mocked like a rust that corrodes all it touches. The truth is, the world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless. It will take you everywhere.
Founded in 2001 by Cromwell and David Edwards,Media Lensis a media analysis website which monitors the broadcast and the print media in the UK, attempting to show evidence of bias, distortions and omissions on such issues as climate change, Iraq and the “war on terror”.
The founders of Media Lens draw on the Propaganda Model of media control advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. As a ‘media analysis site’ Media Lens portrays itself as providing an alternative view to the increasingly mistrusted corporate media.
They claim to focus on calling to account the ‘liberal media’, e.g. the Guardian and the Observer and want us to believe Media Lens are a corrective to the ‘mainstreams’ ‘distorted vision’. Their aim, they claim, ”is to raise awareness of the systemic failure of the corporate media to report the world honestly and accurately.”
Scrutiny of Media Lens output, however, indicates that rather than being objective analysts of the media, they strongly promote their own agenda which has much in common with that of the establishment media they claim to be critiquing.
Media Lens state on their website:
”We also hope to encourage the creation of non-corporate media – good examples are Democracy Now!, The Real News Network and ZNet – that offer genuine alternatives to the corporate mainstream.”
ZNet appears to have folded. But Democracy Now and The Real News Network are hardly ‘ corporate alternatives’ since both are corporate financed. The former is funded by the Carnegie Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society and Tides Foundations, and the Ford Foundation. The latter is funded by the the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.
The corporate hand
Both DN and TRNN claim to be independent and progressive. However, the corporate hand has shown itself very clearly, for example, on the issue of the Syrian war, where both DN and TRNN are firmly squarely on the side of imperialism and regime change.
The public’s ”trust” in Media Lens’ analysis is premised on the false assumption that journalism is a vital component of our democracy. The position of Media Lens seems to be that they and their corporate outlets of choice who they have a number of shared interests with, are best placed to determine which sources are deserving of this “trust”.
Media Lens rely heavily on social media for impact, especially twitter, rather than a high volume of articles (termed ‘Alerts’). The two editors, David Cromwell and David Edwards, have also authored some books, most recently, Propaganda Blitz. They tweet, retweet and write about failings of the media on issues where the corporate media see their role as propaganda or suppression rather than fact.
They are seen as progressive and anti-imperialist, as they largely make the right noises about, for example, Gaza, Yemen and Syria. However, the Media Lens response to the wars on first Libya, then Syria, as well as the Russia-Ukraine conflict, appears dutiful rather than enthusiastic, even compromised. They are seemingly unaware that the tradition of the brutality of Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad owes more to Western propaganda than to evidence.
Media Lens aspires ‘to show evidence of bias, distortions and omissions on such issues as climate change, Iraq and the “war on terror’. As well as stressing their left-wing credentials, the three major issues that are arguably utmost on the Media Lens agenda is their promotion of Noam Chomsky, climate change alarmism and their rejection of the sceptical arguments in relation to the Covid event.
Media Lens and Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky, often hailed as America’s premier dissident illectual, fearless purveyor of truth-fighting against media propaganda, murderous US foreign policy and the crimes of profit-hungry transnational corporations, enjoys a worldwide slavish cult-like following from students, journalists and activists.
Media Lens are among those who fawn over Chomsky’s every utterence and written word as if they were scripture and prophetical. To them, Chomsky is the supreme deity, a priestly master whose logic cannot be questioned. Chomsky has a reputation for being a ‘progressive’, a critic of government and the corporations, and an advocate of democracy. This is also the position of Media Lens.
The implication is that democratic principles are underscored by ‘trusted’ news reportage sanctioned by the likes of Media Lens and their chief advocates and therefore we should trust them, unquestioningly, to the exclusion of dissenting ‘others’.
Chomsky has been strongly criticised as suppressing discussion on any issue that threatens globalist interests, from the Kennedy assassinations, the activities of the CIA, the Federal Reserve and above all the Covid narrative and the plan for global government. The organisations mostly closely involved with global government, the Trilateral Commission, the WEF, the Committee of Foreign Relations are ignored or dismissed as ‘nothing organisations’.
Chomsky facilitated the invasion of Libya by whitewashing the rebels and demonising Gaddafi, and went on to support the United States with regard to the war on Syria. Chomsky pushes the NATO propaganda line of the popular Syrian uprising, the brutal response first by ‘Assad’ and then ‘Assad’ in conjunction with the Russians, and the necessity for regime change, by negotiation if possible and if necessary by arming ‘rebels’.
