All posts by Peter Senior

I'm a very experienced and pragmatic management consultant. I've reviewed and led the restructuring of many organisations - large and small corporations and Government Departments, much of the time as President of the New Zealand Institute of Management Consultants. Before that I was General Manager of a major NZ newspaper; earlier, an analyst for IBM UK. I gained an honours degree in engineering at London University, and studied management at Cambridge University. This wide range of experience has left me frustrated: I continue to see too many examples of really bad management. Sometimes small easily fixed issues; sometimes fundamental faults; and sometimes really tricky problems. Mostly these issues can be fixed using a mixture of common sense, 'management 101' and applying lessons from years of management experience. Unfortunately, all too often, politics, bureaucracy and daft government regulations get in the way; internal factors such as poor culture and out-of-date strategies are often evident. So what's gone wrong, and why, and most importantly, how to fix 'it'? I hope there are like-minded people 'out there' who will share their thoughts enabling 'us' to improve some significant management failures that affect the general public. If you just accept bad management and do nothing about it, you don't have the right to complain! The really tricky part is, what can you do about it that is likely to be effective? If you'd like to share thoughts on any aspects of management, send me an email to petersenior42@gmail.com .
Must-Read Articles

More must-read articles. Currently focused on the COVID-19 ‘plandemic’

 

The current focus of this post relates to the Coronavirus chaos. Note: Many more articles follow the latest six.

Nine COVID Controversies

 

Nine COVID Controversies  By Jeff  Harris, The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, 30 October 2020

Ever since the alleged pandemic erupted this past March the mainstream media has spewed a non-stop stream of misinformation that appears to be laser focused on generating maximum fear among the citizenry. But the facts and the science simply don’t support the grave picture painted of a deadly virus sweeping the land.

Yes we do have a pandemic, but it’s a pandemic of ginned up pseudo-science masquerading as unbiased fact. Here are nine facts backed up with data, in many cases from the CDC itself that paints a very different picture from the fear and dread being relentlessly drummed into the brains of unsuspecting citizens.

1) The PCR test is practically useless

According to an article in the New York Times August 29th 2020 testing for the Covid-19 virus using the popular PCR method results in up to 90% of those tested showing positive results that are grossly misleading.

Officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada compiled testing data that revealed the PCR test can NOT determine the amount of virus in a sample. (viral load) The amount of virus in up to 90% of positive results turned out to be so miniscule that the patient was asymptomatic and posed no threat to others. So the positive Covid-19 tests are virtually meaningless.

2) A positive test is NOT a CASE

For some reason every positive Covid-19 test is immediately designated a CASE. As we saw in #1 above up to 90% of positive Covid-19 tests result in miniscule amounts of virus that do not sicken the subject. Historically only patients who demonstrated actual symptoms of an illness were considered a case. Publishing positive test results as “CASES” is grossly misleading and needlessly alarming.

3) The Centers for Disease Control dramatically lowered the Covid-19 Death Count

On August 30th the CDC released new data that showed only 6% of the deaths previously attributed to Covid-19 were due exclusively to the virus. The vast majority, 94%, may have had exposure to Covid-19 but also had preexisting illnesses like heart disease, obesity, hypertension, cancer and various respiratory illnesses. While they died with Covid-19 they did NOT die exclusively from Covid-19.

4) CDC reports Covid-19 Survival Rate over 99%

The CDC updated their “Current Best Estimate” for Covid-19 survival on September 10th showing that over 99% of people exposed to the virus survived. Another way to say this is that less than 1% of the exposures are potentially life threatening. According to the CDC the vast majority of deaths attributed to Covid-19 were concentrated in the population over age 70, close to normal life expectancy.

5) CDC reveals 85% of Positive Covid cases wore face masks Always or Often

In September of 2020 the CDC released the results of a study conducted in July where they discovered that 85% of the positive Covid test subjects reported wearing a cloth face mask always or often for two weeks prior to testing positive. The majority, 71% of the test subjects reported always wearing a cloth face mask and 14% reported often wearing a cloth face mask. The only rational conclusion from this study is that cloth face masks offer little if any protection from Covid-19 infection.

6) There are inexpensive, proven therapies for Covid-19

Harvey Risch, MD, PhD heads the Yale University School of Epidemiology. He authored “The Key to Defeating Covid-19 Already Exists. We Need to Start Using It” which was published in Newsweek Magazine July 23rd, 2020. Dr. Risch documents the proven effectiveness of treating patients diagnosed with Covid-19 using a combination of Hydroxychloroquine, an antibiotic like azithromycin and the nutritional supplement zinc. Medical Doctors across the globe have reported very positive results using this protocol particularly for early stage Covid patients.

7) The US Death Rate is NOT spiking

If Covid-19 was the lethal killer it’s made out to be one would reasonably expect to see a significant spike in the number of deaths reported. But that hasn’t happened.

According to the CDC as of early May 2020 the total number of deaths in the US was 944,251 from January 1 – April 30th. This is actually slightly lower than the number of deaths during the same period in 2017 when 946,067 total deaths were reported.

8) Most Covid-19 Deaths Occur at the End of a normal Lifespan

According to the CDC as of 2017 US males can expect a normal lifespan of 76.1 years and females 81.1 years. A little over 80% of the suspected Covid-19 deaths have occurred in people over age 65. According to a June 28th New York Post article almost half of all Covid suspected deaths have occurred in Nursing Homes which predominately house people with preexisting health conditions and close to or past their normal life expectancy.

9) CDC Data Shows Minimal Covid Risk to Children and Young Adults

The CDC reported in their September 10th update that it’s estimated Infection Mortality Rate (IFR) for children age 0-19 was so low that 99.97% of those infected with the virus survived. For 20-49 year-olds the survival rate was almost as good at 99.98%. Even those 70 years-old and older had a survival rate of 94.6%. To put this in perspective the CDC data suggest that a child or young adult up to age 19 has a greater chance of death from some type of accident than they do from Covid-19.

Taken together it should be obvious that Covid-19 is pretty similar to typical flu viruses that sicken some people annually. The vast majority are able to successfully fight off the virus with their body’s natural immune system. Common sense precautions should be taken, particularly by those over age 65 that suffer from pre-existing medical conditions.

The gross over reaction by government leaders to this illness is causing much more distress, physical, emotional and financial, than the virus ever could on its own. The bottom line is there is NO pandemic, just a typical flu season that has been wildly blown out of proportion by 24/7 media propaganda and enabled by the masses paralyzed by irrational fear.

State and local governments in particular have ignored the rights of the people and have instituted outrageous attacks on freedom and liberty that was bought and paid for by the blood and sacrifice of our forefathers.

Slowly the people are recognizing the great fraud perpetrated on them by bureaucrats and elected officials who have sworn to uphold rights and freedoms as spelled out in the US Constitution. The time has come to hold these criminals accountable by utilizing the legal system to bring them to justice.

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Fear Secures Obedience in COVID-19 War  By Dr Joseph Mercola, 27 October 2020

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • Scientists, lawyers, medical professionals and academics are increasingly recognizing that the deliberate fear-mongering that has kept the COVID-19 pandemic alive threatens to replace democracy with fascist totalitarian models of government
  • Over the past several years, the threat of bioterrorism and viruses in general have been highlighted as one of the most serious threats to mankind, yet we continue to fund dangerous gain-of-function research — the very source and basis of this threat
  • The data tell us SARS-CoV-2 is not the existential threat it’s been made out to be. The big picture emerging seems to point in one direction, and that is the implementation of a long-standing plan to usher in and permanently establish a technocratic society
  • In a few short months, we’ve been dramatically shifted from a state of freedom to a state of totalitarianism, and the way that was done was through social engineering, which involves psychological manipulation, two tools of which are fear-based propaganda and censorship
  • It appears mobile phone carriers may already be providing data to state governments for quarantines and contact tracing purposes without your knowledge or consent, even though we’ve been told track and trace apps would be voluntary

A famous quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt is “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He understood that fear is ultimately what strips us of our human rights and drives a society into totalitarianism, and that the only way to circumvent such a fate is to bravely resist fear. Today, one of the biggest threats (or so we’re told) is a global pandemic.

Today, we also have something no previous tyrant has had, namely the technology to track, trace, control and manipulate individuals wherever they are. Most people are surrounded by electronics and wireless devices that harvest every imaginable data point about your personal life. Digital currency stands at the ready to complete the net of tyranny.

Engineering Contagion

I’ve written many articles reviewing the scientific evidence supporting the claim that SARS-CoV-2 is a laboratory creation. Whether the pathogen was released accidentally or on purpose is probably less important than establishing the truth of its origin.

The reason I say that is because intent would be hard to prove, while the fact that we’re still engineering bioweapons is unquestionable — and, as long as we continue dangerous gain-of-function research, the end result can only be more of the same. More outbreaks. More pandemics. More fear. Increased control. More restrictions. Fewer freedoms.

Hysteria is infectious. We are working ourselves up into a lather in which we exaggerate the threat and stop asking ourselves whether the cure may be worse than the disease. ~ Lord Sumption, Supreme Court Judge

If we want to dismantle the bioterrorism threat narrative, we have to address the research that makes this threat a possibility in the first place. The video above features independent journalist Whitney Webb, who provides an overview of the research she’s amassed in the course of writing articles on bioterrorism.

Her September 25, 2020, article1 “Engineering Contagion: UPMC, Corona-Thrax and ‘The Darkest Winter” delves into how the biodefense industrial complex are already working on a turbo-charged form of anthrax.

Documents obtained via FOIA reveals anthrax, an already deadly pathogen, is being genetically manipulated to express the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, the part of the virus that allows it to gain access into human cells. This clearly has little to do with staying a step ahead of nature, seeing how bacteria are not likely to mix with and take on characteristics of a virus if left to their own devices. I encourage you to watch the video and/or read her article if you’re interested in this topic.

Democracy Under Threat

As noted by Dr. Reiner Fuellmich2 — co-founder of the German Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee3,4 that is preparing the biggest class-action lawsuit in history5,6,7,8 — scientists, lawyers, medical professionals and academics are increasingly recognizing that the deliberate fear-mongering that has kept the COVID-19 pandemic alive well past its expiration date threatens to replace democracy with “fascist totalitarian models” of government.

Fortunately, more and more of them are now starting to realize that they must speak out, before it’s too late. Case in point, a Journal of Law and the Biosciences paper9 by Stephen Thompson and Eric C. Ip, both from the University of Hong Kong, titled “COVID-19 Emergency Measures and the Impending Authoritarian Pandemic,” which reads, in part:

“This Article demonstrates — with diverse examples drawn from across the world — there are unmistakable regressions into authoritarianism in governmental efforts to contain the virus. Despite the unprecedented nature of this challenge, there is no sound justification for systemic erosion of rights-protective democratic ideals and institutions beyond that which is strictly demanded by the exigencies of the pandemic.

A Wuhan-inspired all-or-nothing approach to viral containment sets a dangerous precedent for future pandemics and disasters, with the global copycat response indicating an impending ‘pandemic’ of a different sort, that of authoritarianization.

With a gratuitous toll being inflicted on democracy, civil liberties, fundamental freedoms, healthcare ethics, and human dignity, this has the potential to unleash humanitarian crises no less devastating than COVID-19 in the long run.”

Bioterrorism Narrative Used to Fuel Fear

Over the past several years, the threat of bioterrorism and viruses in general have been highlighted as one of the most serious threats to mankind. Bill Gates, who invests in and profits from pandemic vaccines, has been priming the public to fear the emergence of deadly diseases for years.

In 2015, he warned his TED Talk audience that the next big threat to humanity would be “a highly infectious virus” that “we are not ready for,”10 and in 2017 he predicted tens of millions could be killed by bioweapons.11

“The next epidemic could originate on the computer screen of a terrorist intent on using genetic engineering to create a synthetic version of the smallpox virus … or a super contagious and deadly strain of the flu,” Gates said at the time.12

Of course, Gates also co-hosted the October 2019 pandemic preparedness simulation known as Event 201, along with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the World Economic Forum. The event eerily predicted what would happen 10 weeks later, when COVID-19 appeared.

This scripted tabletop exercise included everything we now see playing out in the real world, from PPE shortages, lockdowns and removal of civil liberties to mandated vaccination campaigns, riots, economic turmoil and the breakdown of social cohesion. They even got the type of virus right: a “novel coronavirus.”

The detailed working paper13 “Bioterrorism and Biocrimes: The Illicit Use of Biological Agents Since 1900,” originally published in 1998 and revised in 2001, reviews some 270 suspected biowarfare incidents on record.

Considering that paper is now nearly 20 years old, that list is likely to be even longer today. This list may even include SARS-CoV-2, if we are to believe Francis Boyle, who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, and others.

Technocracy Rising

Another medical professional who is now speaking openly about the COVID-19 pandemic being a brazen power-grab by the technocratic elite is Dr. Lee Merritt, an orthopedic spinal surgeon with a medical practice in Logan, Iowa.14

August 16, 2020, she delivered a speech at the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness15 convention in Las Vegas, Nevada, featured in “How Medical Technocracy Made the Plandemic Possible,” in which she dissected the many fear-inducing lies we’ve been told about this pandemic.

When you look at the actual data and statistics available, and compare them to what we’re being told by government officials and the media, it becomes evident that there’s a gulf between the two. The data tells us SARS-CoV-2 is not the existential threat it’s been made out to be. That in turn begs the question: “Why do they want us to live in fear? Surely, there must be a reason for it.”

Of course there is, and it has nothing to do with making sure you and your family remain healthy and safe from infection. The big picture emerging seems to point in one direction, and that is the implementation of a long-standing plan to usher in and permanently establish a technocratic society.

In summary, technocracy16,17 is an economic ideology built around totalitarian rule by unelected leaders. A technocrat is someone who exercises power over you on the basis of their knowledge. As an economic system, technocracy is resource-based. Under this system, companies are told what resources they’re allowed to use, when, and for what, and consumers are told what to buy.

Social Engineering Is in Full Swing

The technocratic system also requires social engineering, which relies on massive data collection and the use of artificial intelligence. Technocrats have silently and relentlessly pushed this agenda forward ever since the 1930s, and signs of its implementation are becoming increasingly visible.

In a few short months, we’ve been dramatically shifted from a state of freedom to a state of totalitarianism, and the way that was done was through social engineering, which of course involves psychological manipulation.

Censoring and propaganda are but two strategies that shape and mold a population. Psychiatry professor Albert Biderman’s “chart of coercion”18,19 also includes the following methods, all of which can be clearly related to the COVID-19 response:

Isolation techniques — Quarantines, social distancing, isolation from loved ones and solitary confinement

Monopolization of perception — Monopolizing the 24/7 news cycle, censoring dissenting views and creating barren environments by closing bars, gyms and restaurants

Degradation techniques — Berating, shaming people (or even physically attacking) those who refuse to wear masks or social distance, or generally choose freedom over fear

Induced debility — Being forced to stay at home and not be able to exercise or socialize

Threats — Threatening with the removal of your children, prolonged quarantine, closing of your business, fines for noncompliance with mask and social distancing rules, forced vaccination and so on

Demonstrating omnipotence/omniscience — Shutting down the whole world, claiming scientific and medical authority

Enforcing trivial demands — Examples include family members being forced to stand 6 feet apart at the bank even though they arrived together in the same car, having to wear a mask when you walk into a restaurant, even though you can remove it as soon as you sit down, or having to wear a mask when walking alone on the beach

Occasional indulgence — Reopening some stores and restaurants but only at a certain capacity, for example. Part of the coercion plan is that indulgences are always taken away again, though, and they’re already saying we may have to shut down the world again this fall

The Trampling of Privacy and Human Rights

The technocracy’s fingerprints are also evident in the invasive, privacy-shredding tracking and tracing programs that have been rolled out around the world, and the repeated warning that unless every man, woman and child gets vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, life will never go back to normal.

The truth is, the technocrats have no intention of ever letting us go back to normal. The plan is to alter society permanently. Part of that alteration is the removal of civil liberties and human rights, and it is now happening at breakneck speed.

As reported by Alex Berenson in a September 30, 2020, Twitter post,20 real-world experience suggests mobile phone carriers, including AT&T and Verizon, are already providing data to state governments for quarantines and contact tracing purposes without your knowledge or consent, even though we’ve been told track and trace apps would be voluntary.

We’re also being bombarded with news reports telling us to prepare to roll up our sleeves and get vaccinated as soon as a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available — or else.

An October 1, 2020, article21 in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine bemoans a poll that found only 49% of Americans plan to get the COVID-19 vaccine when it comes out. The answer, the article suggests, is to make it mandatory for all.

Written by lawyers at Stanford Law School and other health policy experts, the article outlines what the authors claim are “six substantive criteria” that would support the first vaccine ever to be mandated for adults, outside of the flu vaccine for health care workers.

Recognizing that it’s the individual states, not the federal government, that would do the mandating, the authors also review measures that states would need to implement in order to pull off a mandate.

“State mandates should not be structured as compulsory vaccination (absolute requirements); instead, noncompliance should incur a penalty,” the authors say, adding that this penalty should be “substantive,” in the form of employment suspension or stay-at-home orders. If refusing a vaccine results in you being denied an income and forced into house arrest, then it’s not really voluntary, is it? It’s as compulsory as it gets.

Along with Gates, Dr. Anthony Fauci has also been priming the public consciousness throughout the pandemic by warning that, without a vaccine, we’ll never be able to go back to normal.22 All this talk is about forced vaccination, despite the complete lack of assurance that any of the vaccine candidates are safe.

Emerging evidence actually suggests the novel mRNA vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 could be a public health disaster in the making. An October 1, 2020, report23 by CNBC reviews the experiences of five participants in Moderna’s and Pfizer’s SARS-CoV-2 vaccine trials. One of the participants in Pfizer’s vaccine trial “woke up with chills, shaking so hard he cracked a tooth after taking the second dose,” CNBC reports.24

A Moderna trial participant said he had a low-grade fever and felt “under the weather” for several days after his first shot. Eight hours after his second shot he was “bed-bound with a fever of over 101, shakes, chills, a pounding headache and shortness of breath. He said the pain in his arm, where he received the shot, felt like a ‘goose egg on my shoulder.’ He hardly slept that night, recording that his temperature was higher than 100 degrees for five hours.”25

Two others reported similar side effects, and a third warned you would need to take a day off after the second shot. CNBC also noted that “as companies progressed through clinical trials, several vaccine makers abandoned their highest doses following reports of more severe reactions.”

Russian Intelligence: COVID-19 Is a ‘False Pandemic’

The legal eagles of the German Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee26,27 are not the only ones calling the COVID-19 pandemic out as a fraud and cover-up of a more nefarious agenda.

In the video above, Vladimir Kvachkov, a former colonel of Russian military intelligence, calls COVID-19 a false pandemic, planned and implemented with the goal of gaining totalitarian control over the world population. It started with 9/11, Kvachkov says, and the coronavirus is the next step to continue the power grab.

“It’s all a lie and needs to be considered as a global, strategic special operation,” Kvachkov says. “These are command and staff exercises of the world’s behind-the-scenes powers on controlling humanity.”

Comparing it to a military exercise, Kvachkov says the ultimate aim is to reduce the world’s population to 1 billion “ordinary” people and just 100 million of those in control — with the ordinary people being there to serve the 100 million.

In short, he says, the “artificially created” and “purposely spread” coronavirus has four dimensions. The first is religion and population reduction; the second is to establish political control over humanity; the third is to deflate the world economy; and the fourth is to eliminate geo-economic competition.

COVID-19 Rules Mark ‘Hysterical Slide Into Police State’

I’ll end this with some observations by British Supreme Court Judge Lord Sumption, who in a March 30, 2020, interview28 with The Post warned that COVID-19 rules are paving the way for despotism — the exercise of absolute power in a cruel and oppressive manner.

“The real problem is that when human societies lose their freedom, it’s not usually because tyrants have taken it away. It’s usually because people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection against some external threat. And the threat is usually a real threat but usually exaggerated.

That’s what I fear we are seeing now. The pressure on politicians has come from the public. They want action. They don’t pause to ask whether the action will work. They don’t ask themselves whether the cost will be worth paying. They want action anyway. And anyone who has studied history will recognize here the classic symptoms of collective hysteria.

Hysteria is infectious. We are working ourselves up into a lather in which we exaggerate the threat and stop asking ourselves whether the cure may be worse than the disease.”

It is time to ask ourselves some very pressing questions. Is it reasonable to expect government to eliminate ALL infection and ALL death? They’ve proven they cannot, yet we keep relinquishing more and more freedoms and liberties because they claim doing so will keep everyone safer. It’s an enticing lie, but a lie nonetheless.

Remember, they sold us on the business shutdowns and home quarantining by saying we just need to flatten the curve of infection to avoid hospital overcrowding. Now, hospitals are near-empty and deaths are so low they’re not even reported anymore. Yet lockdowns remain in many areas and some — Australia being a prime example — have reached shocking new heights. 

Sooner or later everyone must decide which is more important: Personal liberty or false security? The good news is that many are starting to see the writing on the wall; they’re starting to see we’ve been “had,” and are starting to choose liberty over brutal totalitarianism in the name of public health.

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The science is in, and it’s tainted by its own prejudice

The science is in, and its tainted by its own prejudice  By Nick Cater, The Australian, 26 October 2020

Editor’s note: the last two paragraphs: ‘COVID-19 could have been science’s moment of salvation, an opportunity to put aside past mistakes and join forces in the interest of mankind, inspire a generation of students to take up science courses and fight for a noble cause. Instead, science has slipped further into the swamp, polarised and tainted by its own prejudice, drifting ever further from the Mertonian principles of universalism, disinterest and organised scepticism.’

We expected better from science in this pandemic. Billions of dollars of economic activity have been sacrificed and untold misery caused by lockdowns, a medieval approach to control a virus with no empirical underpinnings.

Surely there are more sophisticated forms of protection than face masks. A Danish study based on a sample of 6000 people, half of whom wore the mask and half of whom didn’t, suggests that face coverings make no difference. Some may want to debate the findings, but it’s hard to do so, since the Lancet and other prestigious publications flatly rejected the study for publication.

The Lancet is not having a good pandemic. In May it published a study claiming hydroxychloroquine had no clinical benefits in treating COVID-19 and was potentially dangerous. The study was quickly retracted when it was found to be based on data described by its editor as “a monumental fraud”.

It would be comforting to think this was an isolated departure from rigorous science. Sadly, it is not. COVID-19 has merely exposed a virus that has infected science for decades, eating away its integrity and weakening public trust. The scientific errors exposed by the pandemic are merely a symptom of a wider malaise to which few, if any, disciplines are immune.

Scottish psychologist Stuart Ritchie makes a forceful case as to why science needs to take a good long look at itself in his book, Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science, published in July.

The scientific method should promote scepticism, rationality and empiricism, he writes. Instead it “has become home to a dizzying array of incompetence, delusion, lies and self- deception”.

The peer review system that is supposed to protect science from human flaws amplifies them instead. The imperative for researchers to publish or perish favours quantity over quality. Of the millions of scientific papers published every year, few make a contribution to the literature.

Most go unnoticed. The worst implant errors that offer false hope or cloud our understanding of the world.

It is disappointing to learn, for instance, that red wine does not make you live longer after all, as cardiologist Dipak Das of the University of Connecticut claimed in a series of much-hyped studies.

Das was found guilty by an inquiry of 145 counts of fabrication and falsification of data, involving at least 23 papers and three grant applications. He manipulated the presentation of experiments called western blots, which assess presence and amounts of specific proteins, slicing and dicing protein bands from separate experiments to suggest they had been measured in the same experiment.

Outright scientific fraud is not as uncommon as we would like to think. Frequently, it is driven by publication bias, the imperative to produce clear results, free from uncertainty and statistical noise. Scientific journals are reluctant to publish negative results or attempts to replicate previous studies.

Ritchie labels this “the file-drawer problem”, the hiding place for null results, evidence of journeys down blind allies trying ideas that just didn’t stack up.

Ritchie exposes ways in which scientists manipulate the “p-value”, a statistical measure of the probability of getting the same result if the hypothesis wasn’t true.

A p-value below 0.5 is the threshold for publication of a paper. It encourages researchers to take short cuts running multiple data sets through the computer with no specific hypothesis in mind, then reporting whichever effects have acceptable p-values.

Outcome-switching, as it is known, is rife in nutritional epidemiology, the study of links between diet and health. One study looked at thousands of papers linking food with cancer. Of 50 types of food studies, 40 had been linked to cancer, including bacon, pork, eggs, tomatoes, bread, butter and tea. Some were said to increase the risk, others to reduce it. But in most cases the statistical significance was small.

Rarely were other possible factors considered; that both poor health and diet might be determined by cultural or socioeconomic circumstances, for example.

Bias is exacerbated by excitable press releases. A 2014 study by researchers at Cardiff University found that 40 per cent of medical science press releases contained recommendations for changed behaviour unsupported by the study.

Others made cross-species leaps, reporting studies on animals that the press release simply assumes are replicable in humans. In fact, 90 per cent of experiments with mice fail to translate to human beings.

The researchers found claims exaggerated in press releases were inflated further by journalists. “In an age of ‘churnalism’, where time-pressed journalists often simply repeat the contents of press releases,” writes Ritchie, “scientists have a great deal of power – and a great deal of responsibility.”

Perhaps we need to make science boring again, recognising that science does not change through a series of breakthroughs but through the slog of trial and error. “If all you do is ground-breaking, you end up with a lot of holes in the ground but no buildings,” says Ritchie.

The roots of the crisis in empiricism run deep. The cult of post-modernism propagating the view that there is no objective truth accounts for some of the rot.

A more direct source for blame, however, are the perverse incentives that drive scientists to publish, not for the advancement of human knowledge, but the advancement of their own careers and the acquisition of research grants.

Rating scientists on their total number of publications and citations drives a system that is too easily gamed. It is a classical example of Goodhart’s law, named after British economist Charles Goodhart, that when a measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure.

The same unreliable metrics are used to evaluate universities and university publications, further incentivising those in the system to publish and be damned.

University rankings rely heaving on measures of research income “productivity” and citations.

COVID-19 could have been science’s moment of salvation, an opportunity to put aside past mistakes and join forces in the interest of mankind, inspire a generation of students to take up science courses and fight for a noble cause.

Instead, science has slipped further into the swamp, polarised and tainted by its own prejudice, drifting ever further from the Mertonian principles of universalism, disinterest and organised scepticism.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.

NICK CATER

 

COLUMNIST

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre and a columnist with The Australian. He is a former editor of The Weekend Australian and a former deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph. He is aut… Read more

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Coronavirus: Health fascism has consumed human rights

Coronavirus. Health fascism has consumed human rights  By Adam Creighton, The Australian, 20 October 2020

What a farce human rights have become. For years progressive politicians, academics and activists have called for stronger ­protection for human rights, new codes, new laws — and well-staffed commissions costing ­millions to oversee them. Democracies just couldn’t be trusted.

Indeed, this year has witnessed the most extraordinary attack on freedoms by democratic governments in modern history, making a mockery of such human rights acts and conventions. Yet there’s been barely a peep from those in the human rights industry, who’ve perhaps been enjoying working from home on their large taxpayer guaranteed salaries.

The $10m-a-year Victorian Human Rights Commission, at ground zero for what will be seen as the most destructive over-­reaction in Australian history, says on its website its focus during the pandemic includes “reducing racism” and “improving workplace gender equality”. COVID-19 “has exposed some weaknesses in the way the Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities protects Victorians from violations of their rights”, the commission does concede on its website.

Talk about understatement: try, it doesn’t protect them at all.

You don’t need to be Immanuel Kant to know that the freedom of expression, assembly, association, the right to work, conduct business, have a private life — all supposedly protected — trump welcome to country ceremonies, quotas for women on boards and whatever is happening in Nauru.

In 2014 the Australian Human Rights Commission was up in arms about counter-terrorism legislation that provided for “control orders” to be placed on suspected terrorists, which could have constrained their freedom of movement. But putting millions of people, suspected of doing nothing wrong, under house arrest for months, and contributing to panic and the biggest economic downturn in a century? Crickets.

The US Centres for Disease Control issued updated coronavirus survival rates in mid September: almost 100 per cent for anyone under 50, 99.5 per cent for 50 to 69 and 94.6 per cent for over 70s. As professor David Livermore, a microbiologist at the University of East Anglia noted recently, six of every seven people aged over 90 affected with the coronavirus survive. This is far from the plague.

The global death toll from COVID-19 remains substantially lower than the flu pandemics of the late 1950s and 1960s.

The Victorian Public Health and Wellbeing Act of 2008, under which much of the lockdown restrictions in Victoria have been enacted, says “the spread of an infectious disease should be prevented or minimised with the minimum restriction on the rights of any person”. By November 2, Melbourne will have been in lockdown for 22 weeks since March 30. That doesn’t sound minimal to me.

Any order, the act goes on, must “be proportionate with the risk that the person poses to public health”. Given Victoria has a handful of cases every day, the risk most Victorians pose is zero.

Governments probably know their actions aren’t justified. In Europe, which endured some of the world’s toughest lockdowns earlier this year, they have simply ignored the European Convention on Human Rights.

The UK, France, Spain and Italy could have applied for convention exemptions, which are justified where a “public emergency threats the life of the nation”. None did, suggesting they didn’t think the threshold had been reached, writes British barrister Francis Hoar in a recent essay. “It must be questionable whether a virus which … appears to have a mortality rate of between 0.12 per cent and 1 per cent could be considered a threat to the life of the nation,” he adds.

The impact of lockdowns ­lingers long after they have been lifted. Freedom House, a US-based think tank, recently found the pandemic had eroded civil rights in at least 80 countries, including the US, France, Belgium and Argentina. To be sure, many of these severe lockdown measures have been popular. But many stupid things have been popular: autarky, World War I and White Australia, to name a diverse few. It doesn’t make them right.

That’s why nations have had constitutions and bills of rights to limit democracies from bouts of collective insanity. I used to oppose bills of rights, disliking lawyers’ picnics and thinking the common sense of MPs would ultimately prevail.

The Great Lockdown of 2020 illustrates how easily we can be spooked into a kind of health fascism, where basic individual rights are sacrificed to the greater health collective, without the slightest ­attempt at a justification, amid fearmongering propaganda and censorship. Anyone who wants to mind their own business and get on with life, making their own risk assessments, is vilified as selfish. Supporters of a police state and health fascism are seen as caring.

Many of the supposed public advocates for the poor, the young and marginal — unions, churches, the Australian Council of Social Service — have been quiet in ­defending their constituents’ core rights to work, to worship.

We are now obsessed with safety, above all else.

There hasn’t even been a health crisis in Australia, just the possibility of one; nurses have been twiddling their thumbs. Overall mortality here, and in Sweden and other western countries, is within the normal range, if higher in the US and UK. The mind boggles what our governments would resort to were we faced with a serious threat, disease or otherwise.

In Europe total mortality rates have been normal since June, ­despite mounting hysteria about “case” numbers and calls for second and third lockdowns.

“The fear generated by the emergence of a previously unknown infection may be greatly out of proportion to its real public health impact. Fear often generates inadequate decisions or inappropriate behaviours,” the World Health Organisation said with great prescience in 2018.

Coronaviruses are natural, as is death in old age.

Thousands of people die of natural causes every day. COVID-19 is just another natural cause that we’ll need to learn to put up with if we ever hope to get our rights back, let alone travel outside Australia.

==============================

World Doctors Alliance: “We Do Not Have A Medical Pandemic.”

World Doctors Alliance. We Do Not Have A Medical Pandemic  By Arjun Walia, 20 October 2020

IN BRIEF

  • The Facts:

Formed under the “Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee,” an alliance of hundreds of doctors and scientists, the “World Doctors Alliance recently held a press conference sharing their views about the coronavirus.

  • Reflect On:

Why are tens of thousands of doctors and scientists all over the world being ridiculed and in many cases censored for sharing their research and opinions?

What Happened: Once again, doctors and scientists are and have been sharing the opinion that COVID-19 should not be classified as a pandemic virus due to the fact that it’s, in their opinion, nowhere near as dangerous as big media is making it out to be.

An organization made up of well over 500 German doctors and scientists called “Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee” who share the same perception discussed in this article have also created the “World Doctors Alliance.” Not long ago they held a press-sharing their perspective.

Below is a clip of one of the members, Dr. Elke De Klerk, founder of Doctors for Truth from the Netherlands sharing her thoughts. Below that you will find the press conference recently held by the alliance.

Many expert have been emphasizing that we are dealing with something no more dangerous than the flu. For example, approximately 40,000 scientists, doctors and more than half a million concerned citizens have now signed The Great Barrington Declaration. The declaration explains that “Covid-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.”

The CDC also released new infection/fatality estimates that show numbers on par with seasonal flu. This recent release also has many people and experts calling into question the severity of the virus, this was well after John P. A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University  said that the infection fatality rate is close to 0 percent for people under the age of 45 years old.

The Physicians For Informed Consent (PIC) recently published a report titled “Physicians for Informed Consent (PIC) Compares COVID-19 to Previous Seasonal and Pandemic Flu Periods.” According to them, the infection/fatality rate of COVID-19 is 0.26%. You can read more about that and access their resources and reasoning here.

Then there is the controversy surrounding the PCR tests and the idea that a large majority of cases may actually be false positives. You can read more about that here and here. This as been coupled with the fact that many COVID deaths may not have actually been the result of COVID. You can read more about that here and here.

These groups are made up of veteran experts in the field, Nobel Laureates, Professors of Medicine, Doctors and more, yet all it takes is for an Anthony Fauci like figure to oppose their opinion, and this is the perspective that gets beamed across mainstream media outlets, radio and television while the opposing view is nothing but ridiculed and “debunked.” This is very bizarre to say the least, mainstream media alone has the power to make the majority seem like the minority, and the minority seem like the majority. They have a huge reach when it comes to regulating the perception of the masses.

The examples listed above are a few of many.

Right now, the Great Barrington Declaration mentioned above and the idea of “heard immunity” is being heavily ridiculed in the mainstream, without any of the renowned scientists who support the declaration having an opportunity to share their opinion via mainstream media.

Below is a recent full press conference held by the alliance.

Is This Fake News? Nothing in this article is fake, these opinions are actually being shared by doctors and scientists around the world, and a lot of them. As far as what they are saying and the opinions expressed above, this is what’s come under the scrutiny of Facebook Fact-Checkers. It’s been emphasized during this pandemic that any type of information that does not come straight from federal health regulatory agencies and the World Health Organization is not to be trusted.

Here’s an article from Health Feedback, for example, explaining why low infection fatality numbers do not mean that the virus is not dangerous.

The organizations above have been speaking up regarding the censorship they’ve experienced from social media giants, and this has also been a common theme throughout this pandemic. Michael Levitt, a Biophysicist and a professor of structural biology at Stanford University, criticized the WHO as well as Facebook for censoring different information and informed perspectives regarding the Coronavirus. According to him, “the level of stupidity” going on here is amazing.

The Takeaway: It’s been quite intriguing to see so many scientists and doctors completely oppose the recommendations and claims made by the World Health Organization (WHO) since the beginning of this pandemic. What’s even more shocking for lots of people is the fact that many scientists and doctors have been completely censored for sharing their research and opinion regarding anything to do with COVID if it opposes the information and recommendations set out by the WHO.

It’s not hard to see why so many people are confused and so many of us have beliefs that completely differ from one another.

Should people not have the right to examine information and opinions and decide for themselves what is and what isn’t Should there be a digital fact checker patrolling the internet limiting peoples’ ability to see certain information? Do organizations like the WHO and our governments really make decisions that are in and for our best interests, or are there other interests being served here?

==================

Stop all lockdown measures immediately

Stop all lockdown measures immediately, 16 October 2020

Also: https://worlddoctorsalliance.com/ims/WDAOpenLetter.pdf, 16 October 2020

Open letter to the UK Government, Governments of the World and the Citizens of the World


We the undersigned call upon the UK government, governments of
the World and the Citizens of the World, to stop all lockdown
measures immediately.

Introduction
We were told initially that the premise for lockdown was to ‘flatten
the curve’ and therefore protect the NHS from being overwhelmed.
It is clear that at no point was the National Health Service (NHS) in
any danger of being overwhelmed, and since May 2020 covid wards
have been largely empty; and crucially the death toll from covid has
remained extremely low.
We now have hundreds of thousands of so-called ‘cases’, ‘infections’
and ‘positive tests’ but hardly any sick people. Recall that four fifths
(80%) of ‘infections’ are asymptomatic (1) Covid wards have been by
and large empty throughout June, July, August and September 2020.
Most importantly covid deaths are at an all-time low. It is clear that
these ‘cases’ are in fact not ‘cases’ but rather they are normal
healthy people.
So-called asymptomatic cases have never in the history of
respiratory disease been the driver for spread of infection. Rather it
is symptomatic people who spread respiratory infections – not
asymptomatic people.(2)
It is also abundantly clear that the ‘pandemic’ is basically over and
has been since June 2020. (3)
We have reached ‘herd’ immunity and therefore have no need for a
vaccine.
We have safe and very effective treatments and preventative
treatments for covid, we therefore call for an immediate end to all
lockdown measures, social distancing, mask wearing, testing of
healthy individuals, track and trace, immunity passports, the
vaccination program and so on.
There has been a catalogue of unscientific, non-sensical policies
enacted which infringe our inalienable rights, such as – freedom of
movement, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. These
draconian totalitarian measures must never be repeated.

Lockdown
? Covid has proved less deadly than previous influenza seasons –
There were 50,100 flu deaths from December 2017 to March
2018 in England and Wales. There were 80,000 flu deaths in
1969. To date we have circa 42,000 covid related deaths in the
UK.
? We have never locked down society for a respiratory virus
before.
? The basis for lockdown was a mathematical model by
Professor Neil Ferguson. His modelling which predicted half a
million deaths in the UK has been roundly condemned as
being not fit for purpose. His estimated death figures were
clearly wrong by a factor of 10 or 12 times. (1)
? Professor Ferguson’s modelling was not even peer reviewed
before being acted upon by several nations. Eminent
epidemiologists such as Professor Gupta from Oxford
University were ignored, they estimated the death count would
be far lower in the UK.
? Professor Ferguson has a long track record of woeful
modelling he was entirely wrong about sars, mers, mad cow’s
disease (CJD), and swine flu. Why did the world listen to him
again? (2)
? Countries which did not lock down Sweden, Japan, Taiwan,
South Korea and Belarus have all done significantly better than
us in terms of percentage of population deaths. They also have
herd immunity and intact economies.
? Lockdown did not save lives, and this has been published in
the Lancet ‘….in our analysis, full lockdowns and wide-spread
COVID-19 testing were not associated with reductions in the
number of critical cases or overall mortality.’ (3)
? The vast majority of deaths occurred in elderly and very elderly
people
? The vast majority of deaths occurred in people with preexisting serious health issues such as cancer, cardiovascular
disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes etc
? Covid poses virtually zero risk to the under 45’s who have more
chance of being struck by lightning than dying from covid.
? Covid poses a very small risk for healthy under 60 year olds
who have a greater chance of accidental drowning than dying
from covid.
? The entire nation was essentially placed under house arrest.
We have never isolated the healthy before.
? Isolating the sick and those who are immunocompromised
makes sense. Isolating the healthy has hampered the
establishment of herd immunity and makes no sense.
? To put it into perspective we had 115,000 smoking related
deaths in the UK in 2015 compared to the 42,000 deaths from
covid.
? We usually have around 600,000 deaths every year in the UK,
roughly 1600 deaths per day.
Collateral damage the cure is worse than the virus
? Placing the public under virtual house arrest has caused untold
damage to both physical and mental health.(1)
? Ventilating patients instead of oxygenating patients proved to
be a deadly policy and an unwarranted failure. Ventilation
resulted in many unnecessary deaths. (2)
? Sending infected people from hospitals to care homes placed
the elderly and frail under unnecessary risk and resulted in
many unnecessary deaths. (3)
? Blanket Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders were imposed on
thousands of people without their consent nor the consent of
their families – this is both unlawful and immoral and lead to
unnecessary deaths in care homes. (4)
? Hospitals became essentially ‘covid only’ centres vast numbers
of patients were wilfully neglected, resulting in many
thousands of unnecessary deaths. (5)
? The government’s own report estimates that some two
hundred thousand (200,000) people will die as a direct result of
lockdown – not the virus. Hospitals being closed, suicide and
poverty will result in more deaths than the virus. (6)
? The cure is worse than the disease!
Death certificates (1)
? The majority of people who died had significant comorbidities,
such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, cardiovascular disease and
diabetes.
? Counting death certificates with a ‘mention’ of covid as being a
death caused by covid is a gross misrepresentation of the facts
and has vastly over exaggerated the death toll.
? The rules for the signing of death certificates have been
changed solely for covid by the Coronavirus 2020 Act.
? Doctors do not even need to have physically seen the patient
in order to sign death certificates.
? The Act has removed the need for a confirmatory medical
certificate for cremations.
? Autopsies have virtually been banned, no doubt leading to
misdiagnosis of the true cause of deaths; and also reducing
our understanding of the disease itself.
? Worse still, care home staff who largely have no medical
training are able to give a statement as to the cause of death.
? Covid was put on death certificates merely on the ‘suspicion’ of
people having covid. This may well be unlawful, since it is a
crime to falsify death certificates.
? People who die within 28 days of a positive pcr test are
deemed to have died from covid, even if they die in a car crash
or from a heart attack; clearly over inflating the death toll (2)

Economic ruin
? Reports now estimate that as many as six and a half million
(6,500,000) people in the UK will lose their jobs as a result of
lockdown. (1)
? It is well known that poverty directly adversely affects health,
we can expect to see many people suffering with poor health
and resulting in many premature deaths, as a direct result of
lockdown.

Censorship
? Government have acted maliciously in censoring doctors,
nurses and NHS staff. The people have the perfect right to
hear what is going on in hospitals, and the medical profession
have a duty to look after the public and to reassure them. (1)
? The medical profession have not been allowed to let the public
know that covid wards have been empty for months, nor that
covid deaths have reached an all-time low for months, and this
has unnecessarily added to the public’s distress and anxiety.
? Doctors and scientists with views that differ from the
government narrative have had their videos and articles
removed from the internet

Testing – False positives
? PCR tests cannot be verified for accuracy as there is no ‘gold
standard’ against which to check them. The virus has not been
purified. (1)
? PCR tests cannot detect viral loads and are prone to false
positives. (2)
? A positive PCR test does not mean that an individual is infected
nor infective. (3)
? In fact approximately 90% of the PCR positive ‘cases’ are false
positives. We therefore have no second wave and no
pandemic. (4 , 5)
? The government’s report estimates a false positive rate of
between 0.8 to 4.0 % using data from other viral infections –
not from covid (6)
? Viral fragments may remain in people’s bodies for several
weeks following recovery from infection. (7)
? The crisis will never end if we are waiting for zero positive
tests. Everyone has probably had a cold caused by a
coronavirus and will likely have a few viral fragments matching
those of the cousin SARS-CoV-2 virus (8)
? Testing healthy asymptomatic individuals is non-sensical,
unscientific and a colossal waste of money. The governments
moon shot daily testing program will cost £100 Billion roughly
two thirds of the annual NHS budget.
? Antibody testing is not the gold standard as many people have
T-cell immunity, and antibodies may not circulate following
recovery from infection.

Hydroxychloroquine
? The controversial drug Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) has been
unfairly smeared, by the WHO, CDC, NIH and the media.
? However HCQ has very firm support from, amongst others:
Professor Harvey Risch epidemiologist from Yale, The
American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS),
American Frontline Doctors, the Henry Ford Health System and
Professor Didier Raoult microbiologist and infectious disease
specialist – to name but a few. (1)
? The Lancet was even forced to retract a study on HCQ after it
was revealed by the Guardian newspaper that they had been
completely fabricated and written by a sci-fi writer and a porn
star. Even following this astounding revelation HCQ was still
banned in most countries. (2)
? HCQ according to AAPS has a ninety per cent (90%) cure rate
when given early and alongside zinc (3)
? HCQ is safer than many over the counter drugs such as aspirin,
Benadryl and Tylenol.
? The AAPS also point out that there has never been a vaccine as
safe as HCQ. (4)
? HCQ has been licensed for over sixty years and has been safely
used by billions of people worldwide. There is a very small risk
of arrythmia which is easily monitored.
? Why was HCQ banned then? Could it be that there are no huge
profits to be made from this out-of-patent drug?
? HCQ was used to great effect in the Sars1 outbreak of 2005 (5)
? In short had HCQ been available then there would not have
been a pandemic !

Prevention
? Preventative measures such as hydroxychloroquine or
vitamins D, C and zinc should have been recommended for the
public. (1)
? Early calcifediol (25-hydroxyvitamin D) treatment to
hospitalized COVID-19 patients significantly reduced intensive
care unit admissions (2)
? Vit D reduces the severity of covid. (2,3)
? Voluntary isolation of the frail – should they so choose; in
combination with preventative measures would have been a
far better strategy. The rest of society could and should have
continued as normal.

Vaccine
? A rushed vaccine is clearly not in the public’s best interest
? Indemnifying vaccine manufacturers against all liability is also
clearly not in the public’s best interest
Conflicts of interest
? Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance has £600,000
worth of shares in GSK Glaxo Smith Klein. He has in
recent years sold £5 million of shares in GSK which he
‘earned’ whilst chief of GSK (1)
? Sir Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer UK, accepted over
£30 million in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates
foundation to study malaria vaccines. (2)
? It has become clear that members of SAGE, Public Health
England (PHE), World Health Organisation (WHO), Centre
for Disease Control (CDC), National institute for Health
(NIH) etc have many conflicts of interests. They all accept
very large ‘donations’ from the pharmaceutical and
vaccine industry. These conflicts of interests may well
have effectively corrupted their integrity. (3)
? It is also clear that governments are heavily lobbied by
the pharmaceutical industry and the vaccine industry,
again this may have compromised their integrity. (4)
Cui bono? Who benefits?
? Vaccine manufacturers will make trillions from this, as will
track and trace manufacturers, and the pharmaceutical
industry stand to make trillions from covid testing.
? Prime minister Boris Johnson announced the new ‘moon shot’
testing will cost £100 Billion, approximately two thirds of the
annual NHS budget.
? Surely these vast sums would be far better spent on treating
all of the neglected patients who have been wilfully neglected
during lockdown and who now face huge waiting lists.

Conclusions
We have effective and safe treatments and preventative medications
for covid, therefore there is no need for any lockdown restrictions
and associated measures. The pandemic is essentially over as can be
seen by the consistent low death rate and hospital admissions over
the past four months.
We demand the immediate and permanent ceasing of all lockdown
measures.
Lockdowns do not save lives, that is why they have never been used
before. Civil liberties and fundamental freedoms have been
unnecessarily removed from the public and this must never happen
again.
Preventative measures such as Hydroxychloroquine, vitamin C,
Vitamin D and zinc must be made readily available to the public.
Isolation must be voluntary. People are perfectly capable of making
their own assessment of the risks and must be free to go about their
lives as they so choose. People must have the right to choose
whether to isolate or not.
Likewise, businesses must have the right to remain open if they so
choose.
We demand that doctors, nurses, scientists and healthcare
professionals must be permitted free speech and never be censored
again.
Professor Mark Woolhouse epidemiologist and specialist in
infectious diseases, Edinburgh University Member of the Scientific
Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours, that advises the
Government stated that –
‘…Lockdown was a monumental disaster on a global scale. The cure
was worse than the disease.’
‘I never want to see national lockdown again. It was always a temporary
measure that simply delayed the stage of the epidemic we see now. It
was never going to change anything fundamentally, however low we
drove down the number of cases,’
‘We absolutely should never return to a position where children cannot
play or go to school.’
‘I believe the harm lockdown is doing to our education, health care
access, and broader aspects of our economy and society will turn
out to be at least as great as the harm done by Covid-19.’(1)
The World Doctors Alliance agree fully with Prof Woolhouse’s
assertions, he is right! We must never lockdown again!
NB the term ‘covid’ has been used to represent Sars-CoV-2 and
Covid-19

References
Introduction
(1)https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1375
(2)
www.ncbi.nim.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7219423/
(3)
sites/2/2020/09/COVID-19-total-announced-deaths-28-
September-2020.xlsx
Lockdown
(1)
(2)https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/professors-model-forcoronavirus-predictions-should-not-have-been-used-z7dqrkzzd
(3)https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-
5370(20)30208-X/fulltext
Collateral damage
(1) https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1931
(2)https://time.com/5820556/ventilators-covid-19/
(3)https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2020/05/11/how-to-make-acrisis-far-far-worse/
(4)https://www.qni.org.uk/news-and-events/news/major-newsurvey-of-care-home-leaders-confirms-severe-impact-of-covid-19/
(5) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53300784
(6)

Death certificates
(1) https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-way-covid-deaths-arebeing-counted-is-a-national-scandal
(2)
Economic ruin
(1) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/
coronavirus-lockdown-job-losses-unemployment-recessionuniversity-essex-study-a9472966.html
Censorship
(1)
Tests
(1)https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/369/bmj.m1808.full.pdf
(2) https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-many-coviddiagnoses-are-false-positives-
(3)https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/infectious-positive-pcr-testresult-covid-19/
(4)

(5)
(6)
system/uploads/attachment_data/file/895843/
S0519_Impact_of_false_positives_and_negatives.pdf
(7)
6736(20)30868-0/fulltext
(8)
HCQ
(1)https://www.newsweek.com/key-defeating-covid-19-alreadyexists-we-need-start-using-it-opinion-1519535
(2)https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)30534-8/
fulltext
(3)
surgisphere-who-world-health-organizationhydroxychloroquine
(4) https://www.thelancet.com/lancet/article/s0140673620313246
(5) https://aapsonline.org/hcq-90-percent-chance/
(6)https://aapsonline.org/patients-need-ability-to-choosehydroxychloroquine-states-aaps/
(7)https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1232869/
Prevention
(1) https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m1101/rr-10
(2)https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsbmb.2020.105751
(3)https://doi.org/10.1016/j.virusres.2020.198148
Conflicts of interests
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
https://www.statnews.com/feature/prescription-politics/prescri
ption-politics/
Conclusion
(1)https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1320428/
Coronavirus-news-lockdown-mistake-second-wave-BorisJohnson

=====================

Previous articles

August 2016

July 2016

June 2016

May 2016

April 2016

March 2016

February 2016

January 2016

December 2015

November 2015

October 2015

September 2015

August 2015

    •  A sea of frothing, sweary, often pompous, intolerance  By Tim Black, Spiked Online, 29 August 2015

July 2015

June 2015

May 2015

April 2015

March 2015

February 2015

    •  

January 2015

 

World finance: when will the bubble burst?

The great ‘reset’. Fiat currencies and economies collapse? Then what? And what role will gold play?

Key parts of the world’s financial affairs have been hi-jacked by self-serving financial organisations, bureaucracies, country leaders and individuals.   The outlook is dire.  Note: The article by Professor Hall, AHT, provides one of the most comprehensive accounts of financial affairs, both recent and back to Biblical times.

Scroll to end to view previous articles

The Fed Has Never Been Right

The Fed Has Never Been Right  By Peter Schiff, Zerohedge, 30 October 2020

Peter Schiff delivered a key-note speech at the Virtual Investor Day Conference. He walked through the history of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy over the last several decades and explained the inevitable outcome. Peter’s recap of Fed history leads you to an undeniable conclusion: the Federal Reserve has never been right. And it has set us up for an even bigger crisis.

 

Peter opened his talk saying that he thinks we are entering the final chapter of the book Alan Greenspan started to write.

And I have a feeling he had an understanding of how badly it was going to end. But unfortunately, a lot of people who have been adding pages or chapters to that book since Greenspan resigned really don’t have any idea what’s coming.”

Greenspan started the book by unleashing the loose money policy that blew up the dot-com bubble.

When that bubble popped, instead of admitting his mistakes, Greenspan ignored them and tried to revive the economy by inflating a bigger bubble in the real estate market than the bubble that had just popped in the stock market. And the Fed succeeded in inflating that bubble. But that was not a success. It was a failure.”

Peter reminds us that he warned that the Fed policy was distorting the economy. He knew that it was creating a bubble economy. People were using the inflated value of their homes as ATMs and that drove consumer spending. People were living beyond their means. Nobody was saving.

So, the whole economy was distorted by the malinvestments and bad decisions that were being made as a result of artificially low interest rates.”

When the Fed tried to normalize, the bubble popped, the mortgage market blew up, and that gave us the Great Recession.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve repeated the process, dropping interest rates to zero and launching quantitative easing. Ben Bernanke promised QE was just temporary – that the Fed was not monetizing the debt. He promised the Fed would shrink its balance sheet once the crisis passed. At the time, Peter said it was impossible. He said even if the Fed tried to normalize rates and shrink its balance sheet, it would fail.

Everything the Fed said about their ability to normalize rates and shrink the balance sheet was wrong. I said they were wrong as they were saying it. They never were able to normalize interest rates. They never came close to returning the balance sheet to pre-crisis levels.”

In Q4 2018, the Fed abandoned rate hikes at about 2.5% – not even close to normal. They called off quantitative tightening. By 2019, the Fed was back to rate cuts and the launched QE, all the while claiming it wasn’t QE. The Fed told us the pivot back to loose monetary policy was only temporary, calling it a “midcourse correction.”  But Peter said we were going back to zero and that’s exactly what happened.

And here we are today with the central bank running QE infinity and saying rates will stay at zero for years.

We are now the banana republic that Ben Bernanke assured us we would never become.”

Peter said he went through the history of Fed failures to make a point that should be pretty obvious.

The Federal Reserve has never been right. Everything they have said about the efficacy of their policies, what their policies would create, and their ability to reverse them or unwind them, has been wrong. And it’s amazing how consistently wrong they have been.”

And now they are pushing toward the logical conclusion.

We are headed for a US dollar crisis and a sovereign debt crisis. The magnitude of this crisis will be unlike anything we’ve ever experienced. Because this is not just mortgages blowing up. This is the credit of the United States government. This is the risk-free asset becoming the most toxic asset on the planet. And it’s not just US Treasuries that are going to collapse, but it’s the entire US-denominated bond market which is built on top the foundation of US Treasuries. So, Treasuries go — it all goes — corporate bonds, muni bonds, mortgages. Any debt instrument that is denominated in US dollars is going to collapse.”

So where will people run?

Gold.

The world is going to return to gold-backed paper money.”

====================================

Debunking The Establishment’s Desperate Plans To Discredit Gold  By James Richards, via DailyReckoning.com. from Zerohedge, 27 August 2020

Central Banks Are Driving Gold

Gold as an asset class is confusing to most investors. Even sophisticated investors are accustomed to hearing gold ridiculed as a “shiny rock” and hearing serious gold analysts mocked as “gold bugs,” “gold nuts” or worse.

As a gold analyst, I grew used to this a long time ago. But, it’s still disconcerting when one realizes the extent to which gold is simply not taken seriously or is treated as a mere commodity no different than soybeans or wheat.

 

The reasons for this disparaging approach to gold are not difficult to discern. Economic elites and academic economists control the central banks. The central banks control what we now consider “money” (dollars, euros, yen and other major currencies).

Those who control the money supply can indirectly control economies and the destiny of nations simply by deciding when and how much to ease or tighten credit conditions, and when to favor (or disfavor) certain types of lending.

When you ease credit conditions in a difficult environment, you help favored institutions (mainly banks) to survive. If you tighten credit conditions in a difficult environment, you can more or less guarantee that certain companies, banks or even nations will fail.

This power is based on money and the money is controlled by central banks, primarily the Federal Reserve System. However, the money-based power depends on a monopoly on money creation.

As long as investors and institutions are forced into a dollar-based system, then control of the dollar equates to control of those institutions. The minute another form of money competes with the dollar (or euro, etc.) as a store of value and medium of exchange, then the control of the power elites is broken.

This is why the elites disparage and marginalize gold. It’s easy to show why gold is a better form of money, why it’s more reliable than central bank money for preserving wealth, and why it’s a threat to the money-monopoly that the elites depend upon to maintain power.

Not only is gold a superior form of money, it’s also not under the control of any central bank or group of individuals. Yes, miners control new output, but annual output is only about 1.8% of all the above-ground gold in the world.

The value of gold is determined not by new output, but by the above-ground supply, which is 190,000 metric tonnes. Most of that above-ground supply is either owned by central banks and finance ministries (about 34,000 metric tonnes) or is held privately either as jewelry (“wearable wealth”) or bullion (coins and bars).

The floating supply available for day-to-day trading and investment is only a small fraction of the total supply. Gold is valuable and is a powerful form of money, but it’s not under the control of any single institution or group of institutions.

Clearly gold is a threat to the central bank money monopoly. Gold cannot be made to disappear (it’s too valuable), and it would be almost impossible to confiscate (despite persistent rumors to that effect).

If gold is a threat to central bank money and cannot be made to disappear, then it must be discredited. So it becomes important for central bankers and academic economists to construct a narrative that’s easily absorbed by everyday investors that says gold is not money.

The narrative goes like this:

There’s not enough gold in the world to support trade and commerce. (That’s false: there’s always enough gold, it’s just a question of price. The same amount of gold supports a larger amount of transactions when the price is raised).

Gold supply cannot expand fast enough to keep up with economic growth. (That’s false: It confuses the official supply with the total supply. Central banks can always expand the official supply by printing money and buying gold from private hands. That expands the money supply and supports economic expansion).

Gold causes financial panics and crashes. (That’s false: There were panics and crashes during the gold standard and panics and crashes since the gold standard ended. Panics and crashes are not caused or cured by gold. They are caused by a loss of confidence in banks, paper money or the economy. There is no correlation between gold and financial panic).

Gold caused and prolonged the Great Depression. (That’s false: Even Milton Friedman and Ben Bernanke have written that the Great Depression was caused by the Fed. During the Great Depression, base money supply could be 250% of the market value of official gold. Actual money supply never exceeded 100% of the gold value. In other words, the Fed could have more than doubled the money supply even with a gold standard. It failed to do so. That’s a Fed failure not a gold failure).

You get the point. There’s a clever narrative about why gold is not money. But, the narrative is false. It’s simply the case that everyday citizens believe what the economists say (usually a bad idea) or don’t know enough economic history to refute the economists (and how could you know the history if they stopped teaching it fifty years ago).

The bottom line is that economists know that gold could be a perfectly usable form of money. The reason they don’t want it is because it dilutes their monopoly power over printed money and therefore reduces their political power over people and nations.

To marginalize gold, they created a phony narrative about why gold doesn’t work as money. Most people were too easily impressed by the narrative or simply didn’t know enough to challenge it. Therefore the narrative wins even if it is false.

In fact, central banks went from being net sellers to net buyers of gold in 2010, and that net buying position has persisted ever since. The largest buyers are Russia and China, but significant purchases have also been made by Iran, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Mexico and Vietnam.

Here’s the bottom line:

Central banks have a monopoly on central bank money. Gold is the competitor to central bank money and most central banks would prefer to ignore gold. Yet, central banks in the aggregate are net buyers of gold.

In effect, central banks are signaling through their actions that they are losing confidence in their own money and their money monopoly. They’re getting ready for the day when confidence in central bank money will collapse across the board. In that world, gold will be the only form of money anyone wants.

As confidence in the dollar is eroded due to Fed money printing and congressional super-deficits, investors will gradually look for alternative stores of wealth, including gold.aily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.

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These trends begin slowly and then gather momentum. As the dollar price of gold really begins to soar, investors will take notice. Even more people will invest in gold, driving the price still higher.

Investors like to say that the price of gold is going up. But what is really happening is that the value of the dollar is going down (it takes more dollars to buy the same amount of gold).

This is the real inflation and the real dollar collapse most investors miss at the early stages.

Eventually, confidence in the dollar will be lost completely, central bankers will need to restore confidence, and they’ll turn to some type of gold standard to do so.

We’re a long way from that point right now.

But if central banks are voting with their printing presses in favour of gold, if the super-rich and their advisers are all jumping on the gold bandwagon, what are you waiting for?

Here’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to front run central banks and acquire your own gold at attractive prices before the curtain drops on paper money.

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Lockdowns, Coronavirus, and Banks: Following the Money

 

Lockdowns, Coronavirus, and Banks. Following the Money  By Prof Anthony Hall, American Herald Tribute 16 August 2020

It usually makes sense to follow the money when seeking understanding of almost any major change. The strategy of following the money in our current convergence of crises in late summer of 2020 leads us directly to the lockdowns. The lockdowns were first imposed on people in the Wuhan area of China. Then other populations throughout the world were told to “shelter in place,” all in the name of combating the COVID-19 virus.

Understanding of the enormous impact of the lockdowns is still developing. The lockdowns are proving to pack a far more devastating punch than any other aspect of the strange sequence of events that is making 2020 a year like no other. Even when the issues are narrowed to those of human health, the lockdowns have had, and will continue to have, far more wide-ranging and devastating impacts than the celebrity virus.

The lockdowns have, for starters, been directly responsible for explosive rates of suicide, domestic violence, overdoses, and depression. In the long run, these maladies from the lockdowns will probably kill and harm many more people than COVID-19.

But this comparison does not tell the full story. The nature and length of the lockdowns are causing millions of people to lose their jobs, businesses and financial viability. It seems that the economic descent is still gathering force. The assault of the lockdowns on our economic wellbeing still has much farther to go.

The lockdowns have proven to be a powerful instrument of social control. This attribute is becoming very attractive especially to some politicians. They have discovered they can derive considerable political traction from hyping and exploiting the largely manufactured pandemic panic.

The lockdowns are still a work-in-progress. There are past lockdowns, revolving lockdowns, partial lockdowns, mandatory lockdowns, voluntary lockdowns, severe lockdowns and probably an array of many lockdown types yet to be invented.

The lockdowns extend to disruptions in supply chains, disruptions in money flows, drops in consumption, breakdowns in transport and travelling, increased bankruptcies, losses of finance leading to losses of housing, as well as the inability to pay taxes and debts.

The lockdowns extend beyond personal habitations to prohibitions on large assemblies of people in stadiums, concert halls, churches, and a myriad of places devoted to public recreation and entertainment. On the basis of this way of looking at what is happening, it becomes clear the economic and health effects of the lockdowns are far more pronounced than the damage wrought directly by the new coronavirus.

This approach to following the money leads to the question of whether the spread of COVID-19 was set in motion as a pretext. Was COVID-19 unleashed as an expedient for bringing about the lockdowns with the goal of crashing the existing economy? What rationale could there possibly be for purposely crashing the existing economy?

