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 In A World War?

Is it possible that we are in a modern-style World War without realising it?

Prior to WW1

Pre-WWI there were new technologies, globalising, free-trade, a rules-based world economic system underpinned by the leading power of the day (and to its advantage), and a period of general peace among major countries. And the rise of a financial class, with great wealth and power. And huge inequality.

J D Rockefeller is a good example of how extremely wealthy individuals use that wealth to protect their income and power. Rockefeller's wealth soared as kerosene and gasoline grew in importance. 

Amazingly the electric carriage was invented in 1828. In 1888 the first real electric car was invented.  Electric battery-powered taxis became available at the end of the 19th century. Electric vehicles had a number of advantages over their early-1900s competitors. They did not have the vibration, smell, and noise associated with gasoline cars. They also did not require gear changes. The cars were also preferred because they did not require a manual effort to start; no need for a hand crank to start the engine. By the early 20th century electric cars had a potential range of some 100 km and were especially popular among well-heeled customers who used them as city cars, where their limited range proved to be even less of a disadvantage. Electric cars were often marketed as suitable vehicles for women drivers due to their ease of operation. 

So what happened? How is it that they are only now becoming a thing again?

In 1900 in the United States, 40 percent of automobiles were powered by steam, 38 percent by electricity (helped by homes having electricity), and 22 percent by gasoline, but the electric car soon went into decline, due mainly to relentless promotion of the gasoline car, where the real money was to be made, from powerful people like Rockefeller. 

Rockefeller was the richest person in the US, controlling 90% of all oil in the United States at his peak. Furthermore, Rockefeller gained enormous influence over the railroad industry which transported his oil around the country. Standard Oil was the first great business trust in the United States. 

The Supreme Court ruled in 1911 that Standard Oil must be dismantled for violation of federal antitrust laws. It was broken up into 34 separate entities, which included companies that became ExxonMobil, Chevron Corporation, and others—some of which still have the highest level of revenue in the world. Individual pieces of the company were worth more than the whole, as shares of these doubled and tripled in value in their early years; consequently, Rockefeller became the country's first billionaire, with a fortune worth nearly 2% of the national economy. Rockefeller was also the founder of the University of Chicago, whose 'Chicago boys' later on brought us neoliberalism.

Rockefeller spent much of the last 40 years of his life in retirement, defining the structure of modern philanthropy. His fortune was mainly used to create the modern systematic approach of targeted philanthropy through the creation of foundations that had a major effect on medicine, education, and scientific research. Like our modern-day Bill Gates, philanthropy fed back into Rockefeller's personal fortune, supporting business and medical philosophies that increased inequalities and his own personal power. And like Bill Gates (or at least his father) Rockefeller was an avid supporter of eugenics, the set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population, historically by excluding or eliminating people and groups judged to be inferior and promoting those judged to be superior. The WHO, whose largest donor is now set to be the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was found to have used the tetanus vaccine in Kenya to impose population growth control.

In WW1, the total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I, was around 40 million.

There were 20 million deaths and 21 million wounded. The total number of deaths includes

9.7 million military personnel and about 10 million civilians. Spanish flu in 1918 killed around 50 million. H1N1 (Spanish flu) was a coronavirus that had jumped from chickens to people, as is very often the case with coronaviruses. US military personnel were widely vaccinated (against typhus, smallpox and against a range of other ailments) and the vaccines contained chicken egg cells, and almost certainly chicken viruses. Spanish flu's first documented case was at a US military base in Kansas.

In fact influenza and pneumonia killed more American soldiers and sailors during the war than did enemy weapons, sickening at least 26% of the army, probably more like 40%. The war fostered disease by creating conditions in the trenches of France that enabled the influenza virus to evolve into a killer of global proportions, and soldiers moving around created new foci of contagion among a wider population that was at the time physically deteriorated. Chickens were also kept in horrible industrial-type conditions in order to feed the soldiers, a second relevant point given that coronaviruses typically come from other species, and as a result our immune system is not prepared for them. There was also an inability to separately identify the viral flu sufferers from bacterial pneumonia.

And now?

Modern globalisation has been spurred by some of the same forces that powered the pre-WWI epoch: new technologies, an open, free-trade, rules-based world economic system underpinned by the leading power of the day (with rules to its own advantage), and a period of general peace among major countries. And the rise of a financial class, with great wealth and power. And huge inequality which has returned to pre-World War I levels.

As before World War I, the great wave of globalisation has led to a surge in immigration, both as poor people flee their trashed countries and as large corporations actively encourage the influx of illegal immigrants, at the same time as they warn against it in the media. Large corporations love illegal immigrants, who are cheap and compliant workers, and simultaneously need to stigmatise the immigrant in order to keep them illegal and cheap, while making sure that the general population sees the immigrant as the source of their own personal stagnation or downright poverty and deprivation, rather than the economic order.

In addition to globalisation, technology, social changes and government policies have all been instrumental in determining who benefits and who loses out from global economic integration in past decades.

But globalisation has also hurt some less-skilled workers by exposing them to competition from places with lower wages and taxes, and less meaningful health, safety and environmental laws. In addition, globalisation allows for an easier political scapegoat: it’s easier for politicians to blame foreign countries or individuals for their troubles than technology or their own policies. Technology tends to make even previously skilled workers non-skilled, as witnessed by artificial intelligence, which is at this very moment making a large portion of the things we do susceptible to automation, and to hierarchical control from above, from a very few, extremely powerful number of individuals.

Prior to WW2

Everyone has heard of the 1929 Crash that brought in the Great Depression. Most people think that the hyper-inflation of the Wiemar Republic caused the resentment that in turn caused the rise of the Nazi Party and, ultimately, the Second World War. In fact it was the terms of the Versailles Treaty that imposed firstly a huge debt on Germany and then austerity towards the end of the 1930s in order for the 'creditors' to be paid that caused the German people to turn towards the populist message of Hitler. Which scapegoated immigrants, Jews, gypsies... the other.