Media Lens, however, has steadfastly ignored the growing disillusionment with Noam Chomsky on part of anti-imperialists, and lose no opportunity to promote him as a cult figure. Media Lens and Chomsky mutually resent the charge they are pro-Assad and reject the arguments of those who are critical of the anthropogenic climate warming narrative.
Cromwell subsequently worked for Shell in the Netherlands (four years) and then for 17 years in a research post at National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, United Kingdom, before leaving in 2010 to work full-time on Media Lens. Cromwell’s impressive qualifications both explain an interest in global warming and give credibility to his position. However, his manner of engagement on the issue is hardly consistent with a scientific interest.
While Media Lens claims to be scrutinising the mainstream media, they are actually in lockstep with the corporate media who are pushing the same message. The media analysts, for example, constantly promote the globalist position by uncritically tweeting mainstream media articles such as this one and this one, as well as tweets from alarmists like Michael Mann on December 5, 2018 and Bill McGuire on February 21, 2023, both of whom blocked me for no apparent reason other than I reject their thesis that human activity is driving catastrophic climate change.
Media Lens have also quoted, uncritically, Inger Andersen, the executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in the Guardian.
”We had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over. Only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster.”
In a November, 14, 2022, Media Alert, Media Lens said:
”Scientists are now admitting more often that they are ‘scared’ about the climate crisis.”
The media analysts added:
”Record high temperatures this summer in the UK alone prompted Professor Hannah Cloke, from Reading University, to say: ”This sort of thing is really scary. It’s just one statistic amongst an avalanche of extreme weather events that used to be known as “natural disasters”.
No room for debate
There is no room for scientific debate with Media Lens on any point. The analysts frequently praise campaigns‘ of vandalism committed by climate activists like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. Their alerts consistently and uncritically report from the alarmist perspective.
In this alert which could well have come from the Guardian, they cited the Daily Mail who they previously condemned as a ‘mainstream climate sceptic‘, apparently quoting the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The Daily Mail article claims that ”normally chill Norway, Sweden and Finland all saw temperatures they have never seen before on any date, pushing past 90 degrees”. Oddly enough, July high temperature records for Sweden, for one, have remained unchallenged since 1901 (Götaland), 1933 (Svealand) and 1945 (Norrland). Climate alarmists have been warning of an ice-free Arctic for decades, and continue to do so, but the ice is, if anything, increasing.
”In Greece, 80 people died in terrible wildfires.”
This completely overlooks the fact that in 2007 there were fires which killed 84 people, and that then as now, Greeks blamed arson, as do many in California. The Media alert is sensationalist popular journalism of the worst kind, designed to uncritically push the corporate agenda.
Their position is totally partisan. What happened to the objective ‘media analysis’ website?
Investigative journalist and researcher, Whitney Webb summed-up the prevailing climate change orthodoxy in a single tweet, highlighting the fact that it’s intimately tied to corporate interests embodied in the UN’s climate change agenda formulated at the annual ‘COP’ gatherings:
“COP26 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.”
Webb’s remark was in response to a speech at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference – COP26 – in Glasgow by the UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, Mark Carney, who remarked:
‘The architecture of the global financial system has been transformed to deliver net-zero. We now have the essential plumbing in place to move climate change from the fringes to the forefront of finance so that every financial decision takes climate change into account.”
Webb had revealed in her tweet the true nature of power and its interconnectedness which extends beyond the limited confines that the media analysts are prepared to admit.
To be fair to Media Lens, they did quote quite extensively from an article of Webb’s in their 22 October, 21 alert where they acknowledged the endless corporate drive to privatise the planet and the tendency for capitalists to both seek control of ecosystems as ‘financial assets’, and the rights people around the world have to ‘ecosystems services’. These include the benefits that humans receive from Nature such as food production, tourism, clean water, biodiversity, pollination and carbon sequestration.
Malthusian agenda
But the problem is, Media Lens are seemingly unable to grasp that legitimate issues and concerns like these are intrinsically linked to a nefarious decades-long Malthusian climate change agenda.
”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.”