One possible reason might have been to put in place new structures to create the framework for a new set of economic relationships. With these changes would come accompanying sets of altered social and political relationships.

Among the economic changes being sought are the robotization of almost everything, cashless financial interactions, and elaborate AI impositions. These AI impositions extend to digital alterations of human consciousness and behaviour. The emphasis being placed on vaccines is very much interwoven with plans to extend AI into an altered matrix of human nanobiotechnology.

There are other possibilities to consider. One is that in the autumn of 2019 the economy was already starting to falter. Fortuitously for some, the new virus came along at a moment when it could be exploited as a scapegoat. By placing responsibility for the economic debacle on pathogens rather than people, Wall Street bankers and federal authorities are let off the hook. They can escape any accounting for an economic calamity that they had a hand in helping to instigate.

A presentation in August of 2019 by the Wall Street leviathan, BlackRock Financial Management, provides a telling indicator of foreknowledge. It was well understood by many insiders in 2019 that a sharp economic downturn was imminent.

At a meeting of central bankers in Jackson Hole Wyoming, BlackRock representatives delivered a strategy for dealing with the future downturn. Several months later during the spring of 2020 this strategy was adopted by both the US Treasury and the US Federal Reserve. BlackRock’s plan from August of 2019 set the basis of the federal response to the much-anticipated economic meltdown.

Much of this essay is devoted to considering the background of the controversial agencies now responding to the economic devastation created by the lockdowns. One of these agencies is empowered to bring into existence large quantities of debt-laden money.

The very public role in 2020 of the Federal Reserve of the United States resuscitates many old grievances. When the Federal Reserve was first created in 1913 it was heavily criticized as a giveaway of federal authority.

The critics lamented the giveaway to private bankers whose firms acquired ownership of all twelve of the regional banks that together constitute the Federal Reserve. Of these twelve regional banks, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is by far the largest and most dominant especially right now.

The Federal Reserve of the United States combined forces with dozens of other privately-owned central banks thoughout the world to form the Bank of International Settlements. Many of the key archetypes for this type of banking were developed in Europe and the City of London where the Rothschild banking family had a large and resilient role, one that persists until this day.

Along with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, BlackRock was deeply involved in helping to administer the bailout in 2008. This bailout resuscitated many failing Wall Street firms together with their counterparties in a number of speculative ventures involving various forms of derivatives.

The bailouts resulted in payments of $29 trillion, much of it going to restore failing financial institutions whose excesses actually caused the giant economic crash. Where the financial sector profited greatly from the bailouts, taxpayers were abused yet again. The burden of an expanded national debt fell ultimately on taxpayers who must pay the interest on the loans for the federal bailout of the “too big to fail” financial institutions.

Unsettling precedents are set by the Wall Street club’s manipulation of the economic crash of 2007-2010 to enrich its own members so extravagantly. This prior experience bodes poorly for the intervention by the same players in this current round of responses to the economic crisis of 2020.

In preparing this essay I have enjoyed the many articles by Pam Martens and Russ Martens in Wall Street on Parade. These hundreds of well-researched articles form a significant primary source on the recent history of the Federal Reserve, including over the last few months.

In this essay I draw a contrast between the privately-owned regional banks of the Federal Reserve and the government-owned Bank of Canada that once issued low-interest loans to build infrastructure projects.

With this arrangement in place, Canada went through a major period of national growth between 1938 and 1974. Canada emerged from this period with a national debt of only $20 billion. Then in 1974 Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau dropped this arrangement to enable Canada to join the Bank of International Settlements. One result is that national debt rose to $700 billion by 2020.

We need to face the current financial crisis by developing new institutions that avoid the pitfalls of old remedies for old problems that no longer prevail. We need to make special efforts to change our approach to the problem of excessive debts and the overconcentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

Locking Down the Viability of Commerce

Of all the facets of the ongoing fiasco generally associated with the coronavirus crisis, none has been so widely catastrophic as the so-called “lockdowns.” The supposed cure of the lockdowns is itself proving to be much more lethal and debilitating than COVID-19’s flu-like impact on human health.

Many questions arise from the immense economic consequences attributed to the initial effort to “flatten the curve” of the hospital treatments for COVID-19. Did the financial crisis occur as a result of the spread of the new coronavirus crisis? Or was the COVID-19 crisis set in motion to help give cover to a long-building economic meltdown that was already well underway in the autumn of 2019?

The lockdowns were first instituted in Wuhan China with the objective of slowing down the spread of the virus so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed. Were the Chinese lockdowns engineered in part to create a model to be followed in Europe, North America, Indochina and other sites of infection like India and Australia? The Chinese lockdowns in Hubei province and then in other parts of China apparently set an example influencing the decision of governments in many jurisdictions. Was this Chinese example for the rest of the world created by design to influence the nature of international responses?

The lockdowns represented a new form of response to a public health crisis. Quarantines have long been used as a means of safeguarding the public from the spread of contagious maladies. Quarantines, however, involve isolating the sick to protect the well. On the other hand the lockdowns are directed at limiting the movement and circulation of almost everyone whether or not they show symptoms of any infections.

Hence lockdowns, or, more euphemistically “sheltering in place,” led to the cancellation of many activities and to the shutdown of institutions. The results extended, for instance, to the closure of schools, sports events, theatrical presentations and business operations. In this way the lockdowns also led to the crippling of many forms of economic interaction. National economies as well as international trade and commerce were severely impacted.

The concept of lockdowns was not universally embraced and applied. For instance, the governments of Sweden and South Korea did not accept the emerging orthodoxy about enforcing compliance with all kinds of restrictions on human interactions. Alternatively, the government of Israel was an early and strident enforcer of very severe lockdown policies.

At first it seemed the lockdown succeeded magnificently in saving Israeli lives. According to Israel Shamir, in other European states the Israeli model was often brought up as an example. In due course, however, the full extent of the assault on the viability of the Israeli economy began to come into focus. Then popular resistance was aroused to reject government attempts to enforce a second wave of lockdowns against a second wave of supposed infections. As Shamir sees it, the result is that “Today Israel is a failed state with a ruined economy and unhappy citizens.”

In many countries the lockdowns began with a few crucial decisions made at the highest level of government. Large and proliferating consequences would flow from the initial determination of what activities, businesses, organizations, institutions and workers were to be designated as “essential.”

The consequences would be severe for those individuals and businesses excluded from the designation identifying what is essential. This deep intervention into the realm of free choice in market relations set a major precedent for much more intervention of a similar nature to come.

The arbitrary division of activities into essential and nonessential categories created a template to be frequently replicated and revised in the name of serving public heath. Suddenly central planning took a great leap forward. The momentum from a generation of neoliberalism was checked even as the antagonistic polarities between rich and poor continued to grow.

To be defined as “nonessential” would soon be equated with job losses and business failures across many fields of enterprise as the first wave of lockdowns outside China unfolded. Indeed, it becomes clearer every day that revolving lockdowns, restrictions and social distancing are being managed in order to help give false justification to a speciously idealized vaccine fix as the only conclusive solution to a manufactured problem.

What must it have meant for breadwinners who fed themselves and their families through wages or self-employment to be declared by government to be “non-essential”? Surely for real providers their jobs, their businesses and their earnings were essential for themselves and their dependents. All jobs and all businesses that people depend on for livelihoods, sustenance and survival are essential in their own way.

Was COVID-19 a Cover for an Anticipated or Planned Financial Crisis?

A major sign of financial distress in the US economy kicked in in mid-September of 2019 when there was a breakdown in the normal operation of the Repo Market. This repurchase market in the United States is important in maintaining liquidity in the financial system.

Those directing entities like large banks, Wall Street traders and hedge funds frequently seek large amounts of cash on a short-term basis. They obtain this cash from, for instance, money market funds by putting up securities, often Treasury Bills, as collateral. Most often the financial instruments go back, say the following night, to their original owners with interest payments attached for the use of the cash.

In mid-September the trust broke down between participants in the Repo Market. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York then entered the picture making trillions of dollars available to keep the system for short-term moving of assets going. This intervention repeated the operation that came in response to the first signs of trouble as Wall Street moved towards the stock market crash of 2008.

One of the major problems on the eve of the bailout of 2008-09, like the problem in the autumn of 2019, had to do with the overwhelming of the real economy by massive speculative activity. The problem then, like a big part of the problem now, involves the disproportionate size of the derivative bets. The making of these bets have become a dangerous addiction that continues to this day to menace the viability of the financial system headquartered on Wall Street.

By March of 2020 it was reported that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had turned on its money spigot to create $9 trillion in new money with the goal of keeping the failing Repo Market operational. The precise destinations of that money together with the terms of its disbursement, however, remain a secret. As Pam Martens and Russ Martens write,

Since the Fed turned on its latest money spigot to Wall Street [in September of 2019], it has refused to provide the public with the dollar amounts going to any specific banks. This has denied the public the ability to know which financial institutions are in trouble. The Fed, exactly as it did in 2008, has drawn a dark curtain around troubled banks and the public’s right to know, while aiding and abetting a financial coverup of just how bad things are on Wall Street.

Looking back at the prior bailout from their temporal vantage point in January of 2020, the authors noted  “During the 2007 to 2010 financial collapse on Wall Street – the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Fed funnelled a total of $29 trillion in cumulative loans to Wall Street banks, their trading houses and their foreign derivative counterparties.”

The authors compared the rate of the transfer of funds from the New York Federal Reserve Bank to the Wall Street banking establishment in the 2008 crash and in the early stages of the 2020 financial debacle. The authors observed, “at this rate, [the Fed] is going to top the rate of money it threw at the 2008 crisis in no time at all.”

The view that all was well with the economy until the impact of the health crisis began to be felt in early 2020 leads away from the fact that money markets began to falter dangerously in the autumn of 2019. The problems with the Repo Market were part of a litany of indicators pointing to turbulence ahead in troubled economic waters.

For instance, the resignation in 2019 of about 1,500 prominent corporate CEOs can be seen as a suggestion that news was circulating prior to 2020 about the imminence of serious financial problems ahead. Insiders’ awareness of menacing developments threatening the workings of the global economy were probably a factor in the decision of a large number of senior executives to exit the upper echelons of the business world.

Not only did a record number of CEOs resign, but many of them sold off the bulk of their shares in the companies they were leaving.

Pam Marten and Russ Marten who follow Wall Street’s machinations on a daily basis have advanced the case that the Federal Reserve is engaged in fraud by trying to make it seem that “the banking industry came into 2020 in a healthy condition;” that it is only because of “the COVID-19 pandemic” that the financial system is” unravelling,”

The authors argue that this misrepresentation was deployed because the deceivers are apparently “desperate” to prevent Congress from conducting an investigation for the second time in twelve years on why the Fed, “had to engage in trillions of dollars of Wall Street bailouts.” In spite of the Fed’s fear of facing a Congressional investigation after the November 2020 vote, such a timely investigation of the US financial sector would well serve the public interest.

The authors present a number of signs demonstrating that “the Fed knew, or should have known…. that there was a big banking crisis brewing in August of last year. [2019]” The signs of the financial crisis in the making included negative yields on government bonds around the world as well as big drops in the Dow Jones average. The plunge in the price of stocks was led by US banks, but especially Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase.

Another significant indicator that something was deeply wrong in financial markets was a telling inversion in the value of Treasury notes with the two-year rate yielding more than the ten-year rate.

Yet another sign of serious trouble ahead involved repeated contractions in the size of the German economy. Moreover, in September of 2019 news broke that officials of JP Morgan Chase faced criminal charges for RICO-style racketeering. This scandal added to the evidence of converging problems plaguing core economic institutions as more disruptive mayhem gathered on the horizons.

Accordingly, there is ample cause to ask if there are major underlying reasons for the financial crash of 2020 other than the misnamed pandemic and the lockdowns done in its name of “flattening” its spikes of infection. At the same time, there is ample cause to recognize that the lockdowns have been a very significant factor in the depth of the economic debacle that is making 2020 a year like no other.

Some go further. They argue that the financial crash of 2020 was not only anticipated but planned and pushed forward with clear understanding of its instrumental role in the Great Reset sought by self-appointed protagonists of creative destruction. The advocates of this interpretation place significant weight on the importance of the lockdowns as an effective means of obliterating in a single act a host of old economic relationships. For instance Peter Koenig examines the “farce and diabolical agenda of a universal lockdown.”

Koenig writes, “The pandemic was needed as a pretext to halt and collapse the world economy and the underlying social fabric.”

Inflating the Numbers and Traumatizing the Public to Energize the Epidemic of Fear

There have been many pandemics in global history whose effects on human health have been much more pervasive and devastating than the current one said to be generated by a new coronavirus. In spite, however, of its comparatively mild flu-like effects on human health, at least at this point in the summer of 2020, there has never been a contagion whose spread has generated so much global publicity and hype. As in the aftermath of 9/11, this hype extends to audacious levels of media-generated panic. As with the psyop of 9/11, the media-induced panic has been expertly finessed by practitioners skilled in leveraging the currency of fear to realize a host of radical political objectives.

According to Robert E. Wright in an essay published by the American Institute for Economic Research, “closing down the U.S. economy in response to COVID-19 was probably the worst public policy in at least one-hundred years.” As Wright sees it, the decision to lock down the economy was made in ignorant disregard of the deep and devastating impact that such an action would spur. “Economic lockdowns were the fantasies of government officials so out of touch with economic and physical reality that they thought the costs would be fairly low.”

The consequences, Wright predicts, will extend across many domains including the violence done to the rule of law. The lockdowns, he writes, “turned the Constitution into a frail and worthless fabric.” Writing in late April, Wright touched on the comparisons to be made between the economic lockdowns and slavery. He write, “Slaves definitely had it worse than Americans under lockdown do, but already Americans are beginning to protest their confinement and to subtly subvert authorities, just as chattel slaves did.”

The people held captive in confined lockdown settings have had the time and often the inclination to imbibe much of the 24/7 media coverage of the misnamed pandemic. Taken together, all this media sensationalism has come to constitute one of the most concerted psychological operations ever.

The implications have been enormous for the mental health of multitudes of people. This massive alteration of attitudes and behaviours is the outcome of media experiments performed on human subjects without their informed consent. The media’s success in bringing about herd subservience to propagandistic messaging represents a huge incentive for more of the same to come. It turns out that the subject matter of public health offers virtually limitless potential for power-seeking interests and agents to meddle with the privacies, civil liberties and human rights of those they seek to manipulate, control and exploit.

The social, economic and health impacts of the dislocations flowing from the lockdowns are proving to be especially devastating on the poorest, the most deprived and the most vulnerable members of society. This impact will continue to be marked in many ways, including in increased rates of suicide, domestic violence, mental illness, addictions, homelessness, and incarceration far larger than those caused directly by COVID-19. As rates of deprivation through poverty escalate, so too will crime rates soar.

The over-the-top alarmism of the big media cabals has been well financed by the advertising revenue of the pharmaceutical industry. With some few exceptions, major media outlets pushed the public to accept the lockdowns as well as the attending losses in jobs and business activity. In seeking to push the agenda of their sponsors, the big media cartels have been especially unmindful of their journalistic responsibilities. Their tendency has been to avoid or censor forums where even expert practitioners of public health can publicly question and discuss government dictates about vital issues of public policy.

Whether in Germany or the United States or many other countries, front line workers in this health care crisis have nevertheless gathered together with the goal of trying to correct the one-sided prejudices of of discriminatory media coverage. One of the major themes in the presentations by medical practitioners is to confront the chorus of media misrepresentations on the remedial effects of hydroxychloroquine and zinc.

On July 27 a group of doctors gathered on the grounds of the US Supreme Court to try to address the biases of the media and the blind spots of government.

Another aspect in the collateral damage engendered by COVID-19 alarmism is marked in the fatalities arising from the wholesale postponement of many necessary interventions including surgery. How many have died or will die because of the hold put on medical interventions to remedy cancer, heart conditions and many other potentially lethal ailments?

Did the unprecedented lockdowns come about as part of a preconceived plan to inflate the severity of an anticipated financial meltdown? What is to be made of the suspicious intervention of administrators to produce severely padded numbers of reported deaths in almost every jurisdiction? This kind of manipulation of statistics raised the possibility that we are witnessing a purposeful and systemic inflation of the severity of this health care crisis.

Questions about the number of cases arise because of the means of testing for the presence of a supposedly new coronavirus. The PCR system that is presently being widely used does not test for the virus but tests for the existence of antibodies produced in response to many health challenges including the common cold. This problem creates a good deal of uncertainty of what a positive test really means.

The problems with calculating case numbers extend to widespread reports that have described people who were not tested for COVID-19 but who nevertheless received notices from officials counting them as COVID-19 positive. Broadcaster Armstrong Williams addressed the phenomenon on his network of MSM media outlets in late July.

From the mass of responses he received, Williams estimated that those not tested but counted as a positive probably extends probably to hundreds of thousands of individuals. What would drive the effort to exaggerate the size of the afflicted population?

This same pattern of inflation of case numbers was reinforced by the Tricare branch of the US Defense Department’s Military Health System. This branch sent out notices to 600,000 individuals who had not been tested. The notices nevertheless informed the recipients that they had tested positive for COVID 19.

Is the inflation of COVID-19 death rates and cases numbers an expression of the zeal to justify the massive lockdowns? Were the lockdowns in China conceived as part of a scheme to help create the conditions for the public’s acceptance of a plan to remake the world’s political economy? What is to be made of the fact that those most identified with the World Economic Forum (WEF) have led the way in putting a positive spin on the reset arising from the very health crisis the WEF helped introduce and publicize in Oct. of 2019?

As Usual, the Poor Get Poorer

The original Chinese lockdowns in the winter of 2020 caused the breakdowns of import-export supply chains extending across the planet. Lockdowns in the movement of raw materials, parts, finished products, expertise, money and more shut down domestic businesses in China as well as transnational commerce in many countries outside China. The supply chain disruptions were especially severe for businesses that have dispensed with the practice of keeping on hand large inventories of parts and raw material, depending instead on just-in-time deliveries.

As the supply chains broke down domestically and internationally, many enterprises lacked the revenue to pay their expenses. Bankruptcies began to proliferate at rates that will probably continue to be astronomical for some time. All kinds of loans and liabilities were not paid out in full or at all. Many homes are being re-mortgaged or cast into real estate markets as happened during the prelude and course of the bailouts of 2007-2010.

The brunt of the financial onslaught hit small businesses especially hard. Collectively small businesses have been a big creator of jobs. They have picked up some of the slack from the rush of big businesses to downsize their number of full-time employees. Moreover, small businesses and start-ups are often the site of exceptionally agile innovations across broad spectrums of economic activity. The hard financial slam on the small business sector, therefore, is packing a heavy punch on the economic conditions of everyone.

The devastating impact of the economic meltdown on workers and small businesses in Europe and North America extends in especially lethal ways to the massive population of poor people living all over the world. Many of these poor people reside in countries where much of the paid work is irregular and informal.

At the end of April the International Labor Organization (ILO), an entity created along with the League of Nations at the end of the First World War, estimated that there would be 1.6 billion victims of the meltdown in the worldwide “informal economy.” In the first month of the crisis these workers based largely in Africa and Latin America lost 60% of their subsistence level incomes.

As ILO Director-General, Guy Ryder, has asserted,

This pandemic has laid bare in the cruellest way, the extraordinary precariousness and injustices of our world of work. It is the decimation of livelihoods in the informal economy – where six out of ten workers make a living – which has ignited the warnings from our colleagues in the World Food Programme, of the coming pandemic of hunger. It is the gaping holes in the social protection systems of even the richest countries, which have left millions in situations of deprivation. It is the failure to guarantee workplace safety that condemns nearly 3 million to die each year because of the work they do. And it is the unchecked dynamic of growing inequality which means that if, in medical terms, the virus does not discriminate between its victims in its social and economic impact, it discriminates brutally against the poorest and the powerless.

Guy Ryder remembered the optimistic rhetoric in officialdom’s responses to the economic crash of 2007-2009. He compares the expectations currently being aroused by the vaccination fixation with the many optimistic sentiments previously suggesting the imminence of remedies for grotesque levels of global inequality. Ryder reflected,

We’ve heard it before. The mantra which provided the mood music of the crash of 2008-2009 was that once the vaccine to the virus of financial excess had been developed and applied, the global economy would be safer, fairer, more sustainable. But that didn’t happen. The old normal was restored with a vengeance and those on the lower echelons of labour markets found themselves even further behind.

The internationalization of increased unemployment and poverty brought about in the name of combating the corona crisis is having the effect of further widening the polarization between rich and poor on a global scale. Ryder’s metaphor about the false promises concerning a “vaccine” to correct “financial excess” can well be seen as a precautionary comment on the flowery rhetoric currently adorning the calls for a global reset.

Wall Street and 9/11

The world economic crisis of 2020 is creating the context for large-scale repeats of some key aspects of the bailout of 2007-2010. The bailout of 2007-2008 drew, in turn, from many practices developed in the period when the explosive events of 9/11 triggered a worldwide reset of global geopolitics.

While the events of 2008 and 2020 both drew attention to the geopolitical importance of Wall Street, the terrible pummelling of New York’s financial district was the event that ushered in a new era of history, an era that has delivered us to the current financial meltdown/lockdown.

It lies well beyond the scope of this essay to go into detail about the dynamics of what really transpired on 9/11. Nevertheless, some explicit reckoning with this topic is crucial to understanding some of the essential themes addressed in this essay.

Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate the relevance of 9/11 to the background and nature of the current debacle. The execution and spinning of 9/11 were instrumental in creating the repertoire of political trickery presently being adapted in the manufacturing and exploiting of the COVID-19 hysteria. A consistent attribute of the journey from 9/11 to COVID-19 has been the amplification of executive authority through the medium of emergency measures enactments, policies and dictates.

Wall Street is a major site where much of this political trickery was concocted in planning exercises extending to many other sites of power and intrigue. In the case of 9/11, a number of prominent Wall Street firms were involved before, during and after the events of September 11. As is extremely well documented, these events have been misrepresented in ways that helped to further harness the military might of the United States to the expansionistic designs of Israel in the Middle East.

The response of the Federal Reserve to the events of 9/11 helped set in motion a basic approach to disaster management that continues to this day. Almost immediately following the pulverization of Manhattan’s most gigantic and iconographic landmarks, Federal Reserve officials made it their highest priority to inject liquidity into financial markets. Many different kinds of scenario can be advanced behind the cover of infusing liquidity into markets.

For three days in a row the Federal Reserve Bank of New York turned on its money spigots to inject transfusions of $100 billion dollars of newly generated funds into the Wall Street home of the financial system. The declared aim was to keep the flow of capital between financial institutions well lubricated. The Federal Reserve’s infusions of new money into Wall Street took many forms. New habits and appetites were thereby cultivated in ways that continue to influence the behaviour of Wall Street organizations in the financial debacle of 2020.

The revelations concerning the events of 9/11 contained a number of financial surprises. Questions immediately arose, for instance, about whether the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers had obliterated software and hardware vital to the continuing operations of computerized banking systems. Whatever problems arose along these lines, it turned out that there was sufficient digital information backed up in other locations to keep banking operations viable.

But while much digital data survived the destruction of core installations in the US financial sector, some strategic information was indeed obliterated. For instance, strategic records entailed in federal investigations into many business scandals were lost. Some of the incinerated data touched on, for instance, the machinations of the energy giant, Enron, along with its Wall Street partners, JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup.

The writings of E. P Heidner are prominent in the literature posing theories about the elimination of incriminating documentation as a result of the controlled demolitions of 9/11. What information was eliminated and what was retained in the wake of the devastation? Heidner has published a very ambitious account placing the events of 9/11 at the forefront of a deep and elaborate relationship linking George H. W. Bush to Canada’s Barrick Gold and the emergence of gold derivatives.

The surprises involving 9/11 and Wall Street included evidence concerning trading on the New York Stock Exchange. A few individuals enriched themselves significantly by purchasing a disproportionately high number of put options on shares about to fall precipitously as a result of the anticipated events of 9/11. Investigators, however, chose to ignore this evidence because it did not conform to the prevailing interpretation of who did what to whom on 9/11.

Another suspicious group of transactions conducted right before 9/11 involved some very large purchases of five-year US Treasury notes. These instruments are well known hedges when one has knowledge that a world crisis is imminent. One of these purchases was a $5 billion transaction. The US Treasury Department would have been informed about the identity of the purchaser. Nevertheless the FBI and the Securities Exchange Commission collaborated to point public attention away from these suspect transactions. (p. 199)

On the very day of 9/11 local police arrested Israeli suspects employed in the New York area as Urban Movers. The local investigators were soon pressured to ignore the evidence, however, and go along with the agenda of the White House and the media chorus during the autumn of 2001.

In the hours following the pulverization of the Twin Towers the dominant mantra was raised “Osama bin Laden and al-Qeada did it.” That mantra led in the weeks, months and years that followed to US-led invasions of several Muslim-majority countries. Some have described these military campaigns as wars for Israel.

Soon New York area jails were being filled up with random Muslims picked up for nothing more than visa violations and such. The unrelenting demonization of Muslims collectively can now be seen in retrospect as a dramatic psychological operation meant to poison minds as the pounding of the war drums grew in intensity. In the process a traumatized public were introduced to concepts like “jihad.” At no time has there ever been a credible police investigation into the question of who is responsible for the 9/11 crimes.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld chose September 10, the day before 9/11, to break the news at a press conference that $2.3 trillion had gone missing from the Pentagon’s budget. Not surprisingly the story of the missing money got buried the next day as reports of the debacle in Manhattan and Washington DC dominated MSM news coverage.

As reported by Forbes Magazine, the size of the amount said to have gone missing in Donald Rumsfeld’s 2001 report of Defense Department spending had mushroomed by 2015 to around $21 trillion. It was Mark Skidmore, an Economics Professor at the University of Michigan, who became the main sleuth responsible for identifying the gargantuan amount of federal funds that the US government can’t account for.

As the agency that created the missing tens of trillions that apparently has disappeared without a trace, wouldn’t the US Federal Reserve be in a position to render some assistance in tracking down the lost funds? Or is the Federal Reserve somehow a participant or a complicit party in the disappearance of the tens of trillions without a paper trail?

The inability or unwillingness of officialdom to explain what happened to the lost $21 trillion, an amount comparable to the size of the entire US national debt prior to the lockdowns, might be viewed in the light of the black budgets of the US Department of Defense (DOD). Black budgets are off-the-books funds devoted to secret research and to secret initiatives in applied research.

In explaining this phenomenon, former Canadian Defense Minister, Paul Hellyer, has observed, “thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on projects about which Congress and the Commander In Chief have deliberately been kept in the dark.” Eric Zuess goes further. As he explains it, the entire Defense Department operates pretty much on the basis of an unusual system well outside the standard rules of accounting applied in other federal agencies.

When news broke about the missing $21 trillion, federal authorities responded by promising that special audits would be conducted to explain the irregularities. The results of those audits, if they took place at all, were never published. The fact that the Defense of Department has developed in a kind of audit free zone has made it a natural magnet for people and interests engaged in all kinds of criminal activities.

Eric Zuess calls attention to the 1,000 military bases around the world that form a natural network conducive to the cultivation of many forms of criminal trafficking. Zuess includes in his reflections commentary on the secret installations in some American embassies but especially in the giant US Embassy in Baghdad Iraq.

The US complex in Baghdad’s Green Zone is the biggest Embassy in the world. Its monumental form on a 104 acre site expresses the expansionary dynamics of US military intervention in the Middle East and Eurasia following 9/11.

The phenomenon of missing tens of trillions calls attention to larger patterns of kleptocratic activity that forms a major subject addressed here. The shifts into new forms of organized crime in the name of “national security” began to come to light in the late 1980s. An important source of disclosures was the series of revelations that accompanied the coming apart of the Saudi-backed Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the BCCI.

The nature of this financial institution, where CIA operatives were prominent among its clients, provides a good window into the political economy of drug dealing, money laundering, weapons smuggling, regime change and many much more criminal acts that took place along the road to 9/11.

The BCCI was a key site of financial transactions that contributed to the end of the Cold War and the inception of many new kinds of conflict. These activities often involved the well-financed activities of mercenaries, proxy armies, and a heavy reliance on private contractors of many sorts.

The Enron scandal was seen to embody some of the same lapses facilitated by fraudulent accounting integral to the BCCI scandal. Given the bubble of secrecy surrounding the Federal Reserve, there are thick barriers blocking deep investigation into whether or not the US Central Bank was involved in the relationship of the US national security establishment and the BCCI.

The kind of dark transactions that the BCCI was designed to facilitate must have been channelled after its demise into other banking institutions probably with Wall Street connections. Since 9/11, however, many emergency measures have been imposed that add extra layers of secrecy protecting the perpetrators of many criminal acts from public exposure and criminal prosecutions.

The events of 9/11 have sometimes been described as the basis of a global coup. To this day there is no genuine consensus about what really transpired to create the illusion of justification for repeated US military invasions of Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and Eurasia.

The 9/11 debacle and the emergency measures that followed presented Wall Street with an array of new opportunities for profit that came with the elaborate refurbishing and retooling of the military-industrial complex.

The response to 9/11 was expanded and generalized upon to create the basis of a war directed not at a particular enemy, but rather at an ill-defined conception identified as “terrorism.” This alteration was part of a complex of changes adding trillions to the flow of money energizing the axis of interaction linking the Pentagon and Wall Street and the abundance of new companies created to advance the geopolitical objectives emerging from the 9/11 coup.

According to Pam Martens and Russ Martens, the excesses of deregulation helped induce an anything-goes-ethos on Wall Street and at its Federal Reserve regulator in the wake of 9/11. As the authors tell it, the response to 9/11 helped set important precedents for the maintaining flows of credit and capital in financial markets.

Often the destination of the funds generated in the name of pumping liquidity into markets was not identified and reported in transactions classified as financial emergency measures. While the priority was on keeping financial pumps primed, there was much less concern for transparency and accountability among those in positions of power at the Federal Reserve.

The financial sector’s capture of the government instruments meant to regulate the behaviour of Wall Street institutions was much like the deregulation of the US pharmaceutical industry. Both episodes highlight a message that has become especially insistent as the twenty-first century unfolds.

The nature of the response to 9/11 emphasized the mercenary ascent of corporate dominance as the primary force directing governments. Throughout this transformation the message to citizens became increasingly clear. Buyer Beware. We cannot depend on governments to represent our will and interests. We cannot even count on our governments to protect citizens from corporatist attacks especially on human health and whatever financial security we have been able to build up.

Bailouts, Derivatives, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York

The elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 was essential to the process of dramatically cutting back the government’s role as a protector of the public interest on the financial services sector. The Glass-Steagall Act was an essential measure in US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Some view the New Deal as a strategy for saving capitalism by moderating ts most sharp-edged features. Instituted in 1933 in response to the onset of the Great Depression, the Glass-Steagall Act separated the operations of deposit-accepting banks from the more speculative activity of investment brokers.

The termination of the regulatory framework put in place by the Glass Steagall Act opened much new space for all kinds of experiments in the manipulation of money in financial markets. The changes began with the merger of different sorts of financial institutions including some in the insurance field. Those overseeing the reconstituted entities headquartered on Wall Street took advantage of their widened latitudes of operation. They developed all sorts of ways of elaborating their financial services and presenting them in new packages.

The word, “derivative” is often associated with many applications of the new possibilities in the reconstituted financial services sector. The word, derivative, can be applied to many kinds of transactions involving speculative bets of various sorts. As the word suggests, a derivative is derived from a fixed asset such as currency, bonds, stocks, and commodities. Alterations in the values of fixed assets affect the value of derivatives that often take the form of contracts between two or more parties.

One of the most famous derivatives in the era of the financial crash of 2007-2010 was described as mortgaged-backed securities. On the surface these bundles of debt-burdened properties might seem easy to understand. But that would be a delusion. The value of these products was affected, for instance, by unpredictable shifts in interest rates, liar loans extended to homebuyers who lacked the capacity to make regular mortgage payments, and significant shifts in the value of real estate.

Mortgage-backed securities were just one type of a huge array of derivatives invented on the run in the heady atmosphere of secret and unregulated transactions between counterparties. Derivatives could involve contracts formalizing bets between rivals gambling on the outcome of competitive efforts to shape the future.  An array of derivative bets was built around transactions often placed behind the veil of esoteric nomenclature like “collateralized debt obligations” or “credit default swaps.”

The variables in derivative bets might include competing national security agendas involving, for instance, pipeline constructions, regime change, weapons development and sales, false flag terror events, or money laundering. Since derivative bets involve confidential transactions with secret outcomes, they can be derived from all sorts of criteria. Derivative bets can, for instance, involve all manner of computerized calculations that in some cases are constructed much like war game scenarios.

The complexity of derivatives became greater when the American Insurance Group, AIG, began selling insurance programs to protect all sides in derivative bets from suffering too drastically from the consequences of being on the losing side of transactions.

The derivative frenzy, sometimes involving bets being made by parties unable to cover potential losses, overwhelmed the scale of the day-to-day economy. The “real economy” embodies exchanges of goods, services, wages and such that supply the basic necessities for human survival with some margin for recreation, travel, cultural engagement and such.

The Swiss-based Bank of International Settlements calculated in 2008 that the size of the all forms of derivative products had a monetary value of $1.14 quadrillion. A quadrillion is a thousand trillions. By comparison, the estimated value of all the real estate in the world was $75 trillion in 2008.

[Bank for International Settlements, Semiannual OTC derivative statistics at end-December, 2008.]

As the enticements of derivative betting preoccupied the leading directors of Wall Street institutions, their more traditional way of relating to one another began to falter. It was in this atmosphere that the Repo Market became problematic in December of 2007 just as it showed similar signs of breakdown in September of 2019.

In both instances the level of distrust between those in charge of financial institutions began to falter because they all had good reason to believe that their fellow bankers were overextended. All had reason to believe their counterparts were mired by too much speculative activity enabled by all sorts of novel experiments including various forms of derivative dealing.

In December of 2007 as in the autumn of 2019, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was forced to enter the picture to keep the financial pumps on Wall Street primed. The New York Fed kept the liquidity cycles flowing by invoking its power to create new money with the interest charged to tax payers.

As the financial crisis unfolded in 2008 and 2009 the Federal Reserve, but especially the privately-owned New York Federal Reserve bank, stepped forward to bail out many financial institutions that had become insolvent or near insolvent. In the process precedents and patterns were established that are being re-enacted with some modifications in 2020.

One of the innovations that took place in 2008 was the decision by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to hire a large Wall Street financial institution, BlackRock, to administer the bailouts. These transfers of money went through three specially created companies now being replicated as Special Purpose Vehicles in the course of the payouts of 2020.

In 2008-09 BlackRock administered the three companies named after the address of the New York Federal Reserve Bank on Maiden Lane. BlackRock emerged from an older Wall Street firm called Blackstone. Its former chair, Peter C. Peterson, was a former Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The original Maiden Lane company paid Bear Stearns Corp $30 billion. This amount from the New York Fed covered the debt of Bear Stearns, a condition negotiated to clear the way for the purchase of the old Wall Street institution by JP Morgan Chase. Maiden Lane II was a vehicle for payouts to companies that had purchased “mortgage-backed securities” before these derivative products turned soar.

Maiden Lane III was to pay off “multi-sector collateralized debt obligations.” Among these bailouts were payoffs to the counterparties of the insurance giant, AIG. As noted, AIG had developed an insurance product to be sold to those engaged in derivative bets. When the bottom fell out of markets, AIG lacked the means to pay off the large number of insurance claims made against it. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York stepped in to bail out the counterparties of AIG, many of them deemed to be “too big to fail.”

Among the counterparties of AIG was Goldman Sachs. It received of $13 billion from the Federal Reserve. Other bailouts to AIG’s counterparties were $12 billion to Deutsche Bank, $6.8 billion to Merrill Lynch, $5 billion to Switzerland’s UBS, $7.9 billion to Barclays, and $5.2 billion to Bank of America. Some of these banks received additional funds from other parts of the overall bailout transaction. Many dozens of other counterparties to AIG also received payouts in 2008-2009. Among them were the Bank of Montreal and Bank of Scotland.

The entire amount of the bailouts was subsequently calculated to be a whopping $29 trillion with a “t.” The lion’s share of these funds went to prop up US financial institutions and the many foreign banks with which they conducted business.

Much of this money went to the firms that were shareholders in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or partners of the big Wall Street firms. Citigroup, the recipient of the largest amount, received about $2.5 trillion in the federal bailouts. Merrill Lynch received $2 trillion,

The Federal Reserve Bank was established by Congressional statute in 1913. The Federal Reserve headquarters is situated in Washington DC. The Central Bank was composed of twelve constituent regional banks. Each one of these regional banks is owned by private banks.

The private ownership of the banks that are the proprietors of the Federal Reserve system has been highly contentious from its inception. The creation of the Federal Reserve continues to be perceived by many of its critics as an unjustifiable giveaway whereby the US government ceded to private interests its vital capacity to issue its own currency and to direct monetary policy like the setting of interest rates.

Pam Martens and Russ Martens at Wall Street on Parade explain the controversial Federal Reserve structure as follows

While the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, D.C. is deemed an “independent federal agency,” with its Chair and Governors appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, the 12 regional Fed banks are private corporations owned by the member banks in their region. The settled law under John L. Lewis v. the United States confirms: “Each Federal Reserve Bank is a separate corporation owned by commercial banks in its region.”

In the case of the New York Fed, which is located in the Wall Street area of Manhattan, its largest shareowners are behemoth multinational banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

There was no genuine effort after the financial debacle of 2007-2010 to correct the main structural problems and weaknesses of the Wall Street-based US financial sector. The Dodd-Frank Bill signed into law by US President Barack Obama in 2010 did make some cosmetic changes. But the main features of the regulatory capture that has taken place with the elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act remained with only minor alterations. In particular the framework was held in place for speculative excess in derivative bets.

In the summer edition of The Atlantic, Frank Partnoy outlined a gloomy assessment of the continuity leading from the events of 2007-2010 to the current situation. This current situation draws a strange contrast between the lockdown-shattered quality of the economy and the propped-up value of the stock market whose future value will in all probability prove unsustainable. Partnoy writes,

It is a distasteful fact that the present situation is so dire in part because the banks fell right back into bad behavior after the last crash—taking too many risks, hiding debt in complex instruments and off-balance-sheet entities, and generally exploiting loopholes in laws intended to rein in their greed. Sparing them for a second time this century will be that much harder.

Wall Street Criminality on Display

The frauds and felonies of the Wall Street banks have continued after the future earnings of US taxpayers returned them to solvency after 2010. The record of infamy is comparable to that of the pharmaceutical industry.

The criminal behaviour in both sectors is very relevant to the overlapping crises that are underway in both the public health and financial sectors. In 2012 the crime spree in the financial sector began with astounding revelations about the role of many major banks in the LIBOR, the London Interbank Offered Rate. The LIBOR rates create the basis of interest rates involved in the borrowing and lending of money in the international arena.

When the scandal broke there were 35 different LIBOR rates involving various types of currency and various time frames for loans between banks. The rates were calculated every day based on information forwarded from 16 different banks to a panel on London. The reporting banks included Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, and Deutsche Bank. The influence of the LIBOR rate extended beyond banks to affect the price of credit in many types of transactions.

The emergence of information that the banks were working together to rig the interest rate created the basis for a huge economic scandal. Fines extending from hundreds of millions into more than a billion dollars were placed on each of the offending banks. But in this instance and many others to follow, criminality was attached to the financial entities but not to top officials responsible for the decisions that put their corporations on the wrong side of the law.

One of the factors in the banking frauds comprising the LIBOR scandal was the temptation to improve the chance for financial gains in derivative bets. The biggest failure of the federal response to the financial meltdown of 2007-210 was that little was done to curb the excesses of transactions in the realm of derivatives.

Derivatives involved a form of gambling that exists in a kind of twilight zone. This twilight zone fills a space somewhere between the realm of the real economy and the realm of notional value. Notional values find expression in unrealized speculation about what might or might not come to fruition; what might or might not happen; who might win and who might lose in derivative speculations.

The addiction of Wall Street firms to derivative betting remains unchecked to this day. The bankers’ continuing fixation with unregulated gambling, often with other people’s money, is deeply menacing for the future of the global economy…. indeed for the future of everyone on earth. According to the Office of the Controller of Currency, in 2019 JP Morgan Chase had $59 trillion in derivative bets. In July of 2020 it emerged that Citigroup held $62 trillion in derivative contracts, about $30 trillion more than it held before it was bailed out in 2008. In 2019 Goldman Sachs held $47 trillion and Bank of America held $20.4 trillion in derivate bets.

A big part of the scandal embodied in these figures is embedded in the reality that all of these banks carry their most risky derivative bets in units of their corporate networks that are protected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. This peril played a significant part in deepening the crisis engendered by financial meltdown that began in 2007.

One of the most redeeming features of the Dodd-Frank Act as originally drafted was a provision preventing financial institutions from keeping their derivative portfolios in banks whose deposits and depositors were backed up by federal insurance.

Citigroup led the push in Congress in 2014 to allow Wall Street institutions to revert back to a more deregulated and danger-prone economic environment. The notoriously inept decisions and actions of Citigroup had played a significant role in the lead up to the financial debacle of 2007 to 2010. Since 2016 Citigroup has become once again the biggest risk taker by loading itself up with more derivative speculations than any other financial institution in the world.

By returning derivative speculations to the protections of federal financial backstops, taxpayers are once again forced to assume responsibility for the most outlandish risks of Wall Street’s high rollers. It is taxpayers who are the backers of the federal government when it comes to their commitment to compensate banks for losses, even when these losses come about from derivative bets.

How much more Wall Street risk and public debt can be loaded onto taxpayers and even onto generations of taxpayers yet unborn? How is national debt to be understood when it plunders working people to guarantee and augment the wealth of the most privileged branches of society? Why should those most responsible for creating the most excessive risks to the financial wellbeing of our societies be protected from bearing the consequences of the very risks they themselves created?

Along with Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase stands out among a group of financial sector reprobates most deeply involved in sketchy activities that extend deep into the realm of criminality. In a simmering scandal six of JP Morgan Chase’s traders have been accused of breaking laws in conducting the bank’s futures trading in the value of precious metals. They have been accused of violating the RICO statute, a law meant for people suspected of being part of organized crime.

In the charges pressed by the Justice Department on JP Morgan Chase’s traders it is alleged that they “conducted the affairs of the [minerals] desk through a pattern of racketeering activity, specifically, wire fraud affecting a financial institution and bank fraud.”

In 2012 JP Morgan Chase faced a $1 billion fine for its role in the “London Wale” series of derivative bets described as follows by the Chair of the US Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation. Senator Carl Levin explained, “Our findings open a window into the hidden world of high stakes derivatives trading by big banks. It exposes a derivatives trading culture at JPMorgan that piled on risk, hid losses, disregarded risk limits, manipulated risk models, dodged oversight, and misinformed the public.”

Traders at Goldman Sachs appear to have been part of the Wall Street crime spree. The tentacles of corruption in the Goldman Sachs case apparently extend deep into the US Justice Department. The case involves allegations of embezzlement, money laundering and missing billions. These manifestations of malfeasance all spin out of a scandal-prone Malaysian sovereign wealth fund administered by Goldman Sachs.

A big part of the scandal reported in Wall Street on Parade in July of 2020 involves the fact that the Justice Department’s prosecutors seem to be dragging their feet in this possible criminal felony case against Goldman Sachs. The prosecutors, including the US Attorney-General, William Barr, worked previously for the law firm, Kirkland and Ellis. Kirkland and Ellis was retained to defend Goldman Sachs in this matter.

Pam Martens and Russ Martens express dismay at the failure of US officialdom to hold Wall Street institutions accountable for the crime spree of some of its biggest firms. They write, “Congress and the executive branch of the government seem determined to protect Wall Street criminals, which simply assures their proliferation.”

Even racketeering charges against officials at JP Morgan Chase, where Jamie Dimon presides as CEO, failed to receive any attention from the professional deceivers that these days dominate MSM. The star reporters of Wall Street on Parade write, “Crime and fraud are so de rigueur at the bank led by Dimon that not one major newspaper ran the headline [of the racketeering charge] on the front page or anywhere else in the paper.

While federal charges that JP Morgan Chase’s Wall Street operation engaged in criminal racketeering was not of interest to the press, Jamie Dimon’s surprise visit in early June to a Chase branch in Mt. Kisco New York aroused considerable media attention. Dimon was photographed with staff wearing a mask and taking the knee. By participating in this ritual Dimon signaled that his Wall Street operation is in league with the sometimes violent cancel culture pushed into prominence by the Democratic Party in partnership with Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

In an article on 21 July marking ten years since the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, the Martens duo conclude, “So here we are today, watching the Fed conduct another secret multi-trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street while the voices of Congress and mainstream media are nowhere to be heard.”

Enter BlackRock

In March it was announced that representatives of the US Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve Board and the BlackRock financial management were joining forces to make adjustments in the US economy. The aim was to address the financial dislocations resulting from the decision to lock down businesses, citizens, schools, entertainment, and social mingling outside the home, all in response to the health care hysteria promoted by governments and their media extensions.

The format of this process suggested some relaxation in the strict distinctions historically drawn between the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve. What would be the role of the third member of the group? In reflecting on this topic Joyce Nelson observed, “the new bailout bill not only further erases the line between the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury, it places BlackRock effectively in an overseer position for both.”

Some saw as symbolically instructive the delegation to BlackRock of a larger role than that assigned it during the first bailout of 2007-2008. It would be hard to overestimate the significance of this prominent Wall Street firm’s return to a strategic role near the very heart of this major exercise of federal power. This invitation to take part in such crucial negotiations at such a consequential juncture in history caused some to characterize BlackRock as a “fourth branch of government.”

As Victoria Guida commented in Politico, “This is a transformational moment for the Fed, and BlackRock’s now going to be in an even stronger position to serve the Fed in the future.”

BlackRock officials had been instrumental in helping to manoeuvre their company into such a strategic role by responding proactively to the understanding in some elite circles that another financial debacle was imminent. Only months before the financial meltdown actually occurred a group of former central bankers all commissioned by BlackRock delivered a recovery plan in August of 2019.

Presented at a G 7 summit of central bankers in Jackson Hole Wyoming, the plan for the government responses to the looming financial collapse was entitled Dealing with the Next Downturn. Its authors are Stanley Fischer, former Governor of the Central Bank of Israel, Philipp Hildebrande, former Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, Jean Boivin, former Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada, and Elga Bartsch, Economist at Morgan Stanley.

The BlackRock Team at Jackson Hole put forward the case that a more aggressive and coordinated combination of monetary and fiscal policy must be brought to the job of stimulating a financial recovery. Monetary policy includes the setting of interest rates. Where monetary policy has historically been the domain of the central banks, fiscal policy, involving issues of taxation as well as the content and size of government budgets, lies within the jurisdiction of elected legislatures.

The nub of the proposal to unite fiscal and monetary policy put the US Treasury and the US Federal Reserve on the same political platform. As the author of this merger of monetary and fiscal policy, BlackRock became third member of the triumvirate charged to address the broad array of economic maladies that arrived in the wake of the lockdowns.

In the spring of 2020 BlackRock has been hired by the Bank of Canada and by Sweden’s Central Bank, the Riksbank, to deliver on the approaches to crisis management its representatives had laid out at Jackson Hole. BlackRock’s most high-profile and strategic engagement, however, began with its involvement in the negotiation of the $2 trillion CARES stimulus package that passed through the US Congress in March of 2020.

The CARES Act included $367 billion for loans and grants to small business, $130 billion for health care systems, $150 billion for state and local government, $500 billion for loans to corporate America, and $25 billion for airlines (in addition to loans).

The heart of the plan involved a payout of $1,200 per adult and $500 per child for households making up to $75,000. This payment to citizens approaches the concept of disseminating “helicopter money” as referred to in BlackRock’s initial outline for dealing with the “downturn.” Helicopter money distributed by the federal government to its citizens was also related to the concept of “going direct” in strategies for stimulating the economy.

BlackRock seems to be moving into the space recently held by Goldman Sachs as Wall Street’s best embodiment of ostentatious success including in the preparation of its corporate leaders for high-ranking positions in the federal government. Laurence Fink, BlackRock’s founder and CEO, might well have replicated this career path to become Treasury Secretary if Hillary Clinton had succeeded in becoming US President in 2016.

BlackRock’s leadership went to great lengths to avoid being tagged with the title in the United States of a “systematically important financial institution” (sifi). To be subject to this “sifi” label entails added federal scrutiny and regulation as well as heightened requirements to keep high amounts of capital on hand. BlackRock’s status as a private company not subject to sifi regulations makes the financial management firm more attractive to its federal partners in the federal payout operation presently underway.

One of the reasons for including a private company in the trio of partners involved in the payouts is to sneak around limitations on the legal powers of the Federal Reserve. As explained by Ellen Brown in her essay, Meet BlackRock: The New Great Vampire Squid, the Federal Reserve can only purchase “safe federally-guaranteed assets.” As a private company, BlackRock apparently faces no such restrictions. It can purchase more risky assets not backstopped by federal insurance.

The regional banks of the Federal Reserve Board are owned by private companies whose directors seem to have been part of the decision to include BlackRock in the implementation of the CARES process. There can be no doubt that the format of the CARES negotiations pulled the supposedly independent Federal Reserve more deeply into the political orbit of the US Treasury branch. The presence of a major Wall Street firm in the process, however, apparently gave the advocates of the Fed’s supposed independence from politics a sense that they retained some leverage in the process.

The inclusion of private companies in the conduct of government business has become in recent decades a very common expression of neoliberalism. One of the reasons for this embrace of public-private partnerships in the conduct of government business is to take advantage of the legal nature of private companies. The apportionment to private companies of significant roles in deciding and implementing public policies helps put veils of secrecy over the true nature of government decisions and actions.

Private companies can more easily assert claims to “proprietary information” than can public institutions when they act on behalf of citizens. This feature of privatization in the performance of public responsibilities by elected government runs counter to the imperatives of democratic transparency. It puts obstacles in the way of genuine accountability because the public is more likely to be kept in the dark about key aspects of what is being decided and done on their behalf.

Suck Up Economics and State Monopoly Capitalism

BlackRock owns, controls, or manages about $30 trillion in total in securities. It directly controls or owns somewhat less than a third of this amount. The remainder of the assets BlackRock manages are to service clients responsible for taking care of pension funds, philanthropies, foundations, endowments, family offices, superannuation funds and such.

A big part of BlackRock’s business model involves attracting customers by allowing them access to great masses of timely information of significant utility to those responsible for making investment decisions. This technological wizardry happens on a very advanced computational platform known as Aladdin.

Aladdin remains a work-in-progress, one that is widely recognized as the most sophisticated medium of its kind for assessing all manner of financial risks and potentials for profit. Its future as an investment platform is to become more and more integrated into the complex mix of hardware and software animating Artificial Intelligence.

BlackRock’s job is to dispense funds ushered into existence through the money-creating powers of the Federal Reserve. These transactions are to take place through eleven so-called “special purpose vehicles” similar to the Maiden Lane companies that BlackRock administered during the prior bailouts.

The funds it distributes in this round starting in 2020 are meant, at least at this early stage of the crisis, as payments for various sorts of assets. These assets might include an array of corporate bonds spanning a range from so-called investment grade to garbage grade junk bonds. The losses incurred in this exchange, involving supposed assets that might turn out to be worthless, or loans that might not be paid back, are to be charged to the US Treasury. Ultimately the liability lies on US taxpayers who are the holders of the national debt.

Bonds of varying levels of worth lie beneath another asset eligible for transformation into cash. This instrument of value is referred to as Exchange Traded Funds, ETFs. ETFs happen to be a specialty of BlackRock ever since the company launched a range of commercial ETFs into Stock Market circulation through its iShares division. BlackRock’s role on both sides of buying and selling ETFs comes up repeatedly as one of the many conflicts of interest of which the Wall Street firm stands accused.

Given that BlackRock is involved in one way or another in the proprietorship of pretty much every major company in the world, there is plenty to back up the allegation that Black Rock is an interested party in most of the transactions in which it engages as part of its partnership with the US Fed and Treasury Branch.

Pam Matens and Russ Martens have been very critical of the role of the Federal Reserve and BlackRock in the current economic crisis. They have anticipated that, if the current drift of events continues, American taxpayers will once again be gobsmacked with a huge growth in the national debt. This development would amount to another major transfer of wealth away from working people to the beneficiaries of Wall Street firms and the same commercial institutions that received the lion’s share of funds during the last bailout.

The co-authors picture BlackRock is part of a scheme to use “Special Purpose Vehicles” like “Enron used to hide the true state of its finances and blow itself up.” They entitle their article published on 31 March, 2020 as  “The Dark Secrets in the Fed’s Wall Street Bailout Are Getting a Devious Makeover in Today’s Bailout.”

The authors observe. “What makes the New York Fed’s bailout of Wall Street so much more dangerous this time around is that it has decided to use a different structure for its loans to Wall Street – one that will force losses on taxpayers and, it hopes, will provide an ironclad secrecy curtain around how much it spends and where the money goes.”

I find this account of an effort by the Federal Reserve to create an “ironclad secrecy curtain” shocking under these circumstances. It suggests an intention to exceed the deceptiveness of the last bailout. This warning renews longstanding suspicions that the failures of transparency and accountability have not subsided since the beginning of the era when deregulation and the 9/11 deceptions converged in the domestic and international operations of Wall Street.

The structural problems already identified in the process initiated to implement the CARES Act could have enormous consequences if the current economic crisis continues to deteriorate. This deterioration is not likely to stop anytime soon given the depth of the crash and its probable domino effects. It was reported in late July that during the second quarter of 2020 the US Gross Domestic Product collapsed at an annualized rate of 33%, the deepest decline in output ever recorded since the US government began measuring GDP in 1947.

The CARES Act helped set in motion a program with the potential to repeat elements of the earlier bailout. The amount of $454 billion was to be set aside to assist the banking sector. The Fed can leverage this amount by ten times according to the principles of fractional reserve banking.

The news of this development caused Mike Whitney to imagine “the Fed turning itself into a hedge fund in order to buy the sludge that has accumulated on the balance sheets of corporations and financial institutions for the last decade,” Whitney pictured an onslaught of “scheming sharpies who will figure out how to game the system and turn the whole fiasco into another Wall Street looting operation.”

Meanwhile the Martens Team at Wall Street on Parade called attention to the $9 trillion already injected by the New York Fed to flood liquidity into the still-troubled Repo Markets that began to falter in September of 2019. Add to this revelation the news that the Fed “has not announced one scintilla of information on what specific Wall Street firms have received this money or how much they individually received.”

There is no doubt that the nature of economic relations will be substantially altered in the process of dealing with the financial meltdown induced by the lockdowns and by the overreliance on high debt rates combined with artificially low interest rates prior to 2020. The altered political economy that is beginning to emerge following the lockdowns is sometimes described as state monopoly capitalism.

In deciding what companies get bailed out and what companies don’t, the financial authorities that are intervening in this crisis are pretty much deciding what enterprises get the advantage of federal financial backstops and what enterprises will not enjoy government sanction. Increasingly, therefore, it is the state that determines winners and losers in the organizing of financial relations. This development further undermines any notion that some idealized vision of competition and market forces will determine winners and losers in the economy of the future.

As Peter Ewarts has observed, it seems that BlackRock is being delegated by federal authorities to exercise “discretionary powers to pick winners and losers,” a choice that is “where the real bonanza and clout lies.” Will the winners be chosen from the companies run by executives that used the money gained from the prior bailouts to engage in stock buy backs? This process of buying back stock tends to be reflected in CEO bonuses and higher share prices. Alternatively this way of allocating funds tends to short change workers as well as innovation and efficiency in industrial production?

Will companies be rewarded whose executives have moved production facilities overseas or issued billions in junk bonds? Will companies be rewarded whose directors have participated in the effort to censor the Internet, bring about lockdowns or foment mask hysteria? Why is it that the coddled elites serving the financial imperatives of most wealthy branches of society are being put in the best position to decide who gets a life preserver from the state and who must sink and drown?

Might this bias be a factor in the current process that led Forbes Magazine to conclude in a headline that “Billionaries Are Getting Richer During the Covid-19 Pandemic While Most Americans Suffer.”

There can be no doubt that the financial transactions beginning with the CARES Act represent a crucial initial stage in what the promoters of the World Economic Forum have been labeling as the Great Reset. Laurence Fink and the BlackRock firm are significant participants in the World Economic Forum. The WEF helped introduce the pandemic in Event 201 in October of 2019 even as it is now trying to put a positive face on the fiasco.

Why should the people most harshly affected by the lockdowns tolerate that the very Wall Street interests dispossessing them, are tasked once again to lead and exploit the reset of the financial system? As presently structured by the likes of BlackRock and its beneficiaries, this process is once again transferring new wealth to the most wealthy branches of society. Simultaneously it is burdening the rest of the population with yet another massive increase in both personal and national indebtedness.

There is no more discussion of “trickle down” economics, a frequent metaphor invoked in the Reagan-Thatcher era. Instead we are in the midst of an increasingly intense phase of suck up economics. The rich are being further enriched and further empowered through the dispossession of the poor and the middle classes. This procedure, initiated when locked down citizens were sidelined from the political process, has the potential to result in the largest upward transfer of wealth so far in history.

BlackRock Versus the Debt-Lite Legacy of the Bank of Canada

At the end of March Laurence Fink, CEO and founder of BlackRock, announced in a letter to his company’s shareholder, “We are honored to have been selected to assist the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of Canada on programs designed to facilitate capital to businesses and support the economy.”

This announcement might leave the impression that the Bank of Canada and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York are similar institutions. This impression is unfounded. The two banks have very different structures and histories. A spotlight on these differences helps illuminate the nature of a number of core financial issues.

These financial issues should command avid attention during this time of reckoning with a serious economic crisis that may well be still in its early stages. Such issues inevitably draw attention to the current manifestations of very old questions about the character of money and its relationship to the concepts of usury and debt. Questions about debt, debt enslavement as well as the possibility of debt renunciation or debt forgiveness are becoming especially pressing.

These controversial queries arise in an era when a tiny minority is aggressively asserting sweeping claims to ownership of vast concentrations of the world’s available assets. The other side of this picture reveals that the largest mass of humanity is sinking into a swamp of rising debt on a scale that is concurrently unsustainable and unconscionable. How did this level of inequity reach such audacious extremes? Are there any remedies in sight?

There is nothing to suggest structural remediation in the current approach to the economic crisis. In fact so far there is every indication that the current approach of bringing about an enormous expansion in the availability of debt-laden money will only compound the further dispossession of the already dispossessed in order to expand the wealth of the already wealthy.

As already noted, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is one of twelve regional banks that together constitute the US Federal Reserve. Every regional Federal Reserve Bank is owned by a group of private banks. Each of the private banks at the base of a Federal Reserve regional bank marks its proprietorship through the ownership of shares. These shares cannot be freely traded in stock markets. The ownership of these shares expresses the private ownership of the US banking system.

The Fed’s New York regional bank has a special role in money creation given its location at the heart of the US financial sector on and around Wall Street. In this crisis, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is creating new money in the name of holding back onslaughts of destitution and penury in a traumatized society. Ever since 1913 every new dollar brought into existence by the Federal Reserve, which is the central bank of the United States, creates added debt that collects compound interest as long as it is left unpaid.

The Bank of Canada was created to counter the delegation of money-creating authority to privately-owned banks. The Bank of Canada was founded during the Great Depression, a time when the failure of many existing institutions created the conditions to try out alternative entities in the attempt to improve economic relationships.

One of the driving forces in the creation of Canada’s new banking system was Gerald Gratten McGeer. McGreer was an elected official in British Columbia dedicated to changing the system so that the people of Canada could generate their own currency through the sovereign authority of Canada’s Parliament. McGeer helped to push the national government of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett in this direction. The wheels were set in motion in 1933 through the work on the Royal Commission on Banking and Currency.

McGeer drew much of his inspiration from former US President, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln led the US federal government throughout the US Civil War. To finance the Armed Forces of the Union, Lincoln used the authority of the federal government to create “Greenbacks” as a means of paying the troops. By employing the sovereign authority of the US government to create its own currency, Lincoln avoided the intrigues that often accompanied the process of borrowing money from foreign lenders.

McGreer had obtained what he viewed as credible evidence that Lincoln had been assassinated because of his antagonism to the designs of private bankers seeking to widen their base of power in the United States. The Canadian politician had taken to heart a comment attributed often to Lincoln: “The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but it is the Government’s greatest creative opportunity.”

The Bank of Canada was created in 1934 and nationalized as a Crown Corporation in 1938. To this day it retains its founding charter that affirms,

WHEREAS it is desirable to establish a central bank in Canada to regulate credit and currency in the best interests of the economic life of the nation, to control and protect the external value of the national monetary unit and to mitigate by its influence fluctuations in the general level of production, trade, prices and employment, so far as may be possible within the scope of monetary action, and generally to promote the economic and financial welfare of Canada.

The Bank of Canada formed an essential basis of a very creative period of Canadian growth, development, and diversification throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century. The Bank of Canada created the capital that financed the Canadian war effort from 1939 until 1945. After the war the Bank of Canada lent money at very low rates of interest to the municipal, provincial and national governments. The monies were used for infrastructure projects and for investments to increase the wellbeing and creative potential of Canada’s most important resource, its people.

This type of low interest or no interest financing formed the economic basis for projects like the creation of a national pension plan, national health care insurance, the Trans-Canada Highway, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Avro-Arrow initiative as well as a formidable system of colleges and universities.

One could say that the Bank of Canada provided an indigenous money supply that was spent into the operations of a fast growing economy greased with lots of federal liquidity. The new money derived its value from the efforts of Canadian workers.  Together they brought about significant increases in the country’s net worth through practical improvements that bettered the lives of all citizens.

Consider the contrast between this type of national development and the kind of larceny facilitated by the Federal Reserve’s infusions of the money it creates into Wall Street’s operations in the twenty-first century. In, for instance, the financial bailouts of 2007 to 2010 the largest part of the newly-created money ended up in the coffers of the wealthy whereas the new debt created ended up as part of a US national debt.

The burden of carrying this debt falls inter-generationally on average working people who form the lion’s share of taxpayers. They have long been saddled with an “inextinguishable debt” that unrelentingly grows, hardly ever shrinks, and remains basically unpayable forever. The very concept of “compound interest” conveys the image of an overall debt spread out over many venues. This debt must grow in perpetuity. There is a constant need for additional debtors while existing debtors must face constantly growing personal debt.