85 million people died in the war, excluding those that died afterwards from related illnesses, homelessness, poverty...

And right now?

The CV-19 pandemic (or plandemic - as you wish) has left millions unemployed adding to those jobless or under-employed after the 2008 crash. The horrible Recession of 2008 and onwards, the one we were told we'd recovered from, although our jobs - if we had one - were precarious and depressing, never really went away and was showing signs of resurgence before the CV-19 crisis. 

During these strange and humiliating times full of rules on where you can go, whom you can see, face and hands coverings, biocidal unguents you must slather yourself with, strangers pointing infrared devices at you or sticking contaminated swabs deep into you, biocide drenched mats to walk over, ozone-poisoned offices and shared spaces, biometric tattoos and passports, digital money, isolation, queuing or walking where the arrows dictate, unrequested CV-19 messages on our phones/social networks/computers/TVs... we have belatedly seen that our governments have really huge power over everything we do and that the obscenely rich have great power over them. 

Many of those who are not happy about all of this are cannon fodder for new populist, unpleasant strongmen, who keep the shocks coming fast and furious, who turn our susceptible gaze towards the immigrants, again fleeing from the extreme poverty or war that our economic system imposes on their countries. Meanwhile our leaders elect are quickly looting the bank vault before they too, like their predecessor, have to skulk off in ignominy, unable or unwilling to deal with their hidden paymasters.

CV-19 (the pandemic or the response to an imagined pandemic - as you wish) has caused a wartime mentality, the "we're-all-in-it-together" feeling, the violent and illogical response of a significant portion of the public to those who are not wearing masks or not walking in the direction the arrows dictate. The same people who in other times would have willingly turned in all the Jews they could to the Gestapo. Along with the immigrant we have this even deadlier enemy, one that is invisible, has no measurable effect on you, that you don't know is inside you, and which makes you and everyone else a deadly threat to everyone else, without you knowing it.

664,000 have died from it, possibly at least, as it seems that less people are dying from other causes, suggesting that CV-19 is being used to group deaths from other causes. In any case, a number similar to a bad flu season (250,000-600,000, WHO). Many will die from having their elective surgery or other medical treatments postponed during these months. Some will do better, having not seen the doctor. Small children whose vaccination has been postponed will probably do much better. But depression caused by the lockdown and other measures will cause a significant reduction in life expectancy for many, with potentially soaring suicides and drug-related deaths, especially when the dire job situation becomes apparent. 

During all this the obscenely rich have become much, much richer. Jeff Bezos broke all records when he increased his fortune by $13 billion in one day. If that isn't the rentier economy that Adam Smith warned us against, I don't know what is! Bezos, like the old aristocracy that used to dine on peacocks' tongues, lives a life far distanced from normal mortals and will eat just about anything so long as its disgusting enough.

In any case, if this is a covert war it is working well as concerns making the rich richer, keeping us all looking the other way, and restructuring the world. But what about population reduction?

Whatever you think about CV-19 itself, you have to admit that no one is really dying from it at the moment. If you believe the official figures, which seem to include an awful lot of people who die having had a positive test result in the past at some point but not necessarily from CV-19, 4,000 people a day in a world of nearly 8 billion is not very many. As a practical consideration, were we all to live to a hundred, around 0.0027% of us would die every day. Currently 0.00007% are officially dying from coronavirus, so approximately 2% of deaths are due to this coronavirus, the rest are coronary artery disease, stroke, lower respiratory infections, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (emphysema, bronchitis), lung disease and cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's and dementia, diarrhoea, TB, road injury (in order)... In fact even this is not true: ALL the CV deaths had another underlying cause.

Note that road injury - a most preventable cause - kills twice as many per year as CV-19 has ever and, yet, no one is fretting about that. We stopped our economies for CV but never contemplated such a thing for road injury, which in 6 months kills as many as CV ever has.

Forget the asymptomatic CV-carriers. If they are carrying an illness which they can transmit and which is still not going to kill others, are they at all relevant? At its most virulent, CV has killed as many people as are murdered in a year in the world. Do we wish to lock up everyone because they may be a homicidal maniac?

You have to have a really blind faith in our deep state not to smell a rat of some sort, either grave conspiracy or plain old incompetence. Quickly forgotten are all the solemn speeches about China's lack of personal freedoms and democracy, as it becomes our model for how people should be ordered about.

China for 35 years, till 2015, had a 'one-child policy'. Those that were powerful or had money to bribe officials had more children, but those that depended on the state for welfare (as the unemployed, underemployed, furloughed, underpaid are) abandoned baby girls in huge numbers and bred pampered, lonely male children. Even in 2007 36% of the population was subjected to the policy, the rest having a series of exemptions. China now faces a serious demographic problems with the excess of lonely males who cannot marry, and old people facing a lonely old age.

It does seem that we are very shortly to be given the choice of never being able to go out, let alone travel, or accepting a vaccine that is largely untested, potentially lethal, probably useless against coronaviruses and unnecessary, as CV-19 is of late a non-story. Our collective immune system ALWAYS adapts to new viruses in time. 

Is the vaccine, as many suspect, a Trojan horse to further reduce our fertility? Our elites almost certainly do not vaccinate themselves or their children: witness Tony Blair's refusal to answer this question in parliament, Bill Gates' doctor's comments, Zuckerberg's rather too public filming of his children at the clinic, Australia's NSW premier pretending to be vaccinated while the cap was on the syringe - there are too many instances to enumerate. 

Hysteria was ramped up at the beginning with photos of coffins and the like. We never saw them in our own streets, although we did get to see nurses just about everywhere going through dance routines. Hysteria is now kept going - despite the dearth of even potential death suspects - with the contradictory narratives of asymptomatic illness (think about it); and - if you prefer - so few cases as to confer no herd immunity at the same time as hundreds of thousands of positive test results.