Perhaps Media Lens can be forgiven for their various shortcomings and ommisions on climate change on the basis of good intentions, no matter how misplaced. But their response to arguably the biggest event in decades, the Covid debacle, is unforgiveable.
Having positioned themselves as analysts who regard media and government propaganda-busting as their raison d’etre, the fact that they have had little or nothing to say in the face of a government and media propaganda blitz, arguably unrivalled in peace time, can only be explained if you happened to be following an agenda consistent with power and accept promoting harmful societal and economic measures.
Excess death rates were another reliable indicator that nothing exceptional was happening. According to a paper published in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation, “the excess deaths from the measures taken is likely to be much larger than the COVID‐19 deaths”.
Cure worse than the disease
That the cure had the vast potential to be far worse than the disease was patently obvious to many before the lunacy of lockdowns became reality. When Peter Hitchens questioned this fundamental principle on 22 March in his Mail on Sunday column, Media Lens responded with ill-informed emotional-based vitriol, devoid of facts:
They agreed wholeheartedly, however, with Paul Mason’s authoritarian advocacy of caging a population that could not be trusted to make sensible decisions based on facts which ought to have been calmly provided by the government.
The science always was and still is clear that locking populations down to address this particular threat is ineffective. Sweden, the smoking-gun ignored by Media Lens, followed an almost identical trajectory in its timeline of infections and deaths, did not lock down and yet achieved better outcomes.
So much for Media Lens adhering to their own stated philosophy: ”Our aim is to increase rational awareness, critical thought and compassion. Our goal is not at all to attack, insult or anger individual journalists…”
Public bodies significantly downgraded the threat of Covid on 19 March, 2020. In addition, many eminent experts cautioned against lockdowns. These facts, in tandem with the speed and aggression with which Media Lens uncritically embraced wholesale imprisonment – the efficacy of which was plainly questionable and the harms all too apparent – is crucial to understanding that the response of Media Lens cannot be regarded as an error of judgement based on lack of knowledge about the threat.
Mike Yeadon
It is reasonable to conclude, that at least as far the Covid event is concerned, Media Lens agree with, and support, the authoritarian diktats of the state. If anybody should doubt this, their subsequent lack of response to the revelations of Dr Mike Yeadon, should end all these doubts.
Dr Mike Yeadon 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.
“the pandemic was over by June 2020 and herd immunity was the main force which turned the pandemic and pressed it into retreat.”
Yeadon’s conclusion demolished the 7 per cent immunity claim made by the government’s chief scientists. So how was was it possible that Media Lens, who claim to ”check the media’s version of events against credible facts and opinion provided by journalists, academics and specialist researchers”, fail to challenge the 7 per cent claims or, at the very least, show any indication that they were even remotely curious about this propaganda and the potential impact of it on society?
Why wouldn’t Media Lens regard it to be an approriate course of action to investigate,in the public interest, the claims made by BBC journalist, Deborah Cohen, that the World Health Organisation changed it’s advice on masks, from ‘don’t wear them’ to ‘do wear them’ due to lobbying pressure from governments’?
Not once has Media Lens challenged the pseudo science underpinning the State’s line on masks. On the contrary, they label those who use scientific-based arguments to challenge the alleged effectiveness of masks, as ”conspiracy theorists”.
Not once, to my knowledge, have Media Lens tweeted about the fact that the far more measured and appropriate response was the approach taken by the Swedish authorities who actually did calmly follow the science.
This kind of a rational approach was identified by the World Health Organisation as being “just as dangerous” as an alleged global pandemic, included any and all information that questioned the diktats of our “democratic” policymakers.
Pfizer
But arguably, most importantly of all, Media Lens have failed abjectly to inform their readers about Pfizer’s history of corruption, lies, and fraud. This dates back to at least 1994 when the corporation agreed to pay $10.75 million to settle allegations from the Justice Department that they “lied to get Federal approval for a mechanical heart valve that has fractured, resulting in over 600 deaths”.
Media Lens have also failed to inform their readers about how Pfizer manipulated studies to bolster the use of its epilepsy drug Neurontin for other disorders, while suppressing research that did not support those uses.
In September of 2009, the U.S Justice Department announced a $2.3 billion fine on Pfizer, the largest healthcare fraud settlement in American history.
The best available data on the adverse event rate of the Pfizer vaccine showed a serious adverse event rate of 1 per 10,000 vaccinees. According to renowned Harvard biostatician Dr. Martin Kuldorff, these figures are unacceptably high (compared to other vaccines on the market which produce adverse event rates in the ballpark of 1 per million).
