THE YELLOW PERIL, THE OPIUM WARS AND WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND…

 A long time ago…

 

The Opium Wars were two armed conflicts fought in China in the mid-19th century between the forces of Western countries and the Qing dynasty. The first Opium War was fought between China and Great Britain from 1839 to 1842, triggered by the Chinese government's campaign to enforce its prohibition of opium, which included destroying opium stocks owned by British merchants and the British East India Company.

 

The second Opium War, also known as the Arrow War or the Anglo-French War in China, was fought by Great Britain and France against China from 1856 to 1860. China, technologically behind Europe, lost both wars and the foreign powers gained commercial privileges and legal and territorial concessions in China under unequal treaties due to gunboat diplomacy.

Due to the problem of the trade deficit Britain had with China, the British were smuggling opium from their Indian colonies into Chinese ports against the wishes of the Chinese government to help pay for the large amounts of Chinese tea that they were importing. Hong Kong became a British colony through the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842; Kowloon in 1860; and Hong Kong was leased for 99 years from 1898. It only devolved to China in 1997. Treaty ports were increased where Britain could trade and reside, from one to five, including Shanghai.

 

China’s problem was the resultant importation of a product that had no possibility of compensating for the cultivation of tea, but instead created widespread addiction and social and economic disruption.

 

And now…

 

The US external debt is the largest in the world, 123% of GDP, with 33% of public debt held by foreigners: $33 trillion (33 with 12 zeros afterwards) at the time of writing. China, with over 4,000 times the US population, has $2.5 trillion of external debt), 14% of its GDP. While debt is not necessarily a bad thing in a capitalist system, if it becomes impossible to service countries can find themselves in dire straits. Switzerland, for example, has a low debt to GDP ratio of 48%. Post Bretton Woods, the US has maintained a constant deficit, providing itself with a high standard of living, facilitated by the dollar’s position as the only international currency. As the world turns potentially multi-polar, coupled with a cloud economy, in which China’s WeChat platform seamlessly integrates digital currency transactions, the dollar’s hegemony is seriously threatened and the USA is pushed to endless wars to stave off the day of reckoning as concerns its balance sheet, threatening any nation that moves towards international trade in non-dollar currency.

 

The USA is currently spending half of its tax dollars on military spending (and in addition there is much spending, for example R&D, that is military in intention, but not included directly in the official figures); and is spending almost as much on servicing its debt. The plethora of wars it is fomenting and selling weapons for is better understood as a last-ditch attempt to maintain the dollar’s hegemony, while the country itself is crumbling from within, border towns inundated by immigrants fleeing hardship in those countries that the Western elites decided to trash, immigrants that will do the low-paid jobs that maintain inflation under control, but which exert downward pressure on blue-collar salaries all over the country, creating misery for the entire working class. As Julian Assange famously explained, Western governments are better understood as nothing more than the instrument used to create endless war, itself the mechanism to remove public funds and give them to private elites, or in other words to steal the labour of the masses and syphon it upwards into a few hands. There is no transparency in “defence” spending – the Pentagon is utterly incapable of passing an audit, and yet receives more money every budget.

 

Currently in the US there are around 80,000 opioid deaths per year (out of a total of some 110,000 drug deaths), according to the CDC, a figure that does not fully reflect the social and economic decay caused by addition. Drugs are killing 324 people out of a million. The European situation is better, but still horrible: in Sweden, for example, 81 drug-induced deaths per million; and an average of 15 per million among 15-64 year-olds. In England and Wales, there were 80 deaths per million due to drug poisoning in 2020, nearly a 4% increase on the 2019 figure, an increase possibly due to lockdown policy. In Wales there was almost a 10% increase on the 2019 figure in 2020.

 

Social problems caused by drug addiction are not evenly spread out, meaning that severely deprived areas bear the burden of many problems, including drug addiction, which in itself causes a vicious circle of lowered economic prospects, bad parenting, crime…

 

The illegal Contra-backing by the US government of Ronald Reagan against the left-leaning Sandinista government in Nicaragua back in 1984, which was designed to circumvent Congress’ decision not to finance the Contras, was funded by the drug trade, as the CIA used flights out of Nicaragua to bring drugs out and send cash back in. Inner cities, especially those with significant black populations, were flooded with crack cocaine so that, while Ronald Reagan’s political discourse was extremely anti-drugs, his government’s policy resulted in massive drug-related crime and misery. 

In Western countries drugs and prostitution are included in official GDP figures. The EU made the inclusion official in all member states in 2014, and the UK’s GDP, as an example, leapt £50 billion, 4%, according to the UK government’s information!

 

In the EU today, policy is generally known to be set out by NATO. US wars are invariably seconded by the UK and the EU. Constant military spending, although good for the industrial military complex – and the third of the US Congress that invariably invests in the stock market at precisely the right time –, is bad for the people who pay for the arms manufacturers’ bonanza, either with life and limb or with plummeting social perspectives, constant austerity, reduced healthcare, vanishing pension schemes, and crumbling schools and infrastructure. As inflation and taxation make us poorer, as the “You will own nothing” mantra is imposed (apparently not even our own bodies as they become, with constant mRNA boosters, yet another subscription service), as the corollary “and be happy” has not come to pass, democracy becomes more elusive as the obscenely rich buy access to political and economic power. Our simulacrum of democracy, our periodic excitement as we choose Team Red or Team Blue, hides the reality that we live in a liberal oligarchy.