Will the new, largely untested vaccine get the second result of a WW done: population control? Vaccine trials are already being pushed in parts of Africa and Indian slums, although we are told that people there are NOT ill. After all, as The Guardian's headline shouts, "over half the people living in the slums of Mumbai have had the coronavirus", but way down we hear that "the survey results suggested asymptomatic infections were “likely to be a high proportion of all infections” and also indicated the virus death rate was likely to be “very low”."  (One also wonders why The Guardian puts "very low" in inverted commas.) Will the vaccine sterilise us, as previous others have provably done? Will it make us weaker and iller, when this coronavirus - and no doubt future ones - weeds out the old and infirm?

Is this our new war, one we're sleepwalking into again? Are millions about to be willingly culled or sterilised, and will these same millions oblige the rest to be unwillingly culled or sterilised? Is the world order being intentionally reconfigured so that a handful of billionaires can get still richer while the obsolete masses are quarantined or exterminated?

Vaccines and the Road to Hell

This is not intended to be a thorough review of vaccination. There are entire books on the subject, for example the excellent Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History, by Suzanne Humphries, MD.

It is just some thoughts on the matter as we dash to sign up to Bill Gates' hurried attempt at vaccinating the entire world in less than 18 months, against Covid-19, a disease that is plausibly not nearly as dangerous as the press would have us believe, and one that - like other coronaviruses (eg the common cold) - will have mutated before long into something that this new vaccine would not in any case guard against.

Unless...

The fact that development of the seasonal flu vaccine manages to anticipate the strain of seasonal flu makes you wonder if all is as it should be. A vaccine purportedly takes a minimum of 18 months to produce (often 15 years or never), assuming that it is not carefully tested beforehand. The common cold has no vaccine against it; the seasonal flu vaccine supposedly protects less than 30% of its recipients. The real figure is probably far lower, as a bad cold is often indistinguishable from the flu, people do not like to admit to having had the vaccine for no good reason, and it is difficult to measure its effectiveness against anything else.

Does receiving the vaccine make the flu, if you get it, worse? It does make you more susceptible to coronavirus in general and human metapneumovirus.

Given that Bill Gates has now received multi-million pledges from almost all major world governments ($8 billion in total) in order to develop a vaccine for Covid-19 in record time - his de facto guarantee that he will have a vaccine in place in just 18 months should make you shudder -, one that is to be applied to the entire world almost simultaneously.

The MSM constantly propagandises for this vaccine, and no one steps outside of the script of when, what type, how much money, etc, to ask whether a vaccine is necessary or desirable. Nor does the MSM ask Gates the pertinent question of how his insistence on vaccination, to the exclusion of proven, long-lasting improvements to health provided by clean water and sufficient food, fits in with his stated aim of reducing the world population by 30%.

The MSM has worked hard to tell us that CV-19 is dangerous for everybody. This is not true. The Guardian headline on 10 May 2020 was "New York warns of children's illness linked to Covid-19 after three deaths". The interesting part is that in the article you can find out that the children did not have any Covid-19 symptoms, nor respiratory problems. They did test positive for Covid-19 antibodies, but just because you have measles antibodies this does not mean that your headache is caused by measles! For the beady eyed, the article establishes no link with CV-19, but does say that the children fell "severely ill with toxic shock-like reaction that has symptoms similar to Kawasaki disease", a disease that is itself related to vaccinating young children.

Given that, excluding the very old and the very infirm, there are in fact no people you know that have died from Covid-19, and that all that means is that when you are old and sick you may die, is rushing to get an untested vaccine that incorporates the new concept of altering your DNA a good idea?

Vaccines are not innocuous

Bill Gates has publicly said over the last few weeks that he wants immunity from liability for vaccine caused damage.

Since the 1960s, tests of vaccine candidates for diseases such as dengue, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) have shown a paradoxical phenomenon: some animals or people who received the vaccine and were later exposed to the virus developed more severe disease than those who had not been vaccinated.

In 1966, a vaccine was tested in the United States against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) — which infects almost all children before they turn two. The tests had dire consequences: Children weren't protected; many infants still caught RSV, suffered worse symptoms than usual, and needed to be hospitalised, and two toddlers died as a result of enhanced disease symptoms.

The official explanation was that the catastrophic vaccine failure could have been averted if adjuvants — chemicals that prime the immune system — had been added to the vaccine. The problem is that adjuvants are typically mercury or aluminium, both highly toxic - do you really want to inject them into your baby? Vaccines also contain fetal tissue from humans and other animals.

In 2019 the CDC (US Govt Centre for Disease Control) admitted in Federal court that it has no studies to support that the DTaP vaccine does not cause autism, despite many parents of autistic children believing that it does indeed cause autism.

The UK government advises those who have immune deficiency to avoid live attenuated vaccines "because the vaccine strain could replicate too much and cause an extensive, serious infection." What this also means is that a recently vaccinated person can spread the virus to others.

Until vaccination programmes were implanted, children got all the childhood diseases and, it was widely accepted, benefited from them. Decades of hysteria make it hard for people to understand how routine these diseases were and how - in my case at least - mothers would rush their children over to a friend's house where they had measles, mumps, rubella, etc, so that their own children could get the diseases at an age at which they posed no practical risk. No hospital scares, no doctors, just how to keep your children amused for a few days.

Small babies were not at risk because their naturally immunised mothers provided them with antibodies for the first year or so of life. Now with successive generations of vaccinated people no effective immunity is passed on to the babies.

Infectious diseases declined in western countries at the time when deep poverty was almost eliminated; and clean water, decent food and good air were available to all. These diseases, which were generally benign - and they were officially called so -, were dangerous to those who were malnourished or very ill. They still are, and this is why vaccination programmes in very poor areas of the world do not improve health because the risk to health is from lack of decent food and water.