There is reason to suspect that the financial debacle of 2020 will re-enact some the worst excesses of the 2008 bailout. Might the payouts this time around to derivative-addicted Wall Street firms like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase exceed the scale of the prior bailout? Would there be any way of even knowing whether the current round of payouts outdoes the former round of bailouts? The current process of federal disbursements is not transparent. In fact the process has been described as one designed to “provide an ironclad secrecy curtain around how much [the Fed} spends and where the money goes.”

Why is the Canadian government turning to the very firm that emerged as Wall Street’s main fixer and winner in the 2008 bailouts? Why is Justin Trudeau looking to BlackRock to respond to the Canadian aspects of the 2020 economic crash?

Justin Trudeau seems unwilling or unable to provide a coherent answer to this question and others requiring thoughtful replies rather than barrages of platitudes. Why is Justin Trudeau instituting what Joyce Nelson has characterized as a “new feudalism” in Canada’s economic policies?

Any decent effort of response on Trudeau’s part would have to make some reference to the background of the current debacle. There would have to be some acknowledgment that between 1934 and 1974 the Canada government did not build up any significant national debt. Then, between 1974 and 2020, the national debt of Canada skyrocketed from $22 billion to $700 billion.

Why was such a good and sustainable use of the Bank of Canada put aside, one that contributed magnificently to the health and wellbeing of the Canadian people as well as the Canadian federation? Who lost out? Who gained besides the international bankers?

The incomprehensible abandonment of a winning formula for Canadian development by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau puts a special onus on his son, Canada’s current PM, to explain the incredibly costly mistake of his father. Why won’t Justin Trudeau fix the mistake of his father and restore the Bank of Canada to its former role in Canadian nation building?

There has never been a full and satisfactory explanation of what really happened in 1974 to persuade Pierre Trudeau to throw aside the means of developing infrastructure with resources generated internally within Canada. Trudeau Senior’s decision to stop building up Canada through the operation of the Canadian people’s own national bank was not debated in Parliament. The option was never part of an election platform let alone the subject of a national referendum.

Apparently the Swiss-based Bank of International Settlements, which is often referred to as the central bank for central bankers, had some role in Pierre Trudeau’s decision to cease using the Bank of Canada’s powers to generate near-debt-free Canadian currency.

Government as a Means of Escaping Debt Entrapment

That powers of debt-lite money creation invested by Parliament in the Bank of Canada have never been formally withdrawn. The Bank of Canada could still revert back to the direct creation of Canadian currency to be spent into an economy of national recovery; to be spent in investments in infrastructure as well as in cultivating and applying the creative skills of the Canadian people.

Between 2011 and 2017 a court case was brought against the government of Canada with the aim of restoring the Bank of Canada to its former role. As Rocco Galati, the lawyer for the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform (COMER) explained  “Not only has the government abandoned its constitutional duty to govern, but it has transferred it to international private banks which corresponds to an abandonment of its sovereignty.”

After some significant rulings and contentious appeals, the COMER case came to an end without delivering results that its plaintiffs sought. But the court case helped to put a spotlight on the potential of the Bank of Canada. If properly utilized, this institution could provide a model corrective to the subordination of governance to the international Lords of Debt Explotation and their minions.

This process of politicizing the role of the Bank of Canada should extend to a process of calling out Justin Trudeau’s current approach to selling off key components of Canada’s infrastructure.

This topic came up in private discussions between Larry Fink and Justin Trudeau at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January of 2016. Fink apparently got Trudeau interested in attracting private investors to the project of improving or building Canadian infrastructure projects like roads, high-speed trains, airports and such. This kind of approach to developing infrastructure projects runs counter to the role once played by the Bank of Canada in incorporating self-sufficiency into the process of national building.

The dangers and opportunities in this time of manufactured crises are indeed unprecedented.  Instead of rejecting the Davos crowd’s preoccupation with a giant reset, why not embrace the concept? Why not treat this moment as an opening to reset the global economy in a way that would restore the Bank of Canada to some of its former functions. Why not highlight this return to the sovereign embrace of benevolent nation building as an example for the rest of the world?

Why not reconstitute the worldwide structures of the international system of economic relations to restore elected governments to the functions that have been pre-empted by unaccountable institutions like the US Federal Reserve or the Bank for International Settlements? Why not renew the model of banking as an exercise and expression of national sovereignty and the self-determination of peoples in a dynamic global arena of rules-based economic interaction?

Why not withdraw the power from private bankers to create national currencies? Why not follow the advice of the deceased Abraham Lincoln by restoring “the greatest of all creative possibilities available to governments,” namely their power to issue money and set interest rates. The restoration of economic power to governments and the people and peoples they represent would involve the infusion of life into conceptions of globalization very different than those used to justify the industrialization of China and the deindustrialization of North America.

By delegating to international organizations much of their capacity to influence the economic conditions affecting their own people, national legislatures have lost much of their capacity to provide responsible government. Governments thus weakened are not realistically in a position to derive their authority from the consent of the governed. When representative bodies cannot effectively express the right of their constituents to collective self-determination in economic realm, what legitimacy is left to the institution of representative government?

This strange moment puts humanity face to face with much that is novel and unprecedented and much that is old and integral to the history of human interaction. The economic dimensions of this crisis constitute its most devastating and far-reaching attribute. The supposed remedy being rushed into operation is to flood large quantities of debt-laden loans into existence and for governments to distribute the borrowed funds to individuals, businesses, and organizations as they see fit.

Once again, vast quantities of debt-laden money are being created without the informed consent of those on whose shoulders the vastly increased loads of debt are falling. Once again governments are rewarding political friends and punishing political enemies by means of the way the new funds are being apportioned.

Decisions are pushed forward that emanate not from citizen constituents but from cabals of supranational connivers actively engaged in wrecking what little remains of responsible government. As governments lose legitimacy by engaging in collusion with corrupt cronies and international crime syndicates they must depend more and more on police state thuggery to enforce some semblance of order.

This process is going forward in spite of the fact that alternative means exist to create as much new money as is required without having to pay large amounts of compound interest to private bankers. Every sovereign government has the capacity to generate new money by following the model of the Bank of Canada between 1938 and 1974.

There is an especially urgent need at this time for some serious reckoning with the economic dimensions of the crisis before us. This reckoning will inevitably meet the resistance of extremely powerful interests who are deriving great benefits from the existing system. The process of privatizing the creation of money has enriched and empowered a clique whose institutionalized, deep-rooted and continuing kleptocracy was exposed in part by the bailout of 2008.

Why should we take for granted in 2020 that the best way to deal with the economic debacle put before us is to create new money by agreeing to go much deeper into a quagmire of debt entrapment. This debt trap, whose cumulative amount will soon be more that $300 trillion globally, creates gross liabilities in a trajectory of disadvantage that severely limits the life chances even of many generations still unborn.

The other side of debt is embodied in assets. Who gets the assets and who gets the liabilities that coalesce to form indebtedness? What is to be made of the role of birth or inheritance or race or natural ability or social connections in apportioning assets or imposing the enslavements of accumulated debt?

John Perkins addressed some of these issues in his Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and in a subsequent follow-up volume. Perkins chronicled how an inter-related complex of US institutions aligned themselves with his own greedy and unscrupulous interventions. The goal of their coordinated aggressions was aimed at imposing the enslavements of massive debt with compound interest. Their version of loan sharking is one of many manifestations expressing a very old and common phenomenon. It often happens that powerful interests parasitically exploit the weak to further enrich themselves.

This partnership between John Perkins and the kleptocratic agencies directed by the US government has long been drawing wealth from struggling countries by pushing them more deeply into national indebtedness. Once the governments of target countries succumbed to greater dependence on debt-based financing, the conditions were ripe to force officials into adopting policies of austerity that harmed local citizens in order to augment the assets of international investors.

Significantly the World Bank demonstrated how this coercion works in the context of the current economic crisis. The World Bank attempted to impose conditions on a loan of $940 million to Belarus because the WB wanted Belarus to conform to the lockdowns that are a primary cause of the current manufactured crisis.

As revealed by the Belarus’s President, Alexander Lukashenko, the World Bank wanted his country to adopt the full set of COVID-19 measures that had been implemented by the Italian government. Lukashenko said no to the loan. He refused to accept the conditions and carried on the established policies of Belarus, a country that has “not implemented strict coronavirus containment measures.”

Lukashenko is far from alone in his contempt for the manipulative tactics of the apparatus promoting the manufactured crisis. For instance Tanzanian President, John Magufuli, tested the accuracy of the testing procedures being forced on his country by the World Health Organization. President and Medical Doctor Mugufi included in the samples submitted to the testing agency some tissue of a goat and a papaya. Both the goat and the papaya tested positive for COVID-19, an outcome he publicized before ordering the WHO group to leave his country.

The Political Economy of Usury From the Middle Ages to the Era of Social Credit and Ezra Pound

We cannot assess the division of humanity between a massive group of debtors and a much smaller group of creditors without touching on the issue of usury. The subject of usury, the lending of money with the addition of interest payments, has been an extremely contentious issue throughout much of human history.

There were prohibitions against usury in ancient Greece, ancient India and the Roman Empire. Throughout much of the last thousand years usury has been regarded as a sin outlawed in the Bible, the Torah and the Koran. At different times in history the Roman Catholic Church has been an especially zealous opponent of some forms of usury.

Considering the nature of our current predicaments including obscene levels of economic inequality, usury might yet again arouse contentions. Some of the core ethical issues raised by the resort to usury remain unresolved. How is it ethical, for instance, to subject disinherited children in poor countries to the indignities of deepened poverty so that rich folks in rich parts of the world can reap larger dividends?

Beginning in the Middle Ages, forms of usury began to show up first in the Italian city states and in the towns of the Franco-Flemish realm. The act of loaning money with interest gradually spread throughout Europe. In some predominately-Muslim jurisdictions, the concept conveyed in the Arabic term, “riba,” approximated the idea of usury or interest. Over time various versions of riba have affected Muslim banking practices.

Often there were prohibitions preventing Jews from demanding interest on loans made to other Jews. There were many Talmudic teachings, however, permitting interest to be collected from gentiles when they borrowed money from Jews. Many accounts of Jewish efforts to break down prohibitions on usury highlight obstacles preventing Jews from pursuing other lines of work. The case is made that the pull of some Jews into banking came about in part because of their exclusion from other occupations.

Whatever the case, the obstacles to usury continued to be lessened including through the changes to Biblical interpretation that came with the Protestant Reformation. Even in the twentieth century, however, usury continued to arouse criticism and distrust. Ezra Pound was one of those who became very outspoken when it came to problems with usury.

The modernist poet and scholar, Ezra Pound, was one of the most influential literary figures of the twentieth century. The importance of his work was expressed not only in his own literary efforts but also in his contributions to other authors in his circle of friends and colleagues.

Pound’s outspoken criticism of usury formed part of the discourse that was integral to the political movements seeking economic reform. The creation and successful nationalization of the Bank of Canada was one of the outgrowths of the concerted quest to give substance to economic institutions that would more effectively serve human needs.

The creation of the Bank of Canada drew on the ideas of Abraham Lincoln and also on those of many other theorists including Major C.H. Douglas. While Major Douglas and John Maynard Keynes each denounced one another’s work, both sought to stimulate economic activity by expanding the supply and distribution of money.  Major Douglas’ vision of Social Credit, one that Pound enthusiastically embraced, sought to bring about greater harmony and equilibrium between the forces of production and consumption.

A biographer of Pound has explained that this formidable literary figure believed “there was the prospect of building a Social Credit society where money served the consumer and served the producer.”  As Pound pictured it, “the middle men” seeking usurious, interest bearing profit” to be collected “without work or prior motivation, could be cut out.” During the Depression the hope of prosperity through the application of Social Credit principles was seized upon by many. One of them was an evangelical preacher in the Canadian province of Alberta.

Largely as a result of the popularity he gained by incorporating Major Douglas’ analysis of Social Credit into his Sunday afternoon Christian radio broadcast, “Bible Bill” Aberhart became the Premier of Alberta. His Social Credit Party gained 56 of 63 seats in the Alberta Legislature. The Social Credit Party continued in power until 1971.

The Social Credit preoccupation with bringing about changes in the relationship of citizens to financial institutions helped add to the discourse from which the Bank of Canada emerged as a dynamic instrument of nation building.

The enthusiasm was well placed of those who threw their lot in with the movement to create and enlivened the Bank of Canada. The generations that put their trust in this federal financial institution had the satisfaction of knowing that their taxes were not devoured to pay big amounts of interest to private bankers in the style that presently prevails almost everywhere.

Like his good friend and colleague, Ernest Hemingway, Pound was a devotee of clear, terse and succinct prose.

This characteristic of his writing comes through strongly in his harsh condemnations of usury. “Usury is the cancer of the world,” Pound wrote. He explained, “Until you know who has lent to whom, you know nothing of politics, you know nothing whatever of history, you know nothing of international wrangles.”

Ezra Pound was born in Idaho but was attracted to Italy throughout long periods of his life. In Italy he lionized its fascist leader, Benito Mussolini. He embraced the Axis side in World War II developing close relations with the British fascist leader, Oswald Mosley. Pound threw himself into the contest producing a torrent of radio broadcasts seeking to win over English-speaking converts to the Axis side. These broadcasts are today widely described as war propaganda.

Pound was indicted in the United States in 1943 and arrested at the war’s end by the US Armed Forces in Italy. After being jailed in Pisa, Pound was charged with treason. Then Pound was diagnosed as being mentally unfit to face charges.

The finding that he was mentally ill caused Pound to be locked up as a patient in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in the Washington DC area for the next 13 years. In spite of his severe prejudices against Jewish bankers and his active embrace of fascism during the war years, Pound continued to carry on very lively interactions with his formidable circle of poets, essayists and novelists.

Pound’s circle included James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and T.S. Eliot. All these writers wrote works that won a Nobel Prize for Literature. These and many other authors benefited from Pound’s encouragement and mentorship. In 1948 Eustace Mullins joined Pound’s circle. Mullins was introduced to the famous poet and scholar through Pound’s wife, Dorothy Shakespeare,

When he first met Pound, Mullins was an art school student and a veteran of the US Air Force. He had already published some short pieces in the British journal, Social Creditor. Mullins remembered Pound’s place of forced residence as “a hideous, urine-soaked madhouse in Washington D.C.” As their visits became increasingly regular, Pound encouraged Mullins to conduct research into the history and activities of the Federal Reserve.

When Pound proposed the idea Mullins was unaware of the existence of the Federal Reserve. Nevertheless, Mullins threw himself into the project that he supported by combining his research with work as a book stacker at the Library of Congress. At the Library he befriended George Stimpson who was well known among Washington journalists and government officials for his wealth of knowledge and his ability to locate relevant research materials.

Stimpson happily worked with Mullins. He helped the aspiring author by guiding him into the primary and secondary literature illuminating many facets of the Federal Reserve’s history

Eustace Mullins Explores the Secrets of the Federal Reserve

An initial edition of the volume appeared in 1952 as Mullins on the Federal Reserve. Another edition with added information was published in 1954. The text has been republished many times, sometimes in different editions under the title Secrets of the Federal Reserve. The text is organized around both thematic and chronological facets.

Mullins lays out the history of the Federal Reserve with considerable attention to the institution’s roots and origins. The author emphasizes several strands of continuity showing the links of the Federal Reserve to the banking establishments of Europe but especially those of Great Britain and Germany.

Mullins characterizes the Federal Reserve as the most powerful institution in the United States whose influence grew so that “it gradually superseded the popular elected government of the United States.” The power of the Fed and its core facet, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is said to have become so formidable because the agency operates in secrecy without any genuine form of accountability to any public institution. The NY Fed combines the power of secrecy with the enormous power to create new currency and to set interest rates becoming in the process “the most gigantic trust on earth.”

Mullins makes the case that the financial district known as the City of London exercised enormous influence over the activities of the Federal Reserve and many of the large Wall Street banks. Mullins wrote, “London is the world’s financial centre, because it commands enormous sums of capital created at its command by the Federal Reserve Board of the United States.”

Mullins is conscientious in presenting many citations to back up his observations and interpretations. He cites, for instance the New York Times on January of 1920 where it states, “The Federal Reserve is a fount of credit not capital.” The manipulation of credit, however, can greatly affect the industrial economy by affecting the ability of manufacturers and farmers to produce.

Mullins emphasizes throughout the text how events are often engineered to strengthen the hand of the Lords of Credit in the matrix of society’s operations. In referring, for instance, to a secret banker’s plan to crash the stock market in 1929, Mullins expressed a view that could as easily describe the growing suspicion in 2020. Could it be that the lockdowns of businesses and workers were purposely engineered to strengthen the hands of the Lords of Credit whose main platform is the Federal Reserve Bank of New York?

Mullins explains that sometimes “bankers paralyse the industrial energies of the country” in order to highlight and strengthen “their tremendous powers” over the financial and business organization of the American economy. Mullins’ observation that “panic is an instrument of [financial] power” is another statement with obvious relevance to the current crisis.

As have many authors since, Mullins emphasizes the importance of a top-secret meeting on Jekyll Island in the state of Georgia in 1910. At this meeting Paul Warburg essentially took the intellectual lead in creating a plan for a Central Bank in the United States. Such an institution was long contemplated and promoted but it had been stopped repeatedly, most famously be Andrew Jackson. Jackson’s political career culminated in his winning the US presidency between 1829 and 1837.

Warburg left his family banking business in Hamburg Germany in 1902. He joined the Wall Street Office of Kuhn Loeb, a Wall Street House that helped finance the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Mullins devotes much effort to describing the complex of alliances and rivalries that characterized banking before and after the founding of the Fed.

Weaving throughout these networks of financial activity were the banking operations of the Rothschild family. Mullins leaves no doubt that the operations of the Rothschild family of bankers were extensive, elaborate and very influential.

In the nineteenth century the Rothschild banking establishment gradually wove its operations into those of large segments of Europe’s royal and aristocratic establishments. Mullins emphasizes the genesis of the close business relationship between the Rothschild banking clan and a London-based US company, George Peabody and Company.

Peabody’s bank was passed on to a father and son team, Junius Spencer Morgan and John Pierpont Morgan. In the days of the Fed’s founding and even today, the name of J.P. Morgan is synonymous with New York banking. Mullins explains how the Rothschild bankers kept a fairly low profile in New York by conducting much of their American business largely through the financial organizations associated with the name and reputation of J.P. Morgan.

Mullins outlines the role of the Federal Reserve in the funding of two world wars. Many of the topics covered in Secrets of the Federal Reserve were later pursued in much more detail in the prolific writings of Antony C. Sutton.

Most of Sutton’s volumes describe the role of Wall Street in helping to bring about many of world history’s major turning points during the twentieth century. These turning points include Wall Street’s funding of the rise of the National Socialist government in Germany in the 1930s and the role of Wall Street in financing the Bolshevik Revolution and the business activities of the Soviet Union.

The capacity of the New York Bank of the Federal Reserve to create vast quantities of credit to finance wars, often with the same bankers funding competing sides in conflicts, provided the key to the creation of huge fortunes. The funding of both sides in war can be seen as an early form of hedging one’s bets. This kind of high impact intervention through banking sometimes created huge leverage for a very small number of people to steer history towards preconceived destinations.

As Mullins explains it, the Federal Reserve was founded in extreme secrecy and often employs deceptive tactics to misrepresent its true nature. As Mullins sees it, for instance, the creation of the twelve regional banks was a ploy to gain political acceptance for the Central Bank’s core entity, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Mullins explains, “the other eleven banks were so many expensive mausoleums erected to salve local pride and quell the Jacksonian fears of the hinterland.”

The ability of Wall Street bankers to invoke the credit creating powers of the New York Fed forms a key aspect of the frequent military adventurism of the US government. This military adventurism continued full force even after the United States became the world’s largest debtor nation after 1990. How large has been the role of the US Fed in building up the US national debt together with the tens of trillions missing from the books of the US Defense Department?

The Israel Lobby and the Federal Reserve

Much of the military adventurism of the United States especially after 9/11 was directed into invasions of Muslim-majority countries that threaten a particular view of Israel as a dominant power in its region and in the world. Why would it be that the Federal Reserve is any less involved in creating the available credit for the waging of wars in the twenty-first century than it was in creating the wars of the twentieth century?

In his authorship of The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, Mullins seems largely oblivious to the role in world history of Zionism and the genesis of Israel. His main attention lay elsewhere. As I read his text, he accurately conveyed how the large Jewish influence in the banking institution of Europe, including the influence of the Rothschild consortium, was extended into Wall Street including the Federal Reserve.

While Mullins does not shy aware from dealing with the Jewish component of the story he set out to tell, I don’t think he belabours this subject or becomes aggressively polemical about it. Certainly the same cannot be said of some of his critics whose condemnations of Mullins can sometimes be extremely polemical.

Mullins might have made more of the identity politics prevailing throughout the twentieth century. The sensibilities of the dominant Christian constituency in the United States probably influenced the decisions of many customers shopping for banking services. Quite likely some of them would have been more comfortable dealing with firms identified with names like J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller and Mellon rather than Warburg, Greenspan or Fink. Times, however, have changed.

Some of the more severe prejudices seem to have subsided around the time that Sandy Weill combined his Travellers Insurance Company with Citicorp to create Citigroup. This merger helped create the political momentum leading to the elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. With Glass-Steagall’s elimination, Citigroup tried to become a giant department store of varied financial services. In its inner sanctums, however, Citigroup developed a preoccupation with derivatives that continues yet.

In the twenty-first century it happened that some of the cosmetic overlays were removed that had previously been imposed to disguise the large representation of Jews in Wall Street banking, including in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. For good or bad, usury has become a core features of how the contemporary world is organized. Some reckoning with the ethnic inheritances attending usury are therefore inescapable, especially when dealing with the some of the most dramatic displays of usury on steroids in Wall Street institutions.

Where I see the need to draw a line in the sand is not on the question of the ethnicity of Wall Street personnel. Rather this line in the sand involves the question of how power is used or abused at the domineering heights of our financial institutions. Generally speaking it is not a justifiable use of the Federal Reserve to produce credit that enables the waging of wars that are offensive rather than defensive in character.

The waging of war has long been one of the big bonanzas producing major windfalls for international bankers. In the twenty-first century so many of the wars involve the flexing of military might by the United States to advance the expansionary designs of the Israeli state. The US Federal Reserve has been part of the process of creating what some would consider wars for Israel in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Iran.

Why are the money-generating powers of the secretive Federal Reserve being invoked to help fund wars for Israel and also to help shape public opinion to accept the US role in these wars of aggression. Especially sensitive is the further indebting of the American people to subsidize the production of propaganda aimed at persuading them to back wars for Israel. This propaganda is deemed necessary to deflate opposition to Israel’s actions including the ruthless dehumanizing treatment of Palestinian Arabs.

We have seen that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was deeply engaged in 2008 in transferring tens of trillions into the coffers of its own member institutions and counterparties. What uses were made of this bailout produced through a dubious process of legalized financial larceny?

One way or another the Israel Lobby must be a prime beneficiary of the machinations of Wall Street and its money spigot, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. This pattern of priority can easily be related to US federal funding of the Israel project as a higher priority in federal budgeting than even the basic needs of the domestic population of the United States. Black Lives Do Matter but why is it that the lives of Israel First Partisans seem to matter more than any other group?

This Israel Lobby has the power to prevent any critic of Israeli policies from gaining the nomination of a major US party to run for US president. The result is that, in election after election, Americans are offered a very limited choice between competitors who are equally supportive of Israel.

The Israel Lobby can intervene to prevent the leadership of opposition parties from adopting policies that emphasize equity in Israel-Palestinian relations. Through its campaign contributions, the Israel Lobby dominates the process of choosing and electing representatives in Congress. How much does it cost to buy the political obedience of most federal politicians? How much does it cost to replicate this feat in the state legislatures and even municipal governments?

Through the ownership and/or control of major media outlets, the Israel Lobby exerts major influence in determining the main outlines of much public discourse when it comes to US-Israeli relations and many related subjects. How could one calculate the amount of money it took to achieve this feat? How much of this money is directed into payments for compliance, in other words, bribery? In the post-Epstein era what is the role of bribery’s criminal cousin, namely backmail?

The Israel Lobby is deeply engaged with other lobbies in transforming the Internet from an open forum of public interaction and debate into a centrally controlled propaganda instrument. Prominent among the Internet’s most aggressive censors and thought police are Google, You Tube, Facebook, Twitter and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

Through all kinds of interventions the Israel Lobby asserts significant forms of control over a broad array of institutions and operations including those of the judiciary, the universities, book publishing, magazine publishing, municipal governments, trade unions and cultural groups. The biggest and most influential cultural group of all is the Hollywood film industry. Not surprisingly there is little in its cinematic output that provides critical perspectives on Zionism and its emanations.

The injection of huge amounts of money are essential to the exercise of so much concerted influence over such a broad sweep of political, intellectual and cultural organizations. Where do the large quantities of money supporting the activities the Israel project come from? Why is it that so many of agencies of the Israel Lobby have the status of charitable organizations with the capacity to extend tax write-offs to donors? What is the relationship of the Israel Lobby to Wall Street and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York?

Even the act of asking such questions will be seen by some as heretical. There is, however, nothing wrong with looking into issues that have so much impact on the quality of our political discourse… so much impact on our capacity to live together with the civility and security we have been losing so quickly with the imposition of the economically crippling lockdowns.

It is no less legitimate to ask questions about the ethnic identity of those who benefit most from the US economy than it is to ask questions about what groups suffer the most from the deprivations of poverty. Wouldn’t it make sense to try to moderate the disparities beginning with processes of research and discussion?

In a book of the same name, former ADL Executive Director, Abe Foxman, has opened the discussion of Jews and Money. Foxman effectively counters the view that all Jews are rich. Foxman, of course, is correct in this assertion. All Jews are not rich. Some are outright poor. A fairly large number of Jews, however, are somewhat rich and a small minority of Jews are disproportionately invested with wealth and power. Jews are especially well represented in the billionaires club both within the United States and internationally.

Some of the wealthiest Jews are part of the Wall Street establishment including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Perhaps the time has come to begin retiring this, “the most gigantic trust on earth.” Perhaps it is time to retire some of the debt created over more than a century of putting private bankers in charge of dictating interest rates as well as creating debt-laden dollars. Perhaps the time has come to lessen the debt burden that is narrowing the life chances of so many people who have been funding the wars for Israel mounted in the wake of the 9/11 deception.

The severity of the crisis before us compel all thoughtful people of conscience to look beyond the redeployment of old institutions and old remedies for old problems that are different from the challenges facing us now. One of the most obvious ways to avert further calamity is to move away altogether from the empowerment of private bankers to massively expand national debts with compound interest charged to tax payers.

The alternative to this approach is to change the present means of creating new money. The creation of many banking systems similar to that of the Bank of Canada should be considered in the quest for the main ingredients of a global reset. The Bank of Canada brought about an almost-debt-free run of prodigious nation building before Pierre Trudeau bent the policies of his government to meet the impositions of the Bank of International Settlements.

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How Central Banks Made the Covid Panic Worse

How Central Banks Made the Covid Panic Worse  By Kristoffer  Mousten Hansen, Mises Institute, 5 August 2020

Introduction

Historical events are complex phenomena, and monocausal explanations are therefore by definition wrong when explaining history. Many factors go into explaining why people and the world’s governments reacted as they did to the coronavirus. It is, however, my contention that examining the inflationary policies pursued by central banks and governments are fundamental to understanding how the current corona hysteria developed.

Calling it hysteria may sound harsh. When the coronavirus first started to draw attention back in February, and when most Western countries instituted extremely restrictive measures in March, one could make a plausible argument that the world was dealing with an unknown and seemingly catastrophic disease and that therefore extreme measures were justified. To be sure, this does not mean that the measures implemented were in any way effective, nor that the sacrifices imposed were morally justified; but there was at least an argument to be made.

At this point in time, however, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has repeatedly cut the COVID-19 fatality rate, and it is now comparable to a bad year of the seasonal flu (see the useful aggregation of studies and reports by Swiss Propaganda Research). The glaring question therefore is: Why do governments across the West act as if they were still dealing with an unprecedented threat? It is no good to simply reply that what politicians really want is power and that they are just using coronavirus as an excuse for extending government control. While a plausible claim, it does not explain why vast majorities in most countries support whatever policies their rulers have thought good. Given the extreme restrictions placed on social and economic life and the mendacious, ever shifting narrative used to justify them, one would think that there would be widespread opposition after four months. So why is there practically none?

Inflation in the Age of Corona

We can better understand this strange phenomenon if we consider the inflationary policies pursued by central banks across the world. I’ll here cleave to the old definition of the term inflation and the one still favored by Austrian school economists: an increase in the quantity of money. The rise in prices which is commonly referred to as inflation is simply the effect of such an increase. While the complexities of modern central banking can sometimes obscure the realities of the process, there can be no doubt that the last couple of months have seen very high levels of inflation.

Modern central banks are no longer content with the classic role of lender of last resort. As the financial system has evolved, central banks have assumed the role of market maker of last resort—that is, they have either implicitly or explicitly assumed the responsibility of making sure that there is always a buyer for financial assets—and first of all government bonds. Thus the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet has ballooned from just over $4 trillion at the beginning of March to now just below $7 trillion; the Bank of England’s has increased from about £580 billion in March to about £780 billion; and the European Central Bank has increased its holdings from about €4.6 trillion to about €6.3 trillion. The balance sheets of the largest central banks thus expanded by between 35 and 75 percent in about five months.

Inflated central bank balance sheets suggest inflation is coming, but actual inflation of the money supply naturally lags behind, since central bank purchases of bonds and securities do not necessarily result in an immediate expansion of the stock of money. The American money stock (measured by the monetary aggregate M2) grew from $15.5 trillion to $18.4 trillion (March–July 13), the British one from £2.45 trillion to about £2.67 trillion (January–May) and the euro area money stock from €12.4 trillion to almost €13.2 trillion (January–June). The annualized rates of inflation in the major monetary areas during the corona episode is then between about 13 (eurozone) and about 50 (USA) percent, well above the norm.1 If we look at the Austrian, “true” measure of the money supply (TMS) for the United States, we see a similar picture, as the TMS in June grew 34.5 percent year over year (YOY).

The Effects of the Present Inflation

Inflation is not an act of God; it is the outcome of a determined policy on the part of governments and central banks. Such a policy has both long-run and short-run effects, which brings us to the first and most obvious way in which inflation has fueled corona hysteria: by essentially putting freshly printed money at the disposal of governments, these latter have been able to first shut down their countries and then pose as saviors as they distributed largesse to workers and businesses. The states have often reimbursed the costs of furloughing employees, either directly or through (sometimes forgivable) loans to companies, or they have distributed generous unemployment benefits to the workers. This, and not any economic collapse, is the story behind the unprecedented spike in unemployment claims in the United States. The central bank has also created facilities to lend to municipal governments and the Main Street Lending Program to “support lending to small and medium-sized businesses and nonprofit organizations that were in sound financial condition before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The effect of these programs and policies and others like them in other countries has been to mitigate the direct impact of government-imposed shutdowns. Businesses may have no revenues, but government aid and loans allow them to meet their contractual payments; workers may be unemployed, but generous unemployment subsidies allow them to maintain themselves comfortably; government support of furloughing schemes hides the true extent of unemployment caused by the shutdowns. And all this seemingly at no cost, since no one notices the inevitable dilution of the purchasing power of the monetary unit.

In the absence of these inflationary policies, the consequences of the shutdown would be much more immediately apparent. Workers would have to spend out of their saved cash and liquidate their savings, while businesses earning no revenues would start to default on their contractual payments. A drastic fall in the prices of real and financial assets would have resulted. The pressure to end the restrictions would have been much stronger. Instead, it looks to most people as if they can go on at their old standard of living indefinitely—or at least as long as they continue to receive their government checks. The economic effects of the shutdown are still the same, however: dislocation of the production structure and capital consumption on a vast scale, but these have been hidden—papered over by inflation and government support.

To the individual business owner and worker, the economic reality is hidden. Inflation leads to a fundamental disconnect with reality. Paul Cantor has previously described “the web of illusions endemic to the era of paper money” and how inflation destroys people’s sense of reality.2 In our case, inflationary monetary policy has hidden the costs of engaging in pandemic hysteria, and hence people do not—indeed, cannot—take account of economic realities when assessing the coronavirus and the shutdowns. Governments at all levels can continue to pose as saviors, inventing new mandates and restrictions to combat the nonexistent threat. Germophobes and busybodies can obsess over other people trying to go about their normal lives, since both the costs to them personally and to society as a whole are completely hidden. How many Karens would have the time to boss peaceful citizens around if they had to actually work to earn a living?

Eventually and pretty quickly, these policies will result in price inflation and a hollowing out of the standard of living. Not only has production been severely restricted, as seen in the drastic fall in US GDP figures; insofar as the newly printed money is used on unemployment compensation in different forms, it will quickly reach normal consumers and be spent on consumer goods. If the programs go on much longer, consumer price inflation, as a result of the fiat money inflation, cannot be far off. Once that happens, only increased rates of inflation can keep the programs going—for a time.

The Effects of the Inflationary System

The effects of the inflationary system as such are much more far-reaching than economic dislocation and destruction, however. Fiat money produced out of thin air by central bankers leads to a long-run change in social attitudes and personal character. Joseph Salerno in a stimulating paper discusses how hyperinflation leads to the destruction of personality,3 and following Guido Hülsmann,4

 

I would argue that fiat inflation entails the erosion of culture and character. This is perhaps most fully in evidence in Japan, where people have suffered under artificially low interest rates for decades. What are some of the consequences of an inflationary fiat standard and the culture it brings about, and what is the connection to the corona crisis? There is first of all a change in time preferences, as inflation leads to repressed interest rates and hence less incentive to save and invest. People’s time horizons change, as they increasingly discount long-run value creation and instead focus on present enjoyments and short-run yields. The changing role of central banks only intensifies this development. Instead of “lenders of last resort,” central banks are now “market makers of last resort.” That is to say, stock markets and bond prices cannot be allowed to fall, and it is the role of the banks to make sure they don’t. As a consequence, investors increasingly turn to the pursuit of short-run yields.

This change in time preference has effects beyond the market. Since a premium is placed on short-term thinking in market affairs, naturally people transfer the same attitude to their nonmarket pursuits. Present benefits and present dangers are both emphasized at the expense of future costs and benefits, respectively. It is not hard to see the connection to the virus: since there is a possibility that the virus may potentially be very dangerous, people get frightened and act to make the fear go away. No matter the future consequences of their actions, the present danger of the virus trumps all.

Closely connected to this change in time preferences is a skewed perception of reality. Inflation alters what constitutes successful action, since it is increasingly no longer productive endeavors but closeness to the source of inflation that determines the individual’s success in life. Since the ability of the central banks to create paper wealth seems virtually boundless, naturally people come to have unrealistic expectations of what is possible. Of course we can have a shutdown. We’ll have a central bank–fueled “v-shaped” recovery once it’s over. Of course governments can and should do whatever it takes to protect us from the virus. They can just finance spending with paper money for however long it takes. Whatever costs there are to these courses of action are hidden or far in the future.

Conclusion

There are many reasons for the corona crisis and the present almost total government control of the economy and society. But if we want to understand why states across the Western world have met virtually no resistance in their quest for power, we need to understand the role of inflation in enabling governments: directly through hiding the real costs and pain of the shutdowns, but also more fundamentally by distorting culture and personal character.

  • Trading Economics, www.tradingeconomics.com; Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED, www.fred.stlouisfed.org.
  • Paul A. Cantor, “Hyperinflation and Hyperreality: Thomas Mann in Light of Austrian Economics,” Review of Austrian Economics7, no. 1 (1994): 3–29.
  • Joseph T. Salerno, “Hyperinflation and the Destruction of Human Personality,” Studia humana2, no. 1 (2013): 15–27.
  • Jörg Guido Hülsmann, “Cultural Consequences of Monetary Interventions,” Journal des économistes et des études humaines22, no. 1 (2016).?

Author:

Kristoffer Mousten Hansen

Kristoffer Mousten Hansen is a PhD candidate at the University of Angers and a Mises Institute Research Fellow.

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Welcome To The Crazed, Frantic Demise Of Finance Capitalism

 

Welcome To The Crazed, Frantic Demise Of Finance Capitalism  By Charles Hugh Smith, via OfTwoMinds blog, 20 July 2020

 The cognitive dissonance required to ignore the widening gap between the real economy and the fraud’s basic machinery–speculation funded by “money” conjured out of thin air–has reached a level of denial that can only be termed psychotic.

 When scams start unraveling, the scammers become increasingly frantic to maintain the illusion of legitimacy and the delusion of guaranteed gains that are the lifeblood of every scam. One sure sign that the flim-flam is about to collapse is the manic rise of FOMO, fear of missing out, as the scammers jam the Ponzi scheme’s stellar returns to new extremes.

What greedy human can resist guaranteed gains, especially of the enviously grandiose variety?

The greatest scam of the past century is unraveling before our eyes. I’m calling it finance capitalism as a general descriptor of the dominant form of what’s called “capitalism” because calling it what it actually is–a fraud that’s destroyed the foundations of our economy and society–is, well, a much more difficult sell than “capitalism,” which still has some faint echoes of the open markets, etc. that characterized traditional capitalism, which I call naive capitalism because it is incapable of differentiating between the parasitic, predatory finance version cloaking itself as “capitalism” and actual capitalism, in which capital is put at risk, markets are transparent, etc.

There are many labels for the distorted, corrupted “capitalism” that dominates our economy and society: I’ve long used state-cartel capitalism, others prefer monopoly capitalism or crony capitalism.

I now favor finance capitalism because the heart of the fraud is finance: printing “money” out of thin air without creating any value or any goods and services. If you can’t print “money,” then borrow it into existence–that’s just as profitable a fraud as printing it.

As I explained in Our Wile E. Coyote Economy: Nothing But Financial Engineering (June 11, 2020), the fairy tale that America has a truly capitalist economy no longer aligns with the reality that the U.S. economy is now a decaying billboard of “producing goods and services” behind which the real money is made in financial engineering, a.k.a. legalized fraud.

I’ve discussed this fraudulent distortion of capitalism for years:

Has “Financial Innovation” Capitalism Run its Course? (June 22, 2010)

When Capitalism Turns to Cannibalism (July 15, 2015)

What Makes You Think the Stock Market Will Even Exist in 2024? (July 6, 2020)

Just as Communism was a god that failed, finance capitalism is also a god that failed, an extreme version of crony-capitalism that is nothing more than a mechanism for concentrating wealth and power at the expense of everyone toiling in the real-world economy.

And if we understand this, then we also understand that with its stock buybacks, high-frequency trading and after-hours manipulation, the stock market is nothing more than finance capitalism’s primary mechanism for increasing the concentration of wealth.

How did outright fraud come to dominate our economy? The answer is simple: infinite greed plus the decline of gains from “real capitalism,” i.e. increasing productivity via producing goods and services. The appeal of something for nothing is irresistible when “money” can be printed / borrowed out of thin air and used to run a fraud that exploits human greed.

Like every good Ponzi scheme, those invested in the scam promote the fraud and cajole new marks to sink their cash into the “guaranteed gains” scheme because everyone already in the fraud will lose if there aren’t enough new marks joining to keep it from collapsing. That perfectly describes the entire financial media, the financial “industry” and everyone in it.

Unfortunately for everyone invested in the scam, all the “wealth” created by financial engineering / legalized fraud is fictitious, i.e. phantom. All Ponzi schemes collapse once the supply of greed-blinded marks dries up, and so the “solution” in our finance capitalism fraud is for the central bank, the Federal Reserve, to become the mark with an infinite checkbook: the Fed is busily conjuring “money” out of thin air to buy corporate junk bonds and other “assets” (ha-ha, as if these are actually worth anything–the joke’s on you) to prop up the Ponzi scheme.

This works until it doesn’t, of course. In the meantime, the folks running the fraud are pulling out all the stops to keep it from imploding–goosing the FOMO frenzy, printing and throwing trillions into the scam to maintain the illusion of legitimacy and the delusion of guaranteed gains and talking up the god-like powers of the Fed to prop up the fraud indefinitely.

Despite these massive manipulations, the cracks are increasingly visible. Volatility refuses to sink back to near zero, and the swings in the skimming machine, a.k.a. the stock market are becoming more extreme.

The cognitive dissonance required to ignore the widening gap between the real economy and the fraud’s basic machinery–speculation funded by “money” conjured out of thin air–has reached a level of denial that can only be termed psychotic.

All bubbles pop, all frauds implode, all scams collapse. That ominous clicking coming from behind the tattered billboard is the sound of dominoes falling.

As Mark, Jesse and I discuss in Salon #13: The “Phase Shift” everyone is worried about has already happened, the meteor triggering the demise of finance capitalism has already hit.

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Previous articles

"New World Order"

Which ‘New World Order’?

Who is planning a ‘New World Order’ (NWO),  in what form, and what progress so far? Also check the articles linked at the end of this article.

New role for China and Russia

New role for China and Russia  By Paul Schmutz, The Saker Blog, 28 October 2020

On the world stage, profound changes are under way. Obviously, China and Russia have lost the confidence that the West will contribute to the solution of the world’s problems in some constructive manner. China and Russia have now accepted their role as the leading forces with the responsibility of holding the world together. The West held this role for centuries, but this time is over. The West has essentially become destructive. The West has lost the power of solving problems and now use her resources mainly for creating problems. In my eyes, this is the central evolution of the last months and it is an epochal change.

China and Russia did not easily decide to go ahead without the West. They have hesitated for a long time. They are quite aware of the burden they will have to bear. Other countries have led the way. In particular, Iran and North Korea have come to the conviction already some time ago that they cannot count on the West. The same is true for Hezbollah, for Syria, for Cuba, or for Venezuela. But apparently, China and Russia did not intend to “blindly” follow these countries. However, not only the moment has come to take a decision, but China and Russia now also feel strong enough to advance without the West, or, maybe more precisely, despite the West.

The new role for China and Russia includes a lot of functions. They have to defend some kind of international order and law; they have to maintain and even strengthen important international organizations, in particular the UNO; they have to try to contain regional conflicts; they have to propose possible solutions for the world’s problems. Of course, this cannot and will not be done in a dictatorial manner. China and Russia always insist that the decisions must be taken in a much more democratic spirit than that which was – and is – practiced by the West.

It is a fact that the West does more and more undermine any kind of international law and order. Their international politics is destructive. There are countless sanctions against other countries, there are murders, conspiracies, and lies. In recent times, there is no conflict in the world where the West has tried to support a peaceful solution, may-be with the exception of Afghanistan and – at least for some time – of the two Koreas. And during the current pandemic, the West has made no effort in order to propose a common reaction of the world; countries like China, Russia, and Cuba did much more in this direction.

It is not a simple coincidence that China and Russia used the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the victory in World War II, the 3 September, in order to clarify their new role. Namely, during this war, Russia and China already bore the principal responsibility for the victory over the fascist aggressors.

In this context, Xin Jinping wrote to Vladimir Putin: „China and Russia both shoulder important responsibilities for the cause of world peace and development. I am ready to work with you to take the 75th anniversary of the victory of the World Anti-Fascist War as an opportunity to lead China and Russia towards deeper comprehensive strategic coordination. Together with the international community, we should firmly protect our victory in World War II and international fairness and justice, actively uphold and practice multilateralism, promote the building of a community with a shared future for mankind, in a bid to allow future generations to enjoy a world featuring lasting peace, universal security and common prosperity.“

Vladimir Putin, on the same occasion (3 September), wrote to Xi Jinping that „it is a common responsibility of Russia and China to safeguard the truth of WWII history“ and called on the two countries to resolutely oppose any attempt to deny the outcomes of the war. Russia is ready “to continue active efforts jointly with its ally China in order to prevent wars and conflicts in the world and ensure global stability and security.”

In his speech at the Valdai Discussion Club (22 October), Putin has very much developed the new role of Russia (and China). This is an absolutely crucial speech, including the questions and answers. In particular, Putin explains that a strong state which has the confidence of the citizens is “a basic condition for Russia’s development”. Putin underlines that „genuine democracy and civil society cannot be ‘imported’ … only the citizens of a particular country can determine their public interest”.

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What the Great Reset Architects Don’t Want You To Understand About Economics

What the Great Reset Architects Don’t Want You To Understand About Economics  By Matthew Ehret, The Saker Blog, 26 October 2020

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Vice President of the World Bank Carmen Reinhardt recently warned on October 15 that a new financial disaster looms ominously over the horizon with a vast sovereign default and a corporate debt default. Just in the past 6 months of bailouts unleashed by the blowout of the system induced by the Coronavirus lockdown, Reinhardt noted that the U.S. Federal Reserve created $3.4 Trillion out of thin air while it took 40 years to create $14 Trillion. Meanwhile panicking economists are screaming in tandem that banks across Trans Atlantic must unleash ever more hyperinflationary quantitative easing which threatens to turn our money into toilet paper while at the same time acquiescing to infinite lockdowns in response to a disease which has the fatality levels of a common flu.

The fact of the oncoming collapse itself should not be a surprise- especially when one is reminded of the $1.5 quadrillion of derivatives which has taken over a world economy which generates a mere $80 trillion/year in measurable goods and trade. These nebulous bets on insurance on bets on collateralized debts known as derivatives didn’t even exist a few decades ago, and the fact is that no matter what the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank have attempted to do to stop a new rupture of this overextended casino bubble of an economy in recent months, nothing has worked. Zero to negative percent interest rates haven’t worked, opening overnight repo loans of $100 billion/night to failing banks hasn’t worked- nor has $4.5 trillion of bailout unleashed since March 2020. No matter what these financial wizards try to do, things just keep getting worse. Rather than acknowledge what is actually happening, scapegoats have been selected to shift the blame away from reality to the point that the current crisis is actually being blamed on the Coronavirus!

This Goes Far Beyond COVID-19

Let me just state outright: That while the coronavirus may in fact be the catalyzer for the oncoming financial blowout, it is the height of stupidity to believe that it is the cause, as the seeds of the crisis goes deeper and originated much earlier than most people are prepared to admit.

To start getting at a more truthful diagnostic, it is useful to think of an economy in real (vs purely financial) terms – That is: Simply think of the economy as total system in which the body of humanity (all cultures, nations and families of the world) exist.

This co-existence is predicated on certain necessary powers of production of food, clothing, capital goods (hard and soft infrastructure), transportation and energy production. After raw materials are transformed into finished goods, these physical goods and services move from points A to B and are consumed. This is very much akin to the metabolism that maintains a living body.

Now since populations tend to grow geometrically, while resources deplete arithmetically, constant demands on new creative discoveries and technological application are also needed to meet and improve upon the needs of a growing humanity. This last factor is actually the most important because it touches on the principled element that distinguishes humanity from all other forms of life in the ecosystem which Lincoln identified wonderfully in his 1859 Discoveries and Inventions Speech:

“All creation is a mine, and every man, a miner. The whole earth, and all within it, upon it, and round about it, including himself, in his physical, moral, and intellectual nature, and his susceptibilities, are the infinitely various “leads” from which, man, from the first, was to dig out his destiny… Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship. This improvement, he effects by Discoveries, and Inventions.”

In a 2016 speech by President Xi Jinping, the principles of Lincoln’s understanding were laid out by the Chinese statesman who said:

“We must consider innovation as the primary driving force of growth and the core in this whole undertaking, and human resources as the primary source to support development. We should promote innovation in theory, systems, science and technology, and culture, and make innovation the dominant theme in the work of the Party, and government, and everyday activity in society… In the 16th century, human society entered an unprecedented period of active innovation. Achievements in scientific innovation over the past five centuries have exceeded the sum total of several previous millennia. . . . Each and every scientific and industrial revolution has profoundly changed the outlook and pattern of world development… Since the second Industrial Revolution, the U.S. has maintained global hegemony because it has always been the leader and the largest beneficiary of scientific and industrial progress.”

What Lincoln and Xi laid 150 years apart are not mere hypotheses, but elementary facts of life which even the most ardent money-worshipper cannot get around.

Of course money is a perfectly useful tool to facilitate trade and get around the awkward problem of lugging bartered goods around on your back all day, but it really is just that: a supporting element to a physical process of maintenance and improvement of trans-generational existence. When fools allow themselves to loose sight of that fact and elevate money to the status of a cause of all value (simply because everyone wants it), then we find ourselves far outside the sphere of reality and in the Alice in Wonderland world of Alan Greenspan’s fantasy world where up is down, good is evil, and humans are little more than vicious monkeys.

So with that in mind, let’s take this concept and look back upon today’s crisis.

London’s ‘Big Bang’

The great “liberalization” of world commerce began with a series of waves through the 1970s, and moved into high gear with the interest rate hikes of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker in 1980-82, the effects of which both annihilated much of the small and medium sized entrepreneurs, opened the speculative gates into the “Savings and Loan” debacle and also helped cartelize mineral, food, and financial institutions into ever greater behemoths. Volcker himself described this process as the “controlled disintegration of the US economy” upon becoming Fed Chairman in 1978. The raising of interest rates to 20-21% not only shut down the life blood of much of the US economic base, but also threw the third world into greater debt slavery, as nations now had to pay usurious interest on US loans.

In 1986, the City of London announced the beginning of a new era of economic irrationalism with Margaret Thatcher’s “Big Bang” deregulation. This wave of liberalization took the world by storm as it swept aside the separation of commercial, deposit and investment banking which had been the post-world war cornerstone in ensuring that the will of private finance would never again hold more sway than the power of sovereign nation-states. For those who are confused about London’s guiding hand in this process, I encourage you to read Cynthia Chung’s impeccable essay “Sugar and Spice, and Everything Vice: The Empire’s Sin City of London”.

Greenspan and the Controlled Disintegration of the Economy

When Alan Greenspan confronted the financial crisis of October1987, markets had collapsed by 28.5% and the American economy was already suffering from a decay begun 16 years earlier when the dollar was removed from the fixed exchange rate and was “floated” into a world of speculation. This departure from the 1938-1971 Industrial growth model ushered in a new paradigm of “post-industrialism” (aka: nation stripping) under the new logic of “globalization”. This foolish decision was celebrated as the consumer-driven, “white collar society” which would no longer worry about “intangible things” like “the future”, infrastructure maintenance, or “growth”. Under this new paradigm, if something couldn’t generate a monetary profit within 3 years, it wasn’t worth doing.

Paul Volcker (Greenspan’s predecessor at the Federal Reserve) exemplified this detachment from reality when he called for the “controlled disintegration of society” in 1977, and acted accordingly by keeping interest rates above 20% for two years which destroyed small and medium agro-industrial enterprises across America (and the world). Greenspan confronted the 1987 crisis with all the gusto of a black magician, and rather than re-connect the economy to physical reality and rebuild the decaying industrial base, he chose instead to normalize “creative financial instruments” in the form of derivatives (aka: “creative financial instruments”), which quickly grew from several billion in 1988 to $2 trillion in 1992 to $70 trillion in 1999.

“Creative financial instruments” was the Orwellian name given to the new financial asset popularized by Greenspan, but otherwise known as “derivatives”. New supercomputing technologies were increasingly used in this new venture, not as the support for higher nation building practices, and space exploration programs as their NASA origins intended, but would rather become perverted to accommodate the creation of new complex formulas which could associate values to price differentials on securities and insured debts that could then be “hedged” on those very spot and futures markets made possible via the destruction of the Bretton Woods system in 1971. So while an exponentially self-generating monster was created that could end nowhere but in a meltdown, “market confidence” rallied back in force with the new flux of easy money. The physical potential to sustain human life continued to plummet.

NAFTA, the Euro and the End of History

It is no coincidence that within this period, another deadly treaty was passed called the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). With this Agreement made law, protective programs that had kept North American factories in the U.S and Canada were struck down, allowing for the export of the lifeblood of highly skilled industrial workforce to Mexico where skills were low, technologies lower, and salaries lower still. With a stripping of its productive assets, North America became increasingly reliant on exporting cheap resources and services for its means of existence. Again, the physically productive powers of society would collapse, yet monetary profits in the ephemeral “now” would skyrocket. This was replicated in Europe with the creation of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 establishing the Euro by 1994 while the “liberalization” process of Perestroika replicated this agenda in the former Soviet Union. While some personalities gave this agenda the name “End of History” and others “the New World Order”, the effect was the same.

Universal Banking, NAFTA, Euro integration and the creation of the derivative economy in a space of just several years would induce a cartelization of finance through newly legalized mergers and acquisitions at a rate never before seen. The multitude of financial institutions that had existed in the early 1980s were absorbed into each other at great speed through the 1990s in true “survival of the fittest” fashion. No matter what level of regulation were attempted under this new structure, the degree of conflict of interest, and private political power was uncontrollable, as evidenced in the United States, by the shutdown of any attempt by Securities and Exchange Commission head Brooksley Born to fight the derivative cancer at its early stages.

When Bill Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall bank separation of commercial and investment banks as his last act in office in 1999, speculators had un-bounded access to savings and pensions which they used with relish and went to town gambling with other people’s money. This new bubble continued for a few more years until the $700 trillion derivatives time bomb found a new trigger and the subprime mortgage market nearly burned the system down. Just like in 1987, and the collapse of the Y2K bubble in 2001, the Mammon worshipping wizards in the ECB and Fed solved this crisis by creating a new system of “bailout” which continued for another decade.

The 2000-2008 Frenzy

With Glass-Steagall now removed, legitimate capital such as pension funds could be used to start a hedge to end all hedges. Billions were now poured into mortgage-backed securities (MBS), a market which had been artificially plunged to record-breaking interest rate lows of 1-2% for over a year by the US Federal Reserve making borrowing easy, and the returns on the investments into the MBSs obscene. The obscenity swelled as the values of the houses skyrocketed far beyond the real values to the tune of one hundred thousand dollar homes selling for 5-6 times that price within the span of several years. As long as no one assumed this growth was ab-normal, and the un-payable nature of the capital underlying the leveraged assets locked up in the now infamous “sub-primes” and other illegitimate debt obligations was ignored, then profits were supposed to just continue infinitely. Anyone who questioned this logic was considered a heretic by the latter-day priesthood.

The stunning “success” of securitizing housing debts immediately induced a wave of sovereign wealth funds to come into prominence applying the same model that had been used in the case of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDO) to the debts of entire nations. The securitizing of bundled packages of sovereign debts that could then be infinitely leveraged on the de-regulated world markets would no longer be considered an act of national treason, but the key to easy money.

The Ugly Truth of Today’s Crisis

New “sub-prime” bubbles have been created in the Corporate Debt sector which has risen to over $13.8 trillion (up 16% from the year earlier). A quarter of which is considered junk, and another half graded at BB by Moodies (a step above junk).

Household debt, student and auto debt has skyrocketed and since wages have not kept up with inflation causing even more unpayable debts have been incurred in desperation. Industrial jobs have collapsed consistently since 1971, and low paying service jobs have taken over like a plague.

The last report from the American Society of Civil Engineers concluded that America desperately needs to spend $4.5 trillion just to bring its decayed infrastructure up to safety levels. Roads, bridges, rail, dams, airports, schools all received near failing grades with the average age of Dams clocking in at 56 years, and many water pipes over 100 years old, and transmission/distribution lines are well over 60 years. The factories which once supplied those infrastructure needs are long outsourced, and much of the productive workforce that had that living knowledge to build a nation are retired or dead leaving a deadly generation knowledge gap in its place filled with millennials who never knew what a productive economy looked like.

American farmers have probably been the most devastated in all this with dramatic population losses across the entire farm belt of America and the average age of farmers now 60 years. It was recently reported that 82% of U.S. Agricultural family income comes from off farms, as mega cartels have taken over all aspects of farming (from equipment/supplies, packaging and the even the actual farming in between).

Combined with the controlled destruction of global food supplies internationally, COVID has ensured that strategic food chain supplies are being ripped to shreds with the UN reporting the worst food crisis in over 50 years (and that is not accounting for the oncoming blowout of the bubble economy).

Why was this permitted to happen? Well besides the obvious intention to induce “a controlled disintegration of the economy” as Volcker so coldly stated, the idea was always to create the conditions described by the late Maurice Strong (sociopath and Rothschild cut-out extraordinaire) in 1992 when he rhetorically asked:

 “What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group’s conclusion is ‘no’. The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

How do we get back to health?

Like any addict who wakes up one morning at rock bottom with the sudden terror that his death is nigh, the first step is admitting we have a problem. This means simply: acknowledging the true nature of the current economic calamity instead of trying to blame “coronavirus” or China, or some other scapegoat.

The next step is begin to act on reality instead of continuing to take heroine (a fine metaphor for the addiction to derivatives speculation).

An obvious first step to this recovery involves restoring Glass-Steagall in order to 1) break up the Too Big to Fail banks and 2) impose a standard of judging “false” value from “legitimate” value which is currently absent from the modern psycho that lost all sense of needs vs wants. This would allow nations to re-create a purge of the unpayable fictitious debt and other claims from the system while preserving whatever is tied to the real economy (whatever is directly connected to life). This process is sort of akin to cutting a cancer.

This act would look very similar to what Franklin Roosevelt did in 1933 which I outlined in my recent paper Hyperinflation, Fascism and War: How the New World Order May be Defeated Once More.

At this point nation states will have re-asserted their true authority over the pirates of private finance controlling the Trans-Atlantic financial system like would-be gods of Olympus (unbounded perverted vices and all).

It should be obvious to all that the United States must get its head out of its proverbial ass before it is too late by imposing these reforms onto the murderous sociopaths on Wall Street and London who would rather promote a “Great Reset” onto the world economy under the fog of COVD in order to control the terms of the blowout and also the rules of the new post-nation state operating system which they wish to see brought online as a (final) “solution”.

Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , a BRI Expert on Tactical talk, and has authored 3 volumes of ‘Untold History of Canada’ book series. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation. He can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

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“You Knew I was a Snake”

 

You Knew I was a Snake By Henry Makow PhD, 25 October 2020

 

Donald Trump used the parable of the snake to refer to immigration. (The parable of the snake is copied below.)

 

People identify the snake as their favourite bogeyman, including Trump himself.

 

In my view the snake represents Evil. And the woman represents Western society.

We embraced the snake and now we are experiencing the reckoning.

But instead of saying thanks, that snake gave her a vicious bite…

“I saved you,” cried that woman

“And you’ve bit me even, why?

You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die”

“Oh shut up, silly woman,” said the reptile with a grin

“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in…”

 

The creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. We gave our national credit cards to a cartel of Cabalist Jews and Freemasons (Satanists) dedicated our destruction. 

 

“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in…”

 

We allowed a satanic cult, Freemasonry, affiliated with the banking cartel to infiltrate every social institution. “We corrupt in order to control (and destroy)” is their motto. 

 

“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in…”

 

We allowed this corruption to spread to all the institutions necessary for the preservation and healthy development of society: government, the mass media, education, church, justice system, military, police.

 

“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in…”

 

 

We elected criminals and perverts, handpicked by the bankers because they can be controlled. Clinton. Biden. Obama. Trump. In Canada we elected Fidel Castro’s son. In Uk, Bojo. In France, they elected Macron over LePen. 

 

“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in…”

 

We have had their masterplan, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for more than 100 years but we believed their excuses. 

 

“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in…”

 

We allowed our defenders to be vilified or murdered without consequences. JFK. Charles Coughlin. Louis McFadden. We ignored the warnings of truthers. 

 

“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in…”

We let them destroy the twin towers on 9-11 killing over 3000 innocent Americans. Again no consequences. 

 

“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in…”

 

We let them spread homosexuality and undermine gender, marriage, and family. 

 

“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in…”

 

We let Communists, who are a branch of Freemasonry disguised as liberals, to operate freely. We turned our foreign policy over to Israel.

 

“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in…”

 

We allowed them to addict us to porn, and sex in general, to distract us from defending the institutions and values we hold dear.  

 

“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in…”

 

Yet you believed Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, and good cop Donald Trump on the #scamdemic and need for lockdowns, masks, vaccines and — coming soon — internment camps. A pandemic with a death rate of one-quarter of one percent is a ruse, not a pandemic. 

 

 

You get the picture.

 

You cannot expect a snake to take mercy on you just because you were negligent, gullible, craven, and feckless.

 

They are open about their plans in order to compromise us. They have succeeded.

 

Satanism has only one goal. To DESTROY.  We embraced the snake. We allowed Evil to invade.

 

Satan destroys his adherents. We are culpable.

 

Now we must reap the whirlwind.

—

 

First Comment from R

 

We didn’t allow all these things. All of them were sneak attacks by liars, thieves, and murderers, aided from the inside by traitors, corrupted villains, and fake news media that have been lying to us for more than a hundred years.

 

Yes, we did elect criminals and perverts, but also only because of the fake news media that we trusted. Again because of the media, we didn’t even know they were snakes before we took them in, at least not the giant snakes they turned out to be. No one chose what we have now. If we go down, it’s not because we are culpable of choosing evil, but because we were too stupid to recognize the evil of these snakes. That’s not quite the same thing, although the end result may be the same. But the guilt for the evil is exclusively on the snakes.

 

Don’t try to load it on our shoulders by declaring us culpable. If we are culpable of anything, it’s only for being too stupid, too trusting, too civilized. Those of us who see what’s coming protest it in the loudest possible way. Sneak attacks are uncivilized, and in a universe that is decent, the treachery of that kind will not go unpunished.

 

To hell with you snakes, and all those who aid and abet you. You are “a people always under the wrath of the Lord”. Malachi 1:4. Your only way out is to repent and become decent and civilized, else you will stay in darkness forever. That will be the judgment of God, and you know it.

 

The parable of the snake

On her way to work one morning

Down the path alongside the lake POLITICS NEWSLETTER

hereA tender-hearted woman saw a poor half-frozen snake

His pretty coloured skin had been all frosted with the dew

“Oh well,” she cried, “I’ll take you in and I’ll take care of you”

“Take me in oh tender woman

Take me in, for heaven’s sake

Take me in oh tender woman,” sighed the snake

She wrapped him up all cozy in a curvature of silk

And then laid him by the fireside with some honey and some milk

Now she hurried home from work that night as soon as she arrived

She found that pretty snake she’d taken in had been revived

“Take me in, oh tender woman

Take me in, for heaven’s sake

Take me in oh tender woman,” sighed the snake

Now she clutched him to her bosom, “You’re so beautiful,” she cried

“But if I hadn’t brought you in by now you might have died”

Now she stroked his pretty skin and then she kissed and held him tight

But instead of saying thanks, that snake gave her a vicious bite

“Take me in, oh tender woman

Take me in, for heaven’s sake

Take me in oh tender woman,” sighed the snake

“I saved you,” cried that woman

“And you’ve bit me even, why?