 

“The expense of a war could be paid in time; but the expense of opium, when once the habit is formed, will only increase with time” (Townsend Harris, 1804-1878)

 

So what goes around comes around. And this time it’s a reckoning for the West.

Who's The Poisoner?

We live in a world of pesticide-drenched food, polluted air, water containing all sorts of unnatural chemicals and drug residues, poisonous homes... Pesticides are biocides and will quickly kill you in large doses, and slowly and accumulatively over time. We also live under dubious medical regimes - even untested and coercive gene therapy, some say, that will irredeemably alter our health and perhaps even our genes. But surely no one is actually trying to poison us, are they?

Is this a necessary trade-off for having enough food?

There is no historical reason to think that small farms cannot produce enough food for the population. In capitalism, scarcity is artificially maintained for economic reasons.

In an important 4-decade-long study done on US farming, organic small-scale farming was in fact found to be more profitable that industrial farming, and had similar yields. During times of drought, yields were even 40% higher. Other long-term studies have found similar results. Additional findings are that organic soil has bacteria and fungi that keep plants healthy and able to defend themselves from pests, and that soil becomes progressively healthier, unlike the soil depletion that results from industrial farming.

India’s massive famines from the 18^th Century onwards occurred at a time when England was importing foods from India, and at times even stockpiling in order to increase prices. The English government at the same time prohibited other regions in India from helping those where hunger was rife, a custom that dated back more than 2000 years (the Kautilya treatise), sustaining in Parliament that aid would in the long term make India weaker and less able to fend for itself. In the mid-19th Century, it was common economic wisdom that government intervention in famines was unnecessary and even harmful. The market would restore a proper balance. Any excess deaths, according to Malthusian principles, were nature's way of responding to overpopulation. Railroads were not, as some cynically state nowadays, used to help India during famine, but to transport India’s resources out of the country.  

The same happened during the Irish famines of the 19^th Century, and for the same reasons, when foodstuffs were exported from Ireland and millions of Irish people lost their land and perished.

Large industrial farms are extractive, removing from nature what is not replaced. Agrobusiness is a huge environmental problem and, as such, cannot be the solution. It decimates biodiversity and food-security, as we depend increasingly on a smaller and smaller selection of foodstuffs, grown on progressively depleted land. It eradicates pollinators. It requires massive amounts of chemical fertilisers, which in turn are 2% of greenhouse gas emissions and the principal source of nitrous oxide emissions.

Even our gut health has been decimated, due to the nutritional paucity of our calorie-laden diets, leading to a new medical procedure: faecal transplants, the transference of faecal matter from healthy people to those whose guts have no healthy bacteria left in them. Clostridium difficile Infections (CDI) are on the rise, no doubt due to our lifestyles. The US CDC reports that approximately 347,000 people in the US alone were diagnosed with this infection in 2012. Of those, at least 14,000 died but the figure is likely to be more in the range of 30,000-50,000 range. Like our soils and ecosystems, our guts have been desertified.

 

Is the sorry state of our environment due to incompetence from our leaders?

Sadly, we do not expect our politicians and leaders to be intellectually endowed, but favour showmen (and women), good-looking individuals like Justin Trudeau, despite his lies and a populist discourse clearly not in line with his coercive policies. We look for soundbites and amusement, so we favour superficially funny types like the UK’s ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, sacked by his own nasty party, but not by his country’s voters; or ones like media-savvy Donald Trump, with his preacher’s sing-song intonation, which goes down well in the southern states, and his brilliant epithets for his rivals – such as: Sanctimonious (Ron) Santos, Slippery James Comey, Sleepy Joe (Biden), Crooked Hillary, Animal Assad, Little Rocket Man (Kim Jong Un), Sloppy Steve (Bannon), Pocahontas (Elizabeth Warren), Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Low Energy Jeb (Bush)…

Our politicians are, maybe, kept reasonably busy scrabbling around for their political space, and we expect no real expertise from our so-called experts, nor relevant studies, nor experience, from government ministers.

But what about those who are really calling the shots, the Bill Gates, Carl Schwabs of this world, and the dark money behind them?

First, a little bit of history...

Once there was a conglomerate of large chemical corporations, formed in 1925, that was the mainstay of the Third Reich’s economy and war effort, supplying the synthetic rubber for vehicle tyres, synthetic fuels and explosives. On 20 February 1933, at a meeting with top Nazis, including Goering and Himmler, this conglomerate, IG Farben, was the largest donor to the Nazi Party, donating 400,000 reichsmarks (approximately $5 million in today’s money). It was the original military-industrial complex, a perfect example of the dangers of state-private collaboration, and very much the definition of fascism. As Mussolini famously stated: fascism is "corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

The Nazi ideology included social eugenics, the biological improvement of German people by selective breeding, involuntary sterilization and the belief that some people were not worthy of life. Eugenics research in Germany was inspired by similar research in the United States; and Britain also had many prominent eugenicists (including the Huxley brothers, Julian and Aldous, and HG Wells). Julian Huxley was President of the British Eugenics Society from 1959-62, and UNESCO’s first President.

The IG Farben cartel built at the start of WWII a large plant in December 1940/January 1941. The plant’s location was chosen because it had good rail transport and coal mines nearby, and land was given by the government at a knock-down price after it had been expropriated from its Polish owners, the site rendered doubly attractive by the possibility of slave labour from the Auschwitz concentration camp. The camp for workers housed some 11,000 people - mostly Jews - by July 1944; and overcrowding, plus overwork – including flogging and physical mistreatment ‑, produced high sickness and mortality.