Small pox, generally lauded as eradicated worldwide in 1980, is kept in two laboratories in the US and Russia. "Experts agreed on keeping the virus in case the disease reappears," which means that a virus is never really eradicated but that they come and go in waves. The vaccine was anything but inoffensive (and has not changed): a 1969 study found that, out of every one million people vaccinated, 74 would suffer serious complications, and at least one would die.

Scarlet fever has not, in any case, been eradicated. And yet... you do not get the disease and you are not vaccinated against it!!!

The problem with the idea that those who are immune deficient should make everyone else get vaccinated, with the associated real risks that this imposes on others, instead of concentrating on improving their own health and backing measures that improve the community's health in general - like good water, good food, clean air, animal welfare -, is that it is badly thought out. Even if you were to impose the burden of vaccination on  entire population, vaccinated people still get diseases and spread them to others, many diseases have no vaccines, viruses mutate, and you have no control over people from abroad, animals, wildlife...

It is probable that vaccines are keeping some diseases going, like polio in India, where children have been left permanently disabled after receiving the vaccine; or measles, a disease that has a different denomination in vaccinated people because it is far more lethal for those people. Measles in vaccinated people in Spain has been catalogued from 2003 to 2014.

Herd immunity, a naturally occurring immunity when some 50% or less of a group has had the disease and the virus cannot find another host easily, does not work in vaccinated people because they do not gain life-time immunity, and the vaccine contains live virus and is propagated over time. When mass vaccination started, it was said that with this 50% cover, herd immunity would be reached. This was later changed to 80%, 90%, 95%... because vaccines do not function the same way as natural immunity does, the latter being generally for life.

Vaccines carry a risk and can result in death or serious lesions. The CDC typifies vaccine injuries,  and the US government has a National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, within a "no-fault" premise, that has to date (and with great impediment to claimants) paid out some $4 billion.

Back in 2009 the historically ALWAYS wrong Neil Ferguson from Imperial College (the same Imperial College that has received $185 million from the Gates Foundation, and $400 million from the Wellcome Trust by the end of 2018)  claimed that swine flu, H1N1 would take the lives of 65,000 people in the UK. In the end, 457 people died from the virus.

In response to the threat of swine flu, Big Pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) developed the Pandemrix vaccine. Sixty patients suffered brain damage as a result of the vaccine and were allocated £60 million in compensation by the UK Government. Most of the victims were children. GSK had been granted indemnity by the Gordon Brown Government.

But - almost all roads lead to Gates - our western, over-vaccinated societies are coincidentally those where assisted reproduction facilities have appeared like mushrooms over the last decades, as young, healthy people find themselves increasingly infertile. In poor countries, people very often try to avoid the WHO and Gates Foundation's forced vaccination programmes, believing that they do little for their well-being and will actually make them infertile.

The papilloma virus vaccination programme in the UK resulted in several young women dying or being seriously injured; and the WHO itself reports that "since 2012, individual case reports have linked vaccination against HPV with primary ovarian insufficiency (POI), defined as dysfunction or depletion of ovarian follicles, menopausal symptoms and reduced fertility before the age of 40," but finds no link between the vaccine and the symptoms, despite a "temporal association" being found!

Equally sinister, is the fact that in developing countries, the tetanus vaccine may be laced with an anti-fertility drug, in a UN vaccination programme.

The WHO has admitted culpability for at least one "serious breach of international ethical standards", vaccinating people without their consent and causing grievous harm and death.

Bill Gates' capture of the WHO (he is the largest individual donor, and his participation is greater than that of the UK) should not be viewed as benign. He has become extremely rich and powerful through his "philanthropy" and there is no reason to assume that this unempathetic computer geek has anything useful to say about anyone's health.

The right to bodily integrity (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, art. 3) is routinely flouted when parents are not given informed consent for the vaccination of their children. In Sweden, the incidence of diphtheria, polio and tetanus was quantified as less than one in a million. Even in the unlikely event that these diseases were to stage a comeback, they would in any case enjoy far better healthcare nowadays than was once the case. The incidence of the disease combined with the risk of the disease becoming serious in case of infection is absurdly low.

However, in a confidential internal report, the makers of the vaccine GSK, quantifies the incidence of secondary effects between 0.6 and 1 in a hundred, with many secondary effects being life-long extremely serious conditions including death.

It could be argued that any of our material possessions could be used for the common good (that's a discussion for another day); but our bodies are inalienable and should not be damaged in order to line the pockets of very rich people. The reasons put forward for damaging our health, no matter how small the purported risks, are feeble and not shown to be true.

Why Private Healthcare Makes Public Healthcare Worse

Like so much that goes on today, there's an idea that private healthcare does not impact public healthcare and can even lessen the burden on the public system. Years of neoliberal simplification of everything into pounds and pence, always understood as today's pecuniary cost, often an imaginary spin on the real cost, without taking into account other repercussions or future impacts, have meant that, even though we can see that every year is a little worse than the previous one, we cannot see why that is. We continue to be told that, if we just apply the selfish, everyone-in-it-for-themselves, I'm-all right-Jack doctrine, suddenly, magically, everything will come out fine.

It was a historic triumph in almost all modern countries - excluding the USA - to achieve a National Health Service, a stunning symbol of solidarity in the community. 

As Aneurin Bevan, the creator of the NHS in England and Wales in 1948, said, “Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune, the cost of which should be shared by the community.” We apply the same principle of solidarity to state education or welfare payments and the arguments for a national health service are more or less the same as for other forms of solidarity within a community.

Margaret Thatcher famously said that there is no society, only individuals. Were this true, it would be a sad and depressing reflection on humankind. But it is not true: we are social animals and become dysfunctional the more isolated we are.

Most people in favour of private health care pay at least lip service to the notion that the national health service should be maintained.

But...

The very existence of private health care undermine the principle of solidarity, one of the most precious foundations of our coexistence with other beings. Do we really want to return to having to avoid others in the street for fear of their carrying dangerous diseases that they cannot afford to have cured?