Sadly, for them, Media Lens have totally swept these scandals under the carpet. It would appear, then, that Media Lens, along with much of the Left in general, are more concerned with defending Big Pharma than they are with defending the public interest against the criminality of Big Pharma.
Resisting dissent
Rather than attempting to counteract government and media hysteria as part of their role within the so-called ‘alternative’ media, Media Lens instead joined in with the legacy media by attacking or ommitting all dissent and looked askance at sceptical scientific papers on behalf of the establishment.
They also looked askance at the millions of people who raised their voices in mass protests. These protests were either ignored by Media Lens or the protestors views were distorted and their peaceful demonstrations labelled “extremist” or ”right wing”.
The lack of any critical engagement in relation to the Covid event, the denial of, and refusal to engage with, the science and their actual support of some of the most draconian, illiberal and authoritarian measures ever enacted by the state, is evidence that Media Lens deliberately and consciously filtered out a relentless campaign that manipulated the public into believing that Covid was the most catastrophic public health threat since the Black Death.
Of course, it would subsequently take their cult leader in crime, Noam Chomsky, to effectively validate Media Lens for their belittling, or at least censoring, of dissenting voices that dared challenge the prevailing Covid narrative.
In this sense, by censorsing by omission dissenting voices that do not conform to their restrictive Chomskyian narrative but, rather, by promoting what have been referred to as the ‘cruise-missile left’, Media Lens are essentially no different from any other ‘news’ outlet. Their main objective is to reaffirm a specific world view ‘brand’ and business plan model.
With Media Lens we don’t get any critiques of ‘net zero’, Agenda 30, of global institutions like the WEF and the WHO, of indiscriminate mandatory vaccination policies, the tyranny associated with lockdowns or the move towards technocratic authoritarianism.
Instead, readers are subjected to anti-Assad propaganda, lip service to anti-imperialism, and the perpetuation of the Club of Rome’s anthropogenic climate change and WEF ‘build back better’ global agendas that, paradoxically, are consistent with the ‘manufacturing of consent’ accusation Media Lens level at many of their ‘mainstream’ media critics.
I’m English, and I’ll probably be called a c*** and told to **** off, but I’ve noticed a change over the last ten years. A new attitude has emerged, especially among the young. There were always people who hated ‘the English’ (often without ever having been to England). But the majority were either indifferent or had a kind of vague dislike that was slightly tongue in cheek – the kind of dislike Canadians feel for Americans, or New Zealanders feel for Australians (kind of jokey and ironic – no more than banter).
In the last few years things have changed. I even heard one Scot talk about the English ‘invading and raping my country’. Obviously no one had explained to him that political union began in 1603 when a Scottish dynasty replaced the Tudors on the English throne. Shakespeare wrote Macbeth to please the new Scottish king of England.
Maybe someone should have explained to him that the first Scottish Prime Minister of the UK, John Stuart, became PM way back in 1762. And it was a Scottish PM who led Britain during the Crimean war in the 1850s. The head of the British army in WW1 was Scottish. The founder of the SAS was Scottish. For god sake, even Gladstone was Scottish.
Of course, it suits the SNP to stir up this kind of hatred, especially among the young. They know it’s the quickest way to win support. Time and again I’ve watched SNP politicians indulge in fake outrage. Everything is twisted and distorted to fit their narrative.
They’ll be asked to comment on some new policy, or some random quote, and will then bang on about how “shocked” or “disgusted” or “outraged” they are by English arrogance. They know just which buttons to press: the English laugh at the Scottish, patronize them, look down on them, don’t care about them, etc, etc.
I remember hearing a story about the experiences of an Englishman working for an Aberdeen-based offshore company in Poland during the independence vote. Lots of Scots on the work bus after the vote shouted about being robbed and what bastards the English were.
The Englishman piped up and said that the big mistake was asking the Scots to vote. If they had asked the English to vote to get rid of the whinging Scots then they would be independent. There was a cheer from the English who were sick of it. The Scots shut up.
Many English people, particularly those on the Left actually admire the Scottish and used to think of Scotland (and to an extent Wales) as the backbone of British Socialism. On the whole, the same is true of the English Right who regard them as the backbone of the British army. There has never been any hatred or contempt.
