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.

The Conformist Is Always Wrong

Just because everybody believes something does not make it right. In fact it makes it very likely to be wrong.

There is really no idea that was widely held in the past that has not had to be radically modified by later generations. This is true of how we understand empirical facts about the world, using science in general: physics, chemistry and mathematics.

Newtonian physics, taught in all secondary schools, is a wonderful thing. And is incidentally never quite as it should be in the real world! Pythagoras was, it is reputed, killed by the other members of his sect-like group when he showed with an easy proof that irrational numbers exist, irrational numbers being those that cannot be written as fractions. His irrefutable proof went against one of their most cherished beliefs, leading them to kill the messenger, rather than deal with the message.

The concept of imaginary numbers was strongly resisted in mathematics, despite their elegance. Although Greek mathematician and engineer Hero of Alexandria is noted as the first to have conceived these numbers, and Rafael Bombelli first set down the rules for multiplication of complex numbers in 1572, they did not really take off till the 1800s, but with many influential detractors. Nowadays, the study of electronics depends on them.

The Galileo affair began around 1610 and culminated with the trial and condemnation of Galileo Galilei by the Roman Catholic Inquisition in 1633. Galileo had shown that the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun at the centre of the Solar System. Heliocentric books were banned and Galileo was ordered to abstain from holding, teaching or defending heliocentric ideas. But Galileo gained some considerable popularity with these ideas and in 1633 Galileo was found "vehemently suspect of heresy", and sentenced to indefinite imprisonment (in his case, house arrest, which lasted until his death).

The Catholic Church tends to be anathema to scientific knowledge. Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310 – c. 230 BC) was an ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician who presented the first known heliocentric model that placed the Sun at the center of the known universe with the Earth revolving around it. Galileo's findings were thus not entirely new but ran against the Catholic Church imposed widely-held belief that the Earth was the centre of the universe, the maximum exponent of God's creation.

We are still, in the West, encouraged to believe without reflexion that we are at the top of God's creation, that there even is a God, and one interested in our personal lives to boot. This belief system encourages us to accept without question that our values, ideas, use of language, interests, etc are the only ones worthy of intellectual and ethical consideration. We believe in a food chain, with us at the top, rather than a virtual circle, where we too are eaten, often alive, by bugs, fungi, bacteria...

Organised religion has a huge problem with scientific knowledge, ranging from the Theory of Evolution, where God ends up being a sort of watchmaker that sets things in motion and then leaves the rest to evolution; to the idea of multiverses, where there most likely exists a possible infinity of life forms, and where it is even probable that whole civilisations appear on a planet, gain in technological knowledge and sophistication, and then provoke their own extinction; and thus have never been known to find each other. In the one case, God has no ostensible power nor significance beyond pushing the start button; in the other there is no reason to believe that Man is made in God's image and, worse still, humankind only exists for a minuscule moment in all eternity.

We give up other childish beliefs, like the Tooth Fairy, or Father Christmas, but it is considered heretic to suggest that belief in God is equally irrational, despite there being no empiric, scientific reason for religious faith. This very year, in Spain, a EU country, an actor was taken to court by a group of Christian lawyers for blasphemy against God and the Virgin. A year ago, a twitter joke about one of Spain's Ministers during the violent and repressive dictatorship the country suffered until 1975 landed Cassandra Vera in prison, for supposedly insulting victims of terrorism in general. There is an underlying supposition that repressive regimes do not encourage terrorism and to challenge that idea, even with a mild joke, should put one in prison; and that God is a real thing, not akin to the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas, and not to be joked about.

Until the middle 1800s there was no concept that germs existed and were the cause of many diseases and there was huge resistance to the idea that something one could not see with the eye could have such an effect. In the Crimean War (1853-1856) the nurse Florence Nightingale - not the surgeons nor doctors - was revolutionary in recognising that hygiene was crucial to saving lives, although she was opposed to germs theory itself. She was not the first in perceiving that nutrition was a key factor for health (Hippocrates in Ancient Greece came before), but she was outstanding at the time for this.

On a political level, people only got universal suffrage after a long, often violent struggle. The first countries in modern times were Spain in 1933, followed by Greece in 1952. Spain's universal franchise was quickly eliminated by a brutal dictatorship, following a civil war instigated by the wealthy classes, together with the Catholic church. Greece later had its own dictatorship, although less long-lived than that of Spain, both regimes being characterised by right-wing cultural policies, restrictions on civil liberties, and the imprisonment, torture, and exile of political opponents.

Prior to universal suffrage the argument was that non property owners had no real stake in the country's well being and should therefore not have the vote. The modern version of this is the idea that the corporations should only have to respond to their shareholders (owners), rather than other stakeholders who live in the area and are, thus, affected by pollution, for example; or workers, who both live nearby and also depend directly on company policy; or the community in general, which is affected by tax regimes that benefit large corporations to the detriment of smaller companies and to the community's infrastructure and services. Why are tax payers not informed in detail how their money has been used? This would be really easy to do now that the internet and computers are available for one and all.