Bill Gates used to have a huge public image problem, arising from his unattractive personality, his criminal undermining of all competition to Windows (and its awful browser), his sullen and shifty performance in the the US anti-trust court case against him, and his ubiquitous and horrible OS and browser. That was until he took advantage of the neoliberal creed that the wealthy managed to foist on us of hardly taxing the very rich. His soaring wealth allowed him to reinvent himself as a health expert and philanthropist. Luckily for him, all that giving was mostly to his own organisations or those he controlled, and it always worked towards his own interests (of gaining power over 99% of the world) so that, although Microsoft is only 20% of his portfolio, his wealth has doubled during these years of "giving", from $50 billion to $100 billion over the last decade.

Amancio Ortega, Zara's immensely rich owner, chooses to produce its garments using cheap labour abroad where the minimum wage is truly minimum and where health and safety measures are in short supply. Zara pays taxes in Holland, Ireland and Switzerland, not Spain, saving itself at least 585 million euros from 2011 to 2014.

There are Irish companies belonging to Inditex that report millions of euros in turnover, but do not have a single employee on the payroll and paid no corporate tax at all.

Ortega is worth more than 62 billion euros, and his yearly dividend is around 270 million euros per year or, if you like 739,726€ per day. Just 514€ per minute, every minute of every day of the year! He  donates from time to time to the health service in specific machines - mostly inappropriate for the public health service and requiring expensive maintenance - or surgical masks, gaining huge popularity. His donation, made possible by starving the Spanish state of the taxes it should receive and by ensuring that Spain's unemployment rate is never mitigated by his company, is always specific, never in cash, and never democratically accountable. It gives him an incalculable value in cheap publicity at an insignificant cost. 

Worse still, as these donations reduce his tax bill, a substantial sum of money comes out of the public purse to pay for these generally useless so-called gifts, should they be accepted. As they say - and, pertinently, was first documented as being put into common parlance in the 1930s during the Great Depression -, there's no such thing as a free lunch (TNSTAAFL).

Philanthropy does not, and cannot, substitute for a proper, solidaristic State. State institutions, when they work, when they have not been undermined and infiltrated by rich, vested interests, protect against the venal interests of particular individuals. Both Gates and Ortega have no medical nor medical research training, yet are able to use their tremendous wealth in order to pressure governments into buying into their agenda. Neither support, either ideologically or economically, the national health service. Gates has received huge pledges of money from most western governments in order to fund the vaccine he intends to use on the entire world population against Covid-19 (excluding his own family, I have no doubt). They will start with Africa, I suspect, although Africa really does not have a problem with the coronavirus. Yet.

As we have just seen, the private health services do NOT generally cover serious new infectious diseases, be they Covid-19, Sars, Mers, Ebola, HIV, tuberculosis..., nor do they cover pre-existing illnesses. New minor ailments are covered but the yearly premium quickly becomes prohibitive once they become serious or chronic. Private health services scrimp on personnel costs, often employing trainees and insufficient qualified staff. When things go wrong, as they often do, patients are frequently transferred to the public hospital, at public cost, never the other way round, and the public sector ends up with patients who may need very expensive life-long treatment, often as a result of mala praxis or incompetence while in private care.

For years, governments have been stealthily selling off the NHS, sending patients for minor treatments to private clinics and paying these clinics for the service. The private clinics make a profit (that is what they are there for), money that should have been saved or invested into the public sector. The public sector increasingly ends up with a disproportionate number of poor, very ill, or chronic patients, making its cost per patient far higher than the private sector's. This leads it to be criticised by unscrupulous people who can then justify further privatisation.

The Centre for Health and the Public Interest claims that post-operative care is generally carried out by a junior doctor, one who is working up to 168 hours a week without supervision.

The criminal surgeon Ian Paterson, who treated more than a thousand patients fraudulently at private hospitals under Spire Healthcare and carried out useless, life-changing operations where many of his patients died and hundreds were mutilated, cost the NHS more than £17m in compensation to victims. Patients were referred to him due to the NHS's long waiting lists, following decades of intentional mismanagement of the NHS, despite Ian Paterson having a dubious background and previous suspension. He was ultimately sentenced to 20 years' prison, and his motive is assumed to have been simply to earn more money.

Such is the incentive to make a profit and line some specific pockets that in Madrid during the Covid scare the authorities dolled out free masks, overalls, gels and the like to the private care homes, valued at 3.2 million euros; and sent many patients to these private centres although there was room in the public ones, costing another million euros. At the same time the overwhelming proportion of deaths was in the private care homes, where many patients were isolated, abandoned, and purposefully not given treatment for illness, nor water, nor food. These deaths tended to be of old people over 70 years of age, in private macro-'care' homes, while the small public sector homes had much better outcomes. Private 'care' and hospitals cost up to six times more than public sector ones.

As Noam Chomsky famously said, "That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital."

Other surgeons, like Dr Arackal Manu Nair who carried out unnecessary prostate operations at Spire Parkway private hospital in Solihull, have also been suspended after years of abusing patients, years too late for their victims, due to lack of oversight and the way that doctors are outsourced and allowed to have private practices elsewhere.

In small, fragmented clinics, consultants, who carry out the surgery, do not hang around to look after their patients afterwards but disappear home. Private clinics often do not have intensive care facilities and, if they do, they may well not have sufficient qualified staff permanently on hand. The transfer to a public hospital also transfers a large cost to the public sector and, at the same time, further endangers the patient's life by the transit.

In 2018, a report by the CQC into the independent sector was scathing. It found two in five private hospitals were failing to meet safety standards. In particular it raised a major concern into the lack of effective oversight of consultants "working" for the hospital but not formally employed by them. It also said there was not enough reporting of serious incidents or transparency when something went wrong.

Mr Patterson worked independently, the private hospital he worked at did not employ him (clinicians are effectively freelance) and he had his own insurance.