Around 10,000 would ultimately be killed when deemed unproductive, either by lethal injection or, in the majority of cases, in the gas chambers. The Zyklon B gas used was produced by one of the company’s subsidiaries and several Nobel-prize winning scientists worked for the company. Apart from forced labour, the company also performed drug experiments on inmates. It was eugenics on steroids.

IG Farben was at the time the world’s largest chemical company. When it was finally wound up in 2003, its remaining assets were paid to banks, not to organizations and families of its victims. Compensation, following the IGF Liquidation Act of 1955, permitted top officials of IGF to resume leading positions in the German chemical industry. Some compensation was paid under the Jewish Material Claims Conference to Jewish forced labourers and prisoners who had been compelled to work at Monowitz, under a voluntary scheme, although the many non-Jewish victims did not receive any compensation.

 

After the Nuremberg trials, in which the IG Farben Trial was the largest of all industrial trials, IG Farben was split into its separate companies, some of which, like BASF, Hoechst (now part of French Sanofi), Agfa and Bayer, continue to prosper till today. In the Soviet zone of occupation, IGF plants were nationalised, whereas in the West they remained under their original ownership.

Only 13 of its executives were ever convicted and all were given small sentences of between 18 months and 8 years, often released early; indeed, by 1951, all IGF officials had been released from prison. Most were allowed to continue their lucrative careers as captains of industry, or receive honours. Some examples:

·      Philipp Heinrich Hörlein, who worked specifically on the Zyklon B gas that he was well aware was being used in the extermination camps, posthumously had a street named after him in Leverkusen in 1955).

·      Fritz ter Meer, who received a sentence of 7 years in prison for ‘mass murder and enslavement’, but was released in 1950 for ‘good behaviour’, in 1951 was elected Chairman of the board of directors for Bayer AG, holding the position of supervisory board chairman until 1964, and holding board positions at many other companies, including Commerzbank and Union Bank AG.

·      Otto Ambros, sentenced to 8 years for slave-labour, was also released in 1951 due to good behaviour and became an adviser to various chemical companies, including Dow Chemical and Grünenthal GmbH, the company responsible for the terrible thalidomide tragedy.

Operation Paperclip

In a secret US intelligence program, between 1945 and 1959, more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers and technicians, including leaders of the Nazi Party, were taken from Germany to the US for government employment after the war, some entering the US through Latin America. The official reason was to gain military advantage for the USA in the new Cold War against the country that had done most to win the war against the Nazis, Russia (by then the USSR).

The NASA Distinguished Service Medal (its highest award) was given to former SS official Kurt Debus, former Nazi Party and SS member Wernher von Braun, among other prominent Germans. Von Braun also received many other prestigious awards, such as the Goddard Astronautics Award, and is in the US Space and Rocket Centre Hall of Fame. 

Once one German medical officer, Walter Schreiber, was linked in the press to human experiments, he was helped by the US military to emigrate to Argentina.

 

Our present world

In 2018 Monsanto was found guilty in the US of knowingly concealing the carcinogenicity of its Roundup herbicide, despite claiming that it had studies that suggest that the product does not cause cancer. A man with terminal cancer was awarded $289 million (later reduced to a lesser, albeit enormous, sum); and tens of thousands of other people have pending cases for the same reason. Further sentences have been equally harsh. The initial court ruling resulted in France banning the product and was bad news for Bayer, which had just finalised its purchase of Monsanto and saw a 30% drop in its share price.

Since 2015 the WHO has ruled that glyphosate (Roundup’s key ingredient) is “probably carcinogenic”, itself a shocking admission for a product routinely sprayed onto our food crops and natural world in increasing quantities. It is a product that decimates endangered species, requires larger and larger doses, creates rapid resistance in pests, alters genes, destroys pollinators and creates ‘superweeds’.

Monsanto was founded in 1901 and has, since then, faced litigation relating to damage from asbestos, PCB, dioxin, benzene, vinyl chloride, Agent Orange, Alachlor and Dicamba (other herbicides), Penncap-M (an insecticide)… It has also admitted falsifying its books and records, and bribery; and the spread of experimental glyphosate-resistant wheat. If you want to read more on the horrors of Monsanto, read Merchants of Poison.

VW, originally created under the Nazi regime (and called the “people’s car”, was caught up in a huge emissions scandal, Dieselgate, in 2020, after the software to control toxic gases in their smaller diesel cars, marketed to city dwellers, had been designed to falsify the results of pollution tests, and the cars were in fact emitting 40 times more pollution than that permitted by law, predictably resulting in tens of thousands of excess respiratory deaths just in Europe. The company President, in a grotesque attempt to show that car diesel fumes are really not so bad compared to lorries, ordered for monkeys to be confined in a Perspex box and for a lorry’s exhaust pipe to be fed directly into the small box. The monkeys’ futile attempts to get away from the unbreathable air are heart-breaking. Other diesel car manufacturers copied VW’s method and also falsified the recorded emissions of their vehicles, including Fiat Chrysler and Opel/GM.

Corporations behave sociopathically, responding to no other objective criterion than their share price. Despite constant scandals of this nature, they generally factor in possible fines for malfeasance, viewing sanctions and large lobbying expenses as the normal cost of doing business. ‘The polluter pays’ is in fact ‘He who pays can pollute.’