The vote for women was generally denied using the argument that women's brains are smaller or that women are more emotional than rational, thereby permitting that the most idiotic man be allowed to vote while the entirety of womanhood could not.

We now accept that, even if someone has the economic power and another does not, slavery is wrong and should not be allowed. This was not the case for thousands of years, and would not be the case if the "markets" were allowed free reign in everything. Shockingly, many forms of slavery are well and alive, but hidden from our gaze, such as overt slavery in many countries that have been destroyed by war, very often war from the liberal West. Libya, once the richest African country, now has since Nato's 2011 invasion open-air slave markets. We are also currently normalising the basest of uses of women's bodies, calling it surrogacy, forgetting that the women used and abused are de facto slaves. Calling prostituion 'sex work' is another form of whitewashing slavery.

In the field of animal welfare, a large part of the population has - against all evidence - wanted to believe that animals, specifically mammals and other vertebrates, are not sentient creatures who have their own personal interests. Animal consciousness is a proven fact, in as much that anything can be proved. We could argue that you do not really exist and are merely a figment of my imagination, and yet we both know that you do.

And until neoliberalism took hold some 70 years ago, it was recognised even within capitalism that the rentier, ie the financial sector, was parasitic and not productive within the economy. The modern confusion between freedom from limitations, rather than freedom to be able to do certain things, means that we have convinced ourselves that there there should be no limit to how much money a few individuals should extract from others, be it from having once had a good idea and the means to put it into action, or from having inherited privilege.

People are led to believe that writing off individual debt in the case of poor people is unfair and that writing off corporate debt is a good thing, as is the existence of de facto slavery, whether it be real slavery used to bring rare earth materials to our mobile phones and seafood to our table, or Wall Mart's and Amazon's coercive labour practices in a world where you have no real freedom to decide whether to work or not, nor in what sort of company or job. The UK's Queen Elizabeth's 2022 Platinum Jubilee celebrations forgot in their pomposity and futility that the original concept of a Jubilee was to reset debt to 0.

We accept as fair the fact that where one is born, both geographically and in what sort of household will to a huge degree determine the opportunities life will offer and where one will end up later on. Socioeconomic mobility is by and large a myth, and our societies are anything but meritocracies. The average life expectancy between two Glasgow city areas in Scotland, UK, barely 5 miles apart, is 28 years, and the only difference is wealth. Those who life in the poorer district can be expected to live fewer years than the citizens of Kabul, in Afghanistan.

The idea that you might have to pay high taxes in order to offset the environmental damage caused by taking a flight (maybe being allowed one flight per year with lower taxes) makes many people feel that their right to a cheap fancy holiday abroad is God-given. And, yet, being poor and never being in a financial position to afford that dream trip abroad, let alone decent housing, barely crosses the radar of most people.

Wall Mart, belonging to the US's richest family and the richest non-royal family in the world, is the largest retail store outlet. It pays such low wages that a third of its workers are on food stamps. It costs the US taxpayer (pretty much everyone) an estimated $6.2 billion per year in public assistance including food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing. It clearly does not create many quality jobs, and the owners ultimately depend on the state for their own outrageously inflated wealth, as the miserly salaries they pay are subsidized by the state; and, yet, collectively we do not see a problem with an economic model that permits the very rich to get richer still, all the while being subsidized by the rest.

Raising taxes on the very rich is over and over again excluded from public policy, as governments constantly promise to reduce taxes, talking as though someone earning 40,000€, say, were in the same bucket as a millionaire or billionaire. In the 70s taxes were made more and more regressive instead of progressive. Taxes on wealth or income are progressive, more so taxes on financial income (currently below the tax rate on wages - why?).

VAT taxes on basic necessities, like in Spain on food or electricity, are regressive, affecting a much higher proportion of poor people's wealth, or lack of it, than of the rich. Why is taxing the rich so controversial when taxing the poor is not?

A philosophy teacher at the University of Salamanca in Spain often asks his new students who the President of Venezuela or Cuba is. They all know. Then he asks who the President of Portugal is. No one ever knows. Yet Portugal is 250 km from Salamanca. A friend retorted to me that this is because Venezuela is a very big country with a large population. It isn't. (It does have loads of oil though.)

I won't hardly mention the past horrors of medical belief, such as bloodletting, mercury or arsenic to cure syphilis, epilepsy as demonic possession, sow’s dung to relieve labor pains, caesareans to fit in with doctors' schedules (a very modern horror), the medieval Italian advice that keeping weasel testicles near one’s bosom was an effective form of contraception, and lobotomies and electric shock treatment to control rebellious patients. Many of our current drug and clinical treatments for depression have been shown to be counterproductive in so many cases and despite this are widely prescribed.