So, when something went wrong, as it so cruelly did, the hospital was able to claim it was not liable (though Spire healthcare has paid out some damages to some patients as has Mr Paterson’s insurance company, but the victims had to fight tooth and nail to get it).

The public health system often seems expensive not only because it treats the most expensive patients (and continues to do so even when extensive private healthcare is available), but also because it incorporates safety and quality procedures and maintains permanent in-house staff. The private sector charges far more in fact but will always end up cutting corners, because it exists in order to make a profit, the larger the better. The US has a highly privatised healthcare system that per capita is the most expensive in the world, yet the US is ranked number 38 in life expectancy.

But far more insidious is the fact that private healthcare starves the public sector of its resources. Imagine if $9,892 per person were used for a public sector healthcare budget in the US. Instead, the biggest cause of personal bankruptcy in the US is medical treatment, despite the country's huge healthcare cost. And yet, over 6 decades, surveys have repeatedly shown that the US population is overwhelmingly in favour of a public, single-payer healthcare system; yet, the private industry's lobbyists ensure that this never happens.

A near-universal single-payer public service can negotiate cheap medicines and supplies, due to the fact that its very size makes it a match for negotiating with any laboratory. Witness the cost of medicines in the US compared to Canada: an Epipen (for serious allergic reactions) typically costs $100 in Canada and $300 in the US. In the UK you will be charged £8.80 ($11). However, the NHS buys them for around £45 ($58).

The last reason why a private system will never coexist in harmony with a public system is that the current system is now out of date. Covid-19 and other recent pandemics shows that infectious diseases, which have been long on the back foot, are perhaps coming back, for whatever reason. Possibly the reliance on vaccines for decades has allowed viruses to mutate and, together with increasing poverty and precarious health for a significant part of the population, allowed them to get a new hold on us.

These infectious diseases must be kept separate from chronic diseases and, indeed, Covid-19 has been shown to be on a practical level dangerous only for those who are chronically ill, who should have been kept away from the Covid-19 patients, but were not or - equally worryingly - have not been able to receive their customary treatment due to hospital saturation with Covid-19 patients.

For any area with sufficient population to warrant a hospital, at the moment the paucity of the public sector ensures that, although there will also be various private clinics, there will not be sufficient resources for there to be a second public hospital, to treat the infectious patients in a different facility to the chronically ill.

We should realise that health is a communal issue and that other people's health affects ours. For that reason alone we should invest in a first class public health system and ditch the idea that a two tier system can do anything decent for us. 

How Prisons for Immigrants Were the Model for Imprisoning All of Us

The west's constant military and economic wars and interventionist policies have united with the climate change our economic model has created, and millions of people are on the march. When the coronavirus panic took hold a few weeks ago, people were videoed fighting over toilet roll in supermarkets, so just imagine the effect that bombs, mutilation and death must produce.

Hundreds of thousands have been stopped at the US or European borders for years now, trapped in de facto concentration camps in horrible life-threatening conditions. Thousands have drowned in the Mediterranean. A few brave people have faced jail for trying to save them, in our Alice-through-the-looking-glass world.

Some migrants - what we would have called in better times "refugees" - get through only to have to try to survive by selling tissues or counterfeit goods on the streets or, much worse, finding themselves interned in migration centres that are closed off to visitors and are simply modern-day prisons of the worse sort, where migrants are separated from family members and routinely abused. There are more than 13,000 immigrants interned just in Spain, a country that has some 2 millions citizens living abroad at the moment.

After the Twin Towers fell in 2001 - those two towers that were supposedly impacted by two planes flown by trainee Muslim pilots, although there were in fact three towers that fell -, we collectively decided that it was all right for terrorists to be whisked away to black sites to be tortured for decades without charge, nor habeas corpus of course. In fact they were not terrorists (after all they had not be found guilty of terrorism) but just people, normally only the brown skinned sort though. It is not that we did not know about this. Everybody saw the shocking images from the Abu Ghraib prison, after all.

As the famous poem puts it:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

(Martin Niemöller)

We have not protested loudly enough about these black sites and internment centres. The narrative was that suspected terrorists must be removed, for the good of the rest of us, even if it turns out that they are not terrorists. As Bush Jr's Vice President Dick Cheney put it in 2006: water-boarding (ie torture) of suspected terrorists is a "no brainer". The following US President, Obama, would peruse a list every week of suspected terrorists, most of them inhabitants of the very poorest of villages in rural Pakistan, deciding which were to be assassinated - along with scores of collateral victims -  using drones.

In 2013 Edward Snowden, an IT analyst, became a western outlaw for showing that the US government and others were unlawfully spying on all of us. We are now all of us presumed guilty, rather than innocent. He had a dramatic escape (from possibly the death penalty in the USA) and currently has asylum in Russia. He has been unable to return home since.

Wikileaks brought to light all sorts of criminal acts carried out by all sorts of governments, including in 2010 the notorious Collateral Damage video, in which US military shot down at least a dozen civilians including 2 Reuters journalists in Baghdad, and including small children, and laughed about the indiscriminate slaying as they did so. Chelsea Manning, a soldier in the US military and an intelligence analyst - the whistleblower -, has spent most of her time since then in US jails, receiving massive fines, and under treatment that can only be classified as torture. Julian Assange (Wikileaks) has spent the best part of a decade cooped up, never charged of a crime, and is currently in bad health in the notoriously awful UK Belmarsh prison, awaiting extradition to the US.

These are the West's political prisoners. There are many others. A few people have protested, but the vast majority has not and sees no cause for alarm in how these heroic citizens have been treated by corrupted power.

Meanwhile, obsessing about possible slights to Jewish sensibilities, confusing the notions of Jewish and Zionist, we have failed to extrapolate from the huge crime the Nazis committed, and have not recognised that it was never about the Jews, per se, but about power and the other. Once the other is equated with some dangerous characteristic, be it usury, lack of hygiene, rabid religious sentiment, black beards..., we have unthinkingly allowed them to be demonised.