One in five business leaders have psychopathic tendencies. According a 2010 study, there were at least three times as many psychopaths in executive or CEO roles than in the overall population.

“He is a charismatic leader who inspires people to follow him. A strategic thinker who can master the details. A tireless worker with incredible focus and problem-solving skills. He is well-liked by his employees but is also able to make and execute unpopular decisions. Above all, he is an exceptional communicator who can convey a vision to any audience, from Wall Street to the most junior employee.”

The quote above could describe an ideal CEO. But it’s actually a portrait of a corporate psychopath. People with psychopathy crave power and dominant positions, but they are also chameleons, able to disguise their ruthlessness and antisocial behaviour under the veneer of charm and eloquence. One route to grabbing power for the highly intelligent psychopath is to climb the corporate ladder. Roughly 4% to as high as 12% of CEOs exhibit psychopathic traits, according to some expert estimates, many times more than the 1% rate found in the general population and more in line with the 15% rate found in prisons.

Bill Gates himself, the son of a rumored eugenicist, managed to reverse the extremely negative image the public had of him, following his courtroom behaviour (for using his de facto monopoly to destroy the competition) and Microsoft’s subsequent conviction in an Antitrust case brought by the US government. By turning to corporate philanthropy, adopting an avuncular tone, and investing in vaccines and other drugs, while funding world organisations that would promote his vaccines and other drug treatments often extremely coercively, together with mainstream media that would sell the narrative, Gates has said it made his best investment ever, turning $10 billion into $200 billion worth of economic benefit, all the while having no medical expertise, no degree and no reason – apart from his extreme wealth – for anyone to take his advice.

The current US President is hellbent on bringing Nato into direct war with Russia, in what could easily provoke the use of nuclear weapons, the destruction of the whole of Europe, or even of humanity itself. The last US government’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, one-time head of the CIA, said: “We lied, we cheated, we stole”.

These people at the top are there to get ahead and stay ahead. They are sociopaths. Do we really want them ruling over us?

Are We Being Poisoned (Part II: Fluoride)

In Vermont, USA a few days ago a town employee was found to have reduced fluoride levels in the municipal water for the last 5 years. A mother was reported to be outraged because her children's dentist had recommended against supplemental fluoride because fluoride was already added to the town's water. What this shows is that adding fluoride to water is a medical decision that affects everyone, whether someone has had already significant amounts of fluoride or not; whereas taking supplemental fluoride or using fluoridated toothpaste is a personal choice. 

Vermont, USA

It has been argued that poorer people cannot afford fluoridated toothpaste and are thus helped by water fluoridation. In fact, as I shall show, poor people are the ones most harmed by the measure. In any case, the solution would seem to be to guarantee that poor people have enough money to buy basic necessities, or to prescribe poor people free toothpaste and fluoride tablets where necessary, and educate everyone on the importance of oral health and good diet for avoiding tooth decay, obesity and diabetes.

Does any of this matter?

We assume that fluoride added to water must be innocuous and, of course, good for our teeth. But is it?

In fact fluoride is a neurotoxin that in 21 out of 23 studies was found to reduce children's intelligence and should be categorised like lead, mercury, arsenic... It is a component of many insecticides and rodenticides (in these cases generally as sodium fluoroacetate).

Excess fluoride causes stains on teeth, hypothyroidism, and possible bone disease (as excess fluoride collects in the body's calcium, i.e. bones and teeth), including weakened bones. It also collects in the pineal gland (more of that later) and may cause mental impairment, tiredness and gastrointestinal problems. Those with impaired kidneys are unable to process fluoride, resulting in a greater accumulation in bones. Fluoride is a neurotoxic mutagen, a compound that can cause genetic damage and, therefore, could conceivably cause cancer. 

Though we talk of 'fluoride', in fact there are three types added to water supplies: fluorosilicic acid, sodium fluorosilicate and sodium fluoride. The first is a designated hazardous substance, a severe irritant and an unwanted byproduct from the phosphate fertiliser industry or from the manufacture of aluminium and iron ore. It is used industrially in the manufacture of ceramics, pesticides and Teflon, and these are highly toxic industries. This byproduct posed a costly and intractable disposal problem until it was solved by adding it to water supplies. The second and third types of fluoride are obtained by adding table salt or caustic soda to the mix. All these fluorides are extremely corrosive to water pipes. 

Amazingly, fluoride products added to water are not pharmaceutical grade, unlike those added to toothpastes, or in tablets. And the few animal studies done on the subject have generally used pharmaceutical grade sodium fluoride, not industrial hexafluorosilicic acid. For the most prescribed medicine in history, there has never been a double-blind, randomised clinical trial, nor large cohort study completed. Fluoridated toothpastes by law include warnings that they are not for small infants and that only a pea-sized amount should be used topically, rinsing out with water afterwards. Yet the amount of pharmaceutical grade fluoride in the pea-sized toothpaste is roughly that of industrial-waste-fluoride in a glass of water.

Calcium fluoride, on the other hand, the natural version of fluoride found in some natural water and soils, is relatively harmless, as calcium and magnesium mitigate the harmful effects of fluoride. The effect to the body of drinking a cup of Indian tea, often naturally high in fluoride, has nothing to do with the toxicity of ingesting fluorosilicic acid.