You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die”

“Oh shut up, silly woman,” said the reptile with a grin

“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in

”Take me in, oh tender woman

Take me in, for heaven’s sake

Take me in oh tender woman” sighed the snake

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Australian Media Finally Calls Out Davos “Great Reset” Agenda

 Australian Media Finally Calls Out Davos Great Reset Agenda  Via 21stCenturyWire.com, 14 October 2020

This week, Sky News Australia contributor and former Australian Senator Cory Bernardi, tore open the debate on COVID after calling out a globalist agenda which few in mainstream media have dared to mention so far.

Since lockdowns began in March of 2020, few have challenged the government rationale for voluntarily imploding their economies and destroying communities and societies – based on a guess that coronavirus might kill tens of millions of citizens.

However, Bernardi believes that the COVID-19 pandemic hysteria is being used as the Trojan horse for a globalist agenda hatched out of the World Economic Forum in Davos. It’s called The Great Reset, and its designed by elite billionaires supposedly to bring about ‘social and economic change.’

“There is something unusual about the continuing pandemic panic,” said Bernardi.

“Medical experts now acknowledge that lockdowns don’t work…

Now none of that makes any sense until you open your mind to consider if there is another agenda at work.”

According to technocrat, Klaus Schwab, founder and Chairman of the World Economic Forum, “COVID 19 cases have shown us that our old systems are not fit anymore for the 21st century, it has laid bare a fundamental lack of social cohesion, fairness, inclusion and equality.”

“Now is the historical moment of time not only to fight the… virus but to shape the system… for the post-corona era,” claims Schwab.

“(Mr Schwab) admits that COVID is the new excuse to usher in the Green New Deal that climate alarmists, profiteers and big government have been pushing for years,” said Bernardi.

“Think about it, the global response to COVID has been a green socialist’s dream.”

Bernardi cites the fact that coordinated government shutdown policies (not COVID) have brought down fuel consumption and canceled international travel and bankrupted scores of airlines and travel firms already.

In addition, governments are using the ‘pandemic’ to permanently curtail civil liberties and freedom of movement and assembly.

“Why do you think the Australian Greens have been so quiet these past months … it’s because their policy agenda is coming to life?” he asked.

“After decades of peddling climate change lies and propaganda to force government by the elites, the socialists have used a media induced hysteria over public health as their latest weapon of economic destruction.”

The end game of creating to illusion of a global pandemic emergency is to rapidly usher-in the introduction of a ‘Green New Deal‘ policy – where billionaires seek to restructure our capitalist system into a new ‘green economy’ – promising equality and “climate justice” along the way.

He also highlights the fact that many of the same scientists and institutions involved in the fraudulent over-the-top modelling of COVID deaths – are also involved in IPCC computer modelled projections of supposed future climate change.

In this segment, Mr. Bernardi explains what’s actually behind the mass-panic being fomented by certain governments and mainstream media, hyping the idea that the world is in the midst of a “deadly plague” and public health crisis: https://youtu.be/npjf0uFZBjU

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Davos ‘Great Reset’ plan has more holes than Swiss cheese

Davos ‘Great Reset’ plan has more holes than Swiss cheese  The Australian, 14 September 2020

Money grows on trees. Somewhere between the unmarked plague graves of Italy and the hallowed halls of Elysium, cosmopolites have planted a seed to transform COVID-19 into an economic revolution.

Globalism is out of fashion in democracies, but its advocates are planning a comeback tour in January, where they will launch the Great Reset from the cradle of the rich and socialist Davos.

When globalists gather for the World Economic Forum in Switzerland each year, we expect virtue-signalling, motherhood state­ments and tremendously vital plans to talk more at the same time, same place, next year. But this time, next year will be different. The WEF website features numerous articles where the case for the Great Reset is made with a sense of urgency. One section reads: “There is an urgent need for global stakeholders to co-operate in … managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset.”

Leaders who think they possess the power to change the course of history are unsettling, but those who believe they control the destiny of the world are deluded and invariably become violent when human nature gets in the way of their grand plans.

Improving the state of the world is a great ambition indeed, but the WEF has a plan. It is a program of radical economic change also favoured by the OECD and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, former president of the Socialist International. They believe COVID-19 is an opportunity to make a new economic order designed by globalists, regulated by unelected officials and funded by workers whose taxes will pay the price for social justice activism and mass decarbonisation.

Of course, the Great Reset is not presented in such bleak terms. In June, a meeting hosted by the WEF showcased globalist solidarity. The Reset set includes Prince Charles, International Monetary Fund chief economist Gina Gopinath and major corporations including Microsoft and MasterCard. Al Gore has offered support for it, as well as Democratic former US secretary of state John Kerry.

To coincide with the event, the OECD released the report Building Back Better: A Sustainable, Resilient Recovery after COVID-19. Like the UN, it is presenting an economic plan under the auspices of a COVID recovery. It contends that building back better means “a focus on wellbeing and inclusiveness”. How nice, but where are the quantified targets and cost-to-benefit analysis? Whatever your position on the question of climate change, decarbonising the economy and decentralising electricity systems will require immense funding from states. The West is usually heaped with the financial burden of globalist reforms but, thanks to COVID-19, we are facing protracted economic depression. WEF founder Klaus Schwab wrote in June: “The changes we have already seen in response to COVID-19 prove that a reset of our economic and social foundations is possible. This is our best chance to instigate stakeholder capitalism.” The OECD asserts that post-COVID-19, economics must include alignment with emission-reduction goals, including net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. It recommends stimulus measures to ensure “social development … is fully integrated with environmental objectives” such as those in the Paris accord and UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Green globalists know the exorbitant cost of their economic revolution will result in popular backlash. The West was heavily in debt before the pandemic. But consider that in March, the US Federal Reserve printed a trillion dollars in two days after stocks fell sharply. Time magazine pointed out that after the 2008 economic crash, the Fed printed $US1.4 trillion over a period of two years. In 2020, it added $US2.9 trillion in less than three months. The Congressional Budget Office found that US government debt will be about the same size as the entire economy by year’s end. Someone needs to tell green globalists hungry for Western cash that the cupboards are bare.

Globalists seem unaware of the impending financial crisis. Rather than curb ambitions for an economic reset, they are framing COVID-19 as a path to a better ­future. The sales pitch will be challenging, but the OECD suggests: “Where stimulus packages target environmental objectives, a focus on people’s wellbeing is also crucial to cement the social and political acceptance of environmental measures.”

To sell green globalism, people must believe it is a common good. Workers expected to pay for green capitalism with high taxes and shocking energy bills must come to believe that they want or need it. The art of persuasion is essential. Globalists are pitching their plan as pragmatic. They have adopted the slogan Build Back Better to embed their objectives in nation-states’ government policy. The phrase has been used for some time in a relation to a capacity-building approach to disaster recovery, and its rationale was basically sound; rebuilding after disasters would involve planning to ensure past structural vulnerabilities were not reintroduced. For example, policymakers sought to ensure that in tsunami-prone areas, critical infrastructure was relocated away from the ocean. Over time, however, building back better has come to reflect ideology, not pragmatic planning.

The UN has decided building back better means a transition to renewable energy and green infrastructure, social inclusion and gender equality, more social welfare and an international system to deliver the objectives. Most of us still think that COVID-19 is a virus and a vaccine is the solution. Stop right there. UN special force Guterres is on the case: “The pandemic is only demonstrating what we all know: that millennia of patriarchy have resulted in a male-dominated world with a male-dominated culture which damages everyone.” And the UN is demonstrating what we all know — that kind of nonsense makes people vote for Donald Trump.

The Great Reset sounds less like an invitation to thrive than a post-COVID oligarchy where ­globalists secure their jobs and wealth at the expense of ours. If you want our support for a green world order, Davos Man, show us the money.

JENNIFER ORIEL

 

COLUMNIST

Dr Jennifer Oriel is a columnist with a PhD in political science. She writes a weekly column in The Australian. Dr Oriel’s academic work has been featured on the syllabi of Harvard University, the University of… Read more

 

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Previous articles 

Environmental battles

The Great Global Warming Hoax

By John Rofe, Fraud Investigator, Auckland, New Zealand.

Editor’s note: this post comprises a series of emails, submissions and documents send to NZ Ministers, Government Departments, shadow Ministers and major NZ media describing the current global warming hoax, including compelling supporting evidence. 

As background, this PowerPoint presentation explains the reasons why Russia and most countries didn’t get into the emission reduction programme, and the history and background for the climate fraud: THE KYOTO PROTOCOL CO2 – Russian presentation to Vladimir Putin 2004

Date: 26 October 2020

Email to: New Zealand senior politicians and news media,

We 7.8 billion humans in the digital age are lucky that the truth is normally very simple and straightforward, the facts are so easily accessible.  But where lies and fraud are both officially promulgated and government-sanctioned, the truth is normally regarded as subversive.  Because we have so little time to question accepted ideas, it is extremely serious for us to find you are all guilty to a greater or lesser extent of spreading both lies and facilitating large scale corruption.  So I hope my complaints will be acted upon by the proper authorities.  (after a year of procrastination, a fairly forlorn hope – regrettably)

So if you are of a frail disposition and cannot handle the truth, please stop at this point.  If you wonder what I am saying about you, read on.

For reasons I won’t go into, I watched the entire Trump Congressional impeachment hearings on YouTube.  I had always believed that the US voters must have hit rock-bottom electing someone as “alternative” as Donald J. Trump as President, so I thought he would get his “come-uppance” during the hearings.  On the contrary, there were no allegations of impropriety made against Mr Trump because everyone delivered evidence under oath and clearly there was no evidence available for them to give.  Their clear wish was to dish the dirt, but none was offered.

The annoyance at improper US vice presidential involvement in Ukraine’s affairs, expressed by the state department officials during impeachment hearings came to the fore.  But nothing improper by Trump was presented, yet a cascade of allegations against Joseph Biden came flooding out regarding his part in the Ukraine Burisma scandal involving his family and himself.  It convinced me that Joe Biden was a corrupt Vice President to Obama and there is now plenty of evidence to show the Obama administration was well aware of his corrupt practices.  To be fair, the people of the USA have become desensitised to the systemic graft which permeates US politics called “Pay for Play” for which no impeachment is ever considered.  So they need to get their act together and tidy things up.  What Mr Biden got up to was disgusting.  You cannot elevate a crook to become the leader of the “free world”.

Recently, we find stories and even compelling evidence emerging from the US Department of Justice that the Russia-Gate impeachment process was a simple fraud with active FBI and CIA complicity.

Every day, evidence of Biden’s complicity in fraud in a Democrat-controlled US Congressional hearing is never mentioned in the mainstream media, yet 10,000 miles away I could hear and see the testimony on the live video feeds.  Today, half of the USA is getting the Biden scandal news, but it is barred from every mainstream media outlet other than Fox.  Our own TVNZ and the NZ Herald have been taking the news feeds from the US media which continues to attack Trump and actively support Biden and his frauds, and our media has repeated the feeds verbatim.  Let me name the media organisations involved…

  • CNN and MSNBC
  • Washington Post
  • New York Times
  • The Guardian

How did the so-called “free world” find itself exposed to such criminality of intent and execution?

These listed are the same news organisations promoting the United Nations sponsored climate fraud (for which a short 2-page summary of the simple and not so simple truth about Earth’s climate is attached above).

Every day Mr Trump’s alleged involvement in serious malfeasance, warranting an impeachment circus, appeared in our mainstream New Zealand media.  The massive and prominent stories of his wickedness often seemed just a total fabrication, whereas I knew the facts.  Mr Trump is so guileless and unscripted that I wondered how he got into such a position of power, but in many key issues of the day, his position is principled and steadfast.  (Is he genius, buffoon or both?) The US voters certainly got the guy they elected.  So how can we ever believe our own press in future?  They are guilty of suppression of the truth in the same way that they routinely suppress the evidence of climate fraud.  For instance:

  1. Every warming event is magnified.
  2. Every cooling event is not mentioned at all, unless it occurs locally – i.e. within New Zealand.
  3. Historical charts that have been falsified under the auspices of the UN IPCC, NOAA, NASA, CSIRO and NIWA use scale and choice of periodicity to create the illusion that human carbon emissions cause climate change, when there is not only no empirical scientific evidence that they do, but masses of easily verifiable empirical scientific evidence that they do not.  The fakery of the UN IPCC’s junk science can never even be questioned in the New Zealand media without a bucket of ink from foreign journalistic scum (or local stooges) being thrown over it.

The real changes to average temperatures always seem to get noticed first by those living in the large land masses of the Northern hemisphere because of the otherwise moderating influence of the world’s oceans.  That was the case between 1980 to 2000 when I became convinced that rapid heating was occurring in Europe, Asia and North America (because I was regularly travelling there in international consulting roles during that time).  There was almost no noticeable warming in New Zealand during that time.   The end of the “little ice age” also came late for us in the 1860’s after the massive blizzards of 1863.  (I found this time lag well understood in Russian Academy of Sciences climate reports.)

We are now more than 50 years into the space age and more than 40 years into having access to empirical global temperature data with 2-3 days of the end of each month.  Yet what do we get?  Just spin.  Sure, according to empirical satellite data, the Earth shows no signs yet of atmospheric cooling, but it has shown no signs of average  warming for the last three years either.  So who are these fraudsters pushing the fake climate crisis?  The UN claims it is science but no, they just use the same sort of sophistry when they gather and summarise the scientists’ reports, that commercial fraudsters use to make 2+2= 5.  This isn’t just the biggest ever fraud, it is so widely decentralised every player appears on the face of it to be potentially innocent of bad intent.  The climate is elegant and the sophistry of the fraudsters is equally so.  And thereby we are all deceived…well not all of us.

Now from the space weather and in accordance with existing predictions from the Russian Academy of Sciences, we are entering what is probably going to be a 200 year event called a Grand Solar Minimum.  When the cold comes, then we will have a genuine crisis because there has not been such an event since the world population was less than 1.5 billion people.  For the last three years a series of major anomalous climate cooling events has begun in those same Northern land masses, while for us the warming continues because we are still warmed by the surrounding seas.

So, you can watch the news flow in the few days ahead of today and decide from the following…. 

  1. On climate …my “version of the truth” is that solar cycles and the terrestrial water cycle determine major climate fluctuations.  See this video which contains a forecast for the coming week for North America showing the kind of information which will be suppressed in NZ media by week’s end:

https://youtu.be/qtbkhYSy7R0

I can now prove absolutely that the UN IPCC narrative is just a fraud…but it isn’t rocket science because analysis of our automated and official  met. data will show anyone that.  All you need is six hours over a two day period and a computer and any year12/13 student can do the maths.

Does anyone really think the result of anomalous cooling will get media mention this week?   This video also contains  the realisation by the US President (at 2 minutes 27 seconds in), that it is the space weather dominated by the sun that causes climate change.  At last the Trump Administration is realising the Russians and Chinese scientists are right (see the final link on my 2-page article below).  Now that the science is agreed between the major powers with their massive scientific establishments, surely it is time for the NZ SFO to deal with my climate fraud complaints against NIWA, PM Ardern and Minister Shaw?

You may wish to avail yourselves of the full and complete details of this week’s new US legislation.  It is called  the “Promoting Research and Observations of Space Weather to Improve the Forecasting of Tomorrow Act” or the “PROSWIFT Act”.  Ref S.881 and covered by the official POTUS Statement dated 21 October 2020.

As an aside…for those who have read the POTUS’ statement…

Obviously, with ever greater reliance on electricity as our energy source, the impact of a Coronal Mass Ejection (a CME from solar storms) will not just potentially take our affected regions back to the “Stone Age”, but because electricity generators will increasingly monopolise our energy supply mix, our resilience to a CME event will also be diminished.  So while we must diversify away from finite supplies of fossil fuels, the process will come with escalating risk.  A CME (such as the Carrington Event of 1-2 September 1859)  has only happened once or twice throughout recorded history, but when it did there were few implications due to our low tech production and communication systems.  Unlikely as the possibility of a direct hit may be, the events are not uncommon and the cost of a CME could prove a near extinction level event.  So the security implications of the PROSWIFT Act are obvious…and not just for the protection of assets in space, but also our civilisation.  By reference to my summary of Earth’s climate you will see reference to the web site www.spaceweather.com run by the brilliant NASA scientist Dr Tony Philips and this contains the data that does have a causal effect upon Earth’s climate – even though some aspects require more investigation.

  1. Is it wise for you to continually channel the ultra-corrupt Joe Biden and his media backers?   There are several key questions that Biden does not give any straight answers to, and he has not even held more than a couple of genuine rallies during this electoral cycle.  Our media gives him a “free ride” and I have to wonder why we are so heavily subjected to another country’s political spin.  The climate fraud is as much as a Democrat led fraud as anything else, and like any experienced fraud investigator, I don’t like coincidences that benefit the same actors.  Because this malfeasance appears to be “a genie that is out of its bottle” these items below summarise some of the allegations :  (this stuff is backed by much more as the internet is overflowing with material as two of Hunter Biden’s former partners come out of the woodwork.)

https://youtu.be/aiiSq7toqlQ

and

https://youtu.be/lDdxavJoLrM

and China…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPm0EduPhgY&feature=youtu.be

But affecting China’s CCP involvement too – really?  https://www.newsletter.zerohedge.com/click.html?x=a62e&lc=kfc&mc=c&s=Fdi&u=v&z=YaKiOBr&

Many of those I have seen ratting out the Biden family are Democrats who claim they want to stay Democrats because they believe the Democrat party of old, but like some Americans we have personally met, they couldn’t vote for Hillary and now they cannot vote for Biden because if nothing else, Mr Trump isn’t gaming the American people.  He is dealing to the “Deep State” actors who on the face of it seem to be selling out the USA.  Yet our mainstream media completely ignores what is the biggest tale of fraud in US history.

Meantime the biased articles about Mr Trump continue to flow.  Will the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” mean he does get voted out, to be replaced by Mr Biden or not?  That remains to be seen, but I don’t really care about the US election outcome.  

What I do care about is the use of the public media to convey state-directed Orwellian conspiracies to the people of New Zealand.  How many times does it take to repeat lies in order to ensure they become accepted as facts?  I guess you could ask Greta Thunberg or one of Minister Shaw’s “groupies”.  Our children should not be so deliberately subjected to political manipulation or taught fake science in our schools.

As they used to say in the USSR just before its collapse in 1989,  “The only way we know for sure that a rumour is true, is when it is officially denied.”

Is that what we Kiwis have now come to?

Despite regular warnings, successive New Zealand’s governments and even our education system have become wedded to the climate fraud.  The problem for the bad actors is that there is a ripeness of time for all frauds to be revealed for what they are.  The present POTUS has signalled the time for those in the USA will come if/when he is re-elected.  This makes this election significant to the political scientists.  But whether that happens  during 2020 or not the truth will out, because truth, like science is apolitical.

PM Ardern and Minister Shaw may have “jumped the shark” at their own October elections, but that does not make wrong right.  Nor does it excuse institutional complicity in the UN IPCC-centred climate fraud, and in this respect, the complicity of NIWA, the Ministry for the Environment and the universities (particularly Auckland and VUW) need to be singled out for review.

The Anthropogenic Global Warming Fraud would not have been possible were it not for the active involvement of the “media barons” among whose ranks, the activities of George Soros and his “Open Society” needs close official examination.  In NZ it is TVNZ and the Herald who need official investigation.  They have let us all down.

As for you, are you part of the solution, or part of the problem?  You probably know which….

If you say that, “climate change is causing bad weather, storms or forest fires”, you are already one of the bad guys.  So get an education.

Please clean up your act because the NZ public deserves better.

Yours sincerely

John Rofe

============================

THE EARTH’S CLIMATE IS A TRULY WONDERFUL THING

After 15 years of trying to figure out whether the “Warming Alarmists” or the “Climate Change Deniers” are right, I have concluded that the causes of climate change are almost totally natural…solar variability on the one hand (because the sun provides 99.9% of Earth’s energy) and the water cycle on the other (because 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water and its evaporation, condensation and precipitation can be seen to affect the climate everywhere, from place to place and from time to time).  Just elegant natural homeostasis.

1.15 trillion tonnes of surface water is converted into water vapour every day and being lighter than air, it rises to the skies, cooling as it ascends (because the air cools by 6.5oC with every 1,000 metres of altitude). Then it forms clouds and they mask 60-70% of Earth’s surface. When condensation has completed the cycle, and minute water vapour droplets coalesce into rain drops, hail or snow, precipitation of an approximate 1.15 trillion tonnes descends, leaving between 15-20 trillion tonnes in the atmosphere at any point in time.

So the sun heats the Earth and the water cycle moderates both the day-time heating and discharge of night-time heat into space.  This is easily provable from official published meteorological data, yet no-one is interested in fact checking, because it would end the gravy train for so many over-paid pseudo-scientists.

Over geological time, the Earth’s attitude to, and the distance from the sun has been the cause of the massive variability in the global temperatures between ice ages and intervening inter-glacial periods.  These “long period” changes are referred to as Milankovich cycles, but they are of no immediate relevance.

For the “Alarmists” to blatantly ignore the 10,000 years history of the current interglacial period (known as the Holocene) and impute a dominant role for humanity’s effects in the changed levels of certain trace gases is at best a gross exaggeration.  There is no evidence that any change in atmospheric carbon dioxide has caused climate change although the reverse has been indicated as possible from Antarctic ice core analysis.

For our leaders to be conned by the protestations of parties benefitting from the deception that it is “settled science” (i.e. UN IPCC) is at best incompetent or at worst malfeasance.  We rightly expected NIWA, the Ministry for the Environment and cabinet ministers have exercised rigorous oversight of public expenditure. 

For our Minister for Climate Change to write a letter in response to my provision of evidence (in 2018) to inform me that good science is never settled, but in this case he is sure it is, defied all logic.  There is no empirical scientific justification for his actions so this showed that no independent New Zealand due diligence was ever performed before the Zero Carbon legislation was enacted by our Parliament. 

It is often argued that the motive for the deception has been the desire of people beyond our shores to tax an element of the periodic table that is the very essence of all life on Earth – carbon.  That was why finding human involvement in climate change was central to the role of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.   With an open chequebook from many governments, the OECD’s scientific community was set to work to employ “confirmation bias” and sophistry in order to achieve the required result.

Around the world and in most countries (from the outset) the bogus nature of this hoax has been resisted by scientists. They are in part the heroes of this sorry business even though blatant systemic media bias in favour of the hoax has left them impotent and ignored (even ridiculed) despite no evidence supporting the supposed orthodoxy.  But every serious scientist works in a silo.  In critic’s silos their expertise is contested, but the overwhelming impossibility of the UN theory disappears into the mist of deliberate sophistry.  In 30 years of deliberate malfeasance, science and the scientific method has been corrupted.  Censorship follows.

2.

How did climate science get corrupted when the corrupting process occurred in the plain sight?

  1. The Vostok ice core experiments were alternately ignored or misinterpreted.
  2. The historical impacts of solar variability were actively suppressed – whether they came from the 11- year regular solar cycles, or the longer term Grand Solar Maximums and Minimums.
  3. The volume of human influenced “greenhouse gases” was overstated and their efficacy magnified.
  4. The measurement by atomic absorption spectroscopy of the impacts of various gases was ignored and the impact of the Beer-Lambert law of physics which down-rated the efficacy of additional concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane was also minimised by either intent or modelling emphasis.
  5. The true natural power of the water cycle was de-rated by deliberately splitting up the three thermally active phases of (i) evaporation – yielding water vapour, (ii) condensation – yielding clouds, and (iii) precipitation-yielding rain hail or snow (by which high altitude H2O is transferred to earth’s surface with cooling effect). It is the water cycle that always provides the climate with moderation.
  6. The automatic cleansing effect of the water cycle is deliberately ignored and in particular the way in which rain brings carbon dioxide (which is also heavier than air) and all pollutants – including residue of the worst catastrophic events earth can sustain – back down to where we live, farm and fish.
  7. The impact of the variable heating from sub-sea volcanism is little understood as is the impact of changes to the magnetosphere from changes in the variability of solar electromagnetic energy.
  8. There is a large area of study still into the role and impact of the changed cyclic influx of galactic cosmic rays on cloud formation and the huge variability in the changes in the thickness and temperature of Earth’s Thermosphere.

With new missions now on their way to Mars, “Climate Science”, the one-dimensional perspective of Earth’s climate being enclosed in a greenhouse is akin to the now rejected flat earth theories of the 17th Century.

Climatologists now keep a weather eye on the “space weather” (key variables are published each day on www.spaceweather.com ). There is growing evidence that it is the space weather (where the role of the sun dominates) that drives our terrestrial climate.  Certainly, that has been the interpretation of the folk running the Russian experiments on the International Space Station.  Their views are shared by many NASA astronauts.  So what is delivered to us as “settled science” is really just a set of theories for which there is no empirical scientific proof at all!”  Human carbon emissions don’t have a significant role to play.

While we are told that many countries do not support the actions of the UN (such as with the Paris Accords), the fact is that there are good and proper reasons to object – and from objectors there is considerable  empirical scientific evidence, in addition to the factors that were accepted by the Russian Academy of Sciences in this 2014 presentation:  (please forgive and forget the audio: concentrate on the screen shots)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdNw8-Cq8h8&feature=emb_logo

The use of “misdirection” techniques is too obvious to ignore and this suggests there is an undercurrent of intent to deceive in much of the material I have reviewed.  So the proper authorities have been informed.

John Rofe            Auckland, New Zealand                                                                                                       20 October 2020

============================

From: John Rofe [mailto:jcrofe@xtra.co.nz]
Sent: Monday, 5 October 2020 4:31 p.m.
To: ‘terry Dunleavy’
Cc: ‘Hon Judith Collins’; ‘Paul Hunt’; ‘Gerry Brownlee’; ‘Hon Scott Simpson’; ‘Peter Goodfellow’; ‘geoffduffy@lycos.com’; ‘Peter J. Morgan’; ‘Jock Allison’; ‘Deborah Alexander’; ‘John Ansell’
Subject: I think this may be the most important three pages Judith Collins will read today/this week
Importance: High

Hi Terry,

Attached as “The Loss of Innocence for Jacinda’s Team of Five million” ( The Loss of Innocence for Jacinda Ardern’s Team of Five Million – Part I ).  It will be the kiss of death for Jacinda’s nuclear moment if anyone in National bothers to read it.  Please feel free to circulate it as widely as you wish.  It contains proof regarding real [as opposed to political/official ‘science’ and how that matches the observed weather.

To support this for the non-believers, a document for the Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy shows the relative efficacy of water vapour, methane, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide [not attached but available by request].  This needs to be factored by volume, where water vapour totally dominates.

To also support this for the non-believers are the three schedules [not attached but available by request] showing the observations of how temperatures and humidity are matched and the dominant role of water vapour in reducing the diurnal temperature range.  Those started as casual observations because I simply couldn’t believe that hundreds of over-paid climate scientists around the world wouldn’t already have done such comparisons.  It seems they haven’t.  I even selected days with no Foehn North-Westerlies to reduce the differentials between East and West. 

The three key variables of climate between say Napier and New Plymouth (and elsewhere) are Latitude, Altitude and Humidity.  At high school in the 1960’s we just learned that continental climates varied from maritime climates.  How “maritime” a climate is, is indicated by its humidity…and the other features of the water cycle, clouds and rain.

Clouds aren’t just a factor in the calculation of Earth’s energy balance, they are also an important climate variable from place to place and from time to time.

As the second requirement for its establishment as a UN agency, was to show the human influence on climate change, the UN IPCC scientists were not stupid when they separated out the various components of the water cycle and then minimised the impact of each.  If they couldn’t show humans could influence the climate, what role did they have?  That was their motivation for the fraud that the Club of Rome saw as creating a vehicle for One-World government and to get their global enterprises far fewer separate tax codes and thereby reduce business complexity.

Prof. Duffy saw through it as did the Russians.  But in general, it enabled the UN IPCC-centric scientists to call clouds as one dimensional and do the same with water vapour.  Then divide and conquer with fairy stories about CO2, CH4 and N2O.

I have two further parts to write and publish…

Part 2. What do I believe causes climate change (summarising the evidence I have sighted for the role of the solar cycles)

Part 3.  A dissertation on the use of miss-direction and sophistry to mask the biggest fraud in history … as perpetrated by a cast of thousands.

I am extremely grateful for the guys at NZCSC who persevered in helping me.

Hopefully, someone will take the time and replicate my calculations.  It just takes 2 hours in the afternoon and 3 hours the next morning.

Best regards

John Rofe

=====================

AN EGREGIOUS FAILURE OF THEIR DUTY OF CARE!

THE GREAT UN IPCC GLOBAL WARMING FRAUD AND ITS NEW ZEALAND AGENCY

Albert Einstein is reputed to have said: 

“The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.”

Please take the time to think this through for yourself:

Is it logical to consider that three relatively ineffectual human-influenced greenhouse gases which in total are less than 4% of the volume of the far more potent gas (water vapour) can drive climate change, solely because a corrupt group of bureaucrats at the United Nations say that it is “settled science”?  If one investigator, acting alone, can see through this fraud, then the scientists at all influential New Zealand institutions have not performed proper due diligence.

[NZ Green Party leader] James Shaw & [NZ Prime Minister] Jacinda Ardern, with the help of NIWA and complicit scientists, promote the following lies:

  1. That the changes in human emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide cause climate change, their increases cause warming and our use of fossil fuels is the “culprit” driving the Modern Warm Period.
  2. That carbon dioxide is the dominant so-called “greenhouse gas” and it is a pollutant.
  3. That humans can restore climate equilibrium by reducing our so-called “carbon emissions”.

The principal causes of climate change are well known because the 100,000-year cycles of glaciations with short interglacial intervals are caused by cyclical changes to earth’s orbit of the sun (known as Milankovich cycles).  The shorter significant variations that have caused periods of relative warmth and cold have been due to the changed activity that varies during 11-year cycles, as the solar poles switch places.  The visible effect is marked by variations in the number of sun spots that appear on the face of the sun.  Groups of active solar cycles (as with three during the 20th century) cause climate warming and groups of markedly inactive solar cycles which are referred to as Grand Solar Minimums, cause atmospheric cooling and the perturbation of the magnetosphere.  Short-term anomalous weather is just a mixture of pattern and chaos. 

If you thought the science supporting the UN IPCC’s fraudulent hypothesis is settled, think again.  (http://www.petitionproject.org/) The UN IPCC report number AR5 fails to even ascribe any role to the dominant greenhouse gas water vapour and clouds that have always acted to moderate earth’s climate through volcanic eruptions and asteroid strikes causing mass extinctions.  Carbon dioxide is essential for all life on earth and is not a pollutant.  Like all of the others, the global warming fraud is common malfeasance.

At best, our leaders are derelict in their duty of care to the general public, but to have ignored all of my warnings since 2018, they must have had a mindset of denial and/or vested interest.  At worst they are deliberate and manipulative fraudsters, relying on those who influence or control the UN IPCC,  ensuring the media foster the deliberate lie that anyone who points out the obvious fraud is just a conspiracy theorist.  For this reason I have laid complaints with the NZ Serious Fraud Office, the NZ Police and the Secretary for Justice.  The alleged fraudsters are aware of my allegations.  So irrespective of their political affiliations:

I am convinced that no-one implicated in this fraud is a fit or proper person to stand for public office.

John Rofe, Experienced Fraud Investigator                                           Auckland New Zealand, August 2020             

===============================

FORMAL COMPLAINT TO THE OFFICER COMMANDING NZ POLICE – HENDERSON  AREA                                                                                TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE

By Hand

Dear Superintendant,

Following many years of investigation and supported by both empirical scientific evidence and having diligently and independently pursued the empirical observations to back up my allegations, I wish to register three complaints of fraud.  They are as follows:

FORMAL COMPLAINT REGARDING THE CONDUCT OF SERIOUS FRAUD BY THE CHIEF SCIENTIST, CLIMATE AND ATMOSPHERE, OF NIWA.

FORMAL COMPLAINT REGARDING THE CONDUCT OF SERIOUS FRAUD BY THE PRIME MINISTER OF NEW ZEALAND, THE RT. HONOURABLE JACINDA ARDERN.

FORMAL COMPLAINT REGARDING THE CONDUCT OF SERIOUS FRAUD BY THE MINISTER FOR CLIMATE CHANGE, THE HONOURABLE JAMES SHAW.

I allege they are promoting for personal gain, the quasi-scientific theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming, with no empirical scientific evidential support for the de-bunked theory they promote.

Internationally, this has become the biggest fraud in world history and it involves three main limbs:

  1. Falsely representing that human emissions of carbon dioxide gas, methane and nitrous oxide are key drivers of climate change, partially by minimising the role of the solar influence, clouds and water vapour. No empirical scientific evidence exists to support their claims.
  2. Falsely representing that carbon dioxide gas is a pollutant, when it is a gas essential for all life on earth.
  3. Falsely representing that the New Zealand Government is capable of changing the climate by altering the New Zealand emissions of the three gases mentioned in point 1. above.

Herewith is a copy of my email of 4 July 2018 and a letter received in late 2018 containing the Government’s misguided and disproven claims.  Also a copy of my warning to Minister James Shaw that is dated 15 May 2019 that outlines the basis of the above allegations of fraud.

My research has been transparently provided to a wide range of politicians from all parties.  The allegations have been pursued at regular intervals over the last three years.  The Government has relied on a news blackout in the matter and as a result, while they acknowledge receipt of my emails they haven’t made any other response.  I have tried to minimise the impact of my allegations on the people involved and failed to achieve any traction.  This is a blatant abuse of their statutory powers.

I am an active conservationist and the actions of Government, while damaging to the New Zealand economy bring disrepute to both the scientific community and the conservation movement.   

My personal resources have been sufficient to now prove beyond reasonable doubt that an ongoing, systemic and costly fraud has occurred and is planned for the future.  I have been able to independently validate the evidence provided by the international and domestic scientific experts.

My personal resources are not sufficient to prove the parties intended to commit the fraud.  Only you have those resources and are entrusted with the job of protecting the New Zealand public.

There is a massive amount of information available to support this allegation and yet absolutely no empirical scientific evidence to refute my claims.  Herewith are the following documents:

  1. Scope of facts, headed “A TALE OF FRAUD, COMPLICITY AND ARRANT STUPIDITY”
  2. A summary of the evidence against the core fraud, headed “GOOD NEWS- NO CRISIS – AND CARBON DIOXIDE DOESN’T EVEN CAUSE CLIMATE CHANGE”.
  3. A note on how physical evidence supports the expert empirical scientific evidence provided by the scientists, headed “ARRANT STUPIDITY – or – RESTATING THE OBVIOUS”.
  4. A short paper describing the business, political and media influences ensuring the truth never leaks into the mainstream media, headed “Many Whistleblowers – Yet nothing to be heard”.

This matter is the most serious set of allegations ever provided to a New Zealand Police station because the implications of derivative frauds includes all schemes for Carbon Tax, The Zero Carbon Act, all carbon trading and schemes for selling carbon credits are all frauds and many of the actions of Government departments focused on “Climate Change”  are all parts of the core fraud.

Please therefore provide this letter and attachments to the Commissioner of Police, for discussion with the Secretary for Justice.  The Secretary has been separately appraised.

I believe that neither Minister James Shaw nor PM Jacinda Ardern is a fit and proper person to be elected as part of the next Government.  I stand ready to cooperate with your investigations.

Yours faithfully

John Rofe, Experienced Private Fraud Investigator

========================

From: John Rofe [mailto:jcrofe@xtra.co.nz]
Sent: Saturday, 18 July 2020 12:58 p.m.
To: ‘Enquiries’
Cc: ‘Hon Judith Collins’; ‘gerry.brownlee@national.org.nz’; ‘Mafi Tu’inukuafe’; ‘Hon Scott Simpson’; ‘Peter Goodfellow’; ‘jacinda.ardern@parliament.govt.nz’; ‘james.shaw@parliament.govt.nz’; ‘Rt. Hon. Winston Peters’; ‘david.seymour@parliament.govt.nz’; ‘alfred.ngaro@national.org.nz’; ‘simeon.brown@national.org.nz’; ‘news@tvnz.co.nz’; ‘news@nzherald.co.nz’; ‘newstalkzb’; ‘news@heraldonsunday.co.nz’; ‘newsdesk herald’; ‘newstips@stuff.co.nz’; ‘Terry Dunleavy’; ‘Richard Treadgold’; ‘Peter J. Morgan’; ‘leighton smith’; ‘shane.jones@parliament.govt.nz’; ‘shane.reti@parliament.govt.nz’; ‘Geoff Duffy’; ‘Jock Allison’; ‘Graham Kearns’
Subject: RE: An Open Letter to NIWA – NIWA’s role in the biggest ever fraud in human history

Attention Caroline:  This is not a normal email because I am hereby notifying NIWA and its directors that they are implicated in a serious and extensive criminal enterprise.  This email exchange is being broadcast and it is being copied to the NZ Serious Fraud Office.

 It attaches a lot of information not relevant to an allegation of fraud because I believe NIWA must work out its own position to advise the Minister in charge and to do that, NIWA must be in a position to match my allegations with NIWA’s own records and research.

Nevertheless, NIWA now faces the allegation of fraud.  The evidence for which I have satisfied myself is compelling, with no room for dispute.

 I urge all readers to begin this email string, by reading my first short email below and then NIWA’s short response.  Then please read on…

“Dear NIWA PR, Management and Directors,

The empirical scientific evidence behind the summary of facts as included in the above one-page attachment marked “A Tale of Fraud, Complicity and Arrant Stupidity”, is all attached herewith in the form of two papers by Professor Duffy, one paper from Dr Jock Allison and my own attempt to establish whether CO2 had any role at all in changing the climate and, if not, whether the role of “greenhouse gas” is totally monopolised by water vapour and clouds.  The undeniable conclusions from my studies are that water vapour is the only significant greenhouse gas and in effect, changes to the climate are due almost entirely to natural causes as  Professor Duffy has claimed in his evidence.

Thank you for your response on behalf of Dr David Wratt (retired).  I note that because you have referred me to the UN IPCC, you are effectively deferring to its leadership role at the centre of the Great Global Warming Fraud.  During the 16 years since I first contacted Dr Wratt, NIWA has seemingly learned nothing about the cause of changes to the climate (which is very sad, given NIWA is paid to do so) and has likely become integrated within the UN IPCC’s fraudulent enterprise, either as a compliant accessory or as a full “Partner-in-Crime”.

Anyway, thank you for the courtesy of a reply to my first email in this string.  Unbeknown to you, I now hold all the evidential “cards”, so I already know the proper responses to the four questions in my email should have been as follows:

“Q1.  There is none,

Q2. There is none,

Q3. There is none, and,

Q4. NIWA has no plans to provide certainty to anyone, nor can it do so.”

 (Memo.  The first two documents I have attached above were also attached to the original email.)

 NIWA and most readers may be unfamiliar with the history between this Government and the writer.  So for the avoidance of confusion…

During 2018 I sent a number of emails to Government ministers advising they were in danger of becoming accessories to fraud as no science supported their climate change rhetoric.

 In September 2018 the Minister for Climate Change wrote to me (as attached) claiming that he had no idea on the science but his fledgling coalition government accepted that the UN IPCC position reflected the “overwhelming consensus”, which it never did.  I then spent a further fruitless six months revisiting the science with the UN IPCC’s so-called “international experts.”   I wanted to find reasons to discontinue, so finding further evidence of malfeasance was certainly not what I had hoped for.  Meantime, the media contained sporadic news of defections from the more highly credentialed ranks of UN IPCC scientific advisers who all claimed that paid UN IPCC bureaucrats and politicians altered their scientific evidence in order to reflect UN IPCC policy, yet had fraudulently maintained their names as authors or even lead authors to the reports.

I then concluded that The New Zealand Government must be exercising some sort of agency from the UN IPCC to import its fraud into New Zealand.  On 15 May 2019 I wrote to the Minister for Climate Change, copying the Deputy Prime Minister and Prime Minister, advising them as to the specific areas where they could be complicit in fraud – not the least of which was that the suggestion of an “overwhelming consensus” was at variance with the facts.   If the Minister misrepresented NIWA’s advice, will NIWA be saying that the Minister for Climate Change misled the people of New Zealand that the science was settled, when neither NIWA, nor he, nor the UN IPCC had any empirical scientific evidence that could possibly withstand public scrutiny?  If so please explain?

The seriousness of NIWA’s answers (by comparison with my own version at Q1-Q4 that I have spelled out above) will become apparent.

We have a Government trying to persuade us to reduce CO2 emissions when there is no empirical scientific evidence that increased atmospheric emissions have any impact at all on the climate.    If you think that this cannot possibly be true, I wish to refer you to the interchange between the NZ Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor, Professor Juliet Gerrard and Mr Peter Morgan, the CEO of Environomics (NZ) Trust Inc., as attached above and marked “191207…”.   She was unable to provide any empirical scientific evidence although Mr Morgan could, so she disengaged, and there are records of plenty of other prevarications in addition to those of NIWA.  In late 2004 I had the same experience with NIWA’s Dr Wratt but did not document it at the time.  The “Augie Auer Memorial Prize” of $10,000 offered in New Zealand remains uncollected as does at least one similar prize overseas. As someone whose first official roles in investigating fraudsters within organisations such as Equiticorp and Goldcorp from as early as 1989, and after 15 years of dogged pursuit of the truth of this case, I believe I am entitled to presume this is just a fraud like any other – even if the sum involved now ranks in the trillions of dollars and is a semi-global fraud (one third of the world population are affected, two-thirds are not – so the fraud and the corruption of science at the hands of the UN IPCC is not quite global – yet).

We have a Government trying to persuade us that CO2 is a pollutant and there is too much “atmospheric carbon” while in fact CO2 is a gas that is essential to all life on earth and the world’s vegetation not only wants three times as much as that which remains in the atmosphere today, but NASA has studies and satellite photos which show a greening of planet earth, due to the increase that has taken place over the last 30 years.  It is colourless, odourless and non-toxic at current atmospheric levels.

As for spending money to solve a non-existent problem when there is absolutely no chance of altering either the atmospheric levels of CO2, or effecting any change to the future climate by human action or restraint, the futility of the Minister for Climate Change’s actions and future published plans show that he is unfit to hold political office.  NIWA should review the Minister’s outrageous claims in 2018 as extracted from attachment 001. above.

  1. “the Government believes that  climate change is a serious global issue that requires international cooperation and domestic action.”
  2. “It is clear that the overwhelming consensus is that human induced climate change is occurring.”
  3. and on the Zero Carbon bill, “ The Zero Carbon Bill will set a target in law, which will be a long term commitment for New Zealand’s transition to a net zero emissions economy. It will provide certainty for businesses, households and for local government so they can make confident decisions about the investments they need to make over the coming decades.”

But anyway, my thanks to NIWA for the confirmation provided through your response that…

  1. NIWA apparently cannot differentiate between the sophistry required to support fraud and what constitutes “empirical scientific evidence”.  (You surely must be aware that there is no empirical scientific evidence of anything relevant contained  in those sections of the UN IPCC’s AR5 report that you just referred me to?)
  2. NIWA is complicit in the UN IPCC fraud by using the UN IPCC’s standard evasive response.
  3. NIWA has scientists as well as administrators who have been corrupted by association with the UN IPCC, or they would realise that 18 years of using the phrase “consensus” instead of making proper enquiry (as you are paid to do) places you at the centre of this fraud.
  4. NIWA has supplied “Lead Authors” for UN IPCC studies and yet there has never been any evidence (let alone empirical scientific evidence) to confirm the effect of changed atmospheric levels of CO2 on the climate.
  5. While frauds are committed by people and not by faceless organisations, NIWA’s involvement shows a failure of governance as well as management.

Whether NIWA’s complicity has occurred to you or not, I am confident that your response makes NIWA at the very least an accessory to the biggest fraud in New Zealand history as agents for the biggest fraud in world history, now being perpetrated by the UN IPCC and its Secretary General Sr. Antonio Guterres.

It seems to me that this Ardern-led government has made a number of multi-billion-dollar decisions justified solely by the illusion that there may be some foreign scientific justification.   I therefore doesn’t seem to me sufficient for NIWA to pass the buck to the UN IPCC, the way NIWA has done in your email to me, dated 15 July 2020 as shown below.  This has all the hallmarks of modern-day “Lysenkoism”.    NIWA is now at least in considerable part, responsible for the contagious effects of this fraud in spawning Ponzi and other commercial frauds, including those of the NZ Government in levying a carbon tax using deceptive and misleading information to justify it, planting huge forests that will have no material effect on the climate, for carbon trading schemes which serve only to enrich bankers and promoting the purchase of carbon credits (by firms such as Air New Zealand) – which are all fraudulent as they lack the substance of genuine purpose.  NIWA’s role is not to participate in projects designed to fleece New Zealanders, whether coerced by corrupt politicians or not.

The farming sector and the Oil and Gas industry and all those who rely on NIWA for weather and climate advice deserve to know what NIWA’s evidence for this mythological but human-instigated faux climate crisis is.  This is a fraud that has depended to date on everyone who is either driving it, or complicit, trying to hide behind faceless and unaccountable bureaucrats somewhere else.   NIWA’s devious response to my email now seems a part of the sort of dance that all fraudsters go though when discovery is close. 

NIWA regularly publishes data about the weather on the public internet.  So anyone with access to the internet can witness the huge role that water vapour, humidity and clouds play in the temperature, the weather and the climate; CO2, CH4 and N2O have absolutely no identifiable impact on daily, weekly and yearly weather and I have empirical scientific evidence that the radiative impact of those three trace gases is negligible by comparison with the radiative effect of water vapour alone – yet water vapour has many other drivers including (inter alia) the impact of variability of cloud cover and the more than 400 trillion tonnes per year of evaporation and precipitation. 

NIWA must surely be aware that during geological time, from 540 million years ago, the atmospheric level of CO2 reached 7,000ppm (compared with only 415ppm today) and  since then there has been no correlation between the movements in the level of CO2 and the movements in the global temperature.  During the last 600,000 years of the Pleistocene era that has been covered in detail by the ice core analysis performed by teams of French and Russian scientists at Vostok in Antarctica, the evidence was absolutely clear that changes in atmospheric temperature pre-dated the change in atmospheric CO2 by 400-800 years, thereby demonstrating that CO2 is a trailing indicator but certainly not a possible driver of changes to the climate.  The ice core analysis performed in Central Greenland that provided temperature data  going back 11,000 years showed that the Holocene climate temperature maximum occurred during the Minoan Warm period some 3,300 years ago at about 6 degrees C. higher than today.  Moreover, it showed that the current global average temperature that NIWA believes shows “unprecedented warming” is in fact considerably lower than 75% of the last 10,000 years of the Holocene.

Please pause at this point to review the expert submission of Dr Jock Allison ONZM, FNZIPIM, to the Zero Carbon public hearing.  It shows in Fig 3 that there is no correlation between the level of atmospheric CO2 and temperature over 540 million years of geological time – that is, according to the consensus of all geologists.  In Fig 4. The Greenland ice core temperatures provides an insight into the temperature of the Holocene interglacial period and show that there is no “Climate Crisis”.  These two schematics are on Page 5 of Dr. Allison’s submission. 

This would lead any prudent person who is appraised of the facts to conclude that changes in atmospheric CO2 have never even appeared to have any influence over the climate.  NIWA’s support for the widely published fraud brings all of science and environmental policy into disrepute.

For there to be evidence of CO2, CH4 and N2O effecting warming, the gases actually need to be capable of doing so, which as it emerges, they are not.  (This is the biggest likely indictment of UN IPCC’s fraud and it is also the biggest likely indictment of NIWA’s seeming negligence.)

The Hon. James Shaw’s letter to me of September 2018 offered me and all New Zealanders the certainty of solving a non-existent problem for the nation.  Not only is there no climate crisis, but CO2, CH4 and N2O have almost no influence in changing the climate.  NIWA is either complicit in Minister Shaw’s misleading statements or has influenced him to issue them.

Which is it?

My role as a fraud investigator requires me (among other things) to examine the evidence and opinions of everyone involved in an issue.  Over 15 years I have had correspondence with many scientists from many countries but now that I am totally convinced that Anthropogenic Global Warming has nothing to do with science and is politically inspired only (and have presented evidence to prove it), I need to address the consequences of this discovery.  My intention is to spend the balance of 2020 fund-raising for private litigation in 2021.  But that is only if the NZ Serious Fraud Office does not pick this up and run with it.  If one political party were to pick this up as an election issue then the way will be open for a week or so for you to get your act together.  First to check the science and  second to work out a strategy for regaining public trust.  Let me make this plain, the NZ SFO has turned down the opportunity to investigate it once; and if they do so again their leadership needs to be promptly changed.

In order to fast track NIWA’s rehabilitation, you should speak with the scientists whose work is included in this document.  They are the experts, not me.

NIWA’s Chief Scientist should review the atomic absorption spectroscopic tests for water vapour, CO2, CH4 and N2O and the way in which the Beer-Lambert Law of Physics drastically reduces the impact of changes in the atmospheric level of CO2 on temperature.  NIWA should also review the attached two papers prepared and presented as evidence by Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering, University of Auckland, Dr. Geoffrey G. Duffy, D.Eng, PhD, BSc, ASTC Dip., FRSNZ, FI Chem E. 

Supporting the two papers provided by Professor Duffy attached, I have separately tested the conclusions reached in them and as a result I agree that only water vapour and clouds have true relevance as greenhouse gases.  This is supported by empirical observations as noted in the two attachments marked as “Casual observations…” as above.  These were drawn from web-based meteorological data. 

The UN IPCC has a reason for its fraud which should have been apparent to scientific observers.   Article 2. requires the UN IPCC to show what human influences affect changes to the climate, or if they cannot do so, the organisations that were instrumental in the establishment and the UN IPCC’s conduct will no longer have the incentive to do so and the UN IPCC will be redundant.  But NIWA scientists have a different duty of care and have become so focused on compliance with the fraud, that NIWA has seemingly neglected to point out what the Egyptians and Chinese knew thousands of years ago, that it is the sun which dominates earth’s climate – at least in between the less frequent but much larger perturbations of the Milankovich cycles. 

While the Russians, Indians and Chinese are properly advised and are taking steps to deal with an approaching Grand Solar Minimum at the commencement of solar cycle 25, NIWA appears to cling to the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory that was disproven 20 years ago.  Of course those countries face the same challenges we do of resource depletion, the demands of exponential population growth and pollution, but they waste no time or resources on foolish fads.

In fact, the modern temperature records since 1934 do not even show any correlation at all between global temperature and Global CO2 emissions.  May I jog NIWA’s thought processes and provide a short video of the sort of information that is provided to President Vladimir Putin….(I suggest you should freeze each screen-shot because the presenter’s English is poor and he has a cold)…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdNw8-Cq8h8&feature=emb_logo

(Dr Habibulo Abdussamatov the presenter, is the eminent  scientist who runs the prestigious Pulkovo Observatory and was responsible for supervising the Russian experiments on the International Space Station.  If you examine his presentation closely you will find that his predictions for the last six years have been borne out by the changes to the solar magnetosphere and his forecast of extreme impending cold this century is now being taken up by many others.)

Readers of this email may be unaware that of all the many computer modellers’ climate forecasts used by the UN IPCC, only the Russian one has been accurate to date, so must be taken seriously.  The others escalate projections of temperature increases that have been at least three times those of NASA satellite recordings showing the temperature graphs for the Lower Troposphere since 1979.  The only purpose they appear to fulfil is to continue to extract ever more funds from governments by meeting the UN IPCC’s agenda.

Yet the average of inaccurate models is still the source of UN IPCC alarmist temperature projections for the future.

Despite the surface temperature measurements being projected by the UN IPCC to accelerate – or as the UN IPCC inspired claims, “Faster than previously thought”, the temperature is only increasing or decreasing within the range of natural variability as shown below…

The biggest upward spikes of the graph above denote el Nino years and their size denotes the fact that 70+%  of the earth’s surface is ocean so the huge heat sinks called simply “the world’s oceans” act as something of an intermediary between the sun’s intensity and the weather we enjoy on planet Earth.  The graph you see above is published monthly, from the NASA satellites, which are monitored by two independent science based organisations (UAH and RSS).

Meanwhile, the earth’s outer defence against the un-survivable frigidity  of outer space, which is called “the Thermosphere” is thinning and cooling according to the recorded physical evidence, at a great rate – right at this point in time.  That is what exercises the minds of leaders such as Putin, Trump, Modi and Xi Jinping, yet clearly does not suit the machinations of Secretary General Guterres, Prime Minister Ardern or Minister Shaw. 

What happens as the activity of solar cycle 25 once again naturally builds over the next 4-5 years remains to be seen.  However unlike the UN IPCC and NIWA, the Russians and Chinese are using real science and are taking note of the lessons of history.   President Trump is trying to follow, but with active Democratic Party leaders’ connivance in the UN IPCC fraud, his options are limited.

My summary of findings based on examining NIWA humidity and temperature data is, as attached above called “Physical Evidence of the Impact….”.  It consists of five pages and with it is enclosed two graphs of recent movements in the level of atmospheric CO2 which is a separate attachment above marked as “CO2 at Keeling …”.  The two papers attached above which are marked “Casual observations…” complete the record of my humble experiment which seeks the truth.

But what was NIWA thinking?  NIWA has all the source data and yet was somehow lured into a fraud that is so obviously deceitful.  Now NIWA’s fraud can be seen by anyone who observes the weather in New Zealand.  Please consider the following “self-evident observations” to support the empirical scientific evidence of Professor Duffy and also Dr Allison.

NIWA scientists and everyday observers know that most deserts with 0.2-0.5% humidity are usually hot during the afternoon due to the low level of water vapour, and similarly, get very cold at night for the same reason.  Massive temperature ranges of hundreds of degrees Celsius are the hallmark of solar system planets lacking “greenhouse gases”.  So the massive diurnal temperature ranges like those in Siberia (up to 107 degrees Celsius in one day!) are a hallmark of low humidity denoting water vapour as the sole dominant greenhouse gas.  NIWA scientists must know that many farmers often check to see whether they can see cloud cover or the stars before going to bed at night, as a precautionary check against the possibility of massive overnight heat loss that can lead to frost.  

The difference in maximum and minimum diurnal temperatures between Auckland and Christchurch, even during hot, still days, is often due to the difference in real humidity; and the overnight heat loss (NIWA’s favourite indicator of a “greenhouse gas”) should have reinforced its true role in NIWA’s Chief Scientist’s mind.  While it is not the only driver of climate, why has NIWA never considered the candidacy of humidity in the difference between the climates of Napier and New Plymouth (same latitude and altitude), between Wellington and Masterton and between Greymouth and Christchurch? 

Then consider what happens when the non-radiative impacts of water vapour and clouds come into play?  Water vapour and clouds vary by the hour and by the day and yet CO2 varies only slightly by the year and decade.  Somehow the dominant natural greenhouse gas (water vapour) finds itself either excluded, or deliberately minimised in many UN IPCC peer-reviewed papers on climate change.

That is the UN IPCC’s game, but what is NIWA’s objective in promoting the interests of the UN IPCC…and why?

In my own insight into the motivation behind the fraud ( marked “Many Whistleblowers…) I named NOAA, NASA, CSIRO and NIWA among those organisations which have altered temperature records at about the same time in an apparently orchestrated move.  Now I want to know why NIWA did that.  Last time I asked this, I was threatened with punitive action by one of your PR team.  Will I get an honest response this time, now that Dr David Wratt is no longer on NIWA’s staff?

To protect myself, this email is going on the public record.   The longer this goes on, the worse the damage to the reputations of science, scientists and the conservation movement will be when the public realises that they and their children have been lied to for the last two decades.

Many sensible people are already suspicious because of all the repeated threats of apocalyptic events that have been held over people’s heads since the UN IPCC was first established and issued its first of several “ten years to Armageddon” warnings in 1989.

Why frighten the children?  Why teach them fake science?  NIWA can change this perception, but only if the empirical scientific evidence provided by Drs Allison and Duffy is accepted.

Your call.  But remember I am happy to litigate if necessary.

Kind regards

John Rofe, Private Fraud Investigator

======================

From: John Rofe [mailto:jcrofe@xtra.co.nz]
Sent: Saturday, 11 July 2020 12:54 p.m.
To: ‘jacinda.ardern@parliament.govt.nz’; ‘james.shaw@parliament.govt.nz’
Cc: ‘todd Muller’; ‘Hon Scott Simpson’; ‘Hon Judith Collins’; ‘Hon Nikki Kaye’; ‘Rt. Hon. Winston Peters’; ‘simeon.brown@national.org.nz’; ‘alfred.ngaro@national.org.nz’; ‘shane.reti@parliament.govt.nz’; ‘Terry Dunleavy’; ‘peter@lockfinance.co.nz’; ‘david.seymour@parliament.govt.nz’; ‘shane.jones@parliament.govt.nz’; ‘Jock Allison’; ‘Barry Brill’; ‘Geoff Duffy’; ‘John Ansell’; ‘news@tvnz.co.nz’; ‘leighton smith’; ‘newstips@stuff.co.nz’; ‘news@nzherald.co.nz’; ‘newstalkzb’; ‘newsdesk herald’; ‘news@heraldonsunday.co.nz’; ‘andrew.laxon@nzme.co.nz’; ‘Peter J. Morgan’; ‘Jim Tucker’
Subject: There is no embargo on the publication of the truth

Dear PM and Minister of Climate Change,

Please find attached a summary of the essential underlying facts after completion of my 15-year enquiry into the Great Global Warming Fraud.

This information may upset you, and if so I apologise for the shock.

In my next email I will provide all the evidence to support my claim that you each – as the Prime Minister and Minister of Climate Change – have either failed to do proper due diligence before taking your actions to waste billions of taxpayer dollars, or else are simply committing malfeasance by lying to the public.  Given the warnings provided to you both over a three year period I believe I am justified in using the common term for malfeasance, rather than either “ignorance” or “stupidity”.

The problem for corrupt but powerful people like you is that the courts love empirical scientific evidence that is supported by inter-locking, self-evident truths.  It typically trumps big names, rock-star scientific reputations, foreign conspiracies and popular misconceptions.

Just as a series of Popes in the 16th and 17th centuries could not counter the fact that people woke every morning and observed the sun rise in the East then later set in the West, the self-evident truth was always that earth revolves around the sun and it rotates each day.  Luckily I am in the happy position of being able to show the public why your actions are so flawed.  The sun dominates our climate, as well as the climate of all other planets within the solar system.   When the self evident truths that we all see every day of the year are pointed out to the public, the game will be up.  You like everyone else will wonder how you could have been so gullible. 

There has never been any consensus among the scientific community about Anthropogenic Global Warming theory, because there has never ever been any empirical scientific evidence to support the fraudulent assertions of the UN IPCC.

The leaders of the world’s major (CO2) emitting countries, Messrs Modi, Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping are doubtless already aware of this.  That is why they are likely laughing at our leaders’ stupidity and why Putin is building floating nuclear power stations for the frozen Arctic regions (to ensure cooling water intakes cannot be iced up) while also completing his fleet of huge nuclear powered ice-breakers to cope with what they believe will be the cold of an unfolding Grand Solar Minimum (each ship has greater cost and tonnage than New Zealand’s entire Cook Strait ferry fleets) .  Forget what they say, look at what they are doing.  Their actions are informed by the expectation of cold rather than warmth.  But I don’t wish to buy into whether that will eventuate, although the change they expect seems on track at this point.

The major net CO2 emitters are clearly being differently advised to you, along the lines of this semi-audible 15-minute video clip below.  (Hint … this Russian expert is difficult to understand so you would be well advised to pause the video at each new slide he presents and read the slide while muting his talk.)  He is probably reading directly from it because of his limited English language skills.  At 3.00minutes his graph of the Vostok ice core analysis explains why during the Pleistocene era (the last 2,7 million years) CO2 has never influenced the global climate.  If you also look closely at the graph at 15-mins 23 secs, you will see the reduction in solar activity is exactly today what he predicted many years ago and then consistent again, during his talk in 2014 during the active peak of solar cycle 24.  He has the credibility of any scientist who can predict what is happening to the climate, using the “space weather” to confidently show his client, the Government of the Russian Federation, what they can expect.

Dr Habibulo Abdussamatov has been Director of the Pulkovo observatory and he ran the Russian scientific programme for the International Space Station.  His forecasts for a looming Grand Solar Minimum and “little Ice Age” date back many years and have in November 2019, finally been confirmed by NOAA and NASA.  I guess those two organisations are both now trying to work out how to escape their roles in the UN IPCC conspiracy as this email is being written.

For the last few years I have been monitoring the accuracy of Dr Abdussamatov’s predictions from the data shown on www.spaceweather.com .

Also from the work of several others.

At the end of June 2020 the world is still warm, if marginally cooler than it was during the previous months, however, the highly subjective and grossly inaccurate models that the UN IPCC use as the basis for their fraud are no substitute for the observed data.  This unimpeachable graph from the NASA satellites below shows the climate isn’t facing unprecedented warmth, despite deliberate lies to the contrary.  Nor is there any climate crisis as the changes are within natural variability.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_June_2020_v6-550x317.jpg

The UN IPCC’s accepted models show three times the warming shown in the above graph.  You back their inaccurate and subjective models, I back the empirical data. 

The first news organisation or political party to agree to widely publish the attached page will get access to the “smoking gun” evidence that I hold…. before you do.

Yours sincerely

John Rofe

Private Fraud Investigator

See article on why whistleblowers are not heart: Many Whistleblowers – Yet Nothing to be Heard

===========================

A TALE OF FRAUD, COMPLICITY AND ARRANT STUPIDITY

THE GREAT UN IPCC GLOBAL WARMING FRAUD AND ITS NEW ZEALAND AGENCY

As Albert Einstein is reputed to have said: 

“The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.”

Now think it through for yourself:

It is illogical to consider that three relatively ineffectual human-influenced greenhouse gases which in total are less than 4% of the volume of the far more potent gas (water vapour) can drive climate change, just because a group of bureaucrats at the United Nations say that it is “settled science”.  If one investigator, acting alone, can see through this fraud, then the New Zealand scientists have not performed any effective due diligence.

The Great Global Warming Fraud costs OECD countries between USD1-2 trillion every year.