George Orwell, for example, writes about ‘the cult of Scottishness’ that existed in the Edwardian public schools when he was a kid. According to him, boys who’d come from Scottish backgrounds had a high status and would often boast of their Highland roots.
The truth is, the vast majority of the English are not that bothered about what the Scots say about them, and understand that banging the nationalist drum has probably more of a benovelent undercurrent than many who excuse it on the basis of a more benign appeal to ‘civic nationalism’ care to admit.
Famously, Billy Connolly once said “it’s pointless the Scots hating the English; because the English simply don’t care”. If you are English, who do you care if they like the English? As an Englishman myself, I can testify to the veracity of this sense of indifference.
If I was 18, I would be too scared to go to university in Glasgow or Edinburgh. Maybe I’m overreacting, but I’d be frightened that if someone heard my accent in a bar or pub I’d get attacked.
I have heard too many stories of hatred directed against English people in Scotland to realize that this more than just banter. The SNP, who routinely whip up anti-English sentiment, portray themselves as enlightened progressives. But to me they often seem more like hate-filled bigots.
Italy and Germany weren’t unified until the late 19th century, and the USA wasn’t formed until 1776. But Britain and Britishness began in 1603. But then I am an evil English oppressor, so I should probably just shut up.
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.
”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.”
”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.
”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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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 .”
In pre-enlightenment times, the earth was widely perceived as a stable force at the centre of the universe overseen by God. Theologians rationalized intellectual curiosity and any challenges to this prevaling orthodoxy as akin to bringing forth evil into the world. Dissenting ‘wrongdoers’ were required by the church to seek salvation in a deity in order to absolve themselves of their intellectual impulses.
But as theology eventually began to accede to scientific inquiry, salvation correspondingly began to take root in a system of ideas embodied in the philosophical writings of Aristotle.
According to Aristotle, the positions in society that individuals were perceived to have naturally occupied, all dovetailed together to form a pattern of the universe which gave everything its purpose. Aristotlian philosophy predicated on order, but underpinned by uneven relations of power, was to be one of the guiding principles of the enlightenment.
So although the enlightenment was a great leap forward from the idea that the power of Kings was historically fixed predicated on a grand purpose and design ordained by God, modernity nevertheless remained tied to the concept of progress as being that of the development of the human mind and of human nature as unchanging.
Knowing your place
The classical economists who arose out of the enlightenment were thus able to reinforce the notion that social and economic hierarchies and the establishment of private property were fixed and ‘natural’ consequences of progress borne out of intellectual endeavour.
Similar claims are made by evolutionary psychologists who reinforce the ideology that human behaviour or psychological characteristics are a biological adaptation shaped by natural selection hard-wired into the human brain.
The notion that human behaviour is genetically determined and that biology holds the key to solving social problems, has a long history going back to Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, in 1865.
Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology reinforce the ideological notion that the mass of ordinary people are conditioned to know their place within an ‘unchanging’ society even though the great changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution prove that power had transferred from feudal landlords to corporate grandees.
Alienation
By the mid 19th century, the supplanting of the aristocracy of land with money led to the transference of the great estates to commodities. Karl Marx was the first to analyse in detail the nature of the emerging capitalism in which the worker devotes his life to producing objects which he does not own or control. The labour of the worker, according to Marx, thus becomes something separate and external to him.
In the year of Marx’s birth in 1818, a young English author called Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley published the first edition of the Gothic and Romantic science fiction novel, Frankenstein – the tale of a monster which turns against its creator. It’s the externalizing and uncontrollable forces Shelley describes in her masterpiece that draws parallels with the daily lot of workers outlined by Marx.
It was precisely the lack of any control workers had in the production process during the Industrial Revolution that led to the Luddites smashing up the machines that churned out the fruits of their ‘externalizing’ or alienated labour. For Marx, alienation is a material and social process that is intrinsic to society and nature in flux.
The dialectic
In dialectical terms, changes in nature are marked by a state of continuous motion driven by the struggle of conflicting and antagonistic forces. At some point, small incremental quantitative shifts in nature over time will eventually result in fundamental qualitative changes in appearance or form even though in ‘essence’ their nature remain one and the same.