The addition of fluoride to public drinking water systems has been routine in communities across the United States since the 1940s and 1950s. In the UK, there are cities that add fluoride to water (for example, Newcastle does, Hull doesn't). Where I live, Seville, water is fluoridated; but in Madrid it is not. Additionally, Seville is within what is 'officially' designated the 'cancer triangle', an area of high cancer incidence. Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland have stopped fluoridation and oral health has not declined, nor is below that of countries that do fluoridate. Many other countries have reduced the permitted levels. The US Federal government lowered recommended amounts for drinking water in 2015. In the UK the best performers in oral health are Brighton, Bristol and Richmond-on-Thames, all cities and towns that don't fluoridate drinking water. In the West Midlands, where water has been fluoridated since 1964, there has been a massive rise in young children being admitted to hospital for multiple teeth extractions over the last decade. At the same time, rates of tooth decay are coming down equally in fluoridated and non-fluoridated countries. 

Oral health is almost entirely determined by socioeconomic status. The poor have disproportionately bad oral health in all cases, and are more susceptible, due to bad diet, to fluoride's toxicity.

European countries that have never fluoridated - like Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway... -, and countries that have discontinued fluoridation - like the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany (East and West), the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland - do not have worse oral health than those that do - like Ireland (70% of the population drinks fluoridated water), the UK (around 10%) and Spain (less than 10%). In countries that stopped, tooth decay continued to decline. 

Ireland, where most people are forced to drink fluoridated water, has relatively bad oral health as measured by the average number of teeth that have been decayed, lost (missing) or filled-in at the age of 12:

And, unlike chlorine in water, fluoride molecules are very small and almost impossible to remove without complicated processes like reverse osmosis or distillation, which themselves bring unwanted health risks for drinking water. 

Many U.S. municipalities and other countries don't fluoridate water for a variety of reasons, including opposition to the universal medication of a population, feasibility, technical problems and the ability to get fluoride other ways. Fluoride is indisputably toxic in large amounts and any debate on the subject is also highly toxic, almost a taboo; but is fluoride itself toxic in the authorised amounts?

Is fluoride toxic?

Tooth decay is a widespread chronic disease and the result of sugary diets. Caries can easily lead to toothache, tooth loss, problems with chewing and infection.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claim that fluoride in water decreases cavities or tooth decay by about 25%, and reported in 2018 that 73% of the U.S. population was served by water systems with adequate fluoride to protect teeth. When a large proportion of municipalities are drinking fluoridated water, comparison between similar populations on a socioeconomic level becomes less viable. However, using the water system to medicate people most importantly goes against the Nuremberg Code and, additionally, is a remarkably inefficient way to do this, as 99,5% of the fluoride will go to environmental pollution. So why is it done, especially since EU countries show no advantage to those countries that fluoridate compared to those that do not?

Adding fluoride to water is Big Business and appealing to our authorities and highly attractive for the phosphate fertiliser industry, which gets to sell its waste chemicals instead of having to environmentally dispose of them. But given the 70-odd years since its introduction as a grand public intervention, it is significant that there is simply no killer evidence to convince the anti-fluoridation crowd. Like so many pharmaceutical and corporate-friendly decisions made by government, there is simply not the will for serious follow-up studies. After all, what government wants to find that they have indeed been poisoning their citizens for decades? What government wants to take on big vested interests and its own captured health authorities? Or alienate voters over a mostly invisible topic especially since water fluoridation is unpopular when the question is properly debated. It is an extremely hot political potato.

The phosphate fertiliser industry is itself a result the industrialisation of farming that came out of excess industrial capacity post-WWII, together with a wish to recondition all those industrial plants that had been previously used for the war, and to boost all those chemical industries that had been producing nerve gases and other unpleasant products that would henceforth be used to kill insects and other organisms. 

Till the 1970s, around phosphate fertiliser plants, all vegetation was decimated and cattle were left crippled by the release of toxic gases. Nowadays, companies have to recover their toxic waste and the industry uses 'wet scrubbers' (a spray of water) to remove two highly toxic gases, hydrogen fluoride (HF) and silicon tetrafluoride (SiF₄) from the stacks. The resultant H2SiF₆, diluted to 23%, is sent to chemical plants and onwards to water companies. Phosphate rock is also mined for uranium and produces the radioactive Uranium 238 and Radium 226 (that in turn produces carcinogenic Radon). No systematic control is made of how much radioactivity ends up in water supplies. Equally awful, after dilution up to 1.66 ppb (parts per billion) arsenic can also end up in our water, having been added deliberately. Ironically, the waste that is used to fluoridate water is considered too hazardous to dump in the sea! Large amounts of sodium hexafluorosilicate are imported from China to the USA, in solid form, leading to reports that after dilution there remains an unidentified sludge.

As a result, the health effects of fluoride in water are not well known. When entire communities are drenched in controversial chemical products, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine if a specific one is carcinogenic for the general population. According to 2020 data from the American Cancer Society, men have a 40.14 percent—or approximately one in two—chance of developing cancer in their lifetime, which in itself in an absolute scandal. For women, the odds are slightly lower at 38.7 percent. And it's not only the old people and an increase in longevity. In the UK, since the early 1990s, incidence rates for all cancers combined have increased for all the broad age groups in the UK. The increase is largest in people aged 25-49 where rates have increased by more than a fifth (22%) (2016-2018).

Quietly debated for years has been the relationship between fluoridated water and cancer, a fact observed in rats, especially male rats. The US National Cancer Institute states that a link cannot be found for humans, although there have been studies that have found an osteosarcoma link for males diagnosed before the age of 20 and exposed to fluoridated water during the mid-childhood growth spurt (6-, 7- and 8-year-olds). The evidence of a link between fluoride and cancer is strong enough to urge extreme caution and, indeed, is stronger than the proven link between cancer and DDT.