The most important things you need to know are:

  • Methane and Nitrous Oxide have never had any proven impact on the earth’s climate.
  • Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (“CO2”) is a more prolific greenhouse gas but…
    • There is no empirical scientific evidence that CO2 has ever had a material effect on earth’s climate.  The UN and their supporters have never offered any. Nor can they.
    • The proportion of CO2 emissions that humans influence is less than 5% of the total.
    • The main source of CO2 emissions is “ocean out-gassing” when it is warm.
    • CO2 is subject to the Beer-Lambert Law of Physics and therefore any thermal impact was almost saturated at the pre-industrial atmospheric level of 280ppm in 1850. 
    • CO2 is not a pollutant and “zero carbon” entails the end of all complex life on earth.
  • There was never any consensus to support this fraud…  http://www.petitionproject.org/
  • There is no climate crisis…  https://clintel.org/world-climate-declaration/
  • Plants thrive with three times current levels of atmospheric CO2, (arguably in short supply).
  • The “Milankovich cycles” drive the 100,000-year climate cycles of ice ages and inter-glacials.
  • In between, climate change is dominated by the sun which supplies 99.5% of earth’s energy.
  • The Solar Cycles conform to the Holocene pattern of 200-year periods of extreme cold.
  • The great majority of the earth’s population is led by people who don’t bow to this fraud.
  • Few of those who signed up to the Paris accords have either the intention or ability to comply.  It is impossible for New Zealand, even with total support, to get any value from this.

I warned the Government in 2018 of their likely complicity in a serious fraud.  The Minister prevaricated so I warned him in 2019 of the actionable basis for a possible fraud complaint. 

As a result of their intransigence, I now see no alternative than to accuse the Right Honourable Jacinda Ardern and the Honourable James Shaw of both fraud and deceptive and miss-leading conduct.  I stand ready to support those serious accusations, as and when called upon to do so.

John Rofe, Private Fraud Investigator                                                        Auckland, New Zealand,  10.7.2020

From: John Rofe [mailto:jcrofe@xtra.co.nz]
Sent: Tuesday, 28 January 2020 12:40 p.m.
To: ‘james.shaw@parliament.govt.nz’; ‘jacinda.ardern@parliament.govt.nz’; ‘Rt. Hon. Winston Peters’; ‘shane.jones@parliament.govt.nz’
Cc: ‘Hon Simon Bridges’; ‘simeon.brown@national.org.nz’; ‘Todd Muller’; ‘Hon Scott Simpson’; ‘alfred.ngaro@parliament.govt.nz’
Subject: Really Big frauds inevitably require bigger and bigger lies…then the child soldiers are weaponised once the biggest lie of all loses its credibility

Hi Politicians,

Each of you, by signature to the Zero Carbon legislation is now guilty of fraud; and of both complicity in, and actively promoting carbon trading Ponzi schemes.  These are criminal offences and I am directly accusing you of at least being accessories to criminality, along with Antonio Guterres and his fellow travellers.

I have told you before, there is a ripeness of time for all frauds to be laid bare to public scrutiny and opprobrium.   So you need to come clean.

If not, then gather your evidence (if any real evidence exists) and lets litigate.  I simply want evidence that human CO2 emissions have any material effect on climate change.  After two years of asking for this I will continue to accuse you of fraud until you deliver it.  As a taxpayer I am entitled to an explanation for your actions – as is everyone.

From 15+ years of my research into the spurious UN IPCC claims, I have found there is no justification for any spending on attempting to reduce “climate change” because the only measurable effects of the human use of the fossil fuels since 1850 has been the increase in atmospheric CO2, the increased wealth and well-being of all humanity from abundant and cheap energy and the greening of planet earth as a result of increased atmospheric CO2.  But because of the long duration of CO2 within the atmosphere, and because human actions account for less than 4.3% of all CO2 emissions (as accepted by UN IPCC) there is absolutely no possibility of confidence that a reduction in human emissions could cause the future level of atmospheric CO2 to fall.  Natural variability could even cause it to increase, despite controlled draconian global attempts at human reduction, which will never happen.

As there are still far more countries planning to increase CO2 emissions than those trying either successfully or unsuccessfully to control them, there is zero chance of any credible reduction in human emissions being made within the next 10-20 years.

The only thing your misguided actions can achieve is to destroy the reputation of science and the scientific method, to go hand in hand with destruction of our economy.  All this to bring about the enrichment of a few of your fellow travellers and higher energy costs for those least able to afford them.

Each adult human inhales a tiny 400 ppm of CO2 to go with 20% O2.  We exhale air heated to body temperature, with 100% relative humidity and CO2 emissions at 4% (or 40,000ppm).  So our inhalations cleanse and oxygenate our blood and we emit 100 times the CO2 we inhaled.  The oxygen exhaled is reduced to 15% or less.  Given the weight of CO2, we each exhale about 360kgs of CO2 per annum.  Animals many time more – or less.  What do you want to do?  Tax us for our exhalations?

Contrary to your advice from the UN IPCC and your ignorant cabal of “junk” scientists, (by both satellite imagery and experimentation) the increase in atmospheric CO2 has already benefitted all plant life, and will continue to do so.  It increases the vigour of plant growth and makes all plants more drought resistant.  There is and has never been any evidence that CO2 is a pollutant and together with water and oxygen, CO2 is one of three reasons that complex life exists on earth, whereas it exists nowhere else in the solar system.  If the atmospheric CO2 concentration falls to 150ppm  or less, then all life on earth will die and the carbon cycle may end.

We are carbon-based life forms and our extinction as an apex mammal would likely be an early effect of low atmospheric CO2.

There has never been any evidence that CO2 has either been a significant influence on climate change as atmospheric CO2 levels have always been a trailing indicator of major temperature fluctuations for as long as scientists could perform their experiments and calculations.  It is generally accepted that ocean de-gassing of CO2 occurs when it is warming, and conversely taking up more CO2  when the atmosphere has been cooling, is the cause for this.  There is even a lag time due to the fact that the ocean takes longer to take up heat and to cool, than does land.

The solar and space weather sciences, together with all the known history of the solar cycles and the Milankovich cycles are an extra-terrestrial cause for the variations in earth’s climate and together with the attempts within the seas and atmosphere to equalise heat distribution as the earth rotates, these account for climate change and  remove any justification for your erroneous presumption that humans have a significant effect on climate.  Localised warming yes, but it dissipates with no significant, measurable effect on climate change.  The extremely active solar cycles of the 20th century alone account for the increases in temperature of earth’s climate during the modern warm period, which despite the deliberate “official”  doctoring of temperature records have only achieved a total increase of 1.1 degree Centigrade between the year 1850 and December 2019.  That is, over a period of 169 years.  So the average increase during that period is well within natural variability.  Forecasts of sea level rise and atmospheric heating made by the UN IPCC junk scientists are simply ridiculous.  But they do show that junk scientists will do anything for money.  Yet still, one by one, they defect.

For politicians of any colour to support the fraud, you must first be prepared to believe that an improbable theory promulgated to advantage sectional interests is superior to the existence of the Beer-Lambert Law of science, because that law already relegates all increases in CO2 to having an inconsequential impact on thermal uptake and therefore climate, at even the pre-industrial levels (i.e. about 280ppm).  Atmospheric CO2 is already thermally saturated and can provide no significant future effect within an enormous time horizon.

You have been taken for idiots by a small group of extremely well paid and funded scientists, UN politicians and their bureaucrats, most of whom have no idea about climate science.  Simply put…from the Google search below… the “we” is you…

“Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive”

“(Sir Walter Scott) Whenever we deceive others, in order to make things better for ourselves in the moment, we deceive ourselves most of all.Oct 25, 2017 “

If you want to prove that human CO2 emissions have a dominant effect on climate, meet me in court.  I will be happy to litigate this as soon as you are ready.  I want a trial date…so come and get me before I go public, along the lines of my 1 January trial run in the NZ Herald.  A copy of that is at the top of the page.

Your fraud is now pretty obvious, and all the world’s delusional Greta Thunbergs cannot change the laws of physics and chemistry.  Now your “tangle” only gets tortuous as any fair-minded person would accept from the detail below…

Yours sincerely

John Rofe

The following advertisement was placed in the NZ Herald Public Notices on 1 January 2020:

From: John Rofe [mailto:jcrofe@xtra.co.nz]
Sent: Monday, 9 December 2019 2:08 p.m.
To: ‘Hon Simon Bridges’; ‘simeon.brown@national.org.nz’; ‘Todd Muller’; ‘Hon Scott Simpson’; ‘jacinda.ardern@parliament.govt.nz’; ‘Rt. Hon. Winston Peters’; ‘james.shaw@parliament.govt.nz’
Cc: ‘Terry Dunleavy’; ‘Peter J. Morgan’; ‘John Ansell’
Subject: Merry Christmas

Dear politicians,

In 2018 I warned of the dire consequences of failing to check the science you rely on for public policy settings over climate change.  I warned of the climate phenomena appearing that supported the narrative that we are probably moving into a Grand Solar Minimum.

In 2019 I laid complaints with the NZ Serious Fraud Office and the NZ Commerce Commission regarding your demonstrably false climate change narrative.  Naturally the complaints came to nothing.  I noted the radical shortening of the Northern growing seasons that have further reduced for each year from 2017, 2018 and again in 2019.  I commented on the signs that food shortages will soon loom large due to cold climate crop losses.  The only certainty at this point is that food costs will head much higher in 2020, because despite shortages, we humans can possibly adapt to cope and farmers will now start changing their cropping choices.

In 2020 the earth will reach the bottom of the eleven year solar cycle numbered 24, and it will start into solar cycle number 25.  So the best Christmas present I can offer you is to explain why the solar cycles are so important.  NASA, NOAA, the Russians and the Chinese have indicated that solar cycle 25 will be the least active for at least 100 years and many experts claim the unfolding Grand Solar Minimum will be a 200 year event.

1. The successive ice ages on earth during the 2.5 million year Pleistocene era have historically been triggered by what is known as Milankovich cycles (now generally accepted).  These consist of three separate cycles referred to as “the Tilt variation of earth from the sun”, “the Obliquity of earth’s motion through space”, and “Eccentricity of earth’s orbit around the sun”.  Of these three cycles the most influential is eccentricity and it takes around 100,000 years to happen.  Our civilisation has only begun during the latest 10-12,000 year interglacial period we live in called the “Holocene”, which has now lasted for at least 11,500 years.  A plunge into extreme glaciations is now probably due.  It was alluded to by the expert climate scientists during the 1970’s when earths average temperature had cooled by about 0.4 degrees C., from 1945.  No-one actually knows when it will happen.

2. Within the Holocene period,  The time of maximum warmth due to natural cycles is said to have already passed and it is considered that the Minoan Warm period 3,500 years ago was when that occurred.  So there is good evidence available that points to earth’s average temperatures today being some 2-3 degrees C. cooler than the Holocene temperature maximum.  There are possibly two certainties that will affect us.  The first is that the solar cycles with rising and falling levels of electromagnetic activity will drive the natural climate variations on planet earth as they will the climates of the other planets within our solar system since the beginning of time.  The second certainty (well an extremely high probability) is that at some point the Milankovich cycles will usher in the return of a period of extensive glaciation that is similar to previous ice ages.

3.  Full ice ages with extensive glaciations must be accepted as near certain extinction-level events.  The significance for New Zealand is less onerous than for others, yet that may mean a progressive but effective end to agriculture in the South Island…. as and when it occurs.

4. Our recorded history of the impact of varying levels of solar activity really began with the Maunder Minimum (1645AD-1715AD) but these provided a mathematical trace back to earlier Grand Solar Minimums before the birth of Christ.  Grand Solar Minimums coincide with the coldest periods of “the Little Ice Age” (which ran from about 1280AD – 1870AD).  They also align well with the record of famines and the fall of dynasties in China.  Both the Russian and the Chinese governments take the science behind Grand Solar Minimums very seriously and use the known cycles for their strategic planning.  As a result I commend the history of Grand Solar Minimums to the attention of yourselves and your Civil Defence personnel.

5.  Space exploration and remote climate monitoring only really began in about 1979.  Today the probing of solar influence is a regular event and the effect of the solar cycles on earth’s weather is well-known if suppressed by the mainstream media.

6.  So my Christmas present to you is to provide my personal understanding of how Grand Solar Minimums likely affect the earth’s climate

This will be extremely topical because many believe we have entered a cooling cycle that will last until 2055.  Some believe it will last much longer.  The data supports this conclusion.  The data does not support suggestions that humans, CO2 build-up and/or CH4 build-up cause climate change.  So I think this topic is well worth spending some time on.

The principle indicator of solar electromagnetic activity is visible to humans by virtue of the number of sunspots appearing on the face of the sun each day.  These are carefully counted and conform to maxima and minima based on the stage of the eleven year solar cycles.  Solar minimums are marked by no sunspots appearing for days or even months.  There is a huge and growing body of solid science surrounding this topic.

If we look at the regular eleven year minimum that occurred between solar cycles 23 and 24, there have been 70 sunspot free days in 2006 (or 19 %), in 2007 there have been 152 sunspot free days (or 42 %) and in 2008 there were 268 days (or 73%).  In the tail end of solar cycle 24 there have been considerably more sunspot-free days.  With 2017 at  104 days (compared with 70 in sc23), in 2018 at 220 days (compared with 152 in sc23).  With the year almost up in 2019 the percentage of spot-free days already stands at 76% compared with 73% in 2008.  This signals how the sun is rapidly becoming less active.  From the attached link to a schematic of solar cycles you can see how the eleven year solar cycles vary and in particular the low sunspot numbers of the Dalton Minimum in the early 19th century.

https://spaceweather.com/glossary/sunspotnumber.html

The reduced solar activity has a number of effects.  First the Total Solar Insolation which strikes earth’s atmosphere is reduced.  The second is that the earth’s Thermosphere tends to thin and become colder.  This  variation to earths outer temperature is indicative of what is to come… as we move towards the solar minimum in 2020…

“Thermosphere Climate Index
today: 3.26×1010 W Cold
Max: 49.4×1010 W Hot (10/1957)
Min: 2.05×1010 W Cold (02/2009)
explanation | more data: gfx, txt
Updated 08 Dec 2019”

With reduced solar activity, the solar wind drops.  It is the solar wind which keeps cosmic rays from flooding the galaxy.  The solar wind is also the reason the tails of comets point away from the sun and not at the direction the comet has come from.  So a key measure of the space weather is the solar wind strength and density…

“Solar wind
speed: 353.3km/sec
density: 5.0protons/cm3
explanation | more data
Updated: Today at 2116 UT”

There are always cosmic rays intruding in our atmosphere and they result in the increased nucleation of water vapour into low level clouds.  The cloud cover is the primary reflective umbrella for earth, with usually about 65% cloud cover.  So only about 56% of the sun’s rays hit the earth’s surface and any contribution to increasing cloud cover has a net cooling effect.

The Earth is once again being bombarded by the highest intrusion of cosmic rays for the space age…

https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2019/02/21/cosmic-rays-increasing-for-the-4th-year-in-a-row/

This below is a snap shot of the current stats from www.spaceweather.com that suggest to me the highest influx of galactic cosmic rays will occur in 2020-2021.

“Oulu Neutron Counts
Percentages of the Space Age average:
today: +10.9% Very High
7-day change: +3.3%
Max: +11.7% Very High (12/2009)
Min: -32.1% Very Low (06/1991)
explanation | more data
Updated 08 Dec 2019 @ 1800 UT”

The solar electromagnetic variation affects earth’s magnetosphere and there is some evidence that the tectonic plates are affected by the changed gravitational effects and by the effect of cosmic rays on sub-surface magma.  However I am not sure how reliable the correlations are between Grand Solar Minimums and volcanism.  Even so the fact that 80% of all volcanoes are under the oceans and they have the potential to heat deep ocean water in a way the surface temperatures cannot, suggests they may have a far greater impact on New Zealand’s eventual weather than anyone acknowledges.  Our climate is maritime by nature, so we are less likely to be affected by cooling solar influences while our oceans remain warm.

So to summarise, the likely effects of the space weather on the climate of earth includes:

1. Variations in Total Solar Insolation (not very large but certainly these are grossly under-rated by the UN IPCC).

2. Variations in the Thermosphere Climate Index because when it cools and thins, the loss of heat at night via infra-red radiation will be greater.

3. Variations in the cosmic ray influx affecting the formation of low level cloud.  This is a climatic feature attributed to large scale flooding and heavy snows during Grand Solar Minimums.

4.  There is a poorly understood effect on both the Northern hemisphere and Southern hemisphere jet streams which leads to them slowing and meandering closer to the Equator.  This leads to reduced temperatures where the loops venture into lower latitudes and higher  temperatures in the higher latitudes when the jet streams venture outside their normal routes.  Historically, we are told this accounts for the massive floods of the so-called “Dark Ages” and the “Little Ice Age”.

From what I can tell from the historical records, the advent of a 200 year cyclic Grand Solar Minimum doesn’t seem to dramatically alter the earth’s average temperature, but it does alter the climate of normally temperate or warm zones.  Hence the snowing in places like the Serengeti, the Sahara and Saudi Arabia in 2018.

In 2019 the effects of the “Eddy” Grand Solar Minimum have become obvious and this has led to recognition by NASA  that the earth is headed for a period of cooling.  Yet all mention of the solar cycles is still absolutely banned from mention in the mainstream media.

Russia and China are already taking emergency steps to protect their food supplies.

Yet you remain asleep at the wheel.   New Zealand is exposed, despite the kindness of our maritime climate.

So may I suggest you give this some thought when you are choosing what to read during your Christmas holidays.  Books by John L Casey such as “Cold Sun” or “Dark Winter” from your local library could be a good start.

Anyway,  I have retired as a Justice of the Peace to eliminate any suggestions of conflict of interest when I plan my year of action.  So 2020 is going to be a whole new “ball game” for me.

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR

Yours sincerely

John Rofe

From: John Rofe [mailto:jcrofe@xtra.co.nz]
Sent: Tuesday, 12 November 2019 9:46 a.m.
To: ‘news@tvnz.co.nz’; ‘news@nzherald.co.nz’; ‘news@heraldonsunday.co.nz’; ‘newstips@stuff.co.nz’
Cc: ‘jacinda.ardern@parliament.govt.nz’; ‘james.shaw@parliament.govt.nz’
Subject: The abject fear of answering three simple questions

Hi Newshounds,

Humour me.  You will find it worthwhile…because you too were either fooled into drinking the populist Koolaid about climate change, or there are powers that control your news reporting that make our world an Orwellian nightmare, and our freedoms lost.  More factual evidence has been presented in previous submissions .

We have entered an era where there are today, arguably more than five times the number of “scientists” who have ever lived before them.  Many ignore the “scientific method” when it is more convenient to “lose it”.  The contestability test is subordinated to the popularity of a theory.

They now tell us which toothpaste to use and which drugs are good and which are bad,  and in most cases they espouse an undisclosed business, or political reason for doing so.  This deception is nowhere more prevalent than the area of climate science where fake news is promoting an orthodox agenda of various trans-national groups, and now this and its sub plots have become the biggest-ever fraud in human history.  Real conservation has been prostituted in favour of fakery.  Yet the science at the heart of the paradigm is missing and can never be discussed in polite company.

And now we have the 11,000 pseudo-scientists’ report – really a blog opinion piece with the “likes” of others signified – heralded as yet another scientific breakthrough.

This is the latest of the faux authoritative scientific studies… https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biz088/5610806

The surveyor of opinions was an obscure forestry blog site at Oregon U., masquerading as a reputable international group of scientists,  and an initial critique is contained here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs3ZPGLPiss&feature=youtu.be

The survey was treated as a learned and peer reviewed research paper, whereas it was really a simple survey of folk who may for whatever reason be willing to share the writers’ opinions and while ‘Professor Mickey Mouse’ and ‘Professor Albus Dumbledore’ of Harry Potter fame were originally respondents, the list was edited to remove anyone who didn’t look worth the “powder and shot” to present their survey. The pruning supposedly was very severe.

This is a critique…  https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/who_are_these_11000_concerned_scientists.html

To check the criticism I have just waded through the entire 323 pages of the names of the “11,000” so-called “knowledgeable scientists” (following editing) providing the latest faux warning of climate Armageddon at this link below.  

 

The kindest things I can say about the New Zealand based contributors to the survey is this:

1. They seem to be well educated, but generally do not seem to have relevant experience in the subject matter of the dire warning to humanity.

2. I doubt they can have known that they were click bait for promoting eugenics as part of this.

3. Of the 230+  Kiwis who put their names, occupations and employment details forward in the survey, there would be less than 5 (possibly only 2) with relevant climate science qualifications and experience who I would wish to consult on this subject.

4. The largest cadre were computer scientists, either Emeritus Professors, Professors, Associate Professors, computer analysts or Lecturers (I suppose they must therefore receive some NZ Government  incentive for noting their agreement to the questionnaire).  Lots of people who work for the NZ Institute for Plant and Food Research popped up too….did someone organise mass support for the individual “likes”? 

5. I couldn’t find any names of the NZ climate scientists I am familiar with.

But I will give the Kiwi respondents the benefit of the doubt because among these folk, there must surely be at least one who can answer the following questions that none of the known climate scientists can answer (certainly not the PM’s science adviser – Professor Juliet Gerrard – see also the letter from the CEO of the Environomics (NZ) Trust above):

1.  What empirical evidence is there that changes in the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide are able to alter the climate and what evidence is there that it ever has to date?  (After all, atmospheric CO2 has increased from 280ppm since the end of “the Little Ice Age” in 1880, to 415ppm at the present date so surely there is clear evidence one way or the other?)

2. What evidence is there that human emissions of CO2 and CH4 act as atmospheric pollutants?

3. What evidence is there that it is possible for humans to reduce the atmospheric level of CO2 by a sufficient amount to reduce the Global Mean Surface Temperature by even one tenth of one degree Centigrade below that which would otherwise obtain from natural causes or the actions of others, by the year 2100?

In 2020 these questions will be a big deal for the PM and the Minister of Climate Change.  You see I am not only a private fraud investigator but I already warned them last year that these are essential planks that support the legitimacy or criminality of their actions.  Failing to answer which, they are at best promoting a fraud, because you see, they say they are implementing policies because the UN IPCC says they should.  No-one, anywhere in the world has, or would be brave enough (or perhaps stupid enough) to provide answers to the three questions I have been asking over the 40 years that this runaway deception has been rolling….

If I were sick of drinking beer and said the only reason I drink it is because “Big Terry” drinks it, that would be OK.   But I am not hurting anyone by failing to make enquiry of my options.

But the response from the Minister of Climate Change (that I have in writing) admits he is committed to his course of action because the UN IPCC and their tame cabal of supposedly orthodox scientists says he should.   And that is not OK because it is the least financially robust of our citizens who will ultimately bear the cost of this fraud.

So who is running this government programme?    PM Jacinda Ardern regards this “fraud” (my word not hers) as her administration’s defining issue.  So why is she going to waste billions of our money to satisfy her and past PM Helen Clark’s Socialist mates at the UN – when there is not a scintilla of scientific justification and yet huge cost?   The ploy of claiming the science is proven when it isn’t, is not a tenable position for our activist government to take when damaging whole industry sectors.  Ministers of the Crown have a fiduciary duty of care to act for proper purpose and I argue that in the case of their climate change bigotry they are not…or at least cannot possibly….demonstrate they are doing so.

In a detailed and fully-referenced paper, Wellington researcher/analyst Barbara McKenzie has published a withering rebuttal of the New Zeaand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s comments in a speech lauding ther passage in the NZ Parliament of the so-called Zero Carbon Bill.Ms McKenzie writes: “Jacinda Ardern calls [the bill] the ‘nuclear moment for this generation.” What she means, of course, is that Parliament is in effect nuking the New Zealand economy and the New Zealand environment on the back of what is frequently referred to as the greatest hoax in the history of science.”Later in the paper, Ms McKenzie says any MP who claims to take an interest in the climate debate must know “Jacinda’s speech was a pack of lies.”

LINK

If you look at my previous correspondence it isn’t that I have not given the Government fair warning.  What we, the people must demand is the truth about the core issue.  This is not about partisan politics nor a criticism of National and NZ First folding their principles to a wasteful piece of legislation.

If the answers to three simple questions are provided and these do actually hold water, I will go quietly into the night.

But remember that in exercising your power of editing or ignoring this information, you have already, by accident or design, ignored numerous warnings of climate Armageddon that have been proven wrong year after year, since 1989 and some before, including Prince Charles, the Duke of Edinburgh, several heads of the United Nations and heads of global corporations.

So we have a dominant paradigm that is nothing more than a 40 year fraud, with numerous subsidiary frauds appended to it.

As Jack Nicholson’s character said in “A Few Good Men”,  “The truth?  You can’t handle the truth!”

Yours sincerely

John Rofe

From: John Rofe [mailto:jcrofe@xtra.co.nz]
Sent: Saturday, 19 October 2019 5:55 p.m.
To: ‘todd.muller@parliament.govt.nz‘; ‘scott.simpson@parliament.govt.nz‘; ‘simon.bridges@national.org.nz‘; ‘simeon.brown@national.org.nz‘
Subject: A short look at Vladimir’s view of the Eddy Grand Solar Minimum contrasted with that of a knowledgeable US farmer
Importance: High

Gentlemen,

It is still too early to see what sort of damage is occurring in the Northern hemisphere due to the approach of the Eddy Minimum.  But the folk at the web site Adapt 2030 have the best window on the 2019 crop losses at this 4 minute video below.  The losses in 2017 and 2018 were not visible because inventory movements masked them.  This year may be the first of many where that becomes impossible…

https://youtu.be/hUOBKTarY5Y

The weather these folk speak of is only relevant, insofar as the early autumnal blizzards are covering crops before they can be harvested.  So every USDA and other forecast of crop levels is being sequentially reduced as they factor in more and more bad news.  How serious will it get? It is too early to tell.

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin know exactly what is happening.  The Chinese have more than 2,000 years of records of solar cycles and can point to the critical impacts of Grand Solar Minimums, like the current one.  There is a near precise correlation between these and the famines that have affected China for the last two millennia .  Matching that timing has been the sequential overthrow of the Chinese dynasties.  Xi Jinping’s planning is obvious and has been underway for at least ten years.  He knows they have not done enough and are being forced to talk trade with Trump in order to get supplies from a US President who doesn’t yet know that he may not have the supplies to meet even a USD50 billion order (or so the American farmers believe).  But for his government Xi knows what is coming is a potentially existential threat for the CCP.

But today I will restrict this email to Russia.  Their space agency collects the same space weather data that NASA does in the USA.  Putin’s principle adviser if the head of the Pulkovo observatory, and the head of the Russian space programme for the International Space Station – a guy called Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov.

I don’t want you to read this stuff at the link below in detail, but a glance would be informative.  It is indicative of the depth of understanding the Russians have for a subject that is strictly banned in the Western media while, the UN pursues global hegemony – focused on warming rather than either the facts or the science.  This is a link to some of his research…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khabibullo_Abdussamatov

and

https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/2011474380_Habibullo_I_Abdussamatov

The actions of the Russian Government are pretty transparent to anyone monitoring the international media (that part which is not affected by Soros, Turner, the Rothschilds and their affiliated three deep state cabals).   While PM Scott Morrison of Australia recently took a firm line with the UN interference in Australian policy two weeks ago (and it never got into the NZ media), three months ago a lecture was given to the Russian press corps by Sergei Lavrov on what the government saw as the biggest existential threat to the Russian Federation – the New World Order being promoted by the UN and the same deep state actors that control the Western media.

Meantime, President Putin has focused his international diplomacy on making friends with every country to the South of Russia and with China.  The Middle East is the new theatre of influence as Russia realises growing seasons will keep shortening.  The strategy to capture the Crimean Peninsula was part of this as was his support for Syrian President Assad.  Murmansk in the West, Syria in the South, Iran in the near East and Vladivostok in the East are strategically linked to the North by his six tiny ice-breakers (a joke)… each has two large nuclear power plants pushing huge propellers, and because the Western Siberian oilfield is substantially depleted, they are following the field offshore into the Kara Sea.  So he has oil tankers to be towed through sheet ice from time to time.  Here is a short video of one of them…does it look like he expects the Arctic Sea Ice to disappear any time soon?

https://youtu.be/bKaVhXn49xY

At home the emergency food planning has been in place for some time.  While Putin has made a big thing about helping the Chinese out, his resource is limited.  But the build of granaries has been well under way and with Grand Solar Minimums the cold is not linear, there will be good years during the 11 year solar cycles and bad years …but more bad years than usual.  Subject to restrictions and embargoes he is reducing the US dollar debt he is holding and converting it into gold, increasing Russia’s bullion holdings, year on year.  He has built and deployed one floating nuclear power station which will be based in the Russian Arctic.  More may follow.

Elsewhere in the Northern hemisphere, regional rivals, PM Modi and PM Khan also understand what is happening but their preparations are less effectual.  Already hit by extensive flooding, peasant farmers will do the best they can.

The farming communities in Europe, USA, Japan and elsewhere are waking up because farmers are on the front line.  Every time there are crop losses the farmers become twitchy.  They lose their farms.  In New Zealand, ours’ is a maritime climate and with warm seas (relatively) we have a farming holiday for a little while longer.

But for the entire continent of North America on average, the 2019 harvest will be a huge disaster.  We have not been allowed by our news media to know that the period from October 2018 to May 2019 has been the coldest and also the wettest in over 100 years.  With growing seasons shortening each year for the last three years.  The Chinese are aware of this and yet they will still try to wring every shipload of oats, soya beans, corn, rice, hogs etc from the USA that they can get.  They have also increased their buying from Canada, who will similarly experience difficulties meeting the Chinese purchase orders.  This will affect New Zealand because when we changed Canterbury farms from cereals to dairy, we became dependent on Australia.  This year Australia plans to import from Canada and will not be an exporter at all.

Some North American farmer blog sites are full of the unfolding drama.  This particular farmer in the link below usually chronicles the moves in the weather extremes and comments on the harvest data.  But in this link he unloads on the causation.  From my knowledge of what is happening, he isn’t far wrong…

https://youtu.be/jbsslmdxvhc

The Eddy Grand Solar Minimum is something we cannot change but we can plan for how it will affect our country.  Perhaps the first thing for your shadow ministers is to understand that Anthropogenic Global Warming is just a fraud.  It has nothing to do with the science or climate, because it is just about transference of the power of national governments to the UN.

The second thing is to have at least one of each of your assistant’s, take an interest in the data appearing on  www.spaceweather.com .  The left hand third of the web site pages is devoted to the unfolding statistics.  The sun is now the quietest it has been since the beginning of the space age and this solar minimum is still deepening.

Can I draw your attention to my summary of the cause of climate change as per the two MS Word documents attached above.

You will see from that and the Farmer’s graphs that the true cause of the “Modern Warm Period” following the end of the “Little Ice Age” in about 1850, was the extraordinary solar activity of the 20th century.  The sun was then its most active in at least 4,000 years.  That isn’t hypothesis, it is published solar science.

I do hope you make good use of this or at least have your staff do so.

By Christmas we will probably know the true dimension of the unfolding crop losses.  I hope I am wrong.  The last time there was a Grand Solar Minimum (the Dalton Minimum) the global population was only about 950 million.  Then most people grew their own food and did not have brittle supply chains and JIT planning.  How will we get on with 7.7 billion?

It will be bad, but just how bad?  We must wait for Christmas.

Yours sincerely

John Rofe

A Concerned Citizen.

From: John Rofe [mailto:jcrofe@xtra.co.nz]
Sent: Monday, 30 September 2019 9:57 a.m.
To: ‘jacinda.ardern@parliament.govt.nz’; ‘james.shaw@parliament.govt.nz’
Cc: ‘Rt. Hon. Winston Peters’; ‘newstips@stuff.co.nz’; ‘news@tvnz.co.nz’; ‘news@heraldonsunday.co.nz’; ‘news@press.co.nz’; ‘news@nzherald.co.nz’; ‘Mafi Tu’inukuafe’; ‘contact@comcom.govt.nz’
Subject: The truth always comes out sooner or later

Dear Prime Minister and Minister of Climate Change,

This email will provide people with an opportunity to choose sides, whether to be “part of the problem or part of the solution”.

I hope those who receive this long message will take the time to print it and its attachments, and also take the time to view any video footage it contains.  You have had time to verify the science and there seems no point in allowing you to continue to attack the New Zealand economy in support of whatever your true ends may be.  So I will publish this as widely as I can.

This email is about the New Zealand section of the biggest and most egregious political crime in human history, now requiring an urgent political solution.  But I think many who receive this email will already know that.  You also know that.  Frankly the science is not complicated, it is simple.

Last week a sub-set of the world’s real scientists provided a rebuttal to the climate alarmism you espouse so fervently…

 

Yet you will ignore it and shrug off its logic.  For me?  I am just a fraud investigator, so I have sat between the competing perspectives of science, to form my own view of the facts irrespective of my financial interests.  You will ignore these at your peril.

Please find attached above in two single page Word documents, the core summary of the climate facts, together with a copy of the satellite temperatures since the tamper-proof records began in 1979.  There is no climate crisis.  There is no man-made global warming.  There is no need to demonise the naturally occurring gases CO2 and CH4 as pollutants, when they are both essential to the survival of all species on planet earth and already in short supply for plant life.  There is no need to drive worried farmers to either depression or off their land.

My allegations of fraud against you are simple and easily substantiated by the facts of your complicity.

Supporting Background Information

15 years ago I started investigating this criminality from the standpoint of a believer in Anthropogenic Global Warming theory and wanted to know why people rebelled against a logical perspective of science that was claimed to be so settled.  Alas, the first thing I discovered was the only reason the science was claimed to be “settled” was because it couldn’t stand any real scrutiny.  It was always a simple political scam as scams go – as simple as the story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, where the mythical tailors wanting the king’s money, claimed only fools could see the King was wearing no clothes at all. 

So by 2003 when the theory was comprehensively disproven, the UN IPCC backers changed the term for “Global Warming” to “Climate Change” and then set out to claim there was a consensus supporting the science…. and then began to demonise the vast body of serious scientists as “Climate Change Deniers”.   The UN IPCC and their backers’ power base is so huge,  obvious and corrupt, as they secured for their “anointed ones” 3 Nobel Peace Prizes and 1 Nobel Prize for Economics…and locked false scientific claims within Wikipedia.  From BBC to “Stuff”  no major media organisation will now allow the truth to be spoken. 

How sick is that?  Science is meant to thrive on scrutiny, yet this junk science does not.

The Great Global Warming Fraud has only been possible for four reasons…

1. We humans do warm our surroundings with a mixture of exotic and natural fuels.

2. We humans have no idea about the composition and chemistry of the air we breathe or how our exhalations are valued by other life forms.  Air is simply taken for granted.

3. We humans are so successful that since 1750, humans and their livestock have gone from comprising about 7% of the world’s land mammals to over 98%;  leaving a trail of species extinctions and pollution behind as we have done so.  Now we worry about resource depletion and over-full waste sinks.

4. We want to do the right thing to “save the planet” and eagerly follow any sensible consensus on how to do that.

More than a year ago I started writing to the three of you (our NZ Government’s coalition leaders), to warn you that you could soon – by your actions – become accessories to the Great Global Warming Fraud.  This was met with distain as per the attached message from Minister Shaw who seemed unfazed by the allegations of fraud I made… (see the Adobe file linked above).  But I did recognise that as a well-rehearsed legal defence against probable fraud charges.

Because your responsible Minister prevaricated, I laid a complaint with the NZ Serious Fraud Office in April 2019 and followed that up with complaints about the misconduct of your Minister of Climate Change (and his political party) to the NZ Commerce Commission.  On 15 May 2019, (see the fourth linked Word document above) I made sure you understood the substance of my complaint, by copy of a letter sent to Minister Shaw and your Deputy PM, which noted three causes of potential criminal action regarding your deliberate and false misrepresentations and the fact that criminality in another jurisdiction is no excuse for committing crimes within New Zealand… 

The causes of action where you now stand accused ( or from your point of view, seek vindication) are simply… 

1.            That changes in the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide (“CO2”) have no impact on climate change.

2.            That carbon dioxide (“CO2”) is not a pollutant, but a gas essential for all life on earth. CH4 rapidly converts to H2O and CO2, upon contact with the atmosphere.

3.            Your “climate change” spending cannot possibly have any measurable impact on earth’s climate.

You, together with your international associates have dreamed up a non-existent crisis that will soon be revealed for all to see as a simple fraud from which the various Ponzi schemes grow and for a time will thrive – but to no legitimate purpose.   When the weather once again changes into severe cooling mode, to reflect the ever-changing solar cycles that drive earth’s climate, the public will react against your obvious lies and lose confidence in you and all politicians. 

Because I have some investments which may already be benefitting from the Great Global Warming Fraud, I was persuaded by some friends to call you to account.  Frankly,  I don’t want to benefit from your criminality, if your actions are proven to be so.  Nor do I want to abandon my renewable energy investments. 

But how did I go from being a believer in the well-orchestrated  lies, to being an active sceptic, now demanding your immediate resignation?

1.  In 1998 a survey of reputable scientists was performed that revealed 31,487, including more than 7,000 with PhD qualifications, had no time for the theory that the modern warming is man-made.

2.  I found the regularly used mantra that  “97% of all scientists supporting the UN IPCC science”  to be a subsidiary fraud and when I looked at the sources being given for the fictional consensus, I found them to be total garbage.

3.  The hyping of sea level change to a height which is thermodynamically impossible was a worry for me.

4.  The reduction in Arctic sea ice extent is being over-hyped.  These days the UN IPCC simply chooses dates to begin sea ice graphs at a date when the ice extent and thickness reached a cyclic maximum and thereby uses the subsequent downward trend to deliberately mislead the public.  The UN IPCC sea ice graphs begin in 1979 when the earth’s climate had cooled significantly from the early 1940’s.  If they had started in 1972 they would see that NASA has satellite photos of the sea ice at the end of that summer melt that were almost identical to the extent the satellite photo at the end of the 2018 summer melt.  I have viewed all those photos and am aware the sea ice extent was far less in 1941 and 1942 when the Arctic convoys ferried supplies from the UK to Murmansk.

5.  In the last 3 years the ice load on Greenland has grown by about 1.2 trillion tonnes.  Where is that in the news?  It does have an effect on sea levels whereas sea ice has no effect.

6.  The polar bears were being hunted to extinction in 1967 and so in 1973 the Arctic Treaty nations placed a moratorium on hunting, save for limited Inuit rights in Canada.  Since then their numbers have grown to the point where they now actively predate on Inuit villages, who want culling to be reintroduced.  Polar bears survived and prospered during the Holocene climate maximum called the “Minoan Warm Period”, through the “Roman Warm Period” and the “Mediaeval Warm Period”.  These warm periods were all considerably warmer than our climate is today.  So fear mongering about the impact on polar bears from loss of sea ice is facile.  The same with so-called “all time heat records” that can only be described in derisory terms. 

6.  When polar bears attack the huge herds of walrus on dry land, some walrus have throughout recorded history been seen to get pushed off cliffs by the crush of others.  They breathe the same air that we do so they prefer to haul out in large numbers (for protection) on dry land near their shallow feeding grounds.  We are told they are sad about climate change.  How can they be?  They are thriving, just like the polar bears. 

7.  Obviously naive funding agencies can get any report they want from venal scientists if those scientists’ tenure is at stake or they are paid enough.  Lysenkoism is extant everywhere I look within the OECD and I despair when watching TV to see yet another phony scientist coming up with implausible studies, which have been funded on the sole basis that they will reinforce the UN IPCC disinformation.

What are the Russians, Indians and Chinese doing to comply with this man-made global warming hoax and with the Paris Accords?  Heck, they don’t even believe the UN IPCC dogma even though they profit from it.  They have each been preparing for the coming Grand Solar Minimum for at least the last 5-10 years.  Look at their preparations.  If you don’t believe me, you could try Googling  the name of  Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov (the scientist who runs the Pulkovo observatory and the Russia programmes on the International Space Station – Vladimir Putin listens to his advice) and you will be able to understand the Russian strategies in the Middle East, why they have built a fleet of nuclear powered ice breakers capable of towing oil tankers through 2 metre thick sheet ice, and why they needed to annex Crimea…all part of the same strategy.  “Winter is coming, Jon Snow!”

It is the same with China and their “String of Pearls” and Silk Road  construction,  together with the diversification of food sources into South America and Africa.  They are already in food trouble that will manifest this winter.  They have records that show whenever there has been a cyclic “Grand Solar Minimum” over the last 2,000 years there has also been both famine and the collapse of China’s major dynasties.  They accept Dr Abdussamatov’s conclusions, given the changes now underway.  I can neither confirm nor reject those forecasts of approaching cold, but you must be made aware that others who have expert knowledge now consider them valid and urgent.

Check this desperate cry for help from Australian sceptics as they pay higher and higher power prices that are based on policies grounded on fraud and disinformation…(This is shown in the third attached Word document above)…

How many of those 31, 487 scientists who have dissented from the UN IPCC’s  politically inspired disinformation programme are allowed to give TV or newspaper commentaries?  Only one in a thousand.  Each year, more of those who work on the mischievously inaccurate computer models on which the overhyped heating claims by the UN IPCC rest, defect to the sceptic camp providing information on how desperately flowed the models and resulting forecasts really are.  The sceptics are either ignored or driven from their jobs, denied publication of their learned, peer reviewed scientific papers and treated like “holocaust deniers” by the likes of smug, self satisfied media presenters who refer to their legitimate scepticism by the derogatory term “Climate Change Deniers”.  Sceptics are never allowed to write the truth about the subject of climate change by mainstream media publications (including such as the NZ Herald and other rags, in favour of “puff pieces” of no journalistic or scientific merit.  These do get taken to print without question or scrutiny, as feedstock of alarmism from overseas newspapers and such climate experts as Past PM Helen Clark.  But her late 2018 NZ Herald article did strike me as indicative that her actions should also have been under scrutiny during her term in office.

Finding such a  cloud of obfuscation  is “meat and veg.” to any true fraud investigator, this is the sort of stuff that points directly to a false narrative which is collapsing, as the lies become less and less credible to a greater proportion of those singled out to be its victims.

I believe I know what has caused the modern warming.  I believe I know what is going to cause the imminent period of cooling.   Sadly for whatever your political intentions may be, the feared cooling is already starting in the Northern hemisphere and were it not for the UN IPCC’s  PR machine, everyone would already know about the threat this cooling poses to global food supplies – all too soon. Perhaps that will change, but there are signs that earth’s Thermosphere is thinning and cooling, so if that worries the people at NASA and NOAA, it should concern you too.   If you actually do know this stuff, then throwing young school children into the front lines of your struggle looks more like an act of desperation and cowardice on your part … the last throw of the dice to deflect allegations of your government’s complicity in an international power play to assert UN control against the primacy of national sovereignty.

If you aspirations were honest, you would have asked the population to vote on whether they want our government to be dominated by the UN.  Instead you choose to prostitute climate science as if it were a global emergency that only the UN could fix.

But whether it is warming or cooling, the changes to earth’s climate are only resulting from natural causes.  If the truth does interest you, may I suggest you have your staff analyse and monitor the web site – www.spaceweather.com.  Even NOAA, an organisation closely enmeshed in the UN IPCC web of influence, acknowledges that it is the space weather that drives earth’s climate.  When you understand how that happens, you may understand why your political actions have been so egregious.

Your cohorts at the UN IPCC upped the ante last week, with their well-orchestrated disinformation.  Seemingly expecting those among us who have actually taken the time to check the science, to retreat under the onslaught of a hysterical teenager and her handlers’ fantasies – ably augmented by the catastrophic alarmism delivered by the usual UN IPCC suspects – yet with attribution to no-one of substance and only peer-reviewed by “partners in crime”.  This short video below captures the sequence including the obvious motivation, the lies and the truth, in one elegant 12 minute splurge…

https://youtu.be/cEs31hNMebg

The international resistance to your global and national scam has begun, and something approaching 50% of New Zealanders will already know or suspect the UN IPCC version of the truth is flawed, because many remember their tirade of concatenated alarmist scares have all failed to materialise.  Most people are now too scared to confess their appreciation of the truth in case you label their words as “Hate Speech”.   Yes, I too have a list of those UN IPCC linked alarmist lies that date back to 1989 when the UN IPCC first started.  But also beyond that to when the same “new World Order” posers were trying to set up a coming ice age as the platform for a UN global takeover…

https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-failed-eco-pocalyptic-predictions

Nowadays, many celebrities squander their good names and reputations to underwrite the fraud.  To what end?  They, and even Sir David Attenborough cannot possibly know the scientific facts, even though  they talk of the “settled science” with such authority.  That is, unless they too are implicated in the dastardly criminality. 

For Joseph Stalin, the use of children and adults who went along with him but were never really aware of what he was doing, led Stalin to coin the term “Useful Idiots”.  Are our MPs, as well as our own children and grandchildren to be treated as those too? 

I know you believe that because you are “saving the planet” you can alienate us all from the basic truths of science in the same fashion as Chairman Mao used the “Cultural revolution” for.  But that seldom works for long.  All you need to do is to provide us sceptics with empirical evidence which proves that changes in atmospheric CO2 cause climate change.  We will melt into the night if you do that.  But I know you cannot do that, because I am able to prove why CO2 – at its molecular level – cannot have any measurable effect on climate, compared say to clouds and water vapour.  The sceptics can never be met in a public debate for one reason, the UN IPCC is now unable to defend the indefensible.  If you feel lucky, try to prove me wrong.

So 30 years after the fraud was dreamed up, there is still no evidence that CO2 does what the UN IPCC says it does, and yet you are prepared to near-bankrupt this country because you conveniently claim you are only taking someone else’s lies on faith?  What sort of Prime Minister would someone be, if they did that?  For Minister of Climate Change  I envisage the title of “King Canute” will be used by the mob when it turns on him, once the true science is generally known.  Frankly the science is not complicated, it is simple.

I believe it is contrary to your fiduciary duty of care as PM to stir up fear among workers, farmers, parents and children alike, and for you to preside over an education system that teaches fake science.  Science is not a popularity contest, it is about facts.  Please also find below  a list that chronicles the truth about alarmist falsehoods, to set our children’s minds at ease. 

(Source of the following is Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun, 26 September 2019)

“

“·         You have never been less likely to die of a climate-related disaster. Your risk of being killed has fallen 99 per cent in the past century. Source: International Disaster Database.

·         You have never been more likely to live longer. Life expectancy around the world has risen by 5.5 years so far this century. Source: World Health Organisation.

·         We are getting fewer cyclones, not more. Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Bureau of Meteorology.

·         There is more food than ever. Grain crops have set new records. Source: Food and Agricultural Organisation.

·         The world is getting greener. Leaf cover is growing 3 per cent per decade. Source: NASA.

·         Low-lying Pacific islands are not drowning. In fact, 43 per cent – including Tuvalu – are growing, and another 43 per cent are stable. Source: Professor Paul Kench, University of Auckland.

·         Cold weather is 20 times more likely to kill you than hot weather. Source: Lancet, 20/5/2015

·         Global warming does not cause drought. Source: Prof. Andy Pitman, ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.

·         Australia’s rainfall over the past century has actually increased. Source: Bureau of Meteorology.

·         There are fewer wildfires. Around the world, the area burned by fire is down 24 per cent over 18 years. Source: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center et al.

·         Polar bear numbers are increasing, not decreasing. Source: Dr Susan Crockford.

“

Perhaps it is time for you to come clean.    But you must now defend your crime against the New Zealand people in your Parliament  or prove me wrong with the substance of my complaints to the SFO and ComCom.

I would be happy to be able to apologise to you and Minister Shaw, because I know from history that warmth is good… and that cold is very bad for humanity.

The next move is over to you and your parliamentary colleagues.

I hope you place some weight on the truth and avoid the urge to attack the messenger.  After all, I am only saying what many thousands of Kiwis would like to be saying to you.

Stop telling blatant lies.

Yours sincerely

John Rofe

An Extremely  Concerned New Zealand Citizen asking for the lies to stop.

=====================

From: John Rofe [mailto:jcrofe@xtra.co.nz]
Sent: Sunday, 28 July 2019 9:06 p.m.
To: ‘james.shaw@parliament.govt.nz’; ‘jacinda.ardern@parliament.govt.nz’
Cc: ‘Rt. Hon. Winston Peters’; ‘Hon Simon Bridges’; ‘Simeon Brown’; ‘peter.goodfellow@national.org.nz’; ‘Todd Muller’; ‘Mafi Tu’inukuafe’; ‘letters@nzherald.co.nz’; ‘letters@press.co.nz’; ‘newstips@stuff.co.nz’; ‘news@tvnz.co.nz’; ‘news@heraldonsunday.co.nz’
Subject: Time for the truth about the “Great Global Warming Hoax” to get a public hearing?

Dear Minister,

It is now a year since I explained to you and PM Ardern about your fraud, and explained the reasons why you should cease and desist.    I have summarised the position outlined in this email in a single page as per the last (Word) document attached above for circulation to the news media.  This lengthy email that follows, substantiates my short statement on such an extremely complicated topic.

My reason for writing this email to you is to ensure that you have the facts at your fingertips to avoid New Zealand becoming further embroiled in the “Great Global Warming” fraud, which is nothing more nor less than a globalist conspiracy orchestrated under the auspices of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“UN IPCC”).  But then, I suspect you already know this.  The fact the conspiracy is global does not in any way excuse your conduct.  By your actions, you and your government are already complicit, and you can no longer rely on the UN IPCC.

The “Great Global Warming” fraud now has an eerie similarity to the “South Sea Bubble” in the following respects…

  1. They were each the largest frauds in recorded history at the time they occurred and then, by the time they were revealed, caused great heart-break.
  2. Both frauds relied on the remoteness of the populace from the facts on the ground.  With the South Sea Bubble, it was geographical remoteness.  With the Great Global Warming fraud it is the scientific remoteness mixed with complexity of the fraud and the interwoven, related conspiracy at the United Nations (“UN”), as they attempt to hype a global emergency to justify their takeover of global government…all in the shaddows.
  3. In both cases the perpetrators have had an incomplete understanding of the true facts that made, or now makes discovery inevitable.

In fairness to those at the centre of the Great Global Warming fraud (whether they and you deserve fairness or not), they/you did not initially have access to all the data.  Furthermore, the very few complicit scientists involved at the outset in 1988 then fell under the sway of politicians progressively including such as (in sequence) John Holdren, Al Gore, Helen Clark, Barrack Obama and even David Attenborough  – all should have known better, with different degrees of ignorance or motivation, as they lent their reputations and legacies to this fraud in order to profit from it – either in terms of political power, or for financial benefit, or for both. 

This shambles evokes the memory of Dwight D. Eisenhower who warned upon his retirement as US President, against the use of political sponsorship for the scientific community who are then funded to distort science for political purposes (as first happened with the Trofim Lysenko fiasco in 20th Century Russia).  What is unusual about your fraud is that it is supported by globalist businessmen and financiers as well as a significant element of the climate science community.

Retired Professor Nils Axel Moerner of Sweden calls it what it is.  I found his frustration with the lies contained in the link below rather like my own. I can now, at last, easily prove that he is right in almost every respect….

https://youtu.be/W1PS9-oOfRw

The Professor is as unaware (as you seem to be) that this fraud is about to be unmasked for public distaste by the speed at which the latest Grand Solar Minimum is advancing.  While outfits like NASA and NOAA still tend to downplay the implications of the new and disastrously weak 11-year solar cycle number 25, their web sites contain the evidence that it is happening as I write this.  Disillusionment day for your public will likely be sometime in early 2020.

So far this year there have only been 11 sunspots.  The public can watch this looming solar minimum threat on a daily basis at www.spaceweather.com  if they have the time and inclination.

NASA suggests that the number of sun spots in sc25 will drop to 111, which is an extremely low level of solar activity.  However, the Russian and British scientists claim they will not exceed 50!  The first is on the level of the Dalton Minimum.  The second is the level of the Maunder Minimum.  Either will prove disastrous to global agriculture and destroy your fraud as well.

It is now proven that the “modern warm period” has nothing to do with increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 (which we humans do give a boost to), but has been solely caused by a huge spike in solar activity…the greatest for 4,000 years. 

As a result of scientific progress, we are now in a position to prove that what you are doing with the NZ zero carbon legislation is a fraudulent enterprise.  It must now be stopped by either your free will, or by court injunction.

  1. The vilification of carbon dioxide (“CO2”) as a pollutant is just one of many essential limbs of this fraud. 

CO2 is essential for all life on earth.  That is a scientific fact.  All plant life relies on CO2 for the process of converting light into the plant sugars that support all other terrestrial life on earth (animals, humans etc)  and, should the atmospheric concentration of CO2 drop below 150ppm, every complex carbon based life form on this planet will likely become extinct.  Plants actually do better when they are given access to a concentration that is between 1,000 and 2,000ppm.  The current concentration is only 415ppm.  This atmospheric deficit is routinely compensated for by farmers injecting bottled CO2 gas into their greenhouses.

Meantime you elect to wage war on CO2 and label it as “undesirable pollution” for UN IPCC’s own devious ends.  They are of course conflicted, yet conceal their conflict of interest from the masses.

The evidence that shows increased concentrations of CO2 leads to the greening of the planet is contained in successive NASA satellite photos that are readily available to you and your advisers.  This greening has occurred primarily because the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has increased from 280ppm at the end of “The Little Ice Age” in 1850, to the current level of more than 400ppm as of today.  If you were a true green you would find that good, not bad.

Plant growth experiments at various CO2 levels have also proven this fact as contained in the first “Word” attachment at the head of this email.  This attachment shows the practical limitations of CO2 as a “greenhouse gas” that were the reasons why it’s possible impact on climate change was trialled and rejected by such eminent scientists as Professors Niels Bohr and Anders Angstrom some 100 years ago.  Those reasons – discovered by actual experiments rather than by totally subjective theoretical modelling – haven’t changed.  The only thing that changed was the arrival of the UN IPCC in 1989 and some biddable scientists who wanted to establish their new field of knowledge and scorned the older inter-linked evidence based earth sciences.

We humans can tolerate an atmospheric CO2 level up to at least 100 times greater than it is at present.  Should you personally ever take ill and collapse, requiring CPR,  any trained person could probably resuscitate you by “rescue breathing” with air containing 40,000ppm of CO2 and a reduced concentration of oxygen (of only about 16% of the air mixture). That is because we all breathe in anywhere between about 400ppm and 800ppm of CO2  and breathe out roughly 4% or 40,000ppm – thereby reducing the amount of oxygen that was inhaled by 20%.

The scientific record has shown that before the beginning of the Quaternary Ice Age the atmospheric levels of CO2 were considerably higher than today and the relentless sequence of natural sequestration of CO2 in rocks, soil and sea bed occurring during colder times over the last 500 million years considerably reduced the CO2 in the atmosphere and will almost inevitably mean for the future, that by the end of the next 90,000 year terrestrial ice age of the current Pleistocene era (or subsequent repeats of that cycle of ice ages and interglacial periods), the atmospheric concentration of CO2 could even fall back to, or fall further from the 180ppm at the end of the last ice age (12,000 years ago), to a much lower level and possibly even reach or breech the extinction threshold of 150ppm at some point. 

So there is considerable hard evidence that human CO2 emissions which involve using and emitting sequestered carbon will actually help to restore a desirable atmospheric balance that is more suitable for all natural life on earth.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with that!  Unless you can prove that increased atmospheric CO2 has a significant effect on climate change, you should regard your criticism of this naturally occurring gas as a grave error, that is contrary to the best ideals of the green movement.

What needs to be dealt with, is to clean up real pollution rather than attempting to levy extortionate taxes based on deliberate lies.

  • In 30 years there has never been any empirical evidence that variations in atmospheric CO2 cause any measurable change in earth’s climate. 

Sure, we humans warm our surroundings by using many heat sources and fuels that provide us with comfort and wealth, but the claim that we alter the future climate is quite extraordinary …. and extraordinary scientific claims require extraordinary proof.   Such proof has never been found – despite the wasting of billions of dollars on the ever more complex computer models.  Sadly for the theories you espouse, there is ample proof that human and indeed total CO2 emissions have no measurable impact on climate and I itemise that proof below…

  • The historical record from the empirical analysis of ice core samples taken from the depths of the Antarctic Ice Sheet at Vostok, and from Greenland has provided clear evidence that as earth’s temperature changes, the level of atmospheric CO2 then also changes after a delay of several hundred years.  When temperatures rise, a rise in CO2 levels follows; then when temperatures fall,  CO2 levels also fall.  This is not only well accepted data, but the result is logical.  The sun which supplies  more than 99% of earth’s energy, heats the ocean more slowly than either the land or the atmosphere and the ocean releases its heat far more slowly.  Water absorbs atmospheric CO2 when cold and releases it when the water is warmed.  The ocean contains 50+ times the CO2 of the atmosphere, so when the ocean is warming it releases more CO2 into the atmosphere than it takes up; and when cooling it takes up more CO2 than it releases.  The data underpins the Vostok evidence.
  • During the last 100 years there has been clear evidence that the level of atmospheric CO2 has increased from around 300ppm to over 400ppm, and at no stage have the recordings at the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s (“NOAA’s)testing site in Hawaii (which both UN IPCC and sceptics accept as valid data) have ever fallen.  Yet during the time from 1918 to 1940 the climate warmed, and then from 1945 to 1975 the climate cooled, and then from 1975 to 1998 the climate warmed again.  From 1999 to 2015 the temperature did not increase by any measurable amount.  Then in 2016 there was a spurt in warming due to the strong El Nino conditions, and then after that the temperature has fallen again – to the present.  This shows that CO2 has had no appreciable effect, unless one changes the starting and finishing times used for the temperature comparison to manipulate the meaning of the data.  In general, the world has emerged from the effects of “The Little Ice Age” and the solar cycles became appreciably more active – with the Total Solar Insolation (“TSI”) during the modern warm period higher than it has been for thousands of years.  It is the sun that has caused the modern warming.   There is no upturn in the number and severity of serious weather events and on the contrary there has even been a significant reduction in severe weather events since the late 1930’s.  You wouldn’t know that to listen to the media.

2.3 The impact of the huge increase in solar activity underpins this evidence and accounts for the warming of the ocean and its current slow expansion.

  • The reasons why human CO2 emissions cannot drive earth’s climate are now well known.

3.1  It is generally accepted by the UN IPCC that human CO2 emissions comprise only 4.3% of total CO2 emissions.  Yet the presumption is made by the UN IPCC that human CO2 emissions drive 98% of climate change with no allowance for the variability over the 95.7% of natural CO2 emission effects.  For example a warming sea alone will emit more CO2 than humans can influence from all activities.  But to make their models work, the UN IPCC modellers even invent separate classes of CO2 molecules.  First, they state that human influenced CO2 molecules do not dissipate, but instead  only increase the level of residual atmospheric CO2.   Second, they say only the CO2 emissions from natural causes do dissipate due to the requirements of vegetation etc.  Of course this is junk science because there is no difference in the molecules, so any lay person can see through that.  But whether we allow the UN IPCC to clutch at straws to support their UN sponsored fraud or not, we humans cannot affect climate change.  Could King Canute turn back the tide?

      3.2  Atmospheric CO2 molecules do not impact with more than an extremely narrow band-width of infra-red re-radiation emanating from earth’s surface/sea and even then, not fully.  Water vapour on the other hand impacts twelve times the band width that CO2 does, and of that scope, for much of it, water vapour fully affects the re-radiation in some of the applicable band widths (As per the first attached (Word) document at the head of this email).  The water vapour also has other effects because of its involvement in the cloud cover and with its ability to phase change between liquid, gas and solid with massive localised thermal effects that the UN IPCC modellers deliberately ignore.  Not only that but water vapour is between 10 to 100 times as voluminous as CO2, depending on temperature and humidity. The suggestions that human CO2 emissions cause climate change is therefore somewhere between risible and ridiculous.

  • The atmospheric concentration of CO2 was already almost thermally saturated at the pre-industrial level of 280ppm (The Beer-Lambert Law refers). This is because an increase in CO2 concentration only leads to a logarithmic increase in the absorption of heat.  After the pre-industrial level of CO2 ( i.e. at 280ppm), its thermal impact for extra atmospheric concentrations of each – say – 100ppm of extra atmospheric CO2 is almost un-measurably minute and similarly, any reduction in temperature change from a reduction in the CO2 level would need to involve a huge reduction of – say 100ppm, if it is to have any measurable effect (even in theory).   As a result, the UN IPCC desire to reduce CO2 emissions and thereby effect a reduction in earth’s temperature is a pipe-dream and is misleading people who are being told that with the expenditure of trillions of dollars over time it can be done.  That change is not within human power because… i. Humans influence only a tiny portion of CO2 emissions and, ii. Because natural causes of CO2 emissions are far greater, so a relatively small variation in natural emissions will overpower any influence from human influenced CO2 emissions, and iii. While CO2 may be a greenhouse gas it is a significantly weaker one, than either water vapour which is measured and clouds which are not, and these factors dominate as shown in Dr Holmes’ video at the link in item 4.1 below.  But meantime a Finnish study has concluded that the increase in atmospheric CO2 over the last 100 years has only resulted in a temperature increase of 0.1 degrees C. and of this the human proportion is only 0.01 degrees C. as noted in this link :
https://summit.news/2019/07/11/new-finnish-study-finds-no-evidence-for-man-made-climate-change/

3.4  Water vapour and clouds provide the principle “greenhouse effect” that keeps earth warmer than outer space.  (But please note, the term “greenhouse” is a gross oversimplification which is mainly used to suit the UN IPCC narrative, because there is no restrictive membrane in earth’s atmosphere – like the glass of a greenhouse.  The true effect of cloud cover is more complicated because clouds’ net effect is one of competing forces of insulation between the partial  shielding of the sun’s rays which (along with water vapour, and other atmospheric compounds) only allows 56% of Total Solar Insolation to descend to the earth’s surface, and the low level cloud and water vapour which inhibits the infra red re-radiation of heat leaving earth’s surface and reaching the extreme cold of space). The attached paper by Emeritus Professor Geoffrey Duffy, dated July 2019, shows “why it is not possible for any of the non-condensable greenhouse gases to have an appreciable effect on weather and climate change”.  It is attached herewith as the second (Adobe) article at the head of this email. 

  • It is now generally accepted that Space Weather determines the weather on earth.  While the UN IPCC chooses to believe that Total Solar Irradiance (“TSI”) only varies by 0.05 watts per square metre – up or down, that is based on their purposefully short term comparison of TSI changes and is demonstrably both biased in their favour and incorrect in fact, as has already been published in a number of peer-reviewed studies (again, see the link at item 4.1 below).  But not only is the TSI variation far greater than the figures shown in the UN IPCC computer models, but also the variations in solar activity (and numbers of sun spots) change the amount of solar wind affecting the planets in the solar system including planet earth.  The stronger the solar wind, the less the number of the galactic cosmic rays that can enter either the solar system or the earth’s atmosphere.  During the regular 11 year solar minimums the influx of galactic cosmic rays increases and during events called “Grand Solar Minimums”  the influx of cosmic rays is even more dramatically increased. 