An acorn, in becoming an oak, for example, will have ceased to be an acorn. Yet implicit within the acorn is the potential to become an oak. Equally, since humans are an integral part of nature, they cannot be excluded from the contradictory socioeconomic forces that interract with it. At some point these socioeconomic forces will eventually become something else and therefore cease to exist in their current form.
The ten-thousand year history of class-based societites from slavery to feudalism, through to capitalism, are indicative of these changes. Colonialism and imperialism, under capitalism, have been marked by the ability of the oppressors to suppress opposition to their rule using monsters as part of their strategy of divide and conquer.
But what the oppressors rarely factor into their strategies, is the potential for working people to break free from the chains that bind them. Attempts by the ruling class-owned corporate media to manipulate the public into accepting their oppression cannot be sustained indefinitely.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend
Similarly, there are limits to which monsters will be supine to their creators and many have been known to break free, and even turn the tables, on them. This, for example, was the case in Afghanistan during the 1980s when then US president Jimmy Carter’s covert programme financed tribal groups known as the mujahedin, including Osama bin Laden, against the common enemy, the Soviet Union, as part what was called, Operation Cyclone.
From this spawned other monsters, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, all of whom felt betrayed enough to turn their ire on their creator in the form of undertaking terrorist attacks, most notably and spectacularly in New York on September 11. The Zionists in Israel are an example of a US-funded monster that has managed to have been kept under relative control, despite its frequent attempts to break free from its masters leash.
In all cases, the monsters described have bitten the financial hand of Washington that feeds them resulting in often unintended and unpredictable, geopolitical consequences. Indeed, Faustian pacts with the devil have, largely by way of ‘blow back’, contributed significantly to the exponential spread of terrorism worldwide.
School of the Americas
There are, however, other monsters which their creators have managed to exert tight control. An example, is the extent to which Washington maintains leverage over terrorist fighters in central and south America who continue to emerge from what was formerly known as the School of the Americas located at Fort Benning near Columbus, Georgia.
The SOA was responsible for training the regime that overthrew the Honduran government headed by Manuel Zelaya in June, 2009, as well as fomenting the March, 2016 coup that culminated in the assassination of the leading grass-roots Honduran environmental activist, Berta Caceres.
More recently, SOA-trained fighters have been implicated in ongoing attempts to destabilize Venezuela. In addition, ISIS and their various terrorist offshoots in Syria are trained and funded, either overtly or covertly, by numerous foreign mercenary forces as part of the imperialists’ geopolitical and regime change strategy in the country.
Saudi Arabia and Ukraine
Saudi Arabia, who is one of the key players in Syria, has also been bombarding Yemen since at least September, 2015 using weaponry sold to them by the UK-US governments’.
Also around this time – February, 2014 – the US instigated a violent coup d’etat in Kiev against the democratically-elected government of pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych.
From 2015 to the present, the policies of successive Ukraine governments’ have been their unwillingness to both ratify and implement the Minsk Agreement which in, part, is designed to guarantee the security of the people of the Donbas region and to secure a lasting peaceful resolution to the year-long Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Zelensky’s recent provocation in which he urged NATO to pre-emptively attack Russia with nuclear weapons, is not only indicative of somebody who is not serious about wanting a peaceful outcome to the conflict, but is also a potential danger to the world.
The fact that the US and UK continue to funnel weapons to paramilitary neo-Nazi’s and ultra nationalists such as the Azov Battalion and other fascist followers of Hitler-collaborator, Stepan Bandera, in support of their monster in Kiev, would indicate that the intention of the UN/NATO powers is not for a peaceful resolution but to prolong the conflict as part of a geopolitical proxy war.
In conclusion, the world’s most powerful and unrestrained monsters are not individuals who commit isolated atrocities but, rather, are the likes of the CIA, the Desk Killers in Washington and the kinds of terrorists linked directly to the British state.
Governments’, whose role is to facilitate the objectives of the military-industrial complex in matters of war, are also subject, more broadly, to imposing the policy agenda’s of their private-public policy-making partners – ie Central Banks, BIS, Chatham House etc – at the top of the global chain of command. These psychopaths will do anything in order to maintain their privileges in the service of naked self-interest, money and power. God only knows who will stop them.
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.”
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.
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’.
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.
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 99.965per cent.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
“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.
Marxand 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.
“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.
For many people, buying a property is the biggest long-term investment they will make in their lives. The problem, however, is that the systemic frailities of the current financial system means that the ‘nest egg’ is not all it seems on the surface.