We all know that some 4% or more of hospital patients are there precisely because of infections they got while in hospital and 11% of those infections turn deadly. The US CDC estimates that some 99,000 patients die every year because of these infections. The real figure is without doubt far higher. One of the most common infections was precisely neumonia.

Yet, here we are with the coronavirus scare, a virus that looks exactly like the seasonal flu, and the loudest medical voices insist on locking people in their homes, despite viruses thriving indoors, and then taking them precisely to crowded hospitals wards and ICUs, if they look even slightly ill - crowded because all non-essential wards have been closed down and all primary medical care has been discontinued. You can see how unhealthy hospitals are in the high level of medical staff who are getting CV-19, with many actually dying from it, compared to the rest of the population. In Spain, where lockdown has been truly draconian, healthcare workers account for more than 13% of the country’s Covid-19 cases. This suggests that hospitals are making the general infection rate worse as their staff spread the infection. The worst part is that this is the entirely predictable outcome for the measures taken.

We are not thinking for ourselves. Who is thinking for us?

The thoughts we think we have, if they are held by almost everybody else, they are almost certainly all false, if history shows us anything. They are not even our own thoughts. If we believe anything that really goes against popular belief, at least we have a chance of getting it right.

Conformism is intellectual laziness and it is time to think for ourselves.

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.

A Stopped Clock Still Tells the Time

Newspapers and magazines get their money from advertisers, not from sales of the paper itself. That is the reason why free newspapers can be economically viable and why so much media is available online for free. Without a doubt the last four decades or more have seen a change from seasoned journalists to young interns, from the local, on-site reporter to rewriting copy from Reuters, Efe and so on. No media magnate wants to spend money he does not have to. Most people have grown used to seeing no anomaly in finding exactly the same news (sometimes with different words) everywhere they look, and those that notice that this undermines the plurality of human experiences are often too cash-strapped to finance a different sort of media.

We actually live already in a de facto totalitarian system on many levels, with a strict limit on what can be said or even thought outside of determined confines. (Post coronavirus it is likely that our regimes will be fully totalitarian.)

You might find a heated discussion about this or that car, or electric scooters, or travel to one exotic place or another, but you will in general never find serious space given to whether a capitalist economy is a good thing, whether all private transport should be discouraged, whether public transport should be abundant and free... Any newspaper is constrained by its advertisers and will not act against their interests. Once you understand that the newspaper's client is the advertiser and that the you are the product being delivered to the client, you can see why mass media is in fact a propaganda outlet.

All this is the same for TV, with the added impact of its intrusive nature: high, strident volume, imperceptible flickering, saturated colours, false dichotomies, lack of opportunity to stop and meditate on whether the reasoning being blared at one is well-founded...

The BBC, without overt advertising, depends on the government and the constant threat of having the substantial licence fee lowered or abolished and will, as a result, defend the interests of the deep state tooth and nail, and will relentless attack any politician that threatens these interests.

All of us above a certain age remember the shocking propaganda that justified the Iraq War. Actually, it was not convincing at any point: the politicians making the case for war (Bush Jr, with creepy and self-interested Cheney and Rumsfeld in the background, Blair, Aznar) were never going to be reliable truth tellers. Important civil servants resigned, stating clearly that there was no legal case for war. We all knew deep down that it was all about the oil in Iraq, about keeping the region in western hands and about keeping the world addicted to oil, not to mention maintaining Israel's privileges. Years later the mainstream media lamented how they had been hoodwinked and, yet, it is hard to believe they actually were hoodwinked, when so many of the public had seen through the lie (witness the huge antiwar demonstrations).

A massive exercise in cognitive dissonance is ongoing, that of believing the BBC and other MSM yet again, this time about the coronavirus. People are suffering and will die, mainly because of the hideous poverty (what is endearingly called "austerity") that will be rained down yet again as a result of shutting down people's lives and locking them indoors - just the 99%, mind you.

Cramming old people into OAP homes, quarantining them without fresh air or green spaces (a perfect recipe for a flu epidemic), stopping them from having visitors, over medicating them and forcing the flu vaccine on them every year (there is a link with the flu vaccine and getting CV-19) has created a perfect environment for this year's flu. And they are dying. No palliative care for them though. No kind attention to their last wishes of a relative or pet nearby, a warm hand, a cup of tea and a biscuit, none of that. Just scary face masks and latex gloves in the intensive care unit, while those who actually need intensive care (accidents, real acute illness) will be turned away. This is no way to die if you are old.