Cosmic rays not only threaten astronauts and high altitude air crews (as they will do for the next two years) but they act to nucleate water vapour to form low level clouds and these provide an increased cooling effect for the earth as well as initiating massive anomalous rain, hail and even snow events.  In 1997 the work of Danish Professor Hendrik Svensmark and his son led to this being promulgated as a substantial theory – but now it has been convincingly proven with successful experiments in the “Cloud” project at CERN.  Unlike Anthropogenic Global Warming which has been disproven, the Svensmark theory about cosmic ray impacts on cloud formation is now, if not settled science (as the UN IPCC fraudsters will never accept the truth) but it is repeatable by scientific experimentation.  Who could ask for more proof?

3.6  There are now numerous studies of climate change that cast doubt on the validity of all of the UN IPCC sponsored computer models, showing all to grossly overstate possible warming.  But each model has a theoretical basis that relies totally on human generated parameters (for which complexity the humans involved receive multiple billions of dollars each year), so the UN IPCC studies cannot be relied upon for one good reason…the actual climate conditions have to date borne no relationship whatsoever to the forecasts of 101 of the 102 computer modelled predictions, or of the 72 models that are currently in vogue and used as the basis for creating deliberate warming alarmism.  They may as well have licked their finger and held it up to the air and taken a guess…because both that guess and the computer models are equally subjective.

3.7  By February 2020 we will see whether the Northern Hemisphere is to suffer massive food shortages as a direct result of the extraordinary cold and wet weather that has been interspersed with drought conditions there over winter of 2018/9 and spring of 2019.  Northern spring planting has been extensively disrupted as a result Grand Solar Minimum conditions and unless there is an “Indian summer” to delay Autumn, their harvest will likely be dire.  While Minister, you have thus far ignored my well-intentioned warnings that you are now becoming at least an accessory to fraud (for over a year), you must try to understand that New Zealand, by your actions is probably becoming exposed to the impacts that will occur on a global basis as a direct result of the presently unfolding Grand Solar Minimum.  You have been warned of this material and demonstrably cyclical hazard.  Now time is of the essence. Watch what is happening to cereal futures prices if you don’t believe me.

  •  How big is your fraud? (the total cost of this fraud globally is estimated at USD1.5 trillion per year and is growing exponentially larger and more onerous for the countries of the OECD)

4.1 The hallmark of a fraud is often denoted by the subsidiary lies that need to be told to lend credence to the central falsehood.

Everything from forest fires… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phw8OlN_x1E&feature=youtu.be

to sea level rise is subject to alarmism…(see for sea level the Professor Moerner link above in the preamble to this email report).

Also for ocean acidification… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bJjBo5ICMc&feature=youtu.be

Editor’s note: the following paragraphs from the Australian IPC are not in the email to the NZ Prime Minister, and have been added to clarify further details of the ongoing issue and court case. Professor Ridd’s key point is that James Cook University scientists have published many reports that do not comply with the proper scientific methodologies and, as such, are not valid. Eg the results cannot be replicated and the data has not been made available. Yet these reports have been published ‘as gospel’ by many mainstream media, leading to, amongst other things people world-wide believing the Great Barrier Reef is ‘dead’ or at least dying, and no longer travelling to see the reef, causing, amongst other issues, a major downturn in the tourist industry.

As reported by the Australian IPC: ‘Professor Peter Ridd has won his litigation against James Cook University about the Great Barrier Reef, the big scandal for North Queensland is the alleged death of coral that is being deliberately used to create an over-hyped sense of climate emergency.  There is nothing wrong with the world’s coral reefs, other than periodic bleaching  occurrences that they often quickly recover from.  This is a cyclic phenomenon.

In May 2018, after an academic career of more than 30 years, Peter had his employment terminated as a professor of physics at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. Peter had spoken against the accepted orthodoxy that climate change was ‘killing’ the Great Barrier Reef. ‘There’s some absolute rubbish being spoken about the reef and people’s livelihoods are being put in jeopardy. If nobody will stand up, then this is just going to go on and on and on. It has to be stopped.’

Peter’s court case has enormous implications for the international debate about climate change, and for the ongoing crisis surrounding freedom of speech.

In April, Federal Court Justice Vasta ruled JCU had erred in its interpretation of a clause in its enterprise agreement and deprived Dr Ridd of his right to express his academic opinion. Within hours of the judgment being released in April, JCU published a statement on its website criticising the ruling.

Dr Ridd is seeking financial compensation after he was sacked by JCU for publicly criticising the institution and one of its star scientists over claims about the impact of global warming on the Great Barrier Reef.

In his decision, Judge Vasta stated that:

[T]he concept of intellectual freedom is not recent and is extremely important as it helps to define the mission of any university… It is the cornerstone upon which the University exists. If the cornerstone is removed, the building tumbles.

[…] To use the vernacular, the University has “played the man and not the ball”. Incredibly, the University has not understood the whole concept of intellectual freedom. In the search for truth, it is an unfortunate consequence that some people may feel denigrated, offended, hurt or upset. It may not always be possible to act collegiately when diametrically opposed views clash in the search for truth.

[…] That is why intellectual freedom is so important. It allows academics to express their opinions without fear of reprisals. It allows a Charles Darwin to break free of the constraints of creationism. It allows an Albert Einstein to break free of the constraints of Newtonian physics. It allows the human race to question conventional wisdom in the never-ending search for knowledge and truth. And that, at its core, is what higher learning is about. To suggest otherwise is to ignore why universities were created and why critically focussed academics remain central to all that university teaching claims to offer.’

We continue to see story after story that hypes the warm temperatures and ignores the cold weather.  Heat waves?  Hype and hoopla.  The sceptics are calling out every one of the lies now, just as quickly as the mainstream media prints them…

https://youtu.be/f5B8gcpggfs

This is only because the media is being manipulated by political forces aligned to the (your?) international socialist movement.  The fake news propaganda effort is being coordinated by the UN IPCC and their supporters.  We can no longer get accurate media reporting on how weather compares, or about climate change, nor on the other sub-plots.  Like this one about Arctic Sea Ice because the fraud dominates… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwUhJaQVi-M&feature=youtu.be  and  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZDtnq9A-Bg&feature=youtu.be

Even the fate of polar bears is being twisted to suit the UN agenda… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6bcCTFnGZ0&feature=youtu.be

In mid July (only last week and during mid-summer!) the “Crown Prince Haakon” a Norwegian icebreaker set out to crash through from Svalbard to the North Pole based on the stories of rapid ice melt.  They quickly turned back due to striking solid 10 ft thick ice.  Even with Greenland’s and Iceland’s principle glaciers now advancing we still get stories that they are retreating.  This level of scientific disinformation may suit your purposes but if this Grand Solar Minimum (2019-2055) is to be a 400 year event like the Maunder Minimum – rather than 200 year event like the Dalton minimum – then this will end in tears because it will soon be too late for us to prepare.

4.2 The establishment of carbon trading schemes relies totally on the ability of the UN IPCC scientists to predict what happens in the future as CO2 levels are notionally to be brought under control by exerting the influence of humans over natural forces to reduce both atmospheric CO2 and global temperatures. That relies totally on the accuracy of trumped up, totally inaccurate, but extremely expensive computer models. In this rush to implement a false doctrine, the developed countries have joined a collective rush that will destroy their economic base.  If you sit down with your scientists and watch these two videos by Dr Robert Holmes and Dr Patrick Moore you will get a sense of the gravity of what your government’s involvement in this fraud is doing to all except those in the developing world who (are already and) will happily continue to eat our lunch in every possible way.

4.3  Herewith is the video of a comprehensive rebuttal of the science that your globalist friends rely upon (by Dr Robert Holmes).  Each video Dr Holmes has put out gradually tightens the knot around the Great Global Warming fraud as he itemises the genuine peer reviewed experiments and research that gives the lie to the UN IPCC dogma that is essential for their survival.  This latest in his series contains most of the evidence that will blow this fraud apart.

4.4  You claim to be a devout environmentalist, yet I allege you are betraying the environmental movement and misleading the general public.  Accordingly I have laid a separate complaint about the deceptive and misleading conduct of both  you as Leader, and the NZ Green Party, with the Commerce Commission under s. 13 of the Fair Trading Act 1986.  You cannot take destructive action against all earth’s/New Zealand’s  vegetative species and still lay claim to being “green”.  Here is Dr Patrick Moore’s video on the destructive actions of others also participating in this fraud.  I make no apology for its length which enables you to better understand his credentials and the similar conundrum they face in Canada to the trouble you are stirring up in New Zealand.   As with Greenpeace, Canada, it is all counter-productive.

https://youtu.be/UWahKIG4BE4

At this point in time there are between 10-15,000 scientists working in every OECD country to combat the Great Global Warming Fraud.  But essentially, when the global harvests begin to fail (as they did last year – if only in some regions), it will be too late for us to prepare.

  • The preoccupation of the UN IPCC with their fraud is because it is an existential requirement for that organisation, as noted by Dr Moore’s video at 29 minutes and 44 seconds…I quote from the UN IPCC’s mandate to analyse… “a change in climate that is attributed to directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.”  The facts however tell us a different story as per the link below…even using UN IPCC approved data…the knowledge of what happened once the ice cores from Antarctica were analysed in 2003, busted their theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming, and since then the UN simply ratcheted up their fraudulent activities to increase their hold on power over national governments.  This Vostok ice core data is also confirmed by Greenland studies of the Holocene climate history, covering only the last 11,500 years…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=higXpFF79Hw&feature=youtu.be

4.6  I cannot open a newspaper without some element of the fraud being telegraphed as proven science.  Whether it is as a result of the studied ignorance of journalists or because children have believed the lies that you and their teachers have told them as part of their school curriculum.  Those elements of the mainstream media that spread the lies and disinformation must be stopped forthwith.  The sceptics know the role that George Soros and others have played in this fraud.  Local Government, Maori interests, Central Government officers, farmers, oil companies business leaders and others have all been misled and become unwitting accomplices.  But of greater cost to the country is the rubbish that carbon trading will lead to some form of beneficial climate modification.  This activity and many others are by definition only Ponzi schemes.  Their life and existence depends on “greater fools” making bigger and bigger financial contributions to the point when the fraud is discovered and a massive “debt jubilee” automatically takes place, to the cost of everyone who has obeyed your erroneous interpretation of junk science and obeyed your corrupt laws.   There is a ripeness of time for all frauds to be exposed.  But the longer it takes, the worse the situation will be.

  • The cost of your policies will be too steep for the country of New Zealand to bear, as it has already been in Germany and Australia.  As the proven cost of the UN IPCC’s wasteful programme becomes known, the global resistance is getting stronger now that the truth is getting out. 

This is a sample of something doing the rounds in Australia…. https://www.youtube.com/embed/BC1l4geSTP8

Minister, you have a duty to familiarise yourself with the science.   Although I am not associated with it, I believe the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition’s experts can provide you with directions of where to get help and support.

I believe from the data that the earth’s climate is always changing, either up or down, and because I now see a bias in favour of the solar and space weather scientists’ consensus – who mostly believe the climate will now cool – I am classed as a “Climate Change Denier”.  Those who believe in human instigated global warming and insist that the term “climate change” is the same as “global warming” are hyping runaway warming for all they are worth and yet their un-warranted alarmism is based solely on computer models that only do one thing – they reinforce their own personal world view.  After 30 years, because their models don’t agree with the data, they simply change the data to suit their models.  Are you really happy to go along with that? 

The Russians used to have a saying,  “The most difficult thing to predict is history”.  (It is like Tiananmen Square and the CCP) Try to track the unwarranted and self-serving alterations to temperature data and you will understand why I, like Professor Moerner of Sweden think the UN IPCC are such frauds.  If you do check this information for yourself you will find yourself sitting on the wrong side of the biggest fraud in global history.  I hope you will feel comfortable there, until the truth does out.

I am simply an investor in renewable energy projects moonlighting as a fraud investigator, calling the facts as I see them.  I don’t like what I see, but unlike you, I face them.  Don’t we, the people, pay you to do the same?

Yours sincerely

John Rofe

An Extremely Concerned New Zealand Citizen

============================================

CLIMATE  CHANGE

By Professor Emeritus Geoffrey G Duffy

DEng, PhD, BSc, ASTC Dip., FRS NZ, FIChemE, CEng

CARBON DIOXIDE CO2  and WATER H2 O  CONTRASTED       

  • Showing water and condensable water vapour have by nature much greater actions on weather changes and climate patterns than non-condensable CO2 ever could.
  • SOLAR RADIATION:  CO2 only has TWO narrow absorption bands for incoming solar energy.  Water vapour has SEVEN (5 larger bands).  Water vapour is 5 times more effective with incoming Solar radiation.
  • RADIATION from EARTH:  CO2 only has TWO more narrow absorption bands for radiation coming back from earth.  Water vapour covers 85% of the entire span. Water vapour is more than 12 times effective than CO2.
  • Overall, water vapour is about 12 times more effective than non-condensable CO2 with respect to all radiation
  • Condensable water vapour evaporates, humidifies, then condenses to form clouds, which can precipitate to produce rain or snow, and scrub dust and pollutants from the air, and then cool the atmosphere and planet surface. 

CARBON DIOXIDE CO2

  • CO2 is NOT a pollutant or a toxin [Carbon MONOXIDE CO is the toxin: prevents blood from carrying oxygen]
  • CO2 in the atmosphere is vital for LIFE – plants and vegetation: we would die without it !
  • Crops, trees, plants, convert CO2 into sugars, cellulose, fruit, vegetables, and more
  • Leaf ‘factories’ convert CO2 into organic carbon compounds and O2
  • Marine plankton and molluscs uptake and convert CO2 too!
  • Humans exhale 1 kg CO2 per day (close to 7 Billion humans on Earth) and the concentration is 40,000 ppm at the exit of the mouth
  • NOT all CO2 in the atmosphere is man-made (< 5%) – most is naturally produced
  • Ruminating animals put out more greenhouse gases than all the cars, buses, trucks and other vehicles in the world
  • The main sources of anthropogenic greenhouse gases are Fossil Fuels: coal, oil, gas, and the burning of crops and waste, wood, trees and other wastes and garbage (still very small worldwide)
  • CO2 absorbs radiant energy over a total of 4 LIMITED NARROW BANDS [see Graph below],
  • Atmospheric CO2 is a non-condensable GAS like nitrogen, oxygen, and methane. Water vapour is the ONLY condensable gas. These changes of phase (evaporation, condensation, precipitation) produce all the atmospheric effects: heat-shielding clouds, cooling, and atmospheric scrubbing
  • For every 1,000,000 molecules of atmosphere, only 10,410 in NZ are greenhouse gas GHG molecules. But 10,000 of the 10,410 are water molecules.  Of the remaining 410, ONLY about 405 are CO2.  Of these, only 5% (about 20 molecules) are from man-made processes (20 in 1 million; 0.002%; 1 molecule in 50,000!!  Can that be the main culprit in climate change when water is typically about 1% in New Zealand; or 1 molecule in 100, while absorbing far more radiant energy as the graph below shows
  • The ocean holds 93% of ALL CO2 (38,000 billion tonnes); the land 5% (2,000 billion tonnes); the atmosphere 2% (850 billion tonnes), of which anthropogenic CO2 is ONLY 5% of that (about 45 billion tonnes)
  • CO2 in rain water is acidic: CO2 in sea water is alkaline (pH 8.1), and can never-ever be acidic while shells, carbonates and molluscs exist to neutralise it. It can become less alkaline but not acidic
  • CO2 is commonly injected into greenhouse to increase plant growth rates and crop yields
  • It has been reported that there has been a 20 – 40% greening of the planet over the last several decades
  • China has 1,171 coal-fired plants planned; India 446; so coal is still in strong demand
  • Examining atmospheric CO2 must always be considered simultaneously with the many larger effects of H2O.

Increasing CO2 concentration increases crop yields as shown in this actual Greenhouse experiment!

WATER VAPOUR H2O

Water is UNIQUE and quite different from CO2:

  • WATER: The most abundant compound on the planet and a universal solvent.  Water makes up over 60% of the human body.  It is in all plants, animals, cells etc ..
  • WATER VAPOUR:  Is the ONLY condensable atmospheric gas. So only H2O can evaporate, humidify, condense (clouds), and precipitate (rain, hail, and snow). 
  • WATER: H2O is the ONLY fluid that FLOATS ON ITSELF when it FREEZES on the liquid surface.  [If it did not float it would sink and crush the creatures (fish, sharks, whales) in the Oceans.  Marine life flourishes in water below the floating ice].
  • WATER VAPOUR: Has the largest percentage greenhouse gas EFFECT [about 45% – 70% (clear sky), 70% – 90% (cloudy sky)]
  • WATER VAPOUR:  The water vapour concentration in the atmosphere depends on temperature and location [< 0.2% in very cold climates to >4% by mass at high Humidity in the tropics >35 0C]
  • WATER:  Oceans absorb 1,000 times more heat energy than the atmosphere, and BUFFERS more than 80% of the large heat fluctuations (and hence temperature variations), thereby moderating weather changes and climate patterns greatly.  This key factor is missed when only isolating radiation-only and CO2.  93% of all CO2 is in the oceans (~38,000 billion tonnes)
  • WATER:  Liquid water has the highest surface tension (surface molecular skin) of all natural liquids. It controls water droplet formation, cloud structures, ocean surfaces, waves, evaporation rates, etc
  • WATER: H2O molecules are polar (H slightly +ve; O slightly –ve). Hence adjacent water molecules can ‘attract’ each other, particularly as the temperature is lowered (ice floats on water because of this). [Liquid water can also ionise slightly H3O+ hydronium ions, and OH– hydroxyl ions]. Hydrogen onding gives some unique features unlike CO2: H2O has the second highest specific heat capacity [only ammonia* is greater]: H2O has a very high heat of vaporisation (2,257 kJ/kg at its boiling point), and ENERGY TRANSFERS are very important in atmospheric changes (weather) (shows up as temperature differences)
  • WATER:  The ‘Structure’ and ‘Behaviour’ of H2O molecules have LARGE buffering effects that moderate the earth’s weather and they affect both evaporation from the seas and condensation in cloud formation. Non-condensable CO2  gas forms NO clouds
  • WATER: The specific enthalpy of fusion (at freezing) is very high (333.6 kJ/kg at 0°C) [only ammonia* is higher], and this confers resistance to melting on the ice. [Density decrease or Bulk increase at freezing is about 9%] 
  • WATER: Water Vapour – Liquid Water – Ice COEXIST at the equilibrium Triple Point.  It is amazing that it occurs near 00C (By comparison, the Triple Point of CO2 is -56.50C so it strongly differs from water).  This has some unique effects in phase transitions near the poles (eg solid ice can go to vapour DIRECTLY with no liquid water for example [sublimation]) (dry ice CO2 used widely on stage and TV)). 
  • WATER: Water has a freezing point of 00C and a boiling point of 1000C due to its unique molecular polar structure.  We live because of that!! 
  • WATER: The nearest molecule to Water (Atomic Weight of 18) is Ammonia (Atomic Weight of 17).   In direct contrast, the freezing point of Ammonia is -770C and a boiling point of -330C even though the Atomic Weights are 1 point different.  This shows that the structure of water is unique!  Just as well, water is THE MOST ABUNDANT COMPOUND on the EARTH’S SURFACE and the temperature absorption-emission bands are just right for life on Earth.
  • The Thermal Lapse Rate or temperature drop is the 6.5C0 temperature drop per kilometer rise above earth.  This is caused by all atmospheric gas molecules moving further with increasing elevation (lower density and lower pressure result). This is vital for humidification, mists, fogs and cloud formation
  • WATER VAPOUR: can regulate, buffer, compensate, correct, and restore atmospheric changes

Professor Emeritus Geoffrey G Duffy

DEng, PhD, BSc, ASTC Dip., FRS NZ, FIChemE, CEng

EMAIL:  geoffduffy@lycos.com

The KEY REFERENCE sources:

            Radiation:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atmospheric_Transmission.png

            Humidity:   http://www.lenntech.com/calculators/humidity/relative-humidity.htm

====================================

THE GREAT GLOBAL WARMING FRAUD – SUMMARY

By John Rofe, 28 July 2019

  1. After 30 years of repeated warnings of impending Armageddon from the United Nations (“UN”) based on the subjective and inaccurate computer modelling performed at the cost of national governments (and all taxpayers) at the UN’s behest, they are certainly no closer to understanding the climate.  But they are instead still trying to defend their 30-year fraud.
  2. Meantime, credible solar scientists have good evidence that the principle cause of climate change lies with the variability of the solar cycles that have continued to affect earth’s climate since the beginning of time.  UN bias ignores this evidence.  Even so, there are some longer cycles that affect the passage of ice ages and inter-glacial periods, and are caused by earth’s movements in relation to the sun.  These don’t yet figure within our time horizon.
  3. The only plausible cause of all the warming that has happened since “The Little Ice Age” ended in 1850, has come from the highest level of solar electromagnetic activity for 4,000 years.  The increase in earth’s temperature of little over 1 degree Centigrade over 160 years is latterly being called the “Modern Warm Period”. Those of us who have checked the history find it is not remarkably warm at all today, even though a lot of effort is being made to convince us that it is, with lies, damned lies and cherry-picked statistics.  The Mediaeval Warm Period was arguably much warmer – a thousand years ago. What about the 1930’s?
  4. NASA now tells us a new weaker 11 year solar cycle – called simply “sc25” – is commencing at a time when there is record thinning and cooling of earth’s outer layer of atmosphere (called “the Thermosphere”) which we are also told heralds the imminent arrival of a new 30 year event called a “Grand Solar Minimum”.  Many scientists now expect a period of much colder weather to last from 2019 to 2055 that could result in horrific global crop losses.  I guess the proof of that is about to be revealed, as early as February 2020.  We will see.
  5. The truth about carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide is that they are only minor trace gases and cannot possibly influence earth’s climate.  They are proven to have no measurable effect on climate change, and carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a gas necessary for all life on earth.  Besides water and light, carbon dioxide is the only resource essential for all plant growth.  Plants really need 1000 parts per million of carbon dioxide from the air.  Yet today the atmosphere only contains about 415 parts per million.  To remedy this deficiency, horticulturalists pump bottled gas into glass houses and growing tunnels at up to 2,000 parts per million.  So carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but it is also in relatively short supply.  There is clearly no possibility of influencing climate change by reducing human emissions of carbon dioxide (“CO2”) which anyway constitute less than 4.3% of total CO2 emissions.  So NZ Government actions are just part of the UN IPCC coordinated fraud.
  6. Because methane emissions have even less effect than CO2, the present demands being made on the NZ farming community are somewhere between bizarre and ridiculous.
  7. But why is your Government lying to you?  I cannot answer for them, but I can assure you that after a year of failing to get satisfactory reasons for their fraudulent behaviour, I laid allegations against Minister James Shaw and PM Jacinda Ardern with the NZ Serious Fraud Office in mid-April 2019…and later also laid a complaint with the NZ Commerce Commission against Minister James Shaw and the NZ Green Party under s.13 of the Fair Trading Act 1986.

There is a ripeness of time for all frauds to be revealed…for this one, let’s fix it today.

=======================

 

 

Uncategorized

John’s newsletter

This post provides John’s latest newsletter which covers a range of topical political, technical and environmental issues.

John’s newsletter, 17 Ocober 2020

Politics

 It looks like the cosy trading relationship between Britain and the EU is coming to an end…will we see a hard BREXIT this week? From Seeking Alpha…

“British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is due to make a final call on whether to accept a narrow post-Brexit trade deal with the EU or go for a no-deal scenario, after being dished an ultimatum at the EU Summit in Brussels. Britain’s chief negotiator, David Frost, said he was “disappointed and surprised” that the EU was no longer committed to working “intensively” for a deal, but a response will come later today. The decision is set to affect $900B in annual trade, as well as supply chains that stretch across Europe and beyond, against the backdrop of a pandemic that has upended the economy. “

 Next a story about the small but persistent war in the Middle East between Armenia (and its Azerbaijani enclave) and Azerbaijan which involves world powers Russia and USA.

The most interesting game around is the US elections.  Trump may be on steroids.  But with recession, Covid-19 and almost the entire mainstream media against him, it is hard to imagine him actually winning re-election.  Boy, the Democrats sure want to get rid of Trump and any lies will do.  The people plotting to kidnap the Michigan Governor were likely Antifa/BLM –related, and this has nothing to do with alleged “white supremacists”. 9 out of 10 atrocities are being perpetrated by Democrat supporters.  But Trump has to accept that every riot is now being blamed on him.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/white-supremacist-narrative-unravels-whitmer-kidnap-suspect-attended-blm-rally-another?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter

With Biden, the Democrats have put up not just a donkey, but a senile one.  He can’t even draw a crowd, but then everyone expects Kamala Harris to take on the POTUS mantle at some point.  It doesn’t yet look like a landslide to the Dems, but it may be, and they may also take control of the senate.  There are however some pundits who say otherwise, and this is what makes their elections fascinating…

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/jpmorgans-kolanovic-has-warning-those-expecting-crushing-biden-victory?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter

With media and the globalist billionaires (orchestrated by George Soros) promoting Biden, how does anyone else get re-elected?  Trump has the Bidens pinned down for fraud but it is blocked by CNN, New York Times, MSNBC, Washington Post and Twitter among other Democrat owned media outlets.  Given Twitter posts unverified and even disproven allegations against Trump it is all a bit rich.  But their election is too soon now for the truth to have any impact in Trumps favour.  Many states have already voted.   Jack Dorsey will get a subpoena for a grilling by the US Senate anyway…

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/twitter-suspends-trump-campaign-senate-gop-accounts-over-biden-scandal-jack-dorseys-mea?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter

The Russians certainly don’t like George Soros’ meddling in Belarus…but we don’t care about that…

https://youtu.be/sjf6hJYO6io

And what is almost too painful to read/watch…

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/new-biden-email-obliterates-burisma-debunking-over-fired-prosecutor-giuliani-teases?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter

And do you remember Patrick McGoohan in the TV series, “The Prisoner”?  Now that really was painful!

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/2020-election-bamboozle-we-are-all-victims-deep-states-con-game?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter

Frankly, anyone who believes the mainstream media narratives in NZ is naive.

Even Jacinda’s massive cash splash in New Zealand had to come from somewhere and with Soros actively working to destroy BREXIT and promote the climate fraud, there is every chance the “Open Society” is supporting Jacinda too.  Wondering aloud? Shouldn’t the NZ Secret Service be investigating “kind Jacinda”?

Let’s change the subject to China.  This is Axios on China…

https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-china-a0924046-92b3-47d8-8346-287bf495189e.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axioschina&stream=china

This article about China is from Sinocism.  It is interesting to see Xi Jinping placing flowers at the Deng Xiaoping statue.  Xi’s father was close to Deng.  My mother met Deng on his visit to Wellington.  It was the first visit of any Chinese communist leader to NZ.  The significance of the flowers Xi laid is to acknowledge the influence Deng had, and he is certainly the most popular of the dead Chinese leadership and far more politically “acceptable these days” than Chairman Mao…

https://sinocism.com/p/xis-shenzhen-speech-canada-china?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjozMDYwMCwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTEyOTMyNDksIl8iOiI2TWQrZSIsImlhdCI6MTYwMjcwOTM3NywiZXhwIjoxNjAyNzEyOTc3LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMiIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.fSFDDkZNgq705XWisDSPQBD7-c0RQjko1z9DuAxy_ko

Economics

 Is there any real correlation between the state of the share markets and the coming elections in the USA?   Avi Gilbert thinks he can see one…

You may have read/seen this already….Jim Rickards perspective on the US economy and how Covid-19 has introduced depression…(43 minutes long)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb_RQabpTAc

The only thing I can be sure about with agricultural commodities is that China would be in famine if they couldn’t import.  The data is patchy…but all of the grain futures prices are starting to move higher. ( Hogs already had liftoff with the swine flu).  But there are signs the corn , wheat, soybeans and rice are going to head higher month by month.  By March 2021 we may have another “Arab Spring” event in the making.  So it is a case of watch this space.  With the globalisation and commoditisation of trade it is the poor who cannot buy when the price goes ballistic as it did in 2008/9 with the last solar minimum.

Covid-19 is for real

 Or, more to the point, the regulations imposed by most countries with their unforeseen consequences are for real.

From Seeking Alpha…

“Concerns over economic fallout from resurging coronavirus infections, as well as dwindling hopes for U.S. fiscal stimulus, weighed on stocks around the globe overnight (see market data below). A record 22 U.S. states recorded more than 1,000 new daily COVID-19 cases, while Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he did not expect to reach a deal on a coronavirus relief package before the presidential election. On the data front, the latest weekly jobless claims numbers will be released this morning, with another 825,000 Americans are expected to have filed for first-time unemployment insurance. “

And…

“Germany posted its highest ever increase in confirmed COVID-19 cases over the past 24 hours and started reimposing restrictions on some of the biggest coronavirus hotspots such as Berlin. The French government meanwhile declared a public health state of emergency and announced a curfew for Paris and eight other big cities from Saturday. Italy has also surpassed its daily record for newly diagnosed coronavirus cases, while a debate is taking place in England over whether a country-wide “circuit breaker” lockdown is needed. ‘

And…

“Vaccine recommendations

COVID-19 vaccines may not be initially recommended for children when they become available, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So far, early clinical trials have only included non-pregnant adults, but participating groups continue to expand as companies recruit more people. Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) has already announced that it will enroll children as young as 12 in its late-stage COVID-19 vaccine trial, while AstraZeneca (NASDAQ:AZN) has said a sub-group of patients in its large trial will test children between five to 12.”

Assorted Conspiracy theories

 All I can say for certain is that I can prove to anyone over level 12 at high school that climate change aka Anthropogenic global warming is a fraud.

But what I can also say for certain is that the same folks driving the climate fraud are also driving the great reset agenda and Covid-19 shutdowns.

Other than that I cannot comment on Covid-19.  Here is an eleven-minute video to consider.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npjf0uFZBjU&feature=emb_logo

Energy

 Wow…

https://newatlas.com/energy/skeleton-superbattery-curved-graphene/

One expert commentator’s view of the future of the oil industry…

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-10-08/has-oil-peaked/

Whether we like it or not, our civilisation runs on oil…and the other fossil fuels…

https://mailchi.mp/770adfbefb4c/oilprice-intelligence-report-why-oil-prices-are-seeing-a-steep-correction-1526006?e=9804a8eb5e

Surely the Covid-19 crisis must end sometime?  Well that is what the IEA assumes, anyway…

We love electricity because it is so useful and so politically correct.  The problem is that our civilisation will not function any longer without it too.  The one thing our governments ignore about risk, is that all it will take to kill off half the world’s population in six-12 months would be a CME similar or larger than the Carrington event of 1859.  That would take us back to the stone age within the first two weeks.  A sobering thought, eh?

So in the rush to eliminate reliance on fossil fuels, just remember we need petrol, oil, diesel, gas and coal as well.

Risk in China? 3-Gorges Dam

The procession of rain events over the headwaters of the Yangtze River have started moving Southwards.  So what is the residual damage to China’s geo-engineering masterpiece, if any?  If there was one event that could end the rule of the CCP it would be the collapse of the 3-Gorges dam.  Fascinating to see their ship elevators built into the dam…

https://youtu.be/DwFyS_IvCGk

Latest update ….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtPsWcHqSIk

Climate fraud

 New Zealand had its temperature records adjusted by NIWA to reflect their intent to support the UN IPCC fraud.  In New Zealand the case went to court and was proven, so the judge said he would leave the temperature to the scientists, so the fraud stood and still stands today.  And NIWA thinks it has gotten away with it.

In the USA they still fight that same battle…probably because they have Trump’s ear, but certainly because they are right…

https://youtu.be/YRXDOAhjBn8

and

https://youtu.be/QmBiXfekga8

When lies and fraud are Government policy, then even thinking the truth about something as elementary as climate change is viewed as subversive.

I know [New Zealand’s current Labour Prime Minister]Jacinda Ardern will win today, but I don’t know whether Trump will be around by Christmas, even though his rallies are great theatre with people queuing up to attend.

Good luck, and may your voting selection be the winner.

Best regards, John

Better Government

‘PC’, ‘Woke’ Orwellian censorship – 1984, official lies, media lies, ‘socialism’ and modern ‘democracy’.

Many from the ‘Left’, progressives, Cultural Marxists and activists keep trying to stymie democracy with their shrill, often illogical, Orwellian and ideological views and variations of mind control. The following articles provide evidence.

Links to more articles follow the three below

While Trump deals with China his enemies look within

While Trump deals with China his enemies look within  By Nick Cater, The Australian, 7 October 2020

In 1940, US president Franklin D Roosevelt had support from the man he beat at the election for a ‘principled stand for freedom’.

The enemies of democracy are having a wonderful year, deftly turning the war on the corona­virus into a war against their own citizens.

Freedom House, an organisation that cut its teeth persuading Americans they should fight Hitler, has found evidence of authoritarian overreach in 80 countries.

The pandemic has provided the excuse to impose sweeping emergency powers, the suspension of parliaments, restrictions on movement and assembly, curfews, thuggish policing, harsh penalties and arbitrary arrests.

Illiberal governments from Russia to Cambodia and China have leapt on the chance to crush dissent and tighten their autocratic grip. Previous reports from Freedom House could be read with detachment, particularly from Australia, where the commitment to international freedom once appeared immovable. For a time after the fall of European Communism, we foolishly imagined we’d won an epic victory and that the universalisation of Western liberal democracy marked, in Francis Fukuyama’s phrase, the end of history. Instead autocracy has staged a comeback, notably in Russia and China. Leaders in both countries look on Western liberal democracy with scorn.

Handicapped by years of complacency, we now have a fight on our hands, and we are hardly in the best of shape. The seriousness of our predicament is spelled out by Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Lieutenant General HR McMaster in his new book, Battlelines: The Fight to ­Defend the Free World.

Trump’s critics had been hoping for a dump on the President from a former member of his inner circle. Instead, McMaster’s critical eye turns to previous administrations, from George HW Bush to Barack Obama, whose hopeful ­aspirations for reform in China overwhelmed any desire to confront unfair economic practices, technology theft, an abysmal human rights record and aggressive military posturing.

“Since the 1990s, US policy betrayed all the elements of strategic narcissism,” he writes. “Wishful thinking, mirror-imaging, confirmation bias, and the belief that others will conform to a US-­developed script.”

While the West was pondering its navel, China and Russia have been working towards a common goal of usurping the rules-based order established by the US and its allies after World War II. The Chinese Communist Party “sees freedom of expression as a weakness to be suppressed at home and exploited abroad”, McMaster writes.

A new China policy, fit for the world we live in rather than the world as we would like it to be, may be Trump’s single greatest legacy. It represents the greatest shift in US foreign policy since the Cold War.

It declares zero tolerance for industrial espionage and the intimidation of Chinese students and expat-Chinese communities in the West. It insists that the US must use its influence, backed by military capability, to curb Chinese expansionism and insist the CCP sticks by the rules.

The US and its allies must relearn how to compete on the world stage, McMaster writes. They can win this “cold war” as they did the last one, by demonstrating the natural advantages that flow from freedom of expression, entrepreneurial freedom and the rule of law.

The overriding question is whether we have the stomach for it, given the direction the New Left is trying to take us and its hegemonic grip on our cultural and ­industrial institutions.

To them, the US is the main cause of the world’s problems. It would be a happier planet if Americans stayed at home on bended knee atoning for their own transgressions. In the New Left’s view of the world, US strategic assertiveness has antagonised China and Russia — and jihadist terrorism is an understandable reaction to the American presence in ­Muslim lands. They are closely aligned to influential foreign policy realists in opposition to an alleged “crusader mentality” and the costly and seemingly futile ­attempts to spread democracy.

Autocrats intent on creating a new world order could not wish for more influential or more forgiving friends. They are willing to overlook the persecution of ethnic minorities in China, Russia’s state-sanctioned anti-LGBT vigilantes and Iran’s sickening deaths in custody. In their eyes, the defining battle for justice is being fought not on the streets of Hong Kong but the streets of the US. Their enemy is not the CCP but the Minneapolis police.

As we look towards the presidential election, McMasters reassures us that Trump’s assertive China policy has bipartisan support, despite the vitriol between leaders on almost everything else.

That may be so. But the presidential challenger’s disposition does little to dispel the fear that the US may be one election away from retreat. The intellectual left, after all, are the Democrats’ people. How willingly would they ­embrace a pivot from, say, Black Lives Matter to the defence of freedom in Taiwan?

In the search for a historical parallel, we are drawn reluctantly to World War II and the formation of the America First Committee in September 1940, one of the country’s largest and most powerful anti-war movements. Its prominent supporters included American heroes such as aviator Charles Lindbergh, industrialist Henry Ford, actor Lillian Gish and architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Future presidents, John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford also contributed to the organisation.

The committee stood resolutely opposed to US involvement in the war or ­assistance of any kind to Britain and the other nations in the frontline of the fight for freedom. American democracy was best defended at home not abroad, was its position.

Should Trump be defeated next month, let us hope the victor has the character of Wendell Willkie, the defeated Republican presidential candidate in the 1940 election. Back then, the tussle between interventionists and isolationists was largely taking place among Republicans. Willkie defied members of his own party and the polls to condemn America First’s populist anti-war rallying cry and took a principled stand for freedom with president Franklin D. Roosevelt. Wilkie and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt were founding supporters of Freedom House.

An alternative history, in which the anti-Semitic Lindbergh beats Willkie, becomes the Republican nominee and wins the presidency in a landslide, forms the narrative of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot Against America.

In Roth’s counterfactual dystopia, Lindbergh signs a non-aggression pact with Hitler and the US descends into paranoid, illiberal chaos while Germany and Japan run amok.

It is a vivid reminder that a world in which the US ceases to lead the fight for freedom is a frightening place.

Let’s hope we don’t go there, whoever wins on November 3.

Nick Cater is executive director of Menzies Research Centre.

NICK CATER

 

COLUMNIST

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre and a columnist with The Australian. He is a former editor of The Weekend Australian and a former deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph. He is aut… Read more

===========================

Moral Nihilism in 2 Australian states

Moral Nihilism in 2 Australian states  By Henry Ergas, The Australian, 18 September 2020

Sophocles’ legendary tyrant was supremely political, imbued with the casual ­ruthlessness of those whose craft is power. This cynicism is also on display in Queensland and Victoria.

Almost 2500 years after it was first performed, Sophocles’s Antigone has seemed more relevant — ever since Queensland refused Sarah Caisip, a 26-year-old Canberra-based graduate nurse, permission to attend her father’s funeral.

Of course, unlike Antigone — who, in Sophocles’s tragedy, refuses to obey the order given by Creon, the recently crowned king of Thebes, to let the body of her brother, who died a traitor, rot in the open, where it will be consumed by vultures, wolves and rats — Caisip did not breach the prohibition, much less face horrendous punishment for doing so.

But no one expressed better than Sophocles the clash between the demands of the state on the one hand, and the human imperative to properly honour the death of those we love on the other.

Despite his apparent indifference to Antigone’s sense of duty, Creon, as Sophocles portrays him, was neither a tyrant nor a monster. Rather, at least initially, he simply believed in the need to respect the rules, because the failure to do so could lead to even more suffering than the pain they cause.

And since time immemorial, Thebes law, like that of the other Greek city-states, had condemned traitors to the humiliation and torment of being denied the funeral rites.

The fact that violating that law might pollute the polis, rekindling the devastating plague which destroyed the reign of Creon’s predecessor, Oedipus, only made the stakes all the greater.

THEAUSTRALIAN.COM.AU1:51

‘Spreading fear’ is the key strategy of Palaszczuk’s election campaign

Former speaker of the house Bronwyn Bishop says Annastacia Palaszczuk has one strategy to win the upcoming election and it purely involves convincing Queenslanders, “I have sa…

Yet faced with mounting pressure to relent — and to respect Antigone’s appeal to a moral law, even higher than the city’s, which, in the name of piety and fidelity, obliged her to ensure and attend the decent burial of her beloved brother — Creon showed himself to be supremely political, imbued with the cynicism and casual ­ruthlessness of those whose craft is power.

Fearing that making concessions under pressure would compromise his authority, and with it his grasp on the throne, he took refuge behind the rules, which, far from reducing cruelty, served only to redirect and formalise his ferocity.

When he ultimately told Antigone — in refusing to compromise — that “You may love the dead and die, I live for life”, the ­future he was protecting was really his own, not that of Thebes’s ­citizens. And while he could claim, with some validity, to have restored security and preserved the city’s health, the moral nihilism into which he descended could only survive amid the ruins and debris of Thebes’s spiritual fabric.

None of that means that Creon lacked popular support. On the contrary, in Jean Anouilh’s masterly retelling of Antigone — which the French playwright composed in the closing days of World War II — Creon, who seized the day, made the hard ­decisions and trounced his opponents, unceasingly manipulating those he referred to as the “brutes that I govern”.

THEAUSTRALIAN.COM.AU6:42

Daniel Andrews takes a ‘sledgehammer to a nail’ on COVID

Victorian shadow Police Minister David Southwick says the opposition hopes to convince Labor Party members to realise Daniel Andrews is “taking a sledgehammer to a nail” on CO…

As things turned out, with the threat of pestilence still looming, the plebs were scarcely interested in ethical dilemmas, so long as their own concerns were met. Even more importantly, Creon’s tough stance entrenched and emboldened the city’s ubiquitous guards, who emerged from Anouilh’s retelling of the tragedy as its greatest, if not only, winners.

At the end of the day, it was the thugs and cronies who profited, while Antigone, whose spirit was doomed to wander forever without finding peace, met her fate.

There are, in the story of ­Antigone, truths that have given it almost unique resonance over the millennia, with a recent study identifying more than 100 significant adaptations and variations of Sophocles’s account in 20th century literature alone.

Almost all of those, Maria de Fatima Silva finds, are set in long-established dictatorships; but now the truths Sophocles’s story tells seem to be playing themselves out on our shores.

It is not simply the appalling heartlessness that was shown to Caisip — who could, for example, have been required to attend her father’s funeral wearing personal protective clothing — which is at issue here.

Rather, with Annastacia Palaszczuk exploiting the threat of contagion to prevent Scott Morrison, who is very popular in Queensland, entering the state during its election campaign, and Daniel Andrews doing whatever he can to avoid public accountability and shield his own guards from the scrutiny they need and deserve, we face a plague of petty Creons, drenched in the moral ­nihilism that distinguishes the breed.

There is, for sure, a chance that they will succeed; the gods, who in Greek tragedy could always be counted on to mete out harsh justice, having long left the scene, little stands between us and the ancients’ presumption, amply justified by every page of political history, that some agents of government will use all the scope they have to entrench their position — including by acting brutally and immorally — unless they are prevented from doing so.

With the crisis removing many of those constraints, our democracy appears to have slipped closer to the edge of the precipice than one might have thought possible. And while it may be that we will edge back once the crisis abates, it is surely critical to revisit the lessons liberalism’s greatest thinkers drew in reflecting on the Sophoclean drama.

Judith Shklar, the Harvard professor whose lectures on ­Antigone and political obligation were recently published post­humously, captured them brilliantly. The liberalism we inherited from the 19th century, she wrote, was a “liberalism of hope” — the hope, most of all, that one could create the basis for human flourishing.

But these dark times, which offer so much room for manipulation and deceit, demand a renewed emphasis on the “liberalism of fear” that instead of concentrating on how to bring about the greatest good, focuses on averting the greatest ills.

Rather than striving for the utopian perfectibility of mankind, the liberalism of fear seeks to limit the damage, so that we can feel free because the government does not, indeed cannot, terrorise us — be it by handcuffing pregnant women for organising innocent protests or by denying to grieving families the solace of farewelling the dead.

In Australia, we have always assumed that those freedoms were so deeply rooted in custom and culture as to be inextinguishable. Today we realise otherwise.

But we also realise there are no simple, much less foolproof, recipes that can balance the need for governments that are effective, even in crises, with the absolute imperatives of liberty.

That is the debate we must have in the months ahead. The alternative is yet more Creons, with all their ambition and venom, in an Australia that seems as remote from what we know and cherish as Antigone’s wandering and inconsolable ghost.

HENRY ERGAS

 

COLUMNIST

Henry Ergas AO is an economist who spent many years at the OECD in Paris before returning to Australia. He has taught at a number of universities, including Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the Universit… Read more

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Why The ‘Journalists’ Don’t Like Julian Assange

 

Why The ‘Journalists’ Don’t Like Julian Assange  From American Herald Tribune, 15 September 2020

The death of real journalism, a sad and sorry tale.  Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Thomas Paine would be turning in their graves.

Why is it that so many journalists have turned their backs on Julian Assange? Why do so many abuse him instead of defending him?  He is, after all, a world historic figure who will be remembered centuries from now in the same way we remember Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Thomas Paine.  Thanks to technology, Assange has been able to do far more than they could ever imagine in advancing the ‘right to know’ component of human rights.  He has broken more real news than all the journalists who sneer at him put together,  so resentment could be one explanation.   They say Assange is ‘not a journalist’ when what they mean is that he is not a journalist like them.

The keywords here are mediation and control. ‘What lies behind the headlines’ has another meaning beyond what is really going on in politics. ‘What lies behind the headlines’ is also what goes on in newsrooms before you read your morning paper or watch the evening news bulletin.

News is a product, like anything that comes off the factory floor.  The raw material comes in, is processed,  refined and polished before being placed on the sales shelf called ‘news.’   Millions of pieces of news flow into editorial rooms every day.  What you read or watch is only the tiniest fraction of this flood.

What you read or see is what someone is choosing for you,  what someone thinks is ‘news’ compared to all the other items that never see the light of day,  what someone thinks you should know as opposed to what you might like to know.

News in the mainstream is mediated from start to finish.  The reporter produces the raw product.  Whether it is a car crash or civil war, someone else will always see it differently but his or her particular version is the raw material submitted for processing.  Editors at the daily news conference decide if it deserves a place and where it should be placed, on page one, three or five,  at the top of the page or lower done,  under a one column or three column heading,  at the top of the nightly news bulletin or closer to the bottom.

The editor has the final say.  He or she is the link between the board and the advertisers and has to deal with the pressure that might come from their direction when the story is a sensitive one.  Thus,  depending on the relationship between editor and the board/proprietor, an important story might not be published at all or might be shriveled to the point where it no longer seems important.

The decision made, an editor gets to work,  cutting,  reshaping, honing and polishing the story, maybe moving paragraphs around if he or she thinks they are not in the right order, until the product is ready to attract the attention of the reader/viewer, much as the male jackdaw lines the nest with silver paper to attract the attention of the female. There can be differences of opinion between the reporter and the editor along the way but in essence they are egotistical, not over truth or untruth or the public’s right to know, but over how the story should be written and presented.

There is no unmediated news in the mainstream media.  It is the news as decided by reporters and editors,  from the choice of story to report in the first place to the end of the production line. There could be thousands of other news items you the reader or viewer might think are worthier of space and time that never see the light of day.

What is happening around the world, therefore, is only what is reported as happening,  before being processed to meet editorial requirements.  If it is not reported it might as well not have happened,  beyond the impact within the immediate circle of where it did happen. Thus the media can make something happen or unhappen, according to the choices made in editorial rooms.

Control relates to control as exerted vertically,  from the board or proprietor down to the editor and then to the very bottom of the editorial chain.  Apart from the car crash, the rape or the robbery, there is a line that has to be protected when it comes to important political stories or stories that affect advertisers and the particular media outlet’s commercial interests.  There is always some flexibility,  depending on how tightly controlled the editorial line is from the top,  but the general political/social profile of the organization always has to be protected.

If ‘news’ is to be defined as something we don’t know,  we could spend our entire lives reading books (and might be better off for it).  Much of the ‘news’ that is printed falls into the same category of what we don’t know but whether we really need or want to know it is another question.

The endless goings-on of the Kardashian family might be a good example.   The definition of news has swung in the direction of ‘celebrity gossip’ and the celebrities have responded by providing editors with all the ‘news’ they might want to print,  but ‘news’ that many of ‘us’ (readers and viewers) would regard as trash. Of course, for the media to remain viable, the product has to sell and amidst all the Kardashian bottoms, that is the bottom line.

So mediation and control are two reasons the journalists abuse Assange.  Given the massive volume of material Wikipedia receives, he or his team have to exert some control and make decisions about how much they can upload within their technical capacity but what they do post is unmediated.  There are no cuts, no editing no polishing: the news comes to you in its raw state and you the reader can decide what to make of it, instead of someone telling you what to make of it.

Another reason for disliking Assange is jealousy.  He has scooped all of these journalists who abuse him thousand times over,  by releasing sensational material that exposes the dirty secrets they would love to get their hands on.

In recent history only one reporter,  Seymour Hersh, without the technical ability to penetrate government vaults that Wikipedia’s sources have and relying entirely on his human sources,  has come anywhere close to what Assange has achieved.  Hersh is the greatest reporter of this age, or just about any age, a model of courage and the determination to dig for the truth, whatever the obstacles.

His fate is instructive. He broke the My Lai massacre in 1968, he exposed the Abu Ghraib prison torture in 2004  and he broke many other stories in between,  yet when he crossed the government-media line on Syria by exposing the falsity of the claim that the Syrian government was responsible for an alleged chemical weapons attack close to Damascus in 2013 his usual outlet, the New Yorker,  refused to publish. The story was handed to the Washington Post, which also turned it down.   The arguments that it did not meet their standards don’t deserve to be taken seriously.

Eventually, the  London Review of Books took the story on but when Hersh followed up with an account questioning the trans-Atlantic government and media line on the alleged role of the Syrian government in the alleged chemical weapons attack at Khan Sheikhun in April, 2017, the LRB declined to publish even though it had paid for the story.

Subsequently,  Hersh had to publish in Germany (‘Khan Sheikhun Trump’s Red Line,’ Welt am Sonntag, June 25, 2017) and he now has no place anywhere in the mainstream print media of his own country.

Another reason for journalists disliking Assange is that in one way or another,  they are not free to write what they want.  They belong to institutions, ‘belonging’ defined as owned by them. They depend on them for their salaries and their careers.  Basically they are correct when they say ‘No-one tells me what to write.’  No one has to tell them because they already know what to write if they want to keep their jobs,  wherever they happen to work.

Self-censorship is central to the practice of journalism in the mainstream.  No-one with an eye on their best interests is going to write something they know editors will throw in their face, not because it is badly written but because it goes against the editorial line.  They might be lucky enough to agree with the editorial line anyway but if they don’t they have to adjust, or look for a future in journalism elsewhere.

Thus, journalists have power,  the power and the money of the institution behind them.  Assange has no institution behind him.  Indeed, the institutions are all against him. A media which used him up has abandoned him.  The government of his own country, Australia, has not lifted a finger in his defense.

What Assange does have behind him is the power of the truth-telling that should be the core of journalism,  not the truth-tailoring and the acceptance of downright lies that characterizes much of mainstream journalism today.   So of course the journalists don’t like him, or should we say ‘journalists’, because who is doing the real work of journalism today,  they or Julian Assange?

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Previous articles

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    • cairns-post-editorial-201016  Laws of diminishing returns as the ‘nanny state’ takes over control of our freedom, By Julian Tomlinson, Cairns Post, 20 October 2016
The Rises, Falls and lies about Western Empires

Empires: rises and falls, so now what?

The US was the dominant world power after WWII but has been failing, compounded by lies and desperate plans for hegemony compounded by declining culture and values. Previous empires such as the UK and Roman empires failed in similar manner.

Scroll down to read the most recent articles.  Links to previous articles  follow.

Eyewitness To The Trial and Agony of Julian Assange

 Eyewitness To The Trial and Agony of Julian Assange  By John Pilger, JohnPilger.com, 4 October, 2020

John Pilger has watched Julian Assange’s extradition trial from the public gallery at London’s Old Bailey. He spoke with Timothy Erik Ström of Arena magazine, Australia:

Q: Having watched Julian Assange’s trial first-hand, can you describe the prevailing atmosphere in the court?

The prevailing atmosphere has been shocking. I say that without hesitation; I have sat in many courts and seldom known such a corruption of due process; this is due revenge. Putting aside the ritual associated with ‘British justice’, at times it has been evocative of a Stalinist show trial. One difference is that in the show trials, the defendant stood in the court proper. In the Assange trial, the defendant was caged behind thick glass, and had to crawl on his knees to a slit in the glass, overseen by his guard, to make contact with his lawyers. His message, whispered barely audibly through face masks, WAS then passed by post-it the length of the court to where his barristers were arguing the case against his extradition to an American hellhole.

Consider this daily routine of Julian Assange, an Australian on trial for truth-telling journalism. He was woken at five o’clock in his cell at Belmarsh prison in the bleak southern sprawl of London. The first time I saw Julian in Belmarsh, having passed through half an hour of ‘security’ checks, including a dog’s snout in my rear, I found a painfully thin figure sitting alone wearing a yellow armband. He had lost more than 10 kilos in a matter of months; his arms had no muscle. His first words were: ‘I think I am losing my mind’.

I tried to assure him he wasn’t. His resilience and courage are formidable, but there is a limit. That was more than a year ago. In the past three weeks, in the pre-dawn, he was strip-searched, shackled, and prepared for transport to the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, in a truck that his partner, Stella Moris, described as an upended coffin. It had one small window; he had to stand precariously to look out. The truck and its guards were operated by Serco, one of many politically connected companies that run much of Boris Johnson’s Britain.

The journey to the Old Bailey took at least an hour and a half. That’s a minimum of three hours being jolted through snail-like traffic every day. He was led into his narrow cage at the back of the court, then look up, blinking, trying to make out faces in the public gallery through the reflection of the glass. He saw the courtly figure of his dad, John Shipton, and me, and our fists went up. Through the glass, he reached out to touch fingers with Stella, who is a lawyer and seated in the body of the court.

We were here for the ultimate of what the philosopher Guy Debord called The Society of the Spectacle: a man fighting for his life. Yet his crime is to have performed an epic public service: revealing that which we have a right to know: the lies of our governments and the crimes they commit in our name. His creation of WikiLeaks and its failsafe protection of sources revolutionised journalism, restoring it to the vision of its idealists. Edmund Burke’s notion of free journalism as a fourth estate is now a fifth estate that shines a light on those who diminish the very meaning of democracy with their criminal secrecy. That’s why his punishment is so extreme.

The sheer bias in the courts I have sat in this year and last year, with Julian in the dock, blight any notion of British justice. When thuggish police dragged him from his asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy – look closely at the photo and you’ll see he is clutching a Gore Vidal book; Assange has a political humour similar to Vidal’s – a judge gave him an outrageous 50-week sentence in a maximum-security prison for mere bail infringement.

For months, he was denied exercise and held in solitary confinement disguised as ‘heath care’. He once told me he strode the length of his cell, back and forth, back and forth, for his own half-marathon. In the next cell, the occupant screamed through the night. At first he was denied his reading glasses, left behind in the embassy brutality. He was denied the legal documents with which to prepare his case, and access to the prison library and the use of a basic laptop. Books sent to him by a friend, the journalist Charles Glass, himself a survivor of hostage-taking in Beirut, were returned. He could not call his American lawyers. He has been constantly medicated by the prison authorities. When I asked him what they were giving him, he couldn’t say. The governor of Belmarsh has been awarded the Order of the British Empire.

At the Old Bailey, one of the expert medical witnesses, Dr Kate Humphrey, a clinical neuropsychologist at Imperial College, London, described the damage: Julian’s intellect had gone from ‘in the superior, or more likely very superior range’ to ‘significantly below’ this optimal level, to the point where he was struggling to absorb information and ‘perform in the low average range’.

This is what the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Professor Nils Melzer, calls ‘psychological torture’, the result of a gang-like ‘mobbing’ by governments and their media shills. Some of the expert medical evidence is so shocking I have no intention of repeating it here. Suffice to say that Assange is diagnosed with autism and Asperger’s syndrome and, according to Professor Michael Kopelman, one of the world’s leading neuropsychiatrists, he suffers from ‘suicidal preoccupations’ and is likely to find a way to take his life if he is extradited to America.

James Lewis QC, America’s British prosecutor, spent the best part of his cross-examination of Professor Kopelman dismissing mental illness and its dangers as ‘malingering’. I have never heard in a modern setting such a primitive view of human frailty and vulnerability.

My own view is that if Assange is freed, he is likely to recover a substantial part of his life. He has a loving partner, devoted friends and allies and the innate strength of a principled political prisoner. He also has a wicked sense of humour.

But that is a long way off. The moments of collusion between the judge – a Gothic-looking magistrate called Vanessa Baraitser, about whom little is known – and the prosecution acting for the Trump regime have been brazen. Until the last few days, defence arguments have been routinely dismissed. The lead prosecutor, James Lewis QC, ex SAS and currently Chief Justice of the Falklands, by and large gets what he wants, notably up to four hours to denigrate expert witnesses, while the defence’s examination is guillotined at half an hour. I have no doubt, had there been a jury, his freedom would be assured.

The dissident artist Ai Weiwei came to join us one morning in the public gallery. He noted that in China the judge’s decision would already have been made. This caused some dark ironic amusement. My companion in the gallery, the astute diarist and former British ambassador Craig Murray wrote:

I fear that all over London a very hard rain is now falling on those who for a lifetime have worked within institutions of liberal democracy that at least broadly and usually used to operate within the governance of their own professed principles. It has been clear to me from Day 1 that I am watching a charade unfold. It is not in the least a shock to me that Baraitser does not think anything beyond the written opening arguments has any effect. I have again and again reported to you that, where rulings have to be made, she has brought them into court pre-written, before hearing the arguments before her.

I strongly expect the final decision was made in this case even before opening arguments were received.

The plan of the US Government throughout has been to limit the information available to the public and limit the effective access to a wider public of what information is available. Thus we have seen the extreme restrictions on both physical and video access. A complicit mainstream media has ensured those of us who know what is happening are very few in the wider population.

There are few records of the proceedings. They are: Craig Murray’s personal blog, Joe Lauria’s live reporting on Consortium News and the World Socialist Website. American journalist Kevin Gosztola’s blog, Shadowproof, funded mostly by himself, has reported more of the trial than the major US press and TV, including CNN, combined.

In Australia, Assange’s homeland, the ‘coverage’ follows a familiar formula set overseas. The London correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald, Latika Bourke, wrote this recently:

The court heard Assange became depressed during the seven years he spent in the Ecuadorian embassy where he sought political asylum to escape extradition to Sweden to answer rape and sexual assault charges.

There were no ‘rape and sexual assault charges’ in Sweden. Bourke’s lazy falsehood is not uncommon. If the Assange trial is the political trial of the century, as I believe it is, its outcome will not only seal the fate of a journalist for doing his job but intimidate the very principles of free journalism and free speech. The absence of serious mainstream reporting of the proceedings is, at the very least, self-destructive. Journalists should ask: who is next?

How shaming it all is. A decade ago, the Guardian exploited Assange’s work, claimed its profit and prizes as well as a lucrative Hollywood deal, then turned on him with venom. Throughout the Old Bailey trial, two names have been cited by the prosecution, the Guardian’s David Leigh, now retired as ‘investigations editor’ and Luke Harding, the Russiaphobe and author of a fictional Guardian ‘scoop’ that claimed Trump adviser Paul Manafort and a group of Russians visited Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy. This never happened, and the Guardian has yet to apologise. The Harding and Leigh book on Assange – written behind their subject’s back – disclosed a secret password to a WikiLeaks file that Assange had entrusted to Leigh during the Guardian’s ‘partnership’. Why the defence has not called this pair is difficult to understand.

Assange is quoted in their book declaring during a dinner at a London restaurant that he didn’t care if informants named in the leaks were harmed. Neither Harding nor Leigh was at the dinner. John Goetz, an investigations reporter with Der Spiegel, was at the dinner and testified that Assange said nothing of the kind. Incredibly, Judge Baraitser stopped Goetz actually saying this in court.

However, the defence has succeeded in demonstrating the extent to which Assange sought to protect and redact names in the files released by WikiLeaks and that no credible evidence existed of individuals harmed by the leaks. The great whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg said that Assange had personally redacted 15,000 files. The renowned New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager, who worked with Assange on the Afghanistan and Iraq war leaks, described how Assange took ‘extraordinary precautions in redacting names of informants’.

Q: What are the implications of this trial’s verdict for journalism more broadly – is it an omen of things to come?

The ‘Assange effect’ is already being felt across the world. If they displease the regime in Washington, investigative journalists are liable to prosecution under the 1917 US Espionage Act; the precedent is stark. It doesn’t matter where you are. For Washington, other people’s nationality and sovereignty rarely mattered; now it does not exist. Britain has effectively surrendered its jurisdiction to Trump’s corrupt Department of Justice. In Australia, a National Security Information Act promises Kafkaesque trials for transgressors. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has been raided by police and journalists’ computers taken away. The government has given unprecedented powers to intelligence officials, making journalistic whistle-blowing almost impossible. Prime Minister Scott Morrison says Assange ‘must face the music’. The perfidious cruelty of his statement is reinforced by its banality.

‘Evil’, wrote Hannah Arendt, ‘comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil’.

Q: Having followed the story of WikiLeaks closely for a decade, how has this eyewitness experience shifted your understanding of what’s at stake with Assange’s trial?

I have long been a critic of journalism as an echo of unaccountable power and a champion of those who are beacons. So, for me, the arrival of WikiLeaks was exciting; I admired the way Assange regarded the public with respect, that he was prepared to share his work with the ‘mainstream’ but not join their collusive club. This, and naked jealousy, made him enemies among the overpaid and under-talented, insecure in their pretensions of independence and impartiality.

I admired the moral dimension to WikiLeaks. Assange was rarely asked about this, yet much of his remarkable energy comes from a powerful moral sense that governments and other vested interests should not operate behind walls of secrecy. He is a democrat. He explained this in one of our first interviews at my home in 2010.

What is at stake for the rest of us has long been at stake: freedom to call authority to account, freedom to challenge, to call out hypocrisy, to dissent. The difference today is that the world’s imperial power, the United States, has never been as unsure of its metastatic authority as it is today. Like a flailing rogue, it is spinning us towards a world war if we allow it. Little of this menace is reflected in the media.