In its review published in 1987, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the World Health Organization, labelled fluorides as “non-classifiable as to their carcinogenicity [ability to cause cancer] in humans.” They noted that the studies “have shown no consistent tendency for people living in areas with high concentrations of fluoride in the water to have higher cancer rates than those living in areas with low concentrations,” but also noted that the evidence was inadequate to draw conclusions one way or the other. Additionally, supporters of fluoridation point to naturally occurring fluoride in some water supplies but, as shown above, the fluoride artificially added to water is not the same a natural fluoride. 

Fluoride is hard to remove once added, especially for lower-income people, and no account is taken of how much fluoride is ingested via other means, nor the amount-of-water-to-bodily-weight ratio. Bottle-fed babies receive a far higher dosage of what is a drug (but not an approved one, and certainly not an essential nutrient, as some would try to suggest). According to the US CDC, 32% of children have dental fluorosis (excess fluoride before the eruption of the second set of teeth, leading to staining and discoloration). Worse still for a drug ingested by whole populations when topical options exist is the fact that topical use is far, far more appropriate than drinking it. As the USA CDC state:

'Fluoride's caries-preventive properties initially were attributed to changes in enamel during tooth development ... However, laboratory and epidemiologic research suggests that fluoride prevents dental caries predominantly after eruption of the tooth into the mouth, and its actions primarily are topical.'

A small risk spread over a very large population becomes a real risk, especially for susceptible populations, which goes against the precautionary principle. Currently some 400 million people in the world drink fluoridated water, and one in a hundred is potentially hypersensitive to it.

As the EU's Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine puts it:

Article 5 – General rule 

An intervention in the health field may only be carried out after the person concerned has given free and informed consent to it. This person shall beforehand be given appropriate information as to the purpose and nature of the intervention as well as on its consequences and risks. The person concerned may freely withdraw consent at any time.

Fluoride also accumulates in the pineal gland because this gland has the highest calcium concentration of any soft tissue in the body, with a high metabolic activity and a profuse blood supply. It is also outside the blood-brain barrier. For children, the accumulation of fluoride at an earlier age reduces melatonin production, affecting among other things puberty. More interestingly, the pineal gland is thought to be associated with spirituality and enlightenment. Might our governments wish us to be less enlightened, only able to think inside the box?

The most neoliberal countries have authorities keen on mandating fluoridation. The US, Canada and Australia have all recently pressed for mandates to fluoridate water. The UK grants indemnity to water providers against legal liability. If this sounds like the indemnity given to vaccine manufacturers, it is because it is. And the question is why private companies, making huge profits off drugs given universally to healthy people, need indemnity from prosecution. In countries mandating fluoride no government agency seems to accept legal liability for possible adverse health effects.

Perhaps Dr B Havlik, Minister for Health of the Czech Republic, put it best: fluoridating water is: 

1. uneconomical
2. unecological
3. unethical
4. toxicologically debatable.

For those readers who wish to know more about this subject, some of the above data is from the excellent book The Case Against Fluoride by Paul Connett.

Are We Being Poisoned (Part I)?

 

There is a point when even the most obtuse might notice that our leaders are not on our side. Many of the poorest were not in the sort of stable jobs that gave them furlough rights and a salary for doing nothing when we were locked down in 2020. Many did not have access to the paperwork that allowed for their mortgage or rent to be postponed. Those who continued working in situ, such as healthcare workers, were forced to get the jab, irrespective of their personal wishes. Their health is almost certainly worse as a result. Two days ago (at the time of writing), Pfizer executive Janine Small admitted to the EU Parliament that the Covid vaccine was never tested for transmission. Given that it does not, even officially, stop infection either – but perhaps reduces symptoms -, whatever this is, it is NOT a vaccine!

But I am not going over that issue. The lies, contradictory statements, unscientific balderdash, relentless fear-mongering and propaganda are an indisputable fact. Additionally, there is a wealth of official statistics that, once we remember that for two weeks after the “vaccine” one was counted as unvaccinated, show an alarmingly high rate of bad health and excess death from all causes among the injected.

An enlightening moment might be when one looks carefully at The Economist’s “The World in 2019”, on sale in December 2018 (a full year before the onset of the surprise pandemic that was itself so eerily predicted in Event 201 one month before), and sees how amazingly prescient it was, with its Leonardo da Vinci-type drawings of a panda, a pangolin, the gene helix on an arm, a stork carrying a bar-coded baby, facial recognition, a cannabis leaf, “Putin’s pipes”, the Four Horsemen - one masked, Pinocchio’s long nose… (in no particular order).

Another moment might be caused by the anomaly of a government encouraging, to the point of compulsion, its population to get the Covid jab, and then suggesting that it will pay for the funeral costs. The following is from the Australian Government official website:

However, Western governments have been poisoning their citizens for decades, while also actively creating wars to enrich hidden elites and massacre large parts of their own populations.

Secret germ and fungal experiments on unwitting populations are too numerous and documented to list in their entirety, and span decades. Some examples:

In 2002 The Guardian detailed in an article how the British Ministry of Defence conducted secret germ warfare tests on the public between 1940 and 1979, involving dangerous chemicals and micro-organisms, in more than 100 covert experiments. For example, between 1955 and 1963, planes flew from northeast England to Cornwall along the coasts dropping huge amounts of zinc cadmium sulphide on the population. Cadmium is carcinogenic. In another experiment, between 1961 and 1968 more than a million people, from Torquay to the New Forest were exposed to bacteria including e.coli and the anthrax-mimicking bacillus globigii. Families in the areas used believe that children’s birth defects and handicaps were caused by the many experiments.