By the same measures, being confined in one's home during the coronavirus scare is entirely logical. After all, it is the choice between a deadly virus that is killing millions or your whim to step outside. The problem is that it is not killing millions, that your stepping outside makes no difference, and that the right to leave your home and wander around is not a whim.

You might wonder why you should be confined if you are seriously ill - surely the CV-19 should warrant being in a hospital at least. And if CV-19 has such mild symptoms why are we confined in our homes. If, on the other hand, we are not ill, why - again - are we confined? Instead of confining all of us, why are not the very vulnerable encouraged to stay in, with on-site health support and grocery deliveries?

The press is now reporting that quarantine may be lifted for those who have a test result to show that they have antibodies or have been vaccinated, as Bill Gates has suggested. Hello, Brave New World!

To be able to walk around our common world used to be one of the most basic of human rights. Not being allowed to was, until very recently, recognised as a characteristic of the most totalitarian regimes.

The Faustian bargain we entered into when we did not take to the streets and protest the horrific reality of migrant centres and those concentration camps found on our borders has given the Dick Cheneys of this world a free pass to do the same thing to us.

Strange Coincidences of Our Time

We are all a bit tired of conspiracies - actually, 'punch drunk' would be a better way of putting it. In these times of very fast change, sociopathic and corrupt leaders, and an undemocratic corporate state working tirelessly to make us redundant and trash the natural world, it seems that you either have to be a raving conspiracy theorist or drink from the MSM cup and believe anything, everything and nothing, no matter how relentless the coincidences.

Our new world was brought out into the open with the shock of the Twin Towers falling, falling endlessly on repeat loop on 24-hour news outlets. Our remaining liberties were removed overnight, with the US Patriot Act and similar laws quickly approved in most western countries.

Our right to privacy, free speech, protest and the presumption of innocence went up in smoke. Foreigners could be deemed terrorists with no evidence and summarily executed. Even nationals could be treated the same way, whisked off to torture chambers to languish for decades without charges levelled against them. Habeas corpus was consigned to history.

The other 9/11, the one we do not remember, is the one in which, on September 11 1973, President Salvador Allende, Chile's first democratically elected socialist, was trapped in La Moneda, Chile’s Presidential Palace, after a coup was orchestrated by the US, specifically by Henry Kissinger - the same Kissinger of the Nobel Peace Prize (you could not make this up). Allende died and General Augusto Pinochet took power in Chile. Recognised victims of the state terrorism practiced by the Pinochet regime number some 40,000. Over 3,000 were murdered or disappeared. Victims were tortured in all sorts of ways, given electric shocks, sexually abused with rats, forced to have sex with close family members, repeatedly raped... Margaret Thatcher felt a great admiration for Pinochet and later on became a close friend.

But, going back to the second 9/11, the one you remember, by coincidence a National Reconnaissance Office drill was being conducted on September 11, 2001. In a simulated event, a small aircraft would crash into one of the towers of the agency's headquarters after experiencing a mechanical failure. The NRO is the branch of the Department of Defense in charge of spy satellites. According to its spokesman Art Haubold: "No actual plane was to be involved - to simulate the damage from the crash, some stairwells and exits were to be closed off, forcing employees to find other ways to evacuate the building."

He further explained: "It was just an incredible coincidence that this happened to involve an aircraft crashing into our facility." As a result, the real-life planes flying over New York were not recognised as a threat and stopped.

Four years later on 7 July 2005, at exactly the same time as the London bomb attacks, a fictional “scenario” of multiple bomb attacks on the London underground took place.

Peter Power, Managing Director of Visor Consultants, a private firm on contract to the London Metropolitan Police, described in a BBC interview how he had organized and conducted the anti-terror drill, on behalf of an unnamed business client. The fictional scenario was based on simultaneous bombs going off at exactly the same time at the underground stations where the real attacks were occurring:

POWER: "At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now."

In actual fact, the stooges who had been sent to do the drill had missed their train and had not been where they were supposed to be, which put in jeopardy the official version that bombs had been in the trains and not on the tracks. No doubt very shocked that they had been sent on a drill to precisely the locations where the bombs went off, they tried to reach the UK press at Canary Wharf but were shot dead just before they arrived.

The Madrid bombs on 11 March 2004 - 911 days after 9/11 - killed 193 people and injured around 2,000. Purportedly al-Qaeda was behind the attacks, but 4 of the alleged perpetrators died, having committed suicide (no judge, no jury), and the others claimed they were not guilty but had been set up. Some had been under police surveillance since 2001. However, in this case, the right-wing PP government, which had taken Spain into Bush and Blair's invasion of Iraq, despite massive anti-war demonstrations, lost the election and the more moderate opposition party gained power.

And now, we have the coronavirus scare, which promises to reconfigure our western world like nothing we have experienced up to now. Just before CV-19 appeared, the exclusive Event 201 was held, hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, on 18 October 2019 in New York, with a very select and limited group of attendees. The subject of the event was a pandemic scenario arising from a coronavirus, and the conclusion was that "the next severe pandemic will not only cause great illness and loss of life but could also trigger major cascading economic and societal consequences that could contribute greatly to global impact and suffering."

Luckily the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a key participant, gave us the following recommendation:

"Media companies should commit to ensuring that authoritative messages are prioritized and that false messages are suppressed including through the use of technology."

There are, in fact, many coincidences happening in these dark times. Which are no doubt coincidental.

It is extremely lucky that our rulers are so prescient.

The Why's and the Wherefore's of What's Going On

The UK's epidemic expert Neil Ferguson has been drastically revising the coronavirus' mortality ever downwards, no longer the dramatic upper figure of half a million, but now more like 20,000. We have recently found out that the first mortal victim was in February, nearly two months ago, backing up Oxford University's research team that postulates that the number of infected is probably far higher than previously thought, maybe even half the population. Neil Ferguson also accepts that the total number of infected is far higher than he originally thought. This would make the current coronavirus more akin to seasonal flu, as all actual mortality data both in the UK and elsewhere has shown from the beginning. And, if so many have been infected, the CV-19's mortality is far, far lower than the screaming headlines have had us believe.