WikiLeaks, on the other hand, has allowed us to glimpse a rampant imperial march through whole societies – think of the carnage in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, to name a few, the dispossession of 37 million people and the deaths of 12 million men, women and children in the ‘war on terror’ – most of it behind a façade of deception.

Julian Assange is a threat to these recurring horrors – that’s why he is being persecuted, why a court of law has become an instrument of oppression, why he ought to be our collective conscience: why we all should be the threat.

The judge’s decision will be known on the 4th of January.

===============================

The Saker’s View of the US Election

The Saker’s View of the US Election  From The Saker, via PaulCraigRoberts.org, 15 September 2020

In early July I wrote a piece entitled “Does the next Presidential election even matter?” in which I made the case that voting in the next election to choose who will be the next puppet in the White House will be tantamount to voting for a new captain while the Titanic is sinking. I gave three specific reasons why I thought that the next election would be pretty much irrelevant:

1The US system is rigged to give all the power to minorities and to completely ignore the will of the people

2The choice between the Demolicans and the Republicrats is not a choice at all

3The systemic crisis of the USA is too deep to be affected by who is in power in the White House

I have now reconsidered my position and I now see that I was wrong because I missed something important:

A lot has happened in the past couple of months and I now have come to conclude that while choosing a captain won’t make any difference to a sinking Titanic, it might make a huge difference to those passengers who are threatened by a group of passengers run amok. In other words, while I still do not think that the next election will change much for the rest of the planet (the decay of the Empire will continue), it is gradually becoming obvious that for the United States the difference between the two sides is becoming very real.

Why?

This is probably the first presidential election in US history where the choice will be not between two political programs or two political personalities, but the stark and binary choice between law and order and total chaos.

It is now clear that the Dems are supporting the rioting mobs and that they see these mobs as the way to beat Trump.

It is also becoming obvious that this is not a white vs. black issue: almost all the footage from the rioting mobs shows a large percentage of whites, sometimes even a majority of whites, especially amongst the most aggressive and violent rioters (the fact that these whites regularly get beat up by rampaging blacks hunting for “whitey” does not seem to deter these folks).

True, both sides blame each other for “dividing the country” and “creating the conditions for a civil war”, but any halfway objective and fact based appraisal of what is taking place shows that the Dems have comprehensively caved into the BLM/Antifa ideology (which is hardly surprising, since that ideology is a pure product of the Dems (pseudo-)liberal worldview in the first place). Yes, the Demolicans and the Republicrats are but two factions of the same “Party of Money”, but the election of Trump in 2016 and the subsequent 4 years of intense seditious efforts to delegitimize Trump have resulted in a political climate in which we roughly have, on one hand, what I would call the “Trump Party” (which is not the same as the GOP) and the “deplorables” objectively standing for law and order. On the other hand, we have the Dems, some Republicans, big corporations and the BLM/Antifa mobs who now all objectively stand for anarchy, chaos and random violence.

I have always criticized the AngloZionist Empire and the USA themselves for their messianic and supremacist ideology, and I agree that in their short history the United States have probably spilled more innocent blood than any other regime in history. Yet I also believe that there also have been many truly good things in US history, things which other countries should emulate (as many have!). I am referring to things like the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the spirit of self-reliance, a strong work ethic, the immense creativity of the people of the US and their love for their country.

It is now clear that the Dems find nothing good in the US or its history – hence their total support for the wanton (and, frankly, barbaric) destruction of historical statues or for the ridiculous notion that the United States was primarily built by black slaves and that modern whites are somehow guilty of what their ancestors did (including whites who did not have any slave owners amongst their ancestors).

Putin once said that he has no problems at all with any opposition to the Russian government, but that he categorically rejects the opposition to Russia herself (most of the non-systemic opposition in Russia is profoundly russophobic). I see the exact same thing happening here, in the USA: the Dem/BLM/Antifa gang are profoundly anti-USA, and not for the right reasons. It is just obvious that these people are motivated by pure hate and where there is hate, violence always follows!

To think that there will be no violence if these people come to power would be extremely naive: those who come to power by violence always end up ruling by violence.

For the past several decades, the US ruling elites have been gutting the Constitution by a million of legislative and regulatory cuts (I can personally attest to the fact that the country where I obtained my degrees in 1986-1991 is a totally different country from the one I am living in now. Thirty years ago there was real ideological freedom and pluralism in the US, and differences of opinion, even profound ones, were considered normal). Now the apparatus needed to crack down on the “deplorables” has been established, especially on the Federal level. If we now apply the “motive, means & opportunity” criterion we can only conclude that the Dem/BLM/Antifa have the motive and will sure have the means and opportunity if Biden makes it to the White House.

Furthermore, major media corporations are already cracking down against Trump supporters and even against President Trump himself (whom Twitter now threatens to censor if he declares that he won). YouTube is demonetizing “deplorable” channels and also de-ranking them in searches. Google does the same. For a President which heavily relies on short messages to his support base, this is a major threat.

[Sidebar: one of Trump’s biggest mistakes was to rely on Twitter instead of funding his own social media platform. He sure had the money. What he lacked was any foresight or understanding of the enemy]

Paul Craig Roberts has been one of the voices which has been warning us that anti-White racism is real and that the United States & Its Constitution Have Two Months Left. I submit that on the former he is undeniably correct and that we ought to pay heed to his warning about what might soon happen next. I also tend to agree with others who warn us that violence will happen next, no matter who wins. Not only are some clearly plotting a coup against Trump should he declare himself the winner, but things have now gone so far that the Chairmen of the JCS had to make an official statement saying that the US military will play no role in the election. Finally, and while I agree that Florida might not be a typical state, I see a lot of signs saying “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic” with the word “domestic” emphasized in some manner. Is this the proverbial “writing on the wall”?

Conclusion:

The Empire is dying and nothing can save it, things have gone way too far to ever return to the bad old days of US world hegemony. Furthermore, I have the greatest doubts about Trump or his supporters being able to successfully defeat Dem/BLM/Antifa. “Just” winning the election won’t be enough, even if Trump wins by a landslide: we already know that the Dem/BLM/Antifa will never accept a Trump victory, no matter how big. I also suspect that 2020 will be dramatically different from the 2000 Gore-Bush election which saw the outcome decided by a consensus of the ruling elites: this time around the hatred is too deep, and there will be no negotiated compromise between the parties.

In 2016 I recommended a Trump vote for one, single, overwhelming reason: my profound belief that Hillary would have started a war against Syria and, almost immediately, against Russia (the Dems are, again, making noises about such a war should they return into the White House). As for Trump, for all his megalomaniacal threats and in spite of a few (thoroughly ineffective) missile strikes on Syria, he has not started a new war.

By the way, when was it the last time that a US president did NOT order a war during his time in office?

The fact is that the Trump victory in 2016 gave Russia the time to finalize her preparations for any time of aggression, or even a full-scale war, which the US might try to throw at her. The absence of any US reaction to the Iranian retaliatory missile strikes against US bases in Iraq in January has shown that US military commanders have no stomach for a war against Iran, nevermind China or, even less, Russia. By now it is too late, Russia is ready for anything, while the US is not. Trump bought the planet an extra four years to prepare for war, and the key adversaries of the US have used that time with great benefit. As for the former world hegemon, it can’t even take on Venezuela…

But inside the USA, what we see taking place before us is a weird kind of war against the people of the USA, a war waged by a very dangerous mix of ideologues and thugs (that is the toxic recipe for most revolutions!). And while Trump or Biden won’t really matter much to Russia, China or Iran, it still might matter a great deal to millions of people who deserve better than to live under a Dem/BLM/Antifa dictatorship (whether only ideological or actual).

The USA of 2020 in so many ways reminds me of Russia in February 1917: the ruling classes were drunk on their ideological dogmas and never realized that the revolution they so much wanted would end up killing most of them. This is exactly what the US ruling classes are doing: they are acting like a parasite who cannot understand that by killing its host it will also kill itself. The likes of Pelosi very much remind me of Kerensky, the man who first destroyed the 1000 year old Russian monarchy and who then proceeded to replace it with kind of totally dysfunctional “masonic democracy” which only lasted 8 months until the Bolsheviks finally seized power and restored law and order (albeit in a viciously ruthless manner).

The US political system is both non-viable and non-reformable. No matter what happens next, the US as we knew it will collapse this winter, PCR is right. The only questions remaining are:

  • What will replace it? and
  • How long (and painful) will the transition to a new USA be?

Trump in the White House might not make things better, but a Harris presidency (which is what a “Biden” victory will usher in) will make things much, much worse. Finally, there are millions of US Americans out there who did nothing wrong and who deserve to be protected from the rioting and looting mobs by their police agencies just as there are millions of US Americans who should retain the ability to defend themselves when no law enforcement is available. There is a good reason why the Second Amendment comes right after the First one – the two are organically linked! With the Dem/BLM/Antifa in power, the people of the USA can kiss both Amendments goodbye.

I still don’t see a typical civil war breaking out in the US. But I see many, smaller, “local wars” breaking out all over the country – yes, violence is at this point inevitable. It is, therefore, the moral obligation of every decent person to do whatever he/she can do, no matter how small, to help the “deplorables” in their struggle against the forces of chaos, violence and tyranny, especially during the upcoming “years of transition” which will be very, very hard on the majority of the people living in the US.

This includes doing whatever is possible to prevent the Dem/BLM/Antifa from getting into the White House.

The Saker

=========================

America’s Colour Revolution

America’s Colour Revolution  By Paul Craig Roberts, Zerohedge, 14 September 2020

I have provided evidence that the military/security complex, using the media and the Democrats, intends to turn the November election into a colour revolution – here, here, and here.

 

The CIA is very experienced at colour revolutions, having pulled them off in a number of countries where the existing government did not suit the CIA.  As we have known since CIA Director John Brennan’s denunciations of President Trump, Trump doesn’t suit the CIA either. As far as the CIA is concerned, Trump is no different from Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, Charles de Gaulle, Manuel Zelaya, Evo Morales, Viktor Yanukovych, and a large number of others.

Russiagate was a coup that failed, followed by the failed Impeachgate coup.  Faced with Trump’s re-election and the realization that upon re-election Trump will be able to deal with the treason against him, the Deep State has decided to take him out with a colour revolution.

The evidence of a colour revolution in the works is abundantly supplied by CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, NPR, Washington Post and numerous Internet sites funded by the CIA and the foundations and corporations through which it operates, all of which are committed to Trump’s ejection from the Oval Office.  The American public does not realize the extent to which the institutions of a free society have been penetrated and turned against freedom. All of these media organizations are establishing the story in the mind of Americans that Trump will not leave office when he loses or steals the election and must be driven out. 

Emails are arriving from readers in the UK and Europe reporting that the British and European media are at work preparing the acceptability of the CIA’s colour revolution against President Trump.  It is taken for granted by both media and politicians in Europe and the UK that Trump cannot win re-election because he:

(1) is a Putin agent,

(2) abuses the power of his office,

(3) represents racist “Trump Deplorables,”

(4) is a womanizer – “grab them by the pussy,”

(5) is responsible for America leading the world in Covid-19 cases and deaths,

(6) doesn’t support NATO (a sinecure for many Europeans),

(7) is an outsider and not a member of The Establishment and “is not like us,”

(8) “has orange hair” (orange is considered a low-class colour). 

You can add your own to the list.

The scenarios for what the American, British, and European media assume to be a necessary colour revolution  to drive Trump from office are:

  1. Trump loses the election, refuses to leave office and must be dislodged or democracy is lost.
  2. Trump wins the election by fraud and must be dislodged or democracy is lost.

The scenarios do not accommodate Trump actually winning the election by the vote of the people.  That outcome is outside the possibilities.

According to the media, Trump can only lose or steal the election.

With Antifa and Black Lives Matter now experienced in violent protests, they will be unleashed anew on American cities when there is news of a Trump election victory. The media will explain the violence as necessary to free us from a tyrant and egg on the violence, as will the Democrat Party.  The CIA will be certain that the violence is well funded.

Trump, isolated in his own government, which has failed to bring charges against the Obama regime officials who tried to frame the President of the United States and drive him from office—Barr and Durham represent The Establishment, not the President or law—will be cut off from Twitter, Facebook and from the print and TV media.  All Americans and the world will hear is that Trump lost and must go or Trump won by vote fraud and must go. It will be impossible for Trump or anyone to refute the charges. The weak-minded, weak-willed Republicans will collapse. Republicans are not people capable of combat. Republicans believe that to disparage the military/security complex is unpatriotic. Thus, they are sitting ducks.

Bottom of Form

The CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, Radio Liberty, etc., have used color revolution against others who stood in the way of the American National Security State. Only Maduro has survived them.  So far.

The Secret Service cooperated with the CIA and the Joint Chiefs in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. What is a re-elected President Trump going to do when the Secret Service refuses to repel Antifa and Black Lives Matter when they breach White House Security?  There is no doubt whatsoever that the Secret Service is penetrated by the CIA.  How else could President Kennedy have been assassinated?

American Democracy is on the verge of being ended for all times, and the world media will herald the event as the successful overthrowing of a tyrant.  

====================

Lockdown Lunacy: Your US Government Ordered Depression Has Arrived

Editor’s note: Download the PDF copy using the link below to view the charts.

Lockdown Lunacy. Your US Government Ordered Depression Has Arrived  By David Stockman, 2 August 2020

 Well, the Virus Patrol sure has done it. In a fit of reckless overkill they have managed to vaporize six years of economic growth during the last 90 days. And that’s just by the mechanical reckoning of the GDP accounts, where total output in Q2 weighed in at essentially the same level as Q4 2014.

The real damage is far deeper, however, and is reflected in millions of small businesses permanently destroyed, tens of millions of households wiped-out financially and the vicious daisy chain of delinquencies, deferrals and defaults just beginning to rip through the $78 trillion edifice of debt which entombs the US economy.

Real GDP Level

Of course, most of the Wall Street talking heads were nonplussed by this morning’s release because, well, Q2 results are claimed to be ancient history: Reality is purportedly the “V”-shaped recovery on their spreadsheets, which really can’t fail to happen because it’s always two quarters out regardless of conditions at the moment.

So let’s get something straight. What is happening is an economic catastrophe the likes of which we have never seen before, even during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In fact, the worst annual decline back then was a 14.8% drop in 1932, while the entire peak-to-trough real GDP decline between 1929 and the 1933 bottom was 30.5%.

So it would be fair to say that measured at an annualized rate, the idiotic Dr. Fauci and his Virus Patrol have now delivered a 32.9% GDP plunge, which single-handedly tops the entire contraction of the Great Depression.

Needless to say, the Q2 result also leaves the recessionary drops since 1950 way back in the dust. Even the auto industry induced plunge of Q1 1958 didn’t make the double-digit threshold. It clocked in at a 9.986% annualized decline or less than one-third of today’s cliff dive.

What was especially notable, however, was the vaporization of personal consumption spending on services, which ordinarily accounts for upwards of 70 percent of total PCE; and which is also ballyhooed by the paint-by-the-numbers Wall Street economist as the ballast the keeps GDP moving ever higher.

Not this time!

Services spending literally fell through the trapdoor, contracting at a 43.4% annualized rate. That compares with the 11 recessions since 1950 where real spending on services never went negative, save for the pinprick decline of -1.6% annualized during the Q1 2009 bottom of the Great Recession.

By every account, the economic plunge in the winter of 2008-2009 was the worst since the 1930s, but today the Commerce Department reported a PCE-services drop that was 28X deeper!

Our purpose here is not to marshal scary numbers, even as they surely are. Rather, our point is that what is coursing through the Q2 numbers is not anything that resembles a normal chain-of-reactions macroeconomic cycle. For instance, where job losses cascade through to shrinking incomes, thereby causing consumer confidence and spending wherewithal to diminish and household spending to be curtailed.

To the contrary, what is depicted below is essentially economic marshal law. Agencies of the state commanded airports, restaurants, bars, hair salons, gyms, movies, dentist offices, theme parks, sporting events etc. to close or operate at drastically reduced capacity, which meant, in turn, that day-in-and-day out commerce and economic output vanished instantly.

Stated differently, this 43% plunge in services spending didn’t happen for the ordinary reason that people were short on cash. As we show below, personal income during the quarter – thanks to the massive flow of free stuff from Washington (aka government transfer payments) – clocked in at a record level!

Consequently, there will be no rebound in the plunging red line below no matter how much fiscal and monetary “stimulus” Washington pumps into the main street economy.

The services sector accounts for nearly 66% of total PCE, which, in turn, accounts for 68% of measured GDP. So the latter will not recover until the Virus Patrol gets its foot off the neck of what we call the social congregation activities of daily economic life; and also until it and its MSM collaborationist desist from fanning the false claim that the Covid is the equivalent of the Black Plague, thereby causing people to voluntarily quarantine out of misplaced fear.

Of course, you don’t have to listen to Dr. Fauci and the Scarf Lady for long – yes, they have not yet been locked up in padded cells where they belong – to realize that the Virus Patrol is on a once-in-a lifetime power trip.

In ultra-busy body/Nanny State fashion they are virtually regimenting the comings and goings of a $20 trillion economy – even as they keep the US economy on indefinite idle waiting for the vaccines and antivirals from their allies in Big Pharma and the Gates Complex to ride to the (mandatory) rescue.

Annualized Change In Personal Consumption Expenditures, Services, 1950-2020

We don’t expect the Virus Patrol to be put out of business any time soon because the Donald is too confused and weak to shut them down.

Moreover, if he keeps shooting himself in the kneecaps via tweets like today’s “lets-postpone-the-election” numbskullery, he will guarantee an even worse scenario: Namely, that while Sleepy Joe is being oxygenated and propped-up behind the Resolute Desk for daily Oval Office photo ops, the left-wing health Nazis who surround him will really go to town on Lockdown Nation.

Nor is that any kind of unhinged trashing of the camarilla of out-and-out statists who will form the core of the Biden Administration. The fact is, the Donald’s malpacticing doctors, the MSM and the Blue State mayors and governors have now unleashed a full-on public hysteria that is self-fueling.

It is now transforming ordinary sheeples into obedient and unquestioning brown-shirts. Even in the purportedly enlightened, socialist republic of Aspen, where we are sheltering for the duration, we see them “mask-up” even with no one in sight, while pumping strenuously up the mountain side on a fat-tired bike.

On manifestation of the Covid-Hysteria is the soaring level of “testing” going on as people either try to get a hall pass in order to return to work or just plain run to the nearest testing station every time the media sends off new alarm bells.

During April, for instance, which was the very worst month of the contagion in terms of serious illnesses and deaths, 5.2 million new tests were reported or 175,000 per day.

By contrast, in July to date (thru the 29th), there have been 21.5 million new tests reported or an average of 745,000 per day.

In a population that has been thoroughly exposed to the virus after five months, it is a given that with the number of tests soaring, the number of positive cases will rise proportionately. But that’s a misdirection because the real issue is the true medical severity of the new cases, and that has dropped precipitously.

The death rate has dropped from 1,800 per day in April to 780 in July; and whereas 15-20% of new cases were being hospitalized in most states during April, that figure has now fallen to 2-4%.

That is, after the Grim Reaper’s original romp through the most vulnerable populations – especially the nursing homes and long-term care facilities in March/April – the preponderant share of the remaining populations being infected and testing positive appear to have stronger immune defenses, and are mainly either asymptomatic or treating and recovering at home in the normal flu-season manner.

So on the facts, the Hysteria should be dying out, but, alas, the facts are of small moment in the context of a runaway public hysteria that is being turbocharged by a severely aggravated anti-Trump partisanship that has no modern precedent, or any at all.

We are constantly reminded that there are less than 100 days until the election, but probably of even more salience is that the next flu season will be arriving even sooner in October. And it won’t matter whether the obvious herd immunities building up against the SARS-Cov-2 cause the next flu season to be unusually mild or not.

That’s because the Virus Patrol will be at shrill alert for the “second wave” in the run-up to October, keeping the suffocated economy evident in today’s GDP report on its back foot for the balance of the year, at least. That means the ballyhooed V is now surely dead-as-a-door nail.

In this context, it needs be recalled that the services sector of the US economy is bearing the brunt of the Lockdown orders, but that it now counts for fully $8.7 trillion or 45% of GDP. That compares to a mere 26% back in the days of America’s industrial might in the mid-1950s.

In the big picture context, therefore, national policy – especially at the Eccles Building – caused the off-shoring and hollowing-out of the US industrial economy over the last three decades. In turn, that has left main street especially vulnerable to a state-orchestrated attack on its new services sector center of gravity such as outpatient surgery clinics, Pilates studios and tapas bars.

Again, an economic marshal law attack on the new epicenter of the US economy means that the issue is not traditional stimulus, but clearing the decks and clearing the air of the Virus Patrol orders and Covid-Hysteria, which was the real culprit behind the Q2 GDP disaster.

Nominal GDP (light brown) Versus Service Sector PCE (dark brown), 1955-2020

Perhaps nowhere is the impact of economic marshal law more evident, ironically, than in the health care sub-sector of the services economy.

The former, of course, has been the workhorse of US GDP growth for decades. However, after peaking at $2.50 trillion in Q4 2019, it weighed in at just $1.89 trillion in Q2 2020. That’s a $608 billion decline, reflecting an astounding -24% contraction.

And this is supposed to be the worst medical crisis to hit America since the Spanish Flu of 1918!

But, actually, the government’s data mill is telling an absolutely opposite, nay crazy, story. Namely, that the single largest sector of the US economy plunged at a 61.6% annualized rate in Q2 – meaning that the figure gives the notion of being “off the charts” of history an altogether new definition.

Needless to say, health care spending is not now and never has been amenable to Washington’s vaunted stimulus machines. The overwhelming share of spending is government funded directly through Medicare/Medicaid et al or through the $300 billion per year tax shelter for employer health plans; and whether public or private, consumer health payments are overwhelming made by third-parties, thereby further limiting the efficacy of the cheap money from the Fed and free money from Uncle Sam.

The plunging red line below, therefore, is the doing of the Virus Patrol and its orders to shutdown most so-called discretionary healthy care services, such as cancer screenings? So until it is put out of business and the public Covid-Hysteria is substantially abated, the rebound of the health services sector is likely to the contained and protracted.

In short, what we have is a government-ordered depression, not a macroeconomic recession that is purportedly remediable by a huge dose of monetary and fiscal stimulus. So the truth is, the Virus Patrol, not the Fed and Washington’s everything bailout brigade, is in charge of the recovery from the Q2 disaster, and they are not much interested in letting it happen.

To take another salient example, the go-to strategy of the Virus Patrol has been to shutdown large scale public gatherings entirely, but that’s obviously the venue of the recreation sector.

So it is not surprising that the PCE spending rate for this sector has given “cliff-diving” a run for its money. Compared to the $590 billion annualized rate of spending in Q4 2019, the current quarter clocked in at just $272 trillion.

The amounted to a 53.4% decline from Q4 and an out-of-this-world contraction of 61% annualized in the current quarter. Or alternatively, recreation spending in Lockdown Nation during Q2 reverted to the level first crossed in Q2 2002.

That’s 18 year’s worth of growth gone in a virtual economic heartbeat.

Of course, there was one thing that was way up in Q2 – transfer payments and personal income. And every dime of the massive increase in transfer payments shown below was borrowed by Uncle Sam and monetized by the Fed.

Yet the only thing it accomplished was to further balloon the public debt because the current depression does not flow from the want of means or desire to spend: It’s the product of economic marshal law ordered up by the Virus Patrol.

Still, it is worth noting that wage and salary income (brown line) was down by $680 billion at an annual rate in Q2, while the Washington spending machine boosted transfer payments at a $2.4 trillion annual rate, or by nearly four times more!

Once upon a time, that would have been considered insane overkill, and at least caused Republicans to screech at the top of their lungs about fiscal profligacy.

Alas, as they put up their $1.2 trillion Everything Bailout 5.0 against the House Dems’ $3.3 trillion alternative in the days just ahead, the chart below will be nowhere seen in the porkers’ lounges of Capitol Hill.

Change From Prior Quarter In Billions: Transfer Payments (purple line) Versus Wages and Salaries (brown line)

PEAK TRUMP, IMPENDING CRISES, ESSENTIAL INFO & ACTION

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The Best of David Stockman

Former Congressman David A. Stockman was Reagan’s OMB director, which he wrote about in his best-selling book, . His latest books are and . He’s the editor and publisher of the new David Stockman’s Contra Corner. He was an original partner in the Blackstone Group, and reads LRC the first thing every morning.

Copyright © David Stockman

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Environmentalism: gravy trains, lies, hidden agendas and alarms such as 5G and gsms.

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Senate inquiry is bringing evidence about state of Great Barrier Reef to the surface

Senate inquiry is bringing evidence about state of Great Barrier Reef to the surface  By Professor Peter Ridd, an independent scientist, The Australian, 16 September 2020

 

Editor’s note: Professor Ridd was sacked by James Cook University, Queensland, for challenging some university colleagues regarding the accuracy of their reports concerning the Great Barrier Reef.  Ridd challenged this in court and won a resounding victory in which the judge castigated JCU. An appeal by JCU was lost based on some convoluted points.  Ridd is escalating an appeal to the highest Australian court.  Over $760,000 has been collected for Ridd’s appeal in a Go-Fund appeal. Ridd is pushing in particular for a far better level of quality control in science.

The Senate committee inquiry into the regulation of farm practices impacting water quality on the Great Barrier Reef has yielded some remarkable confessions by science institutions about the state of the reef. It has been the first time many of the scientists have been asked difficult questions and publicly challenged by hard evidence. They have been forced out of their bubble.

It was revealed by Paul Hardisty, boss of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, that only 3 per cent of the reef, the “inshore reefs”, is affected by farm pesticides and sediment. He also stated that pesticides, are a “low to negligible risk”, even for that 3 per cent.

The other 97 per cent, the true offshore Great Barrier Reef, mostly 50km to 100km from the coast, is effectively totally unharmed by pesticides and sediment.

This has been evident in the data for decades but it is nice to see an honest appraisal of the situation.

Why has this fact not been brought to the public’s attention in major documents such as the GBR Outlook Report produced by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority? Why has everybody been deceived about the true extent of the problem?

AIMS was also forthcoming on other important points. Records of coral growth rates show no impact from agriculture. Large corals live centuries, and have annual growth rings like trees. They record their own rate of growth. If farming, which started about 100 years ago on the reef coast, was damaging the it, there should be a slowing of the growth rate. The records show no slowing when agriculture started a century ago, or when large-scale use of fertiliser and pesticides began in the 1950s.

I have written previously that AIMS has been negligent in not updating the GBR-average coral growth data for the past 15 years. We have the scandalous situation that there is data going back centuries – but nothing since 2005. AIMS claimed coral growth rates collapsed between 1990 and 2005, due to climate change; however, there is considerable doubt about this result because AIMS changed the methodology for the data between 1990 and 2005. At the Senate inquiry, under some duress, AIMS agreed it would be a good idea to update this data if the government will fund the project.

Updating the coral growth rate data will be a major step forward. It will prove or disprove the doubtful decline between 1990 and 2005. It will also give the complete record of how the GBR has fared in the past 15 years, a period when scientists have become more strident in their claims that it is on its last legs.

Hardisty, to his credit, has recently implemented red-blue teams within his organisation to help with quality assurance of the work that AIMS produces. A red team is a group of scientists that takes a deliberately antagonist approach to check, test and replicate scientific evidence. A genuine red team is a far more rigorous quality assurance approach than the present system used in science – peer review – which is often little more than a quick read of the work by the scientist’s mates. What AIMS has done internally is similar to what I have been proposing – an Office of Science Quality Assurance that would check, test, and replicate scientific evidence used for public policy.

Unfortunately, Hardisty’s commitment to quality in science was not reflected by many other important witnesses at the Senate inquiry. Many are in denial and resorted to shooting the messengers. An extract from a letter signed by Professor Ian Chubb, a former Australian chief scientist, was read out by Senator Kim Carr.

Disputing the conventional wisdom on the reef was likened to denying that tobacco causes cancer, or that lead in petrol is a health risk. Worse still, the reason sceptics do this, apparently, is “usually money”. Scientists such as Dr Piers Larcombe, the pre-eminent expert on the movement of sediment on the reef, with decades of experience, is thus written off as a corrupt charlatan.

It is scientific “cancel culture”. It is easier than confronting Larcombe’s evidence that farming has very limited impact on the GBR.

It is customary to be very cynical of our politicians, but it was senators Roberts, Rennick, Canavan and McDonald who forced some truth from our generally untrustworthy science institutions. Only our politicians can save us from them.

The evidence about the reef will not be buried forever. All the data indicates agriculture is having a negligible impact on the reef, and recent draconian Queensland legislation against farmers is unwarranted. And this issue will be influential come the Queensland state election on October 31.

(Professor) Peter Ridd is an independent scientist.

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We need an inquiry into climate alarmism

 

We need an inquiry into climate alarmism  By Chris Kenny, The Australian, 29 August 2020

I hope you are sitting down; this foray into political and media madness over bushfires and climate change starts with recognising some excellent, forensic journalism by the ABC. Investigating last summer’s devastating Gospers Mountain fire, journalist Philippa McDonald took us to the very tree where the fire is believed to have been started when it was struck by lightning in a thunderstorm.

McDonald used this to give us the brilliantly counterintuitive opening line; “It began not with fire, but ice.” In a series of reports, McDonald and her team retraced the history of the fire over a number of weeks, how it was almost extinguished by rain, how bushwalkers in the wrong place at the wrong time thwarted a backburn that might have stopped it, how another prescribed burn got out of control and destroyed houses, and how a fortuitous wind change stopped it encroaching on suburban Sydney.

We might quibble with some of the alarmist language — repeating the silly new “megafire” term and pretending that when fires meet they join and get bigger when, in fact, this reduces the number of fronts and total length of fire perimeter — but overall the reporting was factual and admirable because it explained the many variables in fire behaviour and the factors that can influence whether a fire can be contained or extinguished before weather conditions turn it into an unstoppable beast. Surprisingly, and refreshingly, the reports did not dwell on climate change.

When it comes to our bushfires climate change is so close to being irrelevant, it should hardly warrant a passing reference — we have always faced disastrous bushfire conditions and always will. If climate change makes the worst conditions either marginally more or less common, it matters not; we still need to do the same things to protect ourselves.

In previous articles I have detailed the leading scientific analysis showing the main precondition for the NSW fires — a long drought — cannot be attributed to climate change. Unless climate activists want to argue Australia could do something to alter the global climate sufficiently to reduce our bushfire threat, they are exposed as cynical campaigners who used the sure bet of bushfires to advance their political scare campaign.

The NSW bushfire inquiry released this week took a dive into the climate science — as it was tasked to do — and found, predictably enough, that climate change “clearly played a role in the conditions” that led up to the fires and helped spread them. But thankfully it did not waste much time on climate in its recommendations, merely suggesting climate trends need to be monitored and factored in.

Apart from exercises in politically correct box ticking — Indigenous training for evacuation centre staff so they are “culturally competent”, wildlife rescue training for firefighters, and signs to promote ABC radio stations — most of the recommendations were practical. Better equipment for firefighters, more water bombers, more communication, public education and most importantly, a range of suggestions on fuel reduction around settled areas and planning controls on building in fire prone areas.

The bottom line has always been obvious: the one fire input we can control is fuel, so where we want to slow blazes or protect properties, we must reduce fuel. Planning is also important to prevent housing in indefensible locations, but one crucial phrase missing from the report was “personal responsibility”.

Houses on wooded hilltops or surrounded by bush cannot be protected and their residents should not expect others to risk their lives trying to do so.

People must be educated to clear extensively around properties, sufficient to withstand not a moderate fire but a firestorm, otherwise they must be prepared to surrender their homes and escape early.

“Hazard reduction is not the complete answer,” said report author Mary O’Kane. “People do need to take responsibility, they need to realise that if they live in certain areas it can be very dangerous, and we try to give a strong message of, if you are in a dangerous area and there is one of these big, bad megafires, the message, is get out.”

O’Kane is right, of course. But it seems a hell of a waste to hold a full inquiry only to be told we should do more fuel reduction, be careful where we build houses, and get the hell out of the way rather than try to fight firestorms. We knew all this.

The push for an inquiry was largely driven by the climate catastrophists. Remember, they wanted to blame the blazes on the axing of the carbon tax, and on Scott Morrison. It was inane and rancid stuff.

They will be at it again, this fire season. They love making political capital out of disasters, although they go as quiet as Tim Flannery when it comes to full dams and widespread snowfalls.

The area of land burned in the Australian summer has now been revised down by 25 per cent, and the claims about wildlife deaths revised downwards too, to factor in the mind-blowing realisation that animals actually escape fire when they can — birds fly, wombats burrow, kangaroos hop and even koalas can climb to the treetops and escape all but a crowning blaze.

Remember we had articles in The Guardian, The New York Times, and on CNN and the BBC, saying the bush might never recover. Take a drive through the Blue Mountains, Kangaroo Island or the Australian Alps and see how their predictions turned out.

The sclerophyll forests of southern Australia are not just adapted to fire, they are reliant on it. Therefore, the wildlife also is reliant on it for the rejuvenation of the vegetation — why does basic ecology escape the climate activists? If it is any comfort, the same madness is now playing out in California. Similar climate, similar history of bushfires, and the same maddening political debate. With fires burning more than a million acres in northern California this month, the state’s Democratic Governor, Gavin Newsom, sent a recorded message to his party’s national convention; “If you are in denial about climate change, come to California.” The trouble is that while these are bad wildfires, they are not unusual in the natural and settled history of that environment.

Like the Australian bush, the redwood forests that US journalists suggest are being destroyed by fire, depend on fire for propagation. Just like here, one of the issues has been the suppression of bushfire by human interference, leading to the unnatural build up of fuel that can explode when a wildfire does get away in bad conditions.

Environmentalist and author of Apocalypse Never; Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, Michael Shellenberger says the climate is warming but the impact of this on fires is overstated. In an article for Forbes.com he quoted Scott Stevens of the University of California, Berkeley, saying climate change is not a major factor, as well as other experts scoffing of the idea that severe fires are anything new.

“California’s fires should indeed serve as a warning to the public, but not that climate change is causing the apocalypse,” wrote Shellenberger. “Rather, it should serve as a warning that mainstream news reporters and California’s politicians cannot be trusted to tell the truth about climate change and fires.”

Ditto for Oz. I have detailed previously how Fran Kelly told ABC audiences in November that “the fire warning had been increased to catastrophic for the first time ever in this country” — but that was wrong, wildly wrong.

Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John accused his political opponents of being “no better than arsonists” and other Greens and Labor MPs said Australia’s climate policies were exacerbating bushfires. Insane as this might be, it was amplified rather than interrogated by most media.

The thick smoke haze in Sydney was portrayed as something “unprecedented” — if it has not been on Twitter before it must never have happened — but a quick search of newspaper files found similar bushfire-induced shrouds in 1951, when airports were closed, and 1936, when a ship couldn’t find the heads.

Fires in rainforest areas of southern Queensland and northern NSW were not “unprecedented” either, with archived reports noting similar fires in the spring of 1951 and even the winter of 1946.

Despite 200,000 media mentions of “unprecedented” tracked by media monitors across December and January, the facts showed none of this was new. Greater areas were burned in 1851 and 1974-75, and human devastation was either as bad or worse on Black Saturday in 2009, Ash Wednesday in 1983, Black Tuesday in 1967, Black Friday in 1939 and Black Thursday 1851.

Bushland was not destroyed forever, koalas were not rendered extinct and Scott Morrison was not to blame. We should have an inquiry into climate alarmism, political posturing and media reporting — we would learn a lot more from that than we have from relearning age-old fire preparedness from yet another bushfire inquiry.

CHRIS KENNY

 

ASSOCIATE EDITOR (NATIONAL AFFAIRS)

Commentator, author and former political adviser, Chris Kenny hosts The Kenny Report Monday-Friday 5pm, and Kenny on Media, 8.30pm Friday, on Sky News. He takes an unashamedly rationalist approach to national a… Read more

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Alarmism in New Zealand


Alarmism in New Zealand  By Dr Muriel Newman, NZCPR.com, 25 July 2020

Fear is a natural survival instinct and arguably more motivating than logic and reason. It can also be used to great effect to shift the mindset of communities and nations.

While such manipulation is, of course, not uncommon, what is surprising is how blind societies are to recognising when fear is being used as a tool for political persuasion.

We recently saw this in the Government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic when the Prime Minister used alarmist computer modelling to justify her “Captain’s Call” to lock the country down.

Claiming “tens of thousands of New Zealanders” could die, the PM rejected Ministry of Health advice to stay at Level 2 for 30 days, and imposed what we now know to be the most stringent policy response in the world.

Instead of relying on cost benefit analyses and regulatory impact statements from trusted government agencies to inform her decisions, the PM chose inaccurate computer models that grossly exaggerated the number of deaths.

It has now been revealed that the modelling she relied on did not take into account the contact testing and tracing that was central to the health response being implemented by Dr Ashley Bloomfield, the Director General of Health.

The explosion of predicted deaths that resulted, was then used by the PM to scare the country into accepting her hard-line lockdown.

This is not the first time the Prime Minister has used scaremongering to force her policy agenda onto the country. Her whole response to climate change has been based on fear.

Climate change is, of course, a natural process influenced by a wide range of factors including the sun, clouds, and ocean currents. Throughout history, the Earth’s climate has been far hotter than it is today and far colder. Sea levels have been far higher and far lower. Carbon dioxide – the trace gas used by plants to manufacture food – has existed at far higher atmospheric concentrations and far lower.

But the United Nations’ climate models that are being used to redefine economic policy around the world, only focus on the minuscule proportion of carbon emissions produced by humans. In doing so, they disregard not only the 97 percent of carbon dioxide produced from natural sources, but also the overwhelming influence that other crucial factors such as the sun have on the climate.

These alarmist models, which blame climate change on humans, are being used by politicians – including our Prime Minister – to implement the UN’s socialist agenda: state control of all economic activity through the regulation of carbon emissions.

Fortunately, most scams motivated by scaremongering are eventually exposed – often by the very people who pioneered the movements before they were captured by political extremists.

This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator Michael Shellenberger is a leading American climate activist, who, having promoted global warming propaganda for almost three decades, has decided to stop the lies:

“On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

“Here are some facts few people know: Humans are not causing a ‘sixth mass extinction’; Climate change is not making natural disasters worse;  Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level; Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change; Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels…

“I know that the above facts will sound like ‘climate denialism’ to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.”

Michael Shellenberger explains how difficult it has been to speak out against the climate scare:

“I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an ‘existential’ threat to human civilization, and called it a ‘crisis’.

“But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public…

“But then, last year, things spiralled out of control. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said ‘The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.’ Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed ‘Climate Change Kills Children…

“As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change. Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened. I thus decided I had to speak out.”

While Michael Shellenberger deserves credit for speaking out and exposing the misrepresentation, those activists who lie should be held to account – particularly by the media. It is therefore regrettable that so many in the media have decided their interests are better served by aligning with the popularists, rather than adhering to the bedrock values of their profession.

Prime amongst New Zealand’s serial alarmists is the Green Party’s Climate Change Minister James Shaw. Not only does he knowingly describe carbon dioxide – the cornerstone of life on earth – as a “pollutant”, but he also continues to claim that as a result of climate change, adverse weather events are getting worse, which is another alarmist fabrication that is simply untrue.

But as the late Stephen Schneider, a Stanford University Professor who had been a lead author for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change explained, for advocates of climate alarmism the truth is not a priority: “…we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination.  That entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”

Fearmongering, of course, has been an effective tool to manipulate the public throughout history.

The myth that population growth will deplete food and resources, and ultimately destroy the planet, can be traced back to the writing of the Reverend Thomas Malthus in 1798.

These idea gained unprecedented traction following the 1968 release of The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich, an entomologist at Stanford University. The book incited such fear of overpopulation that it triggered waves of repression around the world.

The facts, however, tell a different story. Population growth has been slowing for more than three decades. Forty years ago, while the average woman had between five and six children to ensure the survival of the next generation, she now has between two and three. Women are having fewer children because better healthcare means that most babies now live to grow up. As a result, half of the world is already below the long-term replacement level.

Concerns over ‘peak oil’ have also been in and out of vogue over recent decades. Driven by the theory that the world would run out of oil, the reality is that scarcity has been the result of geopolitical disruption rather than resource depletion.

The Club of Rome, an Italian-based think tank established in 1965, investigated resource scarcity in their highly influential book The Limits to Growth. Using computer modelling, they forecast apocalyptic economic and environmental disaster.

Ironically, it has now become clear that, contrary to what they were predicting, the best way to improve humanity and the environment is through more growth, not less. As countries improve their living standards, so too they improve social, economic and environmental wellbeing. It is the resourcefulness of free markets to innovate and maximise the efficient use of resources that results in a progressive improvement in living standards.

What is also bizarre is that while in the 1970s climate computer models predicted that the burning of fossil fuels would trigger another ice age, nowadays they are claiming the exact opposite – that the burning of fossil fuels will cause the planet to dangerously overheat.

This contradiction has not stopped our politicians – with fossil fuels identified as the villain, their policy response of an increasing carbon levy, has effectively imposed socialist state control over all economic activity.

When the Prime Minister and Climate Change Minister introduced their Zero Carbon Act last year, they boasted about imposing the harshest restrictions on carbon emissions of any country in the world. Then last month, they amended the Emissions Trading Scheme to cap carbon emissions, causing the price of carbon to jump from around $25 a tonne to $33.

At $25, New Zealander motorists were paying an ETS levy of around 4c for every litre of petrol they bought. At $33, the levy is now around 7 cents a litre, and at $35, it will be around 9c a litre. Such price hikes will flow right through the economy, increasing the cost of living.

The Climate Change Minister expects carbon prices will go much higher.

Meanwhile the price of carbon has had a major impact on vegetable affordability, especially tomatoes. With hothouses no longer economical in some areas, local growers are being forced to close. As a result, New Zealanders will see an increase in produce imported from countries with no carbon costs.

With the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change specifying that measures introduced to enable countries to meet their carbon targets must not reduce food production, Minister Shaw is clearly breaking the rules.

Governments can only get away with imposing socialist control under the guise of climate change because of their scaremongering. Endlessly claiming that burning fossil fuels is causing dangerous global warming, they promote renewable energy as the only sustainable alternative.

In a controversial new film, Planet of the Humans, which climate activists have tried to ban, filmmaker Michael Moore provides a devastating indictment of the renewable energy scam, explaining it is not clean, green, nor sustainable, but is more destructive than the energy sources it seeks to replace.

The film shows how wind, solar and biofuel projects destroy wildlife habitats, rare and endangered species, and millions of acres of forests, deserts and grasslands.

It exposes bogus claims about the benefits of renewable energy and explains that electricity for a small city of 50,000 households requires 15 square miles of solar panels, along with wind turbines, and a huge array of batteries – or a coal or gas power plant – for nights and cloudy days.

Paul Driessen, a senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow has reviewed  the film and describes the turbines:  “Each one is comprised of nearly 5,000,000 pounds of concrete, steel, aluminum, copper, plastic, cobalt, rare earths, fiberglass and other materials. Every step in the mining, processing, manufacturing, transportation, installation, maintenance and (20 years later) removal process requires fossil fuels. It bears repeating: wind and sun are renewable and sustainable; harnessing them for energy to benefit mankind absolutely is not.”

While some of the film’s conclusions are questionable, Michael Moore raises concerns about the merits of alternative energy that alarmists have conveniently ignored: “We’re basically being fed a lie.” Maybe we’d be “better off just burning fossil fuels in the first place,” than doing all of this.

Although dissenting voices are not yet dominating the debate about climate alarmism, there is enough concern for political leaders to stop the headlong rush into policy extremism and exercise some common sense judgement.

With New Zealand already struggling to recover from the harsh lockdown, the last thing this country needs is climate policy based on scaremongering to undermine our fragile economic recovery.

========================

Sorry for misleading you, but I cried wolf on climate change

Sorry for misleading you, but I cried wolf on climate change  By Michael Shellenberger, The Australian, 1 July 2020

I have been a climate activist for 20 years but on behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologise for the climate scare we created.

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologise for the climate scare we created over the past 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by the US congress to provide ­objective testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to serve as a reviewer of its next assessment report, I feel an obligation to apologise for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know: Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”;

The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”;

Climate change is not making natural disasters worse;

Fires have declined 25 per cent around the world since 2003;

The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska;

The author’s new book.

The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California;

Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany and France since the mid-1970s;

The Netherlands became rich, not poor, while adapting to life below sea level;

We produce 25 per cent more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter;

Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change;

Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels;

Preventing future pandemics requires more, not less, “industrial” agriculture.

I know the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism. In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those ­conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, the Inter­national Union for the Conservation of Nature and other leading scientific bodies.

Some people will, when they read this, imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s co-operatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.

Green beginnings

I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to ­invest $US90bn into them. Over the past few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions.

But until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I ­referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilisation, and called it a “crisis”.

But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.

I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke Jr, a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favour of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his ­research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse. But then, last year, things spiralled out of control. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said: “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “climate change kills children”.

Turning point

The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilisations”. Mainstream journalists ­reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world”, and that deforestation was like a ­nuclear bomb going off.

As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity ­extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.

Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.

I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence. And so my formal ­apology for our fearmongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany and France since the mid-1970s.

It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialisation, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.

Some highlights from the book:

  • Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress.
  • The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land.
  • The most important thing for reducing pollution and emissions is moving from wood to coal to petrol to natural gas to uranium.
  • 100 per cent renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5 per cent to 50 per cent.
  • We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities.
  • Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4 per cent.
  • Greenpeace didn’t save the whales — switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did.
  • “Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300 per cent more emissions.
  • Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon.
  • The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants.

Why were we all so misled? In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the ­financial, political and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty “sustainable”. And status anxiety, depression and hostility to modern civilisation are behind much of the alarmism.

The most important thing for reducing pollution and emissions is moving from wood to coal to petrol to natural gas to uranium.

Reality bites

Once you realise just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavoury motivations, it is hard not to feel duped. Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it. The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop. The ideology behind environmental alarmism — Malthusianism — has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.

But there are also reasons to ­believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.

A real crisis

The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis” into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, COVID-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people [Editor’s note 1: There is compelling evidence this figure is grossly inflated due to dubious practices and methods of measuring] and shattered economies around the globe [Editor’s note 2: It is the related governmental regulations that have ‘shattered economies around the world’, not COVID-19].

Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicisation of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform. Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.

Nations are reverting openly to self-interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables.

The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilisation is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilisation that climate alarmists would return us to.

Greenpeace didn’t save the whales — switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did.

The invitations from IPCC and congress are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment. Another one has been to the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists and ­environmental scholars. “Apocalypse Never is an extremely ­important book,” writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning ­author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,” says one of the fathers of modern climate science, Tom Wigley.

“We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,” wrote the former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. “But too often we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love’: a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future.”

That is all I hoped for in writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll agree it’s perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong environmentalist and progressive felt the need to speak out against the alarmism. I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.

Michael Shellenberger is president of Environmental Progress, an independent research and policy organisation. He is the author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, published by Harper Collins

=======================

Links to previous articles

Health

Research on Cognitive Decline and Alzheimer’s Disease

This post presents  the results of initial research into the possibilities of delaying or reversing the onset of cognitive decline that often leads onto Alzheimer’s and other dementia conditions.

If you have any comments that will enhance this initial research before conclusions are formed, please email them to petersenior42@gmail.com.

The complete initial research paper can be downloaded from Research on cognitive decline and Alzheimers, update, 200907

By Peter Senior, 8 September 2020

The objective: find out whether or not cognitive decline (CD), Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and related effects can be slowed, reversed and/or prevented.

Hypothesis: the standard medical view that CD and AD can at best be partly alleviated and that the is no way to reverse it may be false, depending on the individual.

This paper comprises an initial list of key overall findings followed by a chronological list of specific findings that appear to be significant.

The most promising finding to date is Dr Dale Bredesen’s protocol; the first listed, together with several details of Dr Bredesen’s ReCODE protocol. A 52-minute video interview with Dr Bredesen, 4 September 2019, provides a comprehensive introduction, including his comment: “We’ve never seen a case of cognitive decline where there are less than 10 primary causes.”  https://www.beingpatient.com/dale-bredesen-lifestyle-changes-prevent-alzheimers/. Several other areas of research show considerable promise.

Key findings to date

  1. There is now ample compelling evidence that CD and AD can at least be delayed, sometimes reversed and often prevented by applying appropriate remedial actions.
  2. Dr Bredesen’s protocol, advice and lifestyle proposals demonstrate the most comprehensive and promising approach available at present.
  3. The sooner diagnosis and appropriate remedial actions are started, the sooner positive results will be achieved.
  4. Some of the largest organisations, including government and medical bodies, are the least optimistic, indicating little can be done to improve CD and AD. There is at least a suspicion that major organisations, including ‘Big Pharma’, are primarily interested in a single ‘magic pill’ that will greatly enhance their profits.
  5. If the causes of CD and AD are indeed multiple and personalized, as Dr Bredesen has demonstrated, the option of a universally effective single ‘magic pill’ would be excluded and could at best only be effective occasionally and randomly. Note: Dr Bredesen’s comment: “We’ve never seen a case of cognitive decline where there are less than 10 primary causes.”
  6. If there was such a treatment as the single cure-all ‘magic pill’, it surely would already have been discovered, developed, tested and widely marketed, most likely by one or more of the major international pharmaceutical companies.
  7. All significant official bodies and medical people and bodies associated with CD and AD recognise and warn about the massive dangers CD and AD presents for the future, including the current and fast-growing costs to countries for medical and care treatment.
  8. Several articles, videos etc. noted in this paper contain a few aspects that are covered in Dr Bredesen’s protocol and life-style approach, but with few additions. A few, such as the well-known Dr Mercola (page 50), include a reference to Dr Bredesen’s ReCODE protocol.
  9. Most of the single approach solutions offer minimal diagnosis or validation, but several indicate some significant successes in individual cases.
  10. All cases described by Dr Bredesen in his books as treated successfully exhibited major issues. None of the cases involved only mild issues.  It is possible these mild cases would not exhibit the medical shortfalls revealed by Dr Bredesen’s ReCODE. However, the old adage ‘prevention is better than cure’ remains prescient.
  11. At this stage, no specialists have been identified in Australia that are able to, or wish to, fully apply the ReCODE protocol.
  12. Dr Bredesen’s ReCODE appears to parallel the stomach ulcer about-turn. In 1982 two Australian scientists upset medical dogma by proving a bacterium, helicobacter pylori, causes stomach inflammation, ulcers and cancer, and so won the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine yesterday. The findings went so against medical thinking that it took many years for an entrenched medical profession to accept it, even then, reluctantly. Possibly another such breakthrough is in the process of emerging for CD and AD?
  13. Dr Bredesen has released a new book now available on Amazon’s Kindle – the printed version will be available on 20 October 2020: The End of Alzheimer’s Programme: The Practical Plan to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline at Any Age.
  14. Dr Bredesen’s new book is another ‘must-read’. It is packed with practical approaches as well as explanations about how to treat CD and Alzheimers. As noted below, it would be wise for suffers and their carers to work with an empathetic doctor or another health professional in order to plan and apply a practical route through the very detailed and elaborate process recommended. But, again, Dr Bredesen’s approach is the only one available to date that is likely to treat CD and Alzheimers successfully.
  15. It is strongly recommended that all people interested in the subject should view the 84-minutes video Broken Brian, 20 August 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6pETdb6hKE

Further updates will be provided shortly.

Index of contents:

Index of contents:

Page 4   – Dr Dale Bredesen: End of Alzheimer’s. Description of book, protocol and articles

Page 12 – Summary of key tests for ReCODE Protocol

Page 16 – Adam MacDougall, News.com (summary of Dr Bredesen’s work)

Page 20 – The Buck Institute for Research on Aging

Page 20 – MoCA brain test

Page 20 – Brian exercises

Page 20 – Souvenaid

Page 20 – MCT oil 

Page 20 – Ashwagandha, an Indian herb

Page 20 – The APOE gene 

Page 20 – Redimind mixture / tonic (Nutreance)

Page 22 – Mayo Clinic

Page 22 – Webmd.com

Page 22 – National Institute of Aging

Page 22 – Dementia.org

Page 23 – Alzheimer’s Natural Treatment Options, Dr Josh Axe

Page 23 – New Scientist article

Page 23 – UK National Health

Page 25 – UCLA research May 2017

Page 25 – Natural News article

Page 27 – ScienceAlert.com article

Page 28 – ScienceDaily.com (2 articles)

Page 28 – Harvard Medical School

Page 29 – NCBI National Centre for Biological Information

Page 30 – Medical News Today – article

Page 30 – TED video

Page 30 – Dietician Amylee Amos

Page 31 – 7th BioCeuticals Research Symposium, May 2019

Page 31 – YouTube TED talk, Oct 17, 2015:

     Alzheimer’s Is Not Normal Aging — And We Can Cure It

Page 31 – Collective Evolution, 2018 article

Page 32 – The Neuro Development Centre, Providence, Rhone Island, USA

Page 34 – Life Extension

Page 37 – Alzheimers Association

Page 38 – UC Berkeley School of Public Health

Page 38 – World Health Organisation (WHO)

Page 38 – Emory University – ADRC Research Centre

Page 39 – Wikipedia

Page 40 – Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, US Dept of Health

Page 40 – FamilyDoctor.org

Page 41 – Functional Medicine Coaching Academy (training for Dr Bredesen’s protocol)

Page 43 – SharpAgainNaturally

Page 44 – Healing Advocates

Page 44 – Curing Alzheimer’s with Science and Song, 25 min video

Page 45 – MCT and coconut oil

Page 45 – Dementia is preventable through lifestyle. Start now

Page 46 – The latest news on Alzheimer’s disease and brain health research

Page 46 – Biogen Revives Aducanumab

Page 46 – MIT Scientists Reveal Brain Rhythm Role In Alzheimer’s Research

Page 47 – The End of Alzheimer’s, 67-minute interview, Dr Michael Fossel

Page 47 – Keto-nutrition, Dr Dominic D’Agostino

Page 48 – The link between diet, exercise and Alzheimer’s

Page 49 – Diagnosing Alzheimer’s Disease

Page 49 – What is Alzheimer disease? A simple explanation

Pages 49-51 Eight articles that explain how meditation can improve mental health

Page 51 – Cacao, a power drug for the brain

Page 52 – Harvard Medical School. Is my forgetfulness normal?

Page 54 – Analysis by Dr Joseph Mercola, 7 November 2019

Page 55 – Eat more citrus fruits & cucumbers, NaturalNews.com

Page 55 – Benefits of Ashwagandha

Page 55 – Distributed memory: the brain in the heart

Page 56 – Biogen aducanumab 

Page 56 – Sound Therapy

Page 57 – Drugs That Quell Brain Inflammation Reverse Dementia

Page 57 – How to Slow Aging (and even reverse it)

Page 57 – Another Alzheimer’s Vaccine Moves Closer to Human Trials

Page 58 – Biogen Plans to Buy Early-Stage Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Treatment

Page 59 – How Flavonols, Found in Fruit and Tea, Can Stave Off Alzheimer’s

Page 60 – A non-invasive ultrasound technology

Page 60 – The Neuroprotective Effects of Astaxanthin

Page 561 – Viruses and Bacteria Change Our Brains. What Can That Teach Us About Alzheimer’s?

Page 62 – ‘Three little pigs’: Musk’s Neuralink puts computer chips in animal brains

Page 63 – User Reviews & Ratings – donepezil oral

Page 63 – Colloidal Silver as a cure for many diseases, possibly Alzheimers

(Analysis, Conclusions and Summary – to come)

It is strongly recommended that all people interested in the subject should view the 84-minutes video Broken Brian dated 20 August 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6pETdb6hKE

 The video covers: How Alzheimer’s disease in the years to come will be a rare disease (3:09) – Why we need to change the way we think about medicine and health (10:15)

– Why amyloid plaque is not the cause of Alzheimer’s (13:37)

– Cognitive decline and nocturnal oxygen desaturation (16:59)

– The global statistics on Alzheimer’s and cognitive decline (18:39)

– How brain changes can be detected 20 years before Alzheimer’s symptoms are evident (22:38)

– How toxic exposure can lead to cognitive decline (44:26)

– What you can do today to prevent cognitive decline (54:43)

– How to assess your risk for neurodegenerative diseases (1:05:52) – The backlash Dr. Bredesen has faced for his work (1:13:48)

– Where to learn more about Dr. Bredesen (1:22:17)

Dr. Bredesen is on Instagram @drdalebredesen, on Facebook @drdalebredesen, on Twitter @drdalebredesen, and his website is https://www.apollohealthco.com. Also mentioned in this episode: – Cognoscopy – https://www.apollohealthco.com/soluti… – https://www.apoe4.info

Note: Dr Bredesen can be contacted at www.drbredesen.com .  Re-CODE and related services can be viewed at  www.mycognoscopy.com or www.apollohealthco.com

Dr Dale Bredesen’s second book:

 THE END OF ALZHEIMER’S PROGRAMME The Practical Plan to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline at Any Age.

This second book follows on and expands on Dr Bredesen’s first book discussed at length below. It both complements and provides considerable new material focused on practical ways to detect causative issues and how to treat them. The book is only available on Amazon  Kindle until the printed version is available on October 20 2020.

Some reviews on Amazon provide valuable comment on this book that also reflect the conclusions of the writer of this research paper:

This is a comprehensive follow up to Dr Bredesen’s last book. It’s inspiring and concise, even if the list of different tests to take seems long. Another review suggests the book’s recommendations are too difficult to put into practice. I understand where he’s coming from, but it really is worth a go – you might notice quite big changes from smaller portions of meat, or more olive oil, or cutting the carbs, or mixing up your veg, or taking curcumin, or… the list goes on.

 Dr Bredesen’s excellent new book follows on from his last book in cementing the fact that Alzheimer’s is treatable for most people, especially in the early stages. Dr Bredesen is leading the charge in a revolution that will save the lives of millions. Every person who has had an Alzheimer’s diagnosis in the family must read this book, their journey of despair will become a journey of hope and, if they act on the book’s recommendations, very likely a journey to success. Dr Bredesen has saved my wife’s life, what more can I say?

 This book should be a required reading material for every single human being! If you haven’t read this book, buy it, read it, implement the suggestions, and then buy and gift the book to others. I own Dr Bredesen’s first book but this one is just amazing- a summary of everything one should do.

 An important conclusion too is that the book has such a myriad of information – some simple, others very complex, that it is impossible to take in on first reading.  To apply all recommendations would be a full-time job.  It would be wise, as recommended in the book, to gain the confidence and assistance of a doctor who has an open mind and is keen to explore where the medical profession is mostly stuck in a negative rut – as described in the Key Findings to Date, above. This doctor, or knowledgeable medical person, should be able to help navigate the maze of information and organise a practical path for both the carer and person suffering from cognitive decline or Alzheimers.  Or for the person who wants to apply practical preventative measures before the onset of cognitive decline or Alzheimers.

The Epilogue is copied in full at the end of this research paper.  Some key points that should be carefully absorbed are:

  • When I was taught medicine, we studied, we practised, and we taught end-stage medicine—we learned and looked for signs of cancer metastasis and heart failure and dementia that were years down the road from when we should be identifying and treating the associated conditions. As I look back on all of this, it is discomfiting to recall how bad it was.
  • We need such a [new] movement now to effect a tectonic shift in health—the way we think about it, learn it, practise it, and benefit from it.
  • The twenty-first century will see the virtual end to the scourges of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Lewy body disease, multiple sclerosis, autism, schizophrenia, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, ulcerative colitis, and other complex chronic illnesses.
  • Thus the road map is clear. We know what to look for in each person, we know how to identify the contributors, we know how to deal with each one. Now we need to enact it, perfect it, and scale it.
  • Fixing cognition will become as routine as straightening teeth
  • Each one of us is a unique, N-of-1 experiment. May your experiment be successful, fulfilling, joyous, and lasting.

 ———————————————————–

 Dr Dale Bredesen’s first book: End of Alzheimer’s

 https://www.amazon.com.au/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=dr+dale+bredesen

 https://www.apoe4.info/wiki/Bredesen_Protocol :

Dr. Dale Bredesen has created the ReCODE protocol that involves multiple strategies to address specific health issues that contribute to cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). The results of each strategy are measured by using blood tests, cognitive evaluations, and other markers of overall health improvements. Actions are tweaked over time to aim for optimal lab and evaluation results. His analogy is to think of AD as a leaky roof – there are as many as 36 leaks in the AD roof that need to be addressed to stop the problem. Not every patient will have the same leaks, and the protocol is customized based on the patient’s genetics, current health, and lifestyle.

  In 2014, his first published paper on the protocol, Reversal of Cognitive Decline, highlighted 10 case studies. Of those 10 people, nine showed enough improvement to return to normal life activities. Several hundred people with cognitive impairment have since followed the protocol, and most have seen a reversal of cognitive impairment. He published results of reversing various levels of cognitive decline in Reversal of Cognitive Decline: 100 patients, published October 2018. His book The End of Alzheimer’s, published August 2017 discusses his protocol and explains many of the mechanisms of Alzheimer’s.

  Bredesen’s protocol has not been tested as a preventative, however in a May 2019 podcast interview, Dr Bredesen did say that he’s never had someone at risk come in for prevention and develop even mild cognitive impairment. Research has shown that amyloid-? is deposited in E4 carriers as early as their thirties, so addressing components prior to experiencing cognitive impairment symptoms will likely lead to better health and cognition in aging. Members on the APOE4.Info forum who follow the protocol report improvements not only in health but also in cognition, even if they do not have an SCI or MCI diagnosis.

  Although Bredesen does not see private patients, he has made his protocol available to those seeking doctor assistance through AHNP: Precision Health. MPI Cognition, his previous affiliation, was acquired by AHNP and his prior affiliation with Muses Labs has ended.