In the US hundreds of experiments were carried out. In 1950 the coast of San Francisco was sprayed with two types of dangerous bacteria, and one person admitted as a result to hospital died. In 1951 fungal spores were dispersed, mainly onto African-American workers, to see if they were more susceptible to fungal disease than Caucasians.

In 1954 insects were weaponized, as fleas were incorporated into bombs. The Soviets had already accused the US of dropping canisters full of insects infected with Chorea and the plague in Korea and China during the Korean War.

In 1966 light bulbs were filled with bachillus globigii and then smashed onto the rails in the New York subway, and subsequently breathed in by thousands of unwitting civilians whose clothes were also impregnated.

I am not going to detail the horrendous MK Ultra experiments here, but the degeneracy of those who designed them and carried them out is mind-blowing (no pun intended).

In the notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Study of 600 African American men, 399 with syphilis did not get the treatment they believed they were receiving, nor the penicillin that would have cured them, in an experiment that lasted for 40 years. The government finally granted free burial services to the survivors.

There are too many gruesome experiments to list here. However, the news in October 2021 that a ‘non-toxic’ gas was being released into the New York subway system should have rung alarm bells. Back in May 2020 a biocide was sprayed night after night into New York’s subway cars in a measure that would ‘eradicate the coronavirus for up to 90 days’. This is not how respiratory viruses are transmitted for a start; but, if it were to eradicate it for 90 days, then repeat spraying the very next night would be redundant. The US also uses chemical compounds to coerce and control prison inmates, in a measure that is increasingly used and clearly violates human rights.

In many cities worldwide, streets were sprayed with bleach in another absurd measure to purportedly stop Covid. These and so many other measures taken were ultimately proved to be utterly useless, not to mention incredibly unenvironmental. Sweden, which did not impose lockdown, nor mask-wearing, nor closure of schools, fared far better than Spain, which did all these things.

 

Malaga, Spain (2020)

 

The USA CDC has been genetically modifying mosquitos and then releasing them in Brazil, the Cayman Island, Panama and India. Since 2019 over one billion mosquitos have been released. In 2021, despite wide and persistent push-back from residents, Bill Gates-funded (to the tune of over $9 million)-Oxitec did the same in Florida, US. Such measures could, it is said, eradicate malaria, but are inherently undemocratic; and – as is so often the case – they could also have huge unintended effects, such as the eradication of plant pollinators, the development of mutating bugs resistant to known measures of control, the poisoning of birds and other insect eaters, or blood contamination of those bitten by the mosquitoes. In any case, technocratic, nature-modifying solutions really never, ever prove successful without unleashing another, unintended side effect that is just as bad as, or worse than the original problem.

On 16 April 2020, in the early days of the pandemic of fear, Spain’s Health Minister, Fernando Illa, authorised the spraying of biocides from militaryplanes into the sky. I have spoken to many people about this and they seem unaware that, unlike their purported use in order ‘to destroy, deter, render harmless, or exert a controlling effect on any harmful organism’, biocides are in fact poisons for all living beings.

 

Luckily, a few months earlier in August 2019, some might say with fortuitous prevision and precision, the Spanish Ministry for Defence and the Spanish MedicinesAgency agreed to a state-wide deposit of medicines for emergencies and catastrophes, specifically antivirals and the manufacture of medicines for special situations.

 

A few days ago (at the time of writing) in an interview on 8 October 2022, Spanish ex-Minister Illa explains how the anti-vax ‘flat-earthers’ had been one of his Ministry’s main worries. It is a fact that in the entire Western world the narrative came down to vaccination against the coronavirus, despite their being real and historic reasons to query the possible efficacy of an injection against a respiratory illness and a plethora of other tried-and-tested remedies, plus the lack of long-term testing for the experimental gene-therapy. The Minister might, indeed, have worried more about the neglect of elderly, vulnerable people in the ‘care’ homes or isolated alone in their houses, which lead to tens of thousands dying alone or horribly mistreated before their time (mostly in privatised ‘care’ centres). He might even have worried about the needless use of ventilators used on conscious, breathing individuals, which caused death in almost 90% of cases, due to the Covid protocols applied in many Western countries. But not to worry! 

In other Western countries lockdown also had a large impact on mental health, and thousands of abandoned elderly patients died of thirst.

 

Does receiving the flu vaccine make the flu, if you get it, worse?  

It does make you more susceptible to coronavirus in general and human metapneumovirus.

But does it work at all? According to the USA CDC, not very much. The effectiveness in the graph below is based on estimates, which are likely to be boosted upwards, due to the CDC partnership with the very drug companies that produce the vaccines.

Also, please note the disappearance of the flu during the 2020-21 season, resulting in the vaccine effectiveness not even being officially recorded! 

As a sidenote, I intended to investigate exactly which companies provide funding for the various centres for disease control, such as the US CDC and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, but found a massive web of interconnecting semi-governmental agencies with absolutely no transparency over the billions of euros and dollars they manage, much of which is from private corporations. This is a project that will have to wait. 

Down this particular rabbit hole, of official misinformation, obfuscation and fear-mongering, it is easy to switch off, because the alternative – that our leaders are lying psychopaths – is a scary thought. 