Two days ago, the OAP residence right next to my house, was found to have 69% of its inmates infected. No surprise there: the lockdown has deprived people of fresh air and has confined them inside in a perfect virus-breeding ground. The Spanish state has taken over the home, converting it into a "hospital" and installed general medical staff to tend to the inmates. All the people in the home are, by definition, old and very infirm. And, yet, no rushing of inmates to a proper hospital. Rather like you would expect if the CV-19 were simply seasonal flu.

The big question is, then, why are we being scared to death about the pandemic, if it is no different to any previous year over the last decade or more, and why are we living in a de facto totalitarian state as a result.

Quite obviously our throw-away, consumption-based world could not continue indefinitely. For all of us to live the American Dream (the one that far less that half of the US population lives), we would need more than seven planets. Our planet is on fire, almost irreversibly trashed, and capitalism cannot find a way out of the quandary, as central planning is anathema to the neoliberal creed. When the western economies crashed in the early 1970s, following the golden years of the 50s and 60s, capital was unleashed as the Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher revolution allowed high-street banks to act like investment banks, permitting them to behave like casinos.

Corporations were given rights as "persons", more rights in fact than real people. When pressure on salaries and outsourcing of jobs to the lowest-paid and least-protected worker meant that people could no longer buy the products that capitalism needs us to buy, we were encouraged by cheap interest rates to borrow more and more, on the never-never. When that huge Ponzi scheme went tits-up, we were encouraged to keep on spending as goods got cheaper and cheaper. In the UK people change their mobile phone on average around every two years (without taking into account "burn phones", those that are used for days or weeks before being trashed). The improvements found in the new models are imperceptible for most buyers who simply do not have the necessary technical knowledge, but they get the new model anyway.

Huge pressure is put on countries like Bolivia (which has just suffered a coup and has the lithium that we need to keep all those battery-powered phones and cars running) or Venezuela (which has the largest world reserves of oil and which sets a bad example by being fairly democratic and by not being amenable to US expropriation, unlike head-chopping Saudi Arabia). Almost all the wars in the world - and the US is currently involved in some 134 war zones - are to do with fighting over scarce resources, whether water, lithium, gas, petrol, or rare earth elements. The rest are to do with stamping out the dangerous notion that looking after people, rather than corporations, is a good idea.

So things could not really go on as before. The planet is insufficient, there are so many of us and those that do not conform to being simple consumers are dying out or being exterminated.

In this New World Order, capitalism is once again bailed out, and unbelievable funds are right now being funnelled upwards to the very rich, as always perfectly on time, right after the bulk of bank bonuses had just been paid.

There is no debate on MSM about the hideous inequality in our societies, as all us little people face losing our jobs once the CV-19 scare has passed. We are already being told that China's relaxation of their quarantine rules has been problematic, I suppose so that we never imagine that we shall be able to take to the street and protest once this is over. This state of exception can be brought back at any time in the future.

The world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 percent of the planet’s population. Do we really think they are worth it? You are not among them and you will never be! We have computer nerd Bill Gates, made hugely wealthy by mafia-style shenanigans (the original antitrust court case has to be seen to be believed for creepy non-collaboration and amnesia from Mr Gates). Do we really think he is now a health expert, specifically a benign, disinterested health expert? He is the largest single donor to the World Health Organisation and his philanthropy is making him much wealthier as people's health becomes increasingly medicalised. Forget Windows: Microsoft only makes up 20% of his wealth and his net worth is larger than that of 130 countries. His vision is totalitarian: in a recent Ted Talk, Gates says that "eventually what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person" in order to be allowed to travel.

For the 1% to continue living life as they wish, jetting from one mansion to another in exotic locations, the climate crisis dictates that the 99% (all of us) are kept restrained in our unproductive, little lives, as infertile as possible now that AI can do almost all our jobs. Once the CV-19 has disappeared from our screens, we shall no doubt, almost all of us, have our working week reduced, which is a good and necessary thing. But, instead of this being decided upon by us ourselves, we are shortly to join a subclass where, so long as we keep quiet and do not bother the elite, we shall be allowed to carry on. As money is at this very moment funnelled upwards, no one asks us if we think that having an elite with so much money may well be incompatible with democracy.

We have all seen doctors on TV telling us this is a dangerous virus and that they are in a desperate situation fighting it (who does not love being interviewed on TV?). We do not, however, get shown the many other doctors and experts who have a very different point of view. We do not get reminded that many hospitals were overcrowded and overwhelmed long before the virus appeared, or that many hospitals and wards are actually empty as resources are directed to intensive care and Emergency and as elective surgery is postponed. We do not get reminded how many people die every day in normal times and that the overall death rate has NOT gone up with CV-19.

The remaining question is why governments everywhere are overreacting, although they are not all implementing the same measures, not by a long chalk. Most governments operate on political terms. The MP and Ministers are given their information by political advisers primarily (did you really think that ministers were experts in their fields as successive cabinet shuffles move them around?). Western democracy means that political parties are constantly seeking political power and to keep that power. There is a huge political risk, as Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have found out, in not taking measures when the MSM is ramping up the panic. It is politically far safer to do more or less the same as other nations, even if the model has been set by a country you have decried for years as totalitarian, unreliable and as a fragrant abuser of human rights (China). And, if it turns out that CV-19 is after all no different from seasonal flu, the MSM, who were the first to tell the lie, will keep quiet about it.

Governments are substituting the very real herd immunity of diseases for the equally real herd mentality of politicians.

There is another huge advantage for our short-termist western political parties, almost all of which serve the corporate state: the measures taken are truly totalitarian in nature, ensuring a compliant, conformist population with no opportunity for dissent.