  Dr Dale Bredeson End of Alzheimer’s book:  AUD4.99 on Kindle.  He has been researching Alzheimers with a highly qualified team for 25 years. Their view is that what is measured, in particular plaques and tangles (all explained in the book) are only the indirect cause of brain cells being killed deliberately.  The real cause, he explains, is that the brain has a natural defence mechanism that tries to stop the plaques and tangles forming and, if these build up too much, it goes haywire and starts killing too many brain cells.  The trick is to stop the mechanisms that cause the plaque and tangle growth. They have identified 36 so far (see below) and expect just a few more to be found.  These come in categories of inflammatory, toxic and nutrients.  Their programme is to identify which are the major causes for each individual – it varies it seems – and tackle each one starting with the most prominent.  Their program is called ReCODE, and they are training numerous nurses and doctors to apply it.  The reason ReCODE hasn’t made the mainstream is they are not allowed to carry out formal test approval programs, as required for all approved medical drugs.  Big Pharma only want to sell huge numbers of pills.  Problem is, it isn’t a matter of one super pill as each person’s needs vary as which of the 36+ are the major causes, so testing just one would be a waste of time and only appear to prove the treatment doesn’t work.  Ie stop the plaques and tangles forming and the brain’s defence mechanism reckons all is now well, stops killing cells and shuts down until needed.  But the official approval mechanism only allows one factor at a time to be tested, so the approval mechanism for multiple factors has not been approved.  They have had many successes when doctors who knew of this program sent their patients to Dr Bredersen – with amazing full recoveries. The list below links to summaries of why each strategy is important, what you can do, and a selection of research references. NB: Cognoscopy, chapter 7

  Diet Strategies

Optimize diet

Enhance autophagy and ketogenesis

Improve GI Health

  Lifestyle Strategies

Reduce stress

Optimize sleep

Exercise

Rule out sleep apnea

Optimize mitochondrial function

  Lab Tests to Track and Treat

Homocysteine

B vitamins

Inflammation

Insulin sensitivity (insulin and blood glucose)

Hormones

Zn:Cu ratio

Vitamin D

Rule out heavy metal toxicity

Optimize antioxidants  ??

  Brain Strategies

Brain stimulation

Reduction of Aß

Cognitive enhancement

Increase NGF

Provide synaptic structural components

Increase focus

Increase SirT1 function

Inhalational Alzheimer’s (editing note: update to types of AD)

Resources

The latest news on Alzheimer’s disease and brain health research, interview, see page 40

52-minute video interview with Dr Bredesen, 4 September 2019. https://www.beingpatient.com/dale-bredesen-lifestyle-changes-prevent-alzheimers/

“We’ve never seen a case of cognitive decline where there are less than 10 primary causes”.

Dr. Dale Bredesen on Preventing and Reversing Alzheimer’s Disease

68-minute video interview, 1 Oct 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq7uVZ_0D3U&t=472s

Dr Dale Bredesen discusses the metabolic factors underlying Alzheimer’s Disease

86-minute video, 2 June 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS7VZydS8HI

Dr. Dale Bredesen, Changing the world of Alzheimer’s Disease Research https://www.apollohealthco.com/dr-bredesen/

Dr. Mark Hyman Interviews Dr. Dale Bredesen on Cognitive Decline

19-minute video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up8cGbUKS_c

The Bredesen protocol’s “Ketoflex” approach to diet and eating for Alzheimer’s disease.

5-minute video interview, 29 January 2019 video interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgi9IgdXr40

 

Presentation: Dementogens, Exposome, and Alzheimer’s: The Hidden Epidemic

36-minutes presentation, 2 Oct 2018, Dale Bredesen, MD, UCSF and UCLA, discusses how environmental toxins may lead to Alzheimers disease. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM8ouHPnQLI

Video Presentation: “The End of Alzheimer’s: The First Survivors”

Dale E. Bredesen, M.D., UCLA and Buck Institute | Professor of Neurology, Easton Laboratories for Neurodegenerative Disease Research | David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 6 Sept 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSmIqeZvKpQ

The remainder of the initial research paper can be downloaded from Research on cognitive decline and Alzheimers, update, 200907

 

 

Must-Read Articles

Book reviews – ‘They’re conning you!’ first.

This post comprises reviews books that add substantially to the understanding of our world, economics, politics, history and geopolitics, and what may happen in the future.  Scroll down to read all reviews.

  • They’re Conning You! By Peter Senior. Note: the book can now be downloaded as a PDF document until the updated version is available: They’re Conning You!
  • Full review at: David Icke’s Everything You Need To Know But Have Never Been Told
  • JFK and the Unspeakable. Why He Died and Why It Matters  Book review by Edward Curtin, 31 October 2017
  • The Cosmic War, by Dr Joseph P Farrell
  • Phantom Self, by David Icke
  • 1984 – Nineteen Eighty Four. George Orwell’s 1950 classic
  • Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
  • The Death of Money, James Rickards  
  • American Betrayal, Diana West
  • From Third World to First, Lee Kuan Yew
  • Lee Kuan Yew by Graham Allison

They’re Conning You! 

Who are ‘they’? And what are ‘they’ planning? This is the REAL story of our past, present and possibly future.

They’re Conning You! By Peter Senior, Senior Consulting

Note: the book can now be downloaded as a PDF document until the updated version is available: They’re Conning You!

They’re Conning You! is only available on Amazon Kindle because it includes hundreds of vital Internet links that would be far too tiresome to type in from a paper book.

They’re Conning You! presents information that is likely to cause ‘cognitive dissonance’ as it examines in depth a wide range of evidence that demonstrates much of what thought we knew is, in fact, wrong. The subjects discussed cover a wide spectrum from aliens and UFOs to asking where the technologies used to construct ancient structures come from, whether ancient civilisations waged nuclear wars against each other, to financial treason.

‘Consciousness’ is examined, as is what are we made of and how did this come about? Could it be that aliens modified our DNA, which may have come from the outer Cosmos anyway?

We are accustomed to overt and covert PC education, indoctrination and media ‘fake news,’ but do we realise how this is turning us into zombies? Servants of the State? Many scientific bodies, government departments and corporations often distort and lie about what is assumed to be ‘science.’ Even nastier things are being exposed such as paedophilia and Satanism.

Some ‘deep state’ government departments with-hold information that would enable free energy and the consequent massive improvement to most peoples’ lives and countries’ economies in order to protect their secrets as well as the massive oil and associated industries valued at $500 trillion.

There is compelling evidence that US President John F Kennedy was assassinated by covert government people because he planned to share US’ knowledge of aliens and UFOs with Russian President Khrushchev, as well as expose massive corruption.

The book presents frightening information about the two events that changed our world most in the last 55 years: JFK’s assassination and ‘911’, the demolition of the Twin Towers and Tower 7 on 11 September 2001 by covert government-controlled actions.

The subject of who ‘they’ are is discussed in depth, in particular with regard to plans for a New World Order (NWO), and who is orchestrating this.

The US is mimicking the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, whilst Europe is gradually transitioning into a bureaucratic dictatorship. The world’s financial systems are being manipulated for the benefit of their controllers, all underpinned by the ‘deep state’ which has been shown to have syphoned off at least $21 trillion through covert Pentagon misappropriations. Globalisation has expanded trade around the world, but it is now being manipulated by global corporations.

Compelling evidence demonstrates the US and other ‘deep state’ governments have secret space programs that have grown since the first UFO sightings and capture during and shortly after WWII. Imagine what 70 years of ‘reverse engineering’ from captured UFOs would yield, together with alien contact?

Several potential future scenarios are presented with assessments of each. Readers are invited to decide which seems more likely based on what they now know after reading this book and, hopefully, carrying out much more in-depth research.

A review of They’re conning you! by highly-regarded executive journalist Julian Tomlinson, based on 24 years’ experience, notes:
‘This book will appeal to the firm believers in so-called “conspiracy theories” and “conspiracy facts”, as well as those with a curiosity and even the firm non-believers. The author combines painstaking research from innumerable sources and combines bland shreds of information into a compelling narrative. Readers will feel they are sitting there actually talking to the author as he manages to convey a sense of wonder, concern and excitement in every sentence, effortlessly flicking between known pre-history, the Roman period and modern times in a manner that’s easy to follow.
If you are in the “conspiracy camp” this book expertly summarises everything you do know and want to know into one, easy-to-read volume. If you are not in the camp, you’ll at least gain an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of “conspiracies” and why they exist. You may even start to believe. Well worth a look.’

They’re conning you! is available from Amazon Kindle: www.amazon.com – search for: they’re conning you

Seven further reviews by Indie Book Reviewers are highly complimentary, and recommend the book should be read by everyone:

  1. This is a powerful, very well-written and highly informative book! I have read several books on different types of hidden ‘truths’ and conspiracy theories… what is really going on in our world and what the future might hold, and sometimes I get the sense that most are just recycling old information or things we’ve all already heard before. For this book it seems like I read a lot of new ideas presented in a way that makes a great deal of sense, even if might be perceived as somewhat “controversial”. The content was mostly new to me and laid out in a coherent way that is easy to follow, but is meticulously researched and supported with solid evidence. Peter Senior uses facts and present-day conditions as well as real-life examples to share his perspectives and ideas, Fast paced, informative, and easy to read, I recommend this book, “They’re Conning You!” to everyone who wants to know what is really going on, from aliens to secret societies, shadow governments and 9/11 and so much more.  (5 stars) John Goldman– Goodreads; Barnes & Noble; Indie Book Reviewers
  2. Peter Senior has a great ability to take complex ideas, concepts and put them in the simplest terms for all to understand easily. He covers many different points of society – past, present and future—and holds nothing back in the way of exposing information that many people might not be aware of. The media and governments do a great job of distorting reality and manipulating truths so that the average person has no idea what is really happening. Mr. Senior has compiled so much interesting research and documentation on a variety of hot-button topics and gives straightforward, convincing arguments that demand to be heard and studied further. Nicely crafted and I liked how it was formatted/broken down into individual chapters that focused on different elements. Made for easier reading and retention. Near flawless editing (formatting is a little wonky at times) and I walked away feeling like I really learned something from reading this book and am inspired to do more reading and research on my own. (4 stars) Leo Gregory– Goodreads; Barnes & Noble; Indie Book Reviewers
  3. Funny how few books there actually seem to be on so many of these topics… and this is such important information! I am still in college and it’s just not normally the type of book that I gravitate to for ‘fun’, but I thought there might be something useful I could learn anyways and I was so right! It is eye-opening and very compelling – it is clear that the author knows what he’s writing about and has done in-depth research (and has detailed and comprehensive appendices at the end to prove it). Provocative and bold, this book is not just for academics or scientists or political gurus, but for anyone who wants to know what is REALLY going on ‘behind the scenes’ and how different it is from what “they” are telling you. Everything from the JFK assassination to Twin Towers to Extra-Terrestrials, Antarctica and “Deep State” governments… Peter Senior has created an impressively comprehensive body of research and theories that can definitely get people’s attention, whether you are a ‘skeptic’ or a ‘believer’. I could definitely see the truths behind much of what he was saying. The main concern I had was that while he presented lots of great information and shocking revelations, I was left with the feeling of like “okay, now what am I supposed to do with this info?” So in that regard it is a little frustrating, but I guess it is better to know than to not know. I like that it challenged the traditional narrative and put things into new perspective. (4 stars) James Masters– Goodreads; Barnes & Noble; Indie Book Reviewers
  4. I wasn’t sure what to expect when reading “They’re Conning You” by Peter Senior, as I’m not normally one to read about things like this. But surprisingly enough I found the straight-forward and engaging narrative style to be quite fascinating and down-to-earth. I liked how Mr. Senior uses his vast and well-researched knowledge ‘story-style’ to make his points and relate his ideas in ways that we all can fully and easily grasp. Each chapter/section/topic gives valuable information, examples and supporting links or sources for further research/reading. The whole thing just flowed so well and I hope people pay attention to as it is clear that the author knows what he is talking about, and that he is an excellent writer. I have found that many times reading philosophy/political or ‘conspiracy’ theory books can either be too ‘highbrow’ and esoteric, or they just don’t present the material in a way that I feel I can relate to (or its condescending), but this definitely was not the case here at all. My only very small complaint was that I wish there were more in-text citations for sources (footnotes or direct links), because while the author does provide a very thorough appendices/references at the end, there were a few times I would’ve preferred to see the sources cited in text. A very minor thing, though. Recommended read. (4 stars) Cale Owens– Goodreads; Barnes & Noble; Indie Book Reviewers
  5. I think a lot of these types of books get a bad rap sometimes, as a lot of times they are all theory and ‘talking in circles’ but don’t really bring anything ‘new’ to the table or make the information credible and or relevant. But I have to say in this case I feel like the author did a solid job of getting his message out and doing so in a very digestible manner. I was unaware of so many things discussed in this book, and I consider myself to be fairly well educated and worldly. I’m not exactly sure who the right target audience for this would be, as it almost seems something almost anyone could (and should!) read. I admit I am not all that sure what to do with this information, but if nothing else I enjoyed learning more about certain things I was unaware of before, and I have ALWAYS had an interest in knowing more truths with aliens/ET and their contributions to our planet and advancing civilizations. The pacing is pretty even and overall it is an impressive effort by Mr. Senior and worth serious thought and discussion. (4 stars) Carla Biggins– Goodreads; Barnes & Noble; Indie Book Reviewers
  6. In “They’re Conning You…” Peter Senior lays out his ideas is a way that encourages the reader to think ‘outside the box’ and question the ‘reality’ that is often presented to the masses. Whether you believe in conspiracy theories or facts or not, there is enough detailed examination of ‘controversial’ subjects here to entice the pickiest of readers. His narrative is easy to follow, even if some of the concepts were admittedly a little ‘out there’ at times. I still feel like I gleaned some valuable information – actually a lot that I didn’t know before. While not exactly a ‘mainstream’ sort of book, in a way that is exactly what makes it so good –This book is intelligent and thought-provoking – opens your eyes and provides a necessary paradigm shift. Some parts pull the rug out from under you – others will pull the wool from your eyes and expose truths, sometimes uncomfortable, that we all need to at least hear about, even if you chose not to believe it.  At least you can decide for yourself when given the bigger picture. I liked how many outside sources he references, so many links, videos, articles and books… I will definitely be reading more! Recommend. (4 stars) Cody Brighton – Goodreads; Barnes & Noble; Indie Book Reviewers
  7. Warning – when starting “They’re Conning You…” make sure you don’t have anywhere you need to be or anything you need to do because you won’t want to stop reading until you’ve finished it all!! Trust me on this! The book starts off with an intriguing beginning pulling us into this provocative world and ideas, and just keeps going with one interesting topic after the next. I think what I liked the most about this book was just the overall feel the author Peter Senior managed to create where it felt intimate, like a friend is telling me this really cool, strange story that I didn’t want to stop listening to. Loved the energetic tone and the fact that he has his opinions, but the book doesn’t feel overly ‘biased’ or judgmental… This went much deeper than that, and I was truly impressed with the author’s literary and research skills. I actually feel like I learned a lot, all while being ‘entertained’. I’ve always had a fascination with many of these subjects (esp. aliens and secret societies), but they are usually presented in such an eye-rolling, unbelievable way It was great to read something so intelligently constructed with impressive research and complex connections that all come full circle. Suitable for mature teens on up. (5 stars) Essie Harmon—Goodreads; Barnes & Noble; Indie Book Reviewers

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The American Deep State: Big Money, Big Oil, and the Struggle for U.S. Democracy – Updated version 

by Professor Peter Dale Scott 

Note: this review is  copied from the Amazon/Kindle website.

Now in a new edition updated through the unprecedented 2016 presidential election, this provocative book makes a compelling case for a hidden “deep state” that influences and often opposes official U.S. policies. Prominent political analyst Peter Dale Scott begins by tracing America’s increasing militarization, restrictions on constitutional rights, and income disparity since World War II. With the start of the Cold War, he argues, the U.S. government changed immensely in both function and scope, from protecting and nurturing a relatively isolated country to assuming ever-greater responsibility for controlling world politics in the name of freedom and democracy. This has resulted in both secretive new institutions and a slow but radical change in the American state itself. He argues that central to this historic reversal were seismic national events, ranging from the assassination of President Kennedy to 9/11.
Scott marshals compelling evidence that the deep state is now partly institutionalized in non-accountable intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA, but it also extends its reach to private corporations like Booz Allen Hamilton and SAIC, to which 70 percent of intelligence budgets are outsourced. Behind these public and private institutions is the influence of Wall Street bankers and lawyers, allied with international oil companies beyond the reach of domestic law. Undoubtedly the political consensus about America’s global role has evolved, but if we want to restore the country’s traditional constitutional framework, it is important to see the role of particular cabals—such as the Project for the New American Century—and how they have repeatedly used the secret powers and network of Continuity of Government (COG) planning to implement change. Yet the author sees the deep state polarized between an establishment and a counter-establishment in a chaotic situation that may actually prove more hopeful for U.S. democracy.

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Everything You Need to Know,  by David Icke, 14 February 2018

See full review at: David Icke’s Everything You Need To Know But Have Never Been Told

David’s latest book is reviewed in a recent post by Freedom Article, as follows: ‘This book sprinkled throughout with David’s humor, e.g. when discussing transhumanism poster boy Ray Kurzweil of Google, David remarks “I wouldn’t trust him to tell me the date in a calendar factory” or when discussing the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist (eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ), David remarks that mainstream religion is “Satanism lite.”

Here are 2 key quotes from the book:

“If you want to control the dream you must control the perceptions of the dreamer and that’s the global conspiracy to enslave humanity in a single sentence.”

David uses the same quote from Einstein twice in the book, since it’s so important:

“Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you can’t help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.”

Therein lies the grand solution. The solution to all these problems, to the entire New World Order, comes down to some very simple principles. Remember who you are. Identify with the depth of your spirit, not the shallowness of your form. Life is a mirror: whatever you put out, you receive. Change your perception and your change everything. The universe matches your vibration with an experience or situation, so if you change your vibration, you change your experience, and your entire life. If enough of us do it, we change the entire world.

Everything You Need To Know But Have Never Been Told is the kind of book that can change your life. Get a copy, read it, let it inspire you with knowledge and courage, and let the astonishing amount of dot-connecting sink in and give you a perceptual reboot.’

================

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

 JFK and the Unspeakable. Why He Died and Why It Matters  Book review by Edward Curtin, 31 October 2017

Despite a treasure-trove of new information having emerged over the last forty-six years, there are many people who still think who killed President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and why are unanswerable questions. There are others who cling to the Lee Harvey Oswald “lone-nut” explanation proffered by the Warren Commission. Both groups agree, however, that whatever the truth, it has no contemporary relevance but is old-hat, history, stuff for conspiracy-obsessed people with nothing better to do. The general thinking is that the assassination occurred almost a half-century ago, so let’s move on.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as James Douglass shows in his extraordinary book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Simon & Schuster, 2008). It is clearly one of the best books ever written on the Kennedy assassination and deserves a vast readership. It is bound to roil the waters of complacency that have submerged the truth of this key event in modern American history.

It’s not often that the intersection of history and contemporary events pose such a startling and chilling lesson as does the contemplation of the murder of JFK on November 22, 1963 juxtaposed with the situations faced by President Obama today. So far, at least, Obama’s behaviour has mirrored Johnson’s, not Kennedy’s, as he has escalated the war in Afghanistan by 34,000. One can’t but help think that the thought of JFK’s fate might not be far from his mind as he contemplates his next move in Afghanistan.

Douglass presents a very compelling argument that Kennedy was killed by “unspeakable” (the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s term) forces within the U.S. national security state because of his conversion from a cold warrior into a man of peace. He argues, using a wealth of newly uncovered information, that JFK had become a major threat to the burgeoning military-industrial complex and had to be eliminated through a conspiracy planned by the CIA – “the CIA’s fingerprints are all over the crime and the events leading up to it” – not by a crazed individual, the Mafia, or disgruntled anti-Castro Cubans, though some of these may have been used in the execution of the plot.

Why and by whom? These are the key questions. If it can be shown that Kennedy did, in fact, turn emphatically away from war as a solution to political conflict; did, in fact, as he was being urged by his military and intelligence advisers to up the ante and use violence, rejected such advice and turned toward peaceful solutions, then, a motive for his elimination is established. If, furthermore, it can be clearly shown that Oswald was a dupe in a deadly game and that forces within the military/intelligence apparatus were involved with him from start to finish, then the crime is solved, not by fingering an individual who may have given the order for the murder or pulled the trigger, but by showing that the coordination of the assassination had to involve U.S. intelligence agencies, most notably the CIA. Douglass does both, providing highly detailed and intricately linked evidence based on his own research and a vast array of the best scholarship.

We are then faced with the contemporary relevance, and since we know that every president since JFK has refused to confront the growth of the national security state and its call for violence, one can logically assume a message was sent and heeded. In this regard, it is not incidental that former twenty-seven year CIA analyst Raymond McGovern, in a recent interview, warned of the “two CIAs,” one the analytic arm providing straight scoop to presidents, the other the covert action arm which operates according to its own rules. “Let me leave you with this thought,” he told his interviewer, “and that is that I think Panetta (current CIA Director), and to a degree Obama, are afraid – I never thought I’d hear myself saying this – I think they are afraid of the CIA.” He then recommended Douglass’ book, “It’s very well-researched and his conclusion is very alarming.” [1]

Let’s look at the history marshaled by Douglass to support his thesis.

First, Kennedy, who took office in January 1961 as somewhat of a Cold Warrior, was quickly set up by the CIA to take the blame for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. The CIA and generals wanted to oust Castro, and in pursuit of that goal, trained a force of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. Kennedy refused to go along and the invasion was roundly defeated. The CIA, military, and Cuban exiles bitterly blamed Kennedy. But it was all a sham.

Though Douglass doesn’t mention it, and few Americans know it, classified documents uncovered in 2000 revealed that the CIA had discovered that the Soviets had learned of the date of the invasion more than a week in advance, had informed Castro, but – and here is a startling fact that should make people’s hair stand on end – never told the President. [2] The CIA knew the invasion was doomed before the fact but went ahead with it anyway. Why? So they could and did afterwards blame JFK for the failure.

This treachery set the stage for events to come. For his part, sensing but not knowing the full extent of the set-up, Kennedy fired CIA Director Allen Dulles (as in a bad joke, later to be named to the Warren Commission) and his assistant General Charles Cabell (whose brother Earle Cabell, to make a bad joke absurd, was the mayor of Dallas on the day Kennedy was killed) and said he wanted “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Not the sentiments to endear him to a secretive government within a government whose power was growing exponentially.

The stage was now set for events to follow as JFK, in opposition to nearly all his advisers, consistently opposed the use of force in U.S. foreign policy.

In 1961, despite the Joint Chief’s demand to put troops into Laos, Kennedy bluntly insisted otherwise as he ordered Averell Harriman, his representative at the Geneva Conference, “Did you understand? I want a negotiated settlement in Laos. I don’t want to put troops in.”

Also in 1961, he refused to concede to the insistence of his top generals to give them permission to use nuclear weapons in Berlin and Southeast Asia. Walking out of a meeting with top military advisors, Kennedy threw his hands in the air and said, “These people are crazy.”

He refused to bomb and invade Cuba as the military wished during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Afterwards he told his friend John Kenneth Galbraith that “I never had the slightest intention of doing so.”

Then in June 1963 he gave an incredible speech at American University in which he called for the total abolishment of nuclear weapons, the end of the Cold War and the “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” and movement toward “general and complete disarmament.”

A few months later he signed a Limited Test Ban Treaty with Nikita Khrushchev.

In October 1963 he signed National Security Action Memorandum 263 calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 U. S. military troops from Vietnam by the end of the year and a total withdrawal by the end of 1965.[3]

All this he did while secretly engaging in negotiations with Khrushchev via the KGB , Norman Cousins, and Pope John XXIII , and with Castro through various intermediaries, one of whom was French Journalist Jean Daniel. In an interview with Daniel on October 24, 1963 Kennedy said, “I approved the proclamation Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will go even further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we will have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.” Such sentiments were anathema, shall we say treasonous, to the CIA and top generals.

These clear refusals to go to war and his decision to engage in private, back-channel communications with Cold War enemies marked Kennedy as an enemy of the national security state. They were on a collision course. As Douglass and others have pointed out, every move Kennedy made was anti-war. This, Douglass argues, was because JFK, a war hero, had been deeply affected by the horror of war and was severely shaken by how close the world had come to destruction during the Cuban missile crisis. Throughout his life he had been touched by death and had come to appreciate the fragility of life. Once in the Presidency, Kennedy underwent a deep metanoia, a spiritual transformation, from Cold Warrior to peace maker. He came to see the generals who advised him as devoid of the tragic sense of life and as hell-bent on war. And he was well aware that his growing resistance to war had put him on a dangerous collision course with those generals and the CIA. On numerous occasions he spoke of the possibility of a military coup d’etat against him. On the night before his trip to Dallas, he told his wife, “But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it.” And we know that nobody did try to stop it because they had planned it.

But who killed him?

Douglass presents a formidable amount of evidence, some old and some new, against the CIA and covert action agencies within the national security state, and does so in such a logical and persuasive way that any fair-minded reader cannot help but be taken aback; stunned, really. And he links this evidence directly to JFK’s actions on behalf of peace.

He knows, however, that to truly convince he must break a “conspiracy of silence that would envelop our government, our media, our academic institutions, and virtually our entire society from November 22, 1963, to the present.” This “unspeakable,” this hypnotic “collective denial of the obvious,” is sustained by a mass-media whose repeated message is that the truth about such significant events is beyond our grasp, that we will have to drink the waters of uncertainty forever. As for those who don’t, they are relegated to the status of conspiracy nuts.

Fear and uncertainty block a true appraisal of the assassination – that plus the thought that it no longer matters.

It matters. For we know that no president since JFK has dared to buck the military-intelligence-industrial complex. We know a Pax Americana has spread its tentacles across the globe with U.S. military in over 130 countries on 750 plus bases. We know that the amount of blood and money spent on wars and war preparations has risen astronomically.

There is a great deal we know and even more that we don’t want to know, or at the very least, investigate.

If Lee Harvey Oswald was connected to the intelligence community, the FBI and the CIA, then we can logically conclude that he was not “a lone-nut” assassin. Douglass marshals a wealth of evidence to show how from the very start Oswald was moved around the globe like a pawn in a game, and when the game was done, the pawn was eliminated in the Dallas police headquarters. As he begins to trace Oswald’s path, Douglass asks this question: “Why was Lee Harvey Oswald so tolerated and supported by the government he betrayed?” After serving as a U.S. Marine at the CIA’s U-2 spy plane operating base in Japan with a Crypto clearance (higher than top secret but a fact suppressed by the Warren Commission), Oswald left the Marines and defected to the Soviet Union. After denouncing the U.S., working at a Soviet factory in Minsk , and taking a Russian wife – during which time Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane is shot down over the Soviet Union – he returned to the U.S. with a loan from the American Embassy in Moscow, only to be met at the dock in Hoboken, New Jersey by a man, Spas T. Raikin, a prominent anti-communist with extensive intelligence connections, recommended by the State Department. He passed through immigration with no trouble, was not prosecuted, moved to Fort Worth, Texas where , at the suggestion of the Dallas CIA Domestic Contacts Service chief, he was met and befriended by George de Mohrenschildt, an anti-communist Russian, who was a CIA asset. De Mohrenschildt got him a job four days later at a graphic arts company that worked on maps for the U.S. Army Map Service related to U-2 spy missions over Cuba. Oswald was then shepherded around the Dallas area by de Mohrenschildt who, in 1977, on the day he revealed he had contacted Oswald for the CIA and was to meet with the House Select Committee on Assasinations’ Gaeton Fonzi, allegedly committed suicide. Oswald then moved to New Orleans in April 1963 where got a job at the Reilly Coffee Company owned by CIA-affiliated William Reilly. The Reilly Coffee Company was located in close vicinity to the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and Office of Naval Intelligence offices and a stone’s throw from the office of Guy Bannister, a former Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Chicago Bureau, who worked as a covert action coordinator for the intelligence services, supplying and training anti-Castro paramilitaries meant to ensnare Kennedy. Oswald then went to work with Bannister and the CIA paramilitaries.

During this time up until the assassination Oswald engaged in all sorts of contradictory activities, one day portraying himself as pro-Castro, the next day as anti-Castro, many of these theatrical performances being directed from Bannister’s office. It was as though Oswald, on the orders of his puppet masters, was enacting multiple and antithetical roles in order to confound anyone intent on deciphering the purposes behind his actions and to set him up as a future “assassin.” Douglass persuasively argues that Oswald “seems to have been working with both the CIA and FBI,” as a provocateur for the former and an informant for the latter. Jim and Elsie Wilcott, who worked at the CIA Tokyo Station from 1960-64, in a 1978 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, said, “It was common knowledge in the Tokyo CIA station that Oswald worked for the agency.”

When Oswald moved to New Orleans in April 1963, de Mohrenschildt exited the picture, having asked the CIA for and been indirectly given a $285,000 contract to do a geological survey for Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier, which he never did , but for which he was paid. Ruth and Michael Paine then entered the picture on cue. Douglass illuminatingly traces in their intelligence connections. Ruth later was the Warren Commission’s chief witness. She had been introduced to Oswald by de Mohrenschildt. In September 1963 Ruth Paine drove from her sister’s house in Virginia to New Orleans to pick up Marina Oswald and bring her to her house in Dallas to live with her. Thirty years after the assassination a document was declassified showing Paine’s sister Sylvia worked for the CIA. Her father traveled throughout Latin America on an Agency for International Development (notorious for CIA front activities) contract and filed reports that went to the CIA. Her husband Michael’s step-father, Arthur Young, was the inventor of the Bell helicopter and Michael’s job there gave him a security clearance. Her mother was related to the Forbes family of Boston and her lifelong friend, Mary Bancroft, worked as a WW II spy with Allen Dulles and was his mistress. Afterwards, Dulles questioned the Paines in front of the Warren Commission, studiously avoiding any revealing questions. Back in Dallas, Ruth Paine conveniently got Oswald a job in the Texas Book Depository where he began work on October 16, 1963.

From late September until November 22, various Oswalds are later reported to have simultaneously been seen from Dallas to Mexico City. Two Oswalds were arrested in the Texas Theatre, the real one taken out the front door and an impostor out the back. As Douglas says, “There were more Oswalds providing evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald than the Warren Report could use or even explain.” Even J. Edgar Hoover knew that Oswald impostors were used, as he told LBJ concerning Oswald’s alleged visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. He later called this CIA ploy, “the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico…their ( CIA’s) double-dealing,” something that he couldn’t forget. It was apparent that a very intricate and deadly game was being played out at high levels in the shadows.

We know Oswald was blamed for the President’s murder. But if one fairly follows the trail of the crime it becomes blatantly obvious that government forces were at work. Douglass adds layer upon layer of evidence to show how this had to be so. Oswald, the mafia, anti-Castro Cubans could not have withdrawn most of the security that day. The Sheriff Bill Decker withdrew all police protection. The Secret Service withdrew the police motorcycle escorts from beside the president’s car where they had been the day before in Houston; took agents off the back of the car where they were normally stationed to obstruct gunfire. They approved the fateful, dogleg turn (on a dry run on November 18) where the car came, almost to a halt, a clear security violation. The House Select Committee on Assasinations concluded this, not some conspiracy nut.

Who could have squelched the testimony of all the doctors and medical personnel who claimed the president had been shot from the front in his neck and head, testimony contradicting the official story? Who could have prosecuted and imprisoned Abraham Bolden, the first African-American Secret Service agent personally brought on to the White House detail by JFK, who warned that he feared the president was going to be assassinated? (Douglass interviewed Bolden seven times and his evidence on the aborted plot to kill JFK in Chicago on November 2 – a story little known but extraordinary in its implications – is riveting.) The list of all the people who turned up dead, the evidence and events manipulated, the inquiry squelched, distorted, and twisted in an ex post facto cover-up – clearly point to forces within the government, not rogue actors without institutional support.

The evidence for a conspiracy organized at the deepest levels of the intelligence apparatus is overwhelming. James Douglass presents it in such depth and so logically that only one hardened to the truth would not be deeply moved and affected by his book.

He says it best: “The extent to which our national security state was systematically marshaled for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains incomprehensible to us. When we live in a system, we absorb and think in a system. We lack the independence needed to judge the system around us. Yet the evidence we have seen points toward our national security state, the systemic bubble in which we all live, as the source of Kennedy’s murder and immediate cover-up.”

Speaking to his friends Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell about those who planned the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, JFK said, “They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.”

Let’s hope for another president like that, but one that meets a different end.

[1] http://consortiumnews.com/print’2009/091309a.html [This link appears to be too old to still work. Unlike the print age, the digital age loses references, another way that memory and history are stolen.]

[2] Vernon Loeb, “Soviets Knew Date of Cuba Attack,” Washington Post, April 29, 2000

[3] See James K. Galbraith, “Exit Strategy,” Boston Review, October/November 2003

Edward Curtin teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts

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The Cosmic War, by Dr Joseph P Farrell

A review from Amazon of this extraordinary and compelling  ‘must read’ book, The Cosmic War: Interplanetary Warfare, Modern Physics, and Ancient Texts: A Study in Non-Catastrophist Interpretations of Ancient Legends, Author Dr Joseph P Farrell.

Farrell’s foray into ancient antiquity is scholarly in it’s precision and thought-provoking in its ramifications.  Oxford educated researcher Dr. Joseph P. Farrell unleashes a reverberating hypothesis regarding ancient history whose echoes will be forever heard.

Cosmic War is an extremely intriguing incursion into the possibility of a very ancient war in high antiquity. Dr. Farrell’s hypotheses of an Ancient Interplanetary War is argued in an in-depth, precise and reasonable approach. The extensive evidence Farrell collates and synthesizes will leave the reader aghast with the possibilities.

Intriguingly, many ancient cultures stated that the ‘Wars of the Gods’ were quite real. Predictably, even though there’s extensive evidence for advanced physics, advanced weapons, ancient [millions and BILLIONS of year old artifacts found by reputable sources], the establishment has painted all over ancient history with myth.

Regarding this very issue, Jim Marrs in his book Our Occulted History, sets his cross hairs on this very issue: “The term mythology stems from the Greek word mythos, simply meaning words or stories reflecting the basic values and attitudes of people. In past ages, when the vast majority of humans were illiterate, easily understood parables were used to educate people about history, science, and technology. During the Dark Ages, when most of people were taught that the Earth was flat, the word mythology was changed by the Roman Church to mean imaginative and fanciful tales veering far from truthfulness. This small change in semantics has caused untold damage in current perceptions.”

Ironically enough, there is starting to be more and more evidence of ‘myths’ now turning out to be fact. As Chris Hardy Ph.D remarks in her poignant book DNA Of The Gods: “…let’s remember that, before the discoveries of loads of ancient tablets written in the pictographic Sumerian language (Late Uruk period, fourth millennium BCE), the kingdom of Sumer was believed to be a myth. We had already discovered Akkad and deciphered Akkadian, and still archaeologists wouldn’t give credence to the numerous carved references, within historical dated records, to a line of kings whose title was “King of Sumer and Akkad”.

Or how about the “myth” of Troy: “This myth collapsed in 1865 with archeologist Frank Calvet’s discovery of the historic ruins of not only one city of Troy but nine layers of it! The city, whose siege is recounted in Homer’s Iliad, is only Troy VII, the seventh level underground, dating to the thirteenth century BCE.”

The gatekeepers, for many reasons, want to keep established history in a nice little box. Fortunately, as anyone who has extensively research these topics know, there’s more than ample evidence that shows that at minimum history isn’t what we have been told.

In any case, Cosmic War covers wide ranging but pertinent topics such as Van Flandern’s exploded planet hypothesis, an analysis of plasma in relation to weapons that employ scalar physics, petroglyphs which show plasma instability glyphs that were recorded by ancient cultures, remnants of giants in ancient history, optical phase conjugation, the story of the ‘gods’ as related through ancient texts, pulsars, generational charts of the ‘gods’, the scarring of The Valles Mariners being possibly from a weapon, Iapetus and its hexagonal craters, and a LOT more.

The ramifications of this book abound, and filter in all aspects of our lives. Dr. Farrell gives compelling reasons [coupled with countless others in his other trenchant books] as to why we need to give history, particularly ancient history, a very long and thorough look.

In its totality, this book is a veritable fountain of information that is scholarly in precision, and thought-provoking in its ramifications. This book is a must read for anyone interested in ancient history, ancient civilizations, and any of the topics there-in. There is more than enough information to make the reader curious about our past in more ways than they can really imagine.

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David Icke’s “Phantom Self”: A Book Review from Freedom Articles

david-ickes-phantom-self-a-book-review-from-freedom-articles

Phantom Self, the latest book of researcher David Icke, takes conspiracy research to a new depth with the idea of a primal virus that has hacked Life itself.

(Editor’s note: this book is amongst the most fascinating, timely and thought-provoking books I’ve ever read.  I strongly recommend setting aside all prejudice and past learning – what we were taught, and so believed – then reading it with an open mind. And then thinking deeply.)

Phantom Self is the latest book of famous researcher and free-thinker David Icke. Just as in his previous book The Perception Deception, David takes his research to a new level of depth with a comprehensive display of dot-connecting that will leave many in awe of his knowledge – but more importantly awaken people to the real dire straits humanity is in. Like many of his books, it ends with a positive message and the ultimate solution to all of humanity’s problems; however, most of the book is devoted to exposing the current reality of planet Earth, often in horrifying detail. This is an essential part of David’s message, for without the true knowledge of what is really going on – and the capacity to feel the horror of it – we will not muster the courage and motivation to change it. Part of the reason humanity is so stuck deep in the conspiracy is that it is engaged in massive collective denial, which it prevents it from acting decisively to quash and transform the evil (or unconsciousness as I prefer to call it). A hallmark of Phantom Self is that it takes a step further down the rabbit hole – past the reptilians and Archons – and looks at the controlling force behind them, which David says resembles some kind of computer virus that has hacked life itself.

The full review can be seen at david-ickes-phantom-self-a-book-review-from-freedom-articles

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1984 – Nineteen Eighty Four

George Orwell’s classic 1950 novel is very worthwhile reading (again for most people).  It is frightening to review how much of what Orwell wrote is happening today, albeit is somewhat different guise.  Recall Orwell was a member of the Fabian Society, where he learnt of their plans before resigning.  He used novels as a practical was to publicise the plans he learn about from other Fabian members.  The Amazon website – – explains much about the book, and presents several perceptive reviews – this is one of the 4,613:

George Orwell’s classic was incredibly visionary. It is hardly fathomable that this book was written in 1948. Things that we take for granted today – cameras everywhere we go, phones being tapped, bodies being scanned for weapons remotely – all of these things were described in graphic detail in Orwell’s book.
Now that we have the Internet and people spying on other people w/ webcams and people purposely setting up their own webcams to let others “anonymously” watch them, you can see how this culture can develop into the Orwellian future described in “1984.”
If you’ve heard such phrases as “Big Brother,” “Newspeak,” and “thought crime” and wondered where these phrases came from, they came from this incredible, vivid and disturbing book.
Winston Smith, the main character of the book is a vibrant, thinking man hiding within the plain mindless behavior he has to go through each day to not be considered a thought criminal. Everything is politically correct, children defy their parents (and are encouraged by the government to do so) and everyone pays constant allegiance to “Big Brother” – the government that watches everyone and knows what everyone is doing at all times – watching you shower, watching you having sex, watching you eat, watching you go to the bathroom and ultimately watching you die.
This is a must-read for everyone.

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Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now

Author: Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, was raised Muslim, and spent her childhood and young adulthood in Africa and Saudi Arabia. In 1992, Hirsi Ali came to the Netherlands as a refugee. She earned her college degree in political science and worked for the Dutch Labor party. She denounced Islam after the September 11 terrorist attacks and now serves as a Dutch parliamentarian, fighting for the rights of Muslim women in Europe, the enlightenment of Islam, and security in the West.

Editor’s note: this book should be considered essential reading by anyone who has an interest in Islam as well as everyone who is or may be effected by Muslims (that means just about everyone!).  The book is very comprehensive and, unlike most other books on the subject, provides not only a wide-ranging background and analyses based on her own experience, but some thought-provoking solutions.  After scanning numerous reviews of this excellent book, the following written by ‘Helpful Advice’ on Amazon is more or less  what I would have written.

After ‘Infidel’ and ‘Nomad’ worldwide known, equally hated and adored Ayaan Hirsi Ali is back on literary (and considering the topic inevitably political) scene with her new and probably the most controversial book so far she wrote – ‘Heretic’.

A book that will certainly be subject of numerous texts, quoted or despised, she raised the question of some key Islam teachings incompatibility with the values of modern or free society for which the majority (or at least we think so maybe) people in the world stands for.

It seemed that comparing to some other major religions, Islam somehow proved immune to changes in the new world we are living, characterized by enormous speed of information exchange and the development of human rights. There were some attempts such as Arab Spring that tried to challenge traditional thinking, ingrained prejudices or facts about the Muslim world. But with the simultaneous proliferation of Islamic fundamentalism and even its acceptance in certain circles of the population in the West, according to the author it seems that it is time for some radical actions that must be implemented by the very Muslims, not someone else from outside.

So, what Ali proposes needs to happen for Muslims to defeat the extremists for good? Economic, political, judicial and military tools have already been proposed, some of them deployed, though it seems that all these will have little effect unless Islam itself is reformed.

Therefore she calls for a Muslim Reformation—a revision of Islamic teachings, alignment of modern society with traditional religion doctrine, that seems difficult, but not unfeasible due to the rejection of extremist behavior among the majority of Muslims around the world.

She reminds that such reformation has been called for since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent abolition of the caliphate, but instead of general phrases and generalized objectives she precisely pointed out five key precepts that have made Islam resistant to historical change and adaptation. And only when the harmfulness of these ideas will be recognized and as result they will be rejected, a true Muslim Reformation would be possible.

Although to comment each of them would require writing essays, I’ll just list all five of them:
• Removing of Muhammad’s semi-divine status, putting him into the history context as important figure that united the Arabs in a pre-modern time that cannot be copied in the 21st century. And consequently also recognizing the fact that Quran is the book made by human hands.
• Emphasizing that life is more important than something that comes after it will reduce the appeal of martyrdom.
• Appreciation of modern laws that need to be put in front of Shariah legislation that is violent, intolerant or anachronistic.
• The abolition of the individual’s right and so called religious police to enforce the law, something for Muslim community is unfortunately particularly known
• And most important, Islam must become a religion of peace removing the imperative to wage holy wars against infidels

Once again this author must be admitted undeniable courage to tackle the dangerous subjects in a world where because of the drawn cartoons you can easily lose a life. Her theses are clear, her objectives are fully explained, her mission to change the Islamic world from the inside continues, causing the happiness and satisfaction of all civilized Muslims worldwide.

Therefore high recommendations for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, this brave author who after fighting for the rights of women engages into even greater battle with the hope that one day we will be able to say that books like these changed the world. For the better.

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The Death of Money

The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System.  8 April 2014.  By James Rickards.

James Rickards, author of the other best seller, Currency Wars, has gone even further in The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System, in telling it like it is (and will be, so prepare yourself!). Jim’s all-facts, straightforward approach is peppered with just enough analogy and anecdotal wit to make sophisticated economic/mathematical/political concepts understandable to the (educated) layperson. His clarification techniques serve the book well by making sure the content never gets watered down or condescending. For anyone interested in knowing what is going on behind the scenes, how the dollar is being systematically devalued by The Fed (and why), what a rigged sham our banking system is, and how things are likely to play out in the very near future, read The Death of Money!

American Betrayal

The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character by Diana West (May 28, 2013).  Diana West’s newest book “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on our Nations Character” is a highly researched, blockbuster of a story taking 356 pages to tell with 29 pages of notes.  Whilst not directly about ‘management’, this book is packed with information that any successful manager should understand, in particular regarding communications (propaganda?)  and planning.  It’s the most thought-provoking, worrying, disillusioning book I’ve ever read.  I’ve attached a couple of reviews of the book from Amazon.com. American Betrayal, Diana West, May 2013. Reviews  that give you a glimpse of what it’s about.  John, of John’s Newsletter fame, noted: ‘American Betrayal explains what many already know about the creation of the soviet monster by the FDR administration, stacked with communist spies and the author of the cold war from as early as 1942.  How FDR’s lackeys could give the USSR the atomic bomb via Lend Lease is fascinating and unfortunately true.  It is clear that powerhouse though she may be, America has been ungovernable since the outset…Just too big, too complex and too full of leaks and confused ideologies.  America is now, as a reaction, on the road to becoming a police state.  Folk who have read the book  called “The Open Society and Its Enemies” by Karl Popper will understand how the USA came to this pretty pickle and the realities behind this scandalous state of affairs.  Horrific though her anecdotes are, I have seen independent corroboration elsewhere of Diana’s central themes and accept them as factual – when asserted as such.  This book is too disturbing for general consumption.’

From Third World to First

The Singapore Story: 1965-2000 by Lee Kuan Yew  (Oct 3, 2000).  Note:  although older, it is useful to read this book before the Grand Master’s Insights book, below. Some comments on the Amazon website: Lee Kwan Yew had a clear vision, set himself clear goals…. Above all, what led to his success is his execution skills…. Although Singapore is a free market economy, its philosophy concerning workers and employees are caring and genuine, unlike in the United States….His views regarding leadership and a wide range of management issues are profound….. Read this book to be inspired.

Lee Kuan Yew

The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World by Graham Allison et al., 1 Feb. 2013.  Some comments on the Amazon website: Lee excels in pithy evaluations of regional and national strengths and weaknesses. At his best, the man is a cross between Confucius and Machiavelli. (Washington Times)……..”I found myself engrossed this week by the calm, incisive wisdom of one of the few living statesmen in the world who can actually be called visionary. The wisdom is in a book, “Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States and the World,” a gathering of Mr. Lee’s interviews, speeches and writings…He is now 89, a great friend of America, and his comments on the U.S. are pertinent to many of the debates in which we’re enmeshed.” — Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal.

Brexit: a world-changing event?

British democracy in action – or is it?

What will Brexit mean, both short and long-term?

Unlock the people

Unlock the people  By Brendan O’Neill, Editor, Spiked Online, 2 May 2020

Covid hysteria is destroying public spirit. We have to reverse this right now.

A very striking thing has happened in British politics over the past couple of weeks: the liberal elite has suddenly fallen in love with public opinion.

The very politicos and observers who spent the past four years demonising public opinion and seeking to overthrow the largest democratic vote in the history of the UK – the vote for Brexit – now cheer the public for supporting the lockdown and feeling fearful about going back to normal life.

What a revealing insight into how this section of society relates to the people. When we behave as a genuine public, engaged in a free and open democratic contest over the political future of the country, they brand us stupid, brainwashed, possessed of bad, untrustworthy opinions. But when the people are no longer a proper public, and instead have been broken up into atomised households, firmly kept away from the public realm by authoritarianism and fear, they love what we have to say. They can’t get enough of it. Lockdown sceptics are ‘out of sync with public opinion’, trills one of those commentators who spent years casually arguing for the elite to overthrow the largest act of democratic public expression this country has ever known.

On one level, this can be seen as a simple case of people flagging up polls that seem to support their own worldview. We all do that. And the liberal elite has been uniformly in favour of a Chinese-style lockdown of society and the economy. Indeed, the media classes played a not unimportant role in pushing Boris Johnson towards a society-wide lockdown. So it is not surprising that, following years of disdaining public opinion as ill-informed, racist and too susceptible to the tricks of demagoguery, they now cite the public’s views regularly.

For the public seems to support the lockdown, too. To such an extent, in fact, that it is apparently worrying some government officials, who fear many members of the public may be reluctant to return to normal life even when the Covid threat has been significantly reduced. The latest Ipsos Mori polling finds that more than 60 per cent of us would feel uncomfortable about going to bars or restaurants or getting on public transport once the lockdown has been lifted. Forty per cent would feel unhappy about sending their kids to school. More than 30 per cent would be reluctant to return to work or meet friends.

This is the public opinion being cheered by the pro-lockdown left and by comfortably off members of the liberal elite who can still work from their large houses even as the rest of society grinds to a halt: a public opinion that is fearful, distressed, dazed by the prospect of returning to normal work life, social life, and public life. A public opinion that is not really public opinion at all, but rather is a collection of fearful views expressed by individuals who have been expelled from the public realm and who are literally prevented by law from gathering in public, taking part in political protests, or engaging in industrial action.

This is the ‘public’ that the liberal elite admires: a Potemkin public, a pretend public, a public that has been fairly successfully decommissioned and placed under something approaching house arrest. That liberals and leftists raged for years against a clear, confident and real act of public engagement (the vote for Brexit) and now cheer a hyper-fragmented ‘public’ as it expresses dread about the prospect of a return to normal life is incredibly, historically revealing.

It helps to explain their keenness on the lockdown. It suggests that one of the key things these people admire about the lockdown is that it has broken the public. It has retired those swathes of society that proved so disappointing to the elites in recent years, whether by their political choices or their apparently problematic lifestyles. The public-sector left, the woke-leaning elites and the Remainer wing of the establishment are generally favourable towards the lockdown not only because it has less of an impact on their lives than it does on other people’s, but also because it makes physically, legally real what they consider to be the ideal relationship between their class and the rest of us – that is, one in which they can still proffer their ‘expertise’ and advice on how the masses should be cared for and financed, while the rest of us are silenced, by law, and have been reduced essentially to non-citizens who must await the favour and instruction of the government and our betters.

Witness the excitability with which sections of the left have talked about the massive state spending in relation to Covid-19. This proves the importance of the state, they say. It shows that Universal Basic Income is possible, they claim. Some, including Jeremy Corbyn himself, cite the current situation as proof that their welfarist worldview was right all along. They are almost saying ‘Comrade Covid’, taking pleasure in the way that a virus has made real the political set-up they have long dreamt of: one in which the state has extraordinary power in relation to people’s lives and incomes, and in which the rest of us accept this as the natural order of things.

It’s remarkable: in the fear and defeatism being expressed by the decommissioned public in relation to Covid-19, these people glimpse the pacified, grateful public in receipt of state largesse that has for a long time fuelled their political fantasies and political activity.

Some of them use noble-sounding language to justify and celebrate the unprecedented use of law, policing and fear to break up the public and keep us all at home. They say the people are engaged in an act of ‘solidarity’. Staying at home is heroic, they claim. It shows how much we all care. This is entirely false. Solidarity is when active, engaged citizens recognise their commonalities and offer one another assistance in the pursuit of a political goal or a social good. Like the vote for Brexit, for example, which was a clear, free and public demand for more forms of social solidarity against the disempowering dynamic of technocratic rule and the individuating trends of neoliberalism. In contrast, the current fearful retreat from the public realm speaks to an atomised torpor that is the opposite of solidarity, and in which one of our few ‘public’ roles is to agree not to be a burden on the NHS. Stay home, do nothing, don’t impose on the system – this is compliance with authority, not solidarity.

Of course, there are glitches, hopeful glitches, in the culture of compliance nurtured in relation to Covid-19 and celebrated by the anti-democratic left and anti-masses elites. Not everyone is happy with the lockdown, of course. Surveys by King’s College London suggest that people can be split into three categories: we are accepting, suffering or resisting the lockdown. King’s says 48 per cent accept the lockdown, 44 per cent are suffering through it, and nine per cent are resistant to it. And even as the public has been broken up there have been acts of genuine solidarity, most strikingly through the setting-up of WhatsApp groups across the country in which people assist neighbours and look out for the vulnerable.

But while that’s all good, there is no avoiding the larger problem of compliance, resignation and retreat into the non-public realm. It is not surprising that this culture is being celebrated by sections of the liberal elite, for, fundamentally, it represents the very thing they failed to achieve over the past four years: the victory of fear over public spirit. Where their Project Fear in relation to Brexit was not successful, Project Fear in relation to Covid-19 has been. But that is what makes this all so destructive. Covid-19 is impacting on many people, as we know, but officialdom’s response to Covid-19 is having a devastating impact on public spirit and public life. Having unleashed fear, having convinced people that it is dangerous to go outside, having informed us that other people are a grave threat to our health and even our lives, the powers-that-be cannot now be shocked that the broken, over-policed public feels trepidation about returning to work, production and life. Existential dread is easy to push out, but difficult then to contain.

The destruction of public life and public engagement would be one of the worst consequences of the coronavirus crisis. It threatens to have dire impacts on social solidarity, social confidence and democratic citizenship that could outlast the virus itself. We need to reverse this damaging culture with urgency. Nothing less than an overhaul of the political narrative and an unflinching questioning of the culture of fear is required. Only by questioning the authoritarian new corona-laws, questioning the lockdown, questioning the idea that this virus outbreak is an apocalypse, and questioning the notion that the breaking-up and silencing of the public is an act of ‘solidarity’ can we begin to restore public life.

We have two fights on our hands: a medical, discrete fight against a novel virus, and a political fight against elites who relish rather too much the current suspension of political life, economic life and public life. We are not mere disease-carriers; we are also workers, producers and members of communities that can stand up to viruses and other threats together. In decommissioning the public, our society has destroyed its own best resource when it comes to dealing with crises. That’s enough – unlock the people.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy

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Ignore the Britain-bashers

 

Ignore the Britain-bashers  By Brendan O’Neill, Spiked Online, 19 April 2020

Shame on those who are using the Covid tragedy to bash Britain and sneer at British people.

Like vultures, they swoop. The Britain-bashers. The still bruised Remainers. The woke elites for whom Britain is little more than a former Empire, still riddled with racism and drunk on nationalism. All of these ghouls spy in the Covid-19 crisis a chance to put the boot into Britain. To say: ‘I told you so. I told you Britain wasn’t special. I told you this nation you foolishly worship is weak and useless.’ This is the sick Schadenfreude of the bourgeois defeatists who see Covid-19 almost as a rebuke from God – or someone – to a nation with dangerous delusions of grandeur.

Their vulture-like feasting on a country struggling to deal with a nasty new virus is clear from the headlines to their columns. ‘The myth of Great Britain must finally end when our government has failed us so badly over coronavirus’, says a piece in the Independent . The writer, a Corbynista, naturally, doesn’t only criticise the government’s strategy for dealing with the virus, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do. She also mocks the ‘myth’ that Britain is a great country. The ‘illusion of a Great Britain’ and the nonsense idea of the ‘Blitz Spirit’ will surely collapse following the Covid crisis, she says. This is more than criticism of ministers and tactics. It feels like the pursuit of the culture war by other means, the weaponisation of the Covid tragedy to re-energise the Britain-bashing that had already become so rife among cut-off woke elites.

Everywhere they are taking aim at the supposed myth of British exceptionalism. The Covid defeatists have convinced themselves that the reason Britain has a relatively high number of Covid deaths is because Boris Johnson and his cabinet of Brexiteers – and by extension us dimwits who voted for them – took the ridiculous view that Britain is a unique, wonderful, freedom-loving country and therefore it would be wrong for us to rush into a lockdown. In the words of arch Britain-basher and obsessive opponent of Brexit, Fintan O’Toole, ‘On the altar of this exceptionalism, lives have been sacrificed’. So national pride isn’t only stupid and vulgar, a view the disconnected, pseudo-cosmopolitan elites have held for a long time – it is positively lethal, too.

‘Was it British exceptionalism’ that nurtured the current Covid-19 crisis, asks a writer for the New Statesman? It was partly ‘a sense of British exceptionalism’ that ramped up the Covid virus here, says one public-health expert. Brexit, of course, is never far from some of these people’s minds, given that our democratic rejection of the EU was also a rejection of their cultural miserabilism and technocratic arrogance. So it isn’t surprising that our alleged Covid mistakes have been neatly folded into the mistake (as they see it) of Brexit. ‘Whoever said that British exceptionalism would end with Brexit?’, one writer asks, perusing the apparently arrogant approach Britain’s deluded leaders initially took to the virus. We thought we could manage outside of the EU and now we think we can manage against a global virus – what fools we are.

Witness, too, the policing of any pro-British language in relation to the struggle against Covid-19. A writer in the Financial Times takes aim at all the talk of Blitz Spirit. The Blitz Spirit is ‘bunk’, he says, but it is ‘just too comforting a story for Britons to abandon’. And how about the unhinged response to Dominic Raab’s description of ill Boris as a ‘fighter’? From Newsnight to the Guardian – hard to tell the difference these days – they mocked the ‘fighter’ talk. ‘That kind of talk is dangerous’, a writer for the Independent claimed.

There is almost a sense of relish in some of this Covid commentary. The purveyors of this sick Schadenfreude seem to believe that Britain is finally being taught a lesson. This is clearest in Fintan O’Toole’s borderline mockery of Covid-hit Britain. The virus has ‘exposed the myth of British exceptionalism’, he trills. He mocks Boris for enforcing a lockdown reluctantly and for expressing regret about the loss of freedom it would entail. This nation is so ‘drunk on freedom’ that it is willing to harm itself, he says. British exceptionalism consists of a ‘fantasy of personal freedom as a marker of ethnic and national identity’. Having previously pathologised the vote for Brexit as the act of a deluded people nostalgic for Empire, now O’Toole pathologises our attachment to freedom as a kind of madness, a national drunkenness, just another story we tell ourselves in order to feel ethnically distinctive. Our love for democracy was racist, and our love for freedom is racist too, apparently.

O’Toole’s commentary increasingly comes across as anti-British bigotry. It is not criticism of governments or strategies, but of the entire culture of Britain and the comforting lies Brits apparently tell themselves. And don’t think for one moment that the Britain-bashing of O’Toole and the other Covid vultures is about attacking the elites. Their targets are just as often the little people, who, after all, are the ill-educated Empire nostalgists who put Boris in power. As O’Toole said of Brexit, it was powered by a strange mix of ‘people with tattooed arms and golf-club buffers’. We all know what ‘people with tattooed arms’ means: it’s the kind of phrase anti-democratic elites must use when political correctness restrains them from saying ‘scum’.

Covid Schadenfreude can likewise be glimpsed in the almost gleeful sharing of stats and graphs showing Britain’s daily death rate. This is clearest in the context-free doom-graphs made by John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times. Every day his graphs of death are latched on to by dystopian millennials and woke leftists as proof of the evilness of the Tories or the myth of Britain’s greatness. ‘Look how much worse we are doing than New Zealand!’, people cry, which is almost immeasurably ignorant. In terms of population density, the size of immigrant communities (in which the known co-morbidities of Covid-19 are often quite pronounced), and how we measure and document Covid-related deaths, Britain could not be more different to New Zealand, and other countries too. And yet none of this is factored in. Context is not permitted, because the overarching aim is one of horror, a desire to create a jarring, disorientating sense that Britain is doing worse than any other nation on Earth and that we absolutely must consent to being humbled and changed by this horrible experience. Maybe we should even rejoin the EU?

There is such a deep cynicism in all of this. It is not constructive criticism or debate, which we need in spades right now. Yes, we should be holding the government to account. Yes, we should talk about the ill-preparedness of the health service. Yes, we must reckon with the sclerotic nature of the bureaucracy we live under (which long predates Boris’s presence in Downing Street) and its lack of responsiveness. And yes, we should continue questioning the lockdown and its predicted disastrous impact on the economy. But the vulturism of the Britain-bashers is something very different. It represents the importing of pre-existing prejudices into the current crisis. It is the exploitation of a health crisis to the woke end of taming Britain, humbling the British people, ridiculing our belief in freedom and democracy, and questioning whether our attachment to the ideal of nationhood is wise in an era of global problems and global viruses. We need to be more ‘cosmopolitan and global’, as O’Toole says. Make no mistake: they are refighting the battle over Brexit on the terrain of Covid. They seem to hope a disease will achieve what they failed to achieve at the ballot box: the neutering of British nationhood and the taming of British democracy.

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‘The Alleged Cure Is Immensely Worse Than the Disease’

‘The Alleged Cure Is Immensely Worse Than the Disease’  By Brendan O’Neill and Peter Hitchens, Spiked, 6 April 2020

Peter Hitchens on the dangerous folly of the Covid-19 shutdown.

In the past few weeks, society has been shut down, the economy has been put on hold, and civil liberties have been curtailed in the name of fighting against coronavirus. There has been hardly any scrutiny of or opposition against these ever-stricter measures. Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens has been one of the few dissenting voices in the media. He joined spiked editor Brendan O’Neill for the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show.

Brendan O’Neill: We live in a country where parliament has been suspended, our most basic freedoms have been eroded, we are all virtually under house arrest, and there are a whole bunch of new rituals we all have to observe when we encounter other people, which is increasingly rare. Like me, are you a bit terrified by the speed and the ease with which Britain became this country?

Peter Hitchens: I wouldn’t say terrified – distressed and grieved, but not terrified. I am actually not shocked because in several controversies in recent years, where I have thought that the people of this country would stand against the way in which they were being bullied and messed around, I have noticed that there hasn’t been all that much spirit of liberty. I think there is an awful lot of conformism now in this country and people have accepted being pushed around. I’m not sure parliament has been suspended exactly. It has just folded up or dissolved into a pool of blancmange. If it had any kind of leadership, it could insist on continuing to sit, just as it could have opposed the action or subjected it to anything remotely resembling scrutiny. But it just folded up and stole away in the night. All the institutions of civil society which are supposed to protect us did the same thing. The judiciary, the human-rights lot, the civil service, the media, parliament, Her Majesty’s Opposition and public opinion in general have simply failed to do their jobs. It has demonstrated that we don’t really have a civil society any longer. In the Soviet Union, where I spent a lot of time, it was clear that there was only one official point of view and that people were being pushed around. I don’t recall ever being compelled to stay at home, and there was at least a pretence made of having a legislative body as well.
But the point that strikes me here is that – particularly in the Eastern European countries, but also largely in Russia – most people regarded the Soviets’ rule with a certain amount of contempt and made jokes about it and realised they were being mocked and fooled. In this case, the population accepts what they are being told, without any question. It’s extraordinary. The old USSR would have loved to have had a population like that in the Western world and in the United Kingdom, which genuinely believes the propaganda and does what it is told. You could say, ‘The chocolate ration has gone up’, when in fact it has gone down and people will believe it.

O’Neill: You have written some very solid pieces, questioning the need for this kind of shutdown. Let’s just talk for a moment about the extraordinary situation we find ourselves in. There is this novel virus, which undoubtedly causes great harm, especially to older people and to medically vulnerable people, and in response to it – which is unprecedented in human history – we have closed down virtually the whole of society and most of the economy, and in the process we have stored up immeasurable problems for the future. I think you have found it a bit of a struggle to convince people that this might not be the best way to tackle a virus? Hitchens: It’s extraordinary. Again, the willingness of people to accept that ‘something must be done, and this is something, so we will do this’. The argument goes, ‘We have a problem, the way of solving it is to shut down the country and strangle civil liberties. Therefore, let’s do that.’ What I have been surprised by is how little examination there has been to whether there is any logic to this. It is as if you went to the doctor with measles and the doctor said that this was serious measles and the only treatment for it is to cut off your left leg. And he cuts off your left leg and then later on,