When banks lend money to people for a ‘mortgage’ – literally translated as ‘death grip’ – the increasing circulation of debt-fueled cash results in greater demand for property when supply is low. This has a knock-on effect in terms of rising prices.
For the bankers, this process amounts to an apparent never ending cycle of growth. But for society in general this means an increasing mortgage debt burden which has culminated in global record levels of overall debt. According to the latest update of the IMF’s Global Debt Database, global debt rose by 28 percentage points to 256 percent of GDP.
Private debt from non-financial corporations and households also reached new highs. Increasing demand has exacerbated expanding household debt levels which, in the case of the UK, for example, is already tipping 65 thousand pounds per household.
The accumulation of public debt now accounts for almost 40 percent of total global debt, the highest share since the mid-1960s. Since 2007, this accumulation of public debt is largely attributable to the current global financial crisis.
The political response to the Covid pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict has exacerbated a crisis that largely resulted from the fact that people continue to buy houses and goods with money they don’t have. In the UK, we can see how this insane system has played out in terms of the relationship between house price and stock market inflation and what we have been told has been a growth in living standards.
The price of nearly all assets – shares, bonds, property, land etc – have been on an upward trajectory for the best part of fifteen years since the last crash. And yet the economy is no better then it was in 2009. “Green shoots” have been talked about ever since but never materialized.
This is because stock markets, and particularly house prices, have no bearing on reality. This false reality is sustained because bankers motivated by short-term gain, have persuaded people to buy assets. If, for instance, a large swath of people invest their money into the same company by buying shares, then the value of those shares will increase and so will their return on their initial investment.
The current record level of debt is predicated on historically low levels of interest. The problem is as interest rates are now beginning to climb, it is putting more people into debt which has a negative knock on effect in terms of housing demand.
This has a downward pressure on prices. For those people who took out variable mortgages at the peak of the bubble, any increase in mortgage rates mean they are likely to fall into a negative equity. The FT reports: ”A pandemic-induced property boom peaked at the end of 2021 but the sector is now braced for the broadest slowdown since the financial crash.” Under these circumstances buying a house becomes less of an attractive option.
One might think that putting savings into a bank would be a more secure alternative than taking on a potentially precarious mortgage debt. But this isn’t necessarily the case. The Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) is supposedly intended to cover depositors for a limited amount invested per bank in the event of any collapse.
But under such circumstances, depositors’ would likely panic and demand all of their cash back at the same time. Inevitably, there would be shortfall of available cash since the banks wouldn’t be able to release it on mass given that it would almost certainly be tied up in high risk off shore investments.
The problem is that the reach of these banks is greater now than previously because other smaller banks that were teetering on the edge have been swallowed up by the larger ones. So the banks who in 2008 were regarded as being too big to fail are even bigger in 2023.
In the event on a run on banks, the priority of government is not to protect depositors, but rather, to protect the bankers from their own incompetence and proflicacy One of the main functions of the banking racket is to ensure the ‘socialization’ of losses and the ‘privatization’ of profits. So for them, it’s ‘win-win’ situation.
The close knit ‘revolving door’ culture that exists between retired parliamentarians’ taking their places on the boards of financial companies’ and the fact that irresponsible actions of bankers continue to be underwritten by the tax payer, means there is no incentive for either parliament or banks to change their destructive ways.
With property prices now in decline, against a backdrop of low growth, rising inflation and the Russia-Ukraine conflict coming on the back of the international response to the Covid crisis, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the property market will take a huge hit sooner rather than later.
The last time the real estate bubble burst, the global economy plunged into the deepest downturn since the Great Depression. The public, therefore, might be advised to increase their liquidity by ensuring they have access to physical money.
But there is another potential problem. The move towards Central Bank Digital Currencies implies the phasing-out of cash which will almost certainly mean increasing demand for precious metals like gold and silver.
As society and economy begins to ‘reset’ on a new footing that reflects a move away from the current Fiat system, a concomitant new paradigm with regards to the way human beings attribute value to their lives, is also likely to emerge in the post-interregnum new world order.
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’.
‘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.
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.
Since 2010 the Tories have killed over 250,000 claimants & starved and made homeless millions more! The poor, sick & disabled need your help for this to end. Not voting Tory is a start!
Road To Somewhere Else 