All the relentless propaganda - after all, who actually reads anything over a screen in length, if that, nowadays? - has made us see reality not as it is but a little off centre. We do not see the big picture as we take the little selfie. If, in your isolation, the clock on your mobile was a little off you could tell the time all day and never get it right. A mad man in the next flat might stare at a stopped clock and happily say all day, "It's 9:30!" He'd be right twice a day though.

Better to be neither of them, not the coherent but wrong individual, nor the mad person. Better to take off the blinkers, switch off the MSM noise, take on the arguments on the other side, and see what there is to them.

Nature and The Police State

I notice today that The Guardian is suggesting we be encouraged to get out more on our bicycles, which would be without a doubt a good way to do a bit of exercise, enjoy some fresh air and maintain our distances from one another. I am not going to go into the very dubious claim that distances should even be maintained, as I have made my opinion clear enough in previous blogs that the medical case for this lock-down is not simply debatable but totally absent. There is a mass of well-documented evidence out there, the sort that has actual data and not merely screaming hysteria and panic.

There is also in The Guardian today the very sensible suggestion that we should deal with our horrendous anxiety - over our early, and forced, retirement, lack of job, money, you-name-it - as an opportunity to get in contact with Nature.

These two measures are not going to be of much use to most of us. In much of Europe, alas, we are currently banned from going out on our bikes, unless we can prove it is to go to work, in which case a packed tube or bus will do just as well. Likewise, in Spain you are not allowed to walk in the park, or stroll to the shops admiring the spring flowers, unless you can prove you are doing some serious shopping or that you are dashing to the tobacconists (yes, really).

Many people have no garden nor patio, no balcony even. We have over the last 40 years or so totally abolished the idea of a world to be shared in common or of a common goal for humanity. Some 300 years ago, capitalism enclosed what remained of common land and established the human goal as competitive, the accumulation of private wealth - some of which could be shared for a profit -, and public misery. The basic notion of being able to wander around, enjoy the spring flowers and nature in general, chat to other people - all of this is currently fanciful, subversive even.

In most societies poor people are known for having larger families, for a variety of reasons but one is that the children may well continue in the same vein of work, manual or otherwise, as their parents, and will not move far away from home in the future. It thus makes economic and affective sense to have children. Not so well known is the fact that the wealthy also have large families. Wealthy children will carry on the dynasty and have similar business interests. The middle classes on the other hand have low fertility as the cost in general of bringing up and educating children, and that of the childcare associated with working mothers, is prohibitively expensive.

At this moment, during the coronavirus lock-down, there are children from wealthy families playing in their gardens, many allowed the company of other children behind the gardens' high walls, and who will not be unduly affected by the stringent measures in force. School studies will be done in the morning, helped along by well-educated parents and the household's staff. In poor households, there will be no garden and no opportunity to leave the flat for weeks. Little studying will be done in the end. The middle class's children will study but not have much opportunity to play with other children or get outside bar a dreary wander around the patio or small garden.

Even if it were shown that the coronavirus was a significant risk to the old, beyond the risk that is posed by old age itself and accompanying illnesses, we could have put the elderly into quarantine, delivered their food, made sure that they had sufficient care and company, and done all of this at a minuscule fraction of the cost that crashing our economies has meant. The data shows conclusively that there is statistically no serious health risk to anyone who is not old or sick. The years and years of new austerity on the horizon should have been taken into account. Austerity that once again will negatively affect all but the very wealthy.

The 10 years of austerity in the UK after the 2008 crash caused 130,000 unnecessary deaths. Many of those who lose jobs, houses and their health, and all of the many who lose their lives, will never recover. Why was a small risk to very elderly or sick turned into a massive decline in living standards and, foreseeably, in life expectancy for everybody else?

How Coronavirus Hysteria will Be Very Bad for Young People

The University of Leeds has looked into inequality in 86 countries and found that the 10% richest consume 20 times more energy than the 10% poorest. They drive SUVs, jet and helicopter all over the world, have mansions to air-condition, and so on. As far as I can see this figure does not take into account the energy that goes into their excessive consumption: caviar and champagne flown over to wherever they find themselves, the first beaujolais rushingly brought to their table, designer clothing to be worn a couple of times and then thrown out...

And yet there is an idea that the world is overpopulated. It is, of course. There are nearly 8 billion of us, and we and our suffering domesticated animals have increased uncontrollably to take up almost all of the biomass of our planet and have left wildlife virtually no habitat. Population control would be a good thing, starting with the very rich, who after all use up a hugely disproportionate amount of the world's resources. But it does not look like that is going to happen.

From here it looks like the current coronavirus hype is being used to firstly control the workers and lower classes, taking away our right to movement and association, making us regard each other with great suspicion, making us terrified of others giving us germs, and giving us a false notion of passivity and lack of political nous as being patriotic. Once the hysteria has died down, no one will bother to tell us that life expectancy was NOT significantly reduced by the virus. Meanwhile there is a