But are they psychopaths?

In two-party representative political systems, as produced by first-past-the-post electoral procedures, it is easy for both parties to degenerate into a one-party system with two superficially different ‘Choose red or blue!’ factions. Both will invariably support indistinguishable economic measures and forever wars – there is nothing like war to allow public money to fall into unaccountable private hands. 

Most politicians are more akin to second-rate actors, reading their lines well, and looking the part on the screen. They will never explain to the public how obscure financial interests absolutely determine the political direction that a country can take and how any whiff of socialism will provoke these interests into trashing the pound or euro and rendering the huge debts that all Western countries have unpayable in a matter of hours, all the while profiteering off the chaos.

As George Soros said, as an investor he puts his humanity to one side and concentrates on making a profit. We live in capitalism that raises the more unscrupulous to the top (Gordon Gekko’s ‘Greed is good’!) and incentivises sociopathy. Roughly 4%, to as high as 12% of CEOs exhibit psychopathic traits, according to some expert estimates, many times more than the 1% rate found in the general population and more in line with the 15% rate found in prisons.

As for the rest of the enablers who are not sociopaths, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it, as Upton Sinclair famously observed.

And yet, in the uplifting and rather remarkable book Human Kind: a Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman shows that the vast majority of us are compassionate, empathetic beings. One of the many anecdotes from the book is the following:

Tom Postmes, professor of social psychology at the University of Groningen has asked students the same question for years: 

Imagine an airplane makes an emergency landing and breaks into three parts. As the cabin fills with smoke, everybody inside realises: ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’ What happens?

On Planet A, the passengers turn to their neighbours to ask if they’re okay. Those needing assistance are helped out of the plane first. People are willing to give their lives, even for perfect strangers. On Planet B, everyone’s left to fend for themselves. Panic breaks out. There’s lots of pushing and shoving. Children, the elderly, and people with disabilities get trampled underfoot.

Now the question: 

Which planet do we live on? 97 per cent of people think we live on Planet B; but the truth is, in almost every case, we live on Planet A.

The problem is that we have allowed a system to be imposed that effectively enslaves us and gives us a truly false idea of our potential for peaceful, meaningful existence. Even more damaging, it has given the very worst elements huge power over us. Mainly because we have let ourselves be convinced that this is the natural order of things. And if we are being poisoned like rats, so be it!

 

 

 This article originally appeared in: http://themirrorinspires.com/are-we-being-poisoned/

 

 

 

 

 

We've gone a long way backwards in human rights

There was a time when women couldn't be professional competitors in sports. Because - excluding synchronised swimming - women in general, as a collective, cannot compete with the heavier muscular mass and more streamlined shape of men. Women for most of history were kept to the sidelines and even mocked for their sports pretensions, and never allowed to earn money as professional sportswomen. This way the lie could be maintained that women were inferior for many lucrative jobs, not only sports but in the professions as well.

There was a time when women did not have any safe spaces. All could be invaded by men, and women were encouraged, and in many cases forced, to limit themselves to indoors as a result.

There was a time when women had no rights, over their bodies, over their children, over money.

There was a time when eugenics was openly favoured by some elites. 

There was a time when eunuchs were created, women were butchered for being hysterical and some men were castrated in order for the rich to use them as servants or listen to them singing.

Nowadays, these same elites have created a society so alienating and competitive, and with such poor intellectual standards in general culture and education, that many people are mentally ill and easily misled. Now these elites prefer to insist that the ideations of the mentally ill and confused have a material reality, and that our species is not sexually dimorphic. The corruption in media, politics and law allows this lie to be repeated so often that people forget what they knew not so long ago: that our species has exactly two sexes and that everyone actually knows that their biological mother is a woman.

There was a time when society forgot that great inequality is unfair and incompatible with democracy, because it is a fact that the very rich will buy political and economic advantage.

There was a time when unbridled capitalism and unchecked corporate power ruled the roost until human suffering threatened to create a revolution.

There was also a time when it was understood that well-being depends on a good personal immune system and that chopping off parts of your body, injecting poisons, or implanting synthetic substances not necessitated by specific medical reasons is a truly bad idea; and that transhumanism is a pernicious, horrible idea found in science fiction and nowhere else.

Why have we forgotten that creating eunuchs is a horrible idea and that desexing children is a crime?

Why have we forgotten basic biology and that good health depends on eating natural food, taking few pharmaceutical products and never taking any when one is well?

Why have we unlearnt that new-born babies that are taken away from their mother are on sale exclusively because the mother is poor, and because those who have bought the baby are treating her like nothing more than a slave and a breeder? That the buyers' attitude towards the mother and child is reprehensible and that they should never be allowed to buy another human being. That not only the mother's but the baby's most basic rights are being violated?

Why have we forgotten that there are no unsymptomatic ill people, that if you feel well you are well?

Why have we forgotten the simple fact that an economic and political system that gives us large corporations that have more rights than real people is not a system that cares about us as individuals? This system that gives a few great power over the 99%, is not a benign one and is leading us to hell.

Can we not see that a State that claims total rights over children, including the right to encourage those children to think they can change their sex, is a State that takes rights away from poor parents, not rich ones?

Why do we always allow our governments to spend millions on dangerous drugs supposedly to treat sick people at home and abroad; and, yet, we do not insist they provide clean water, basic housing and sufficient food, which would in itself keep the whole world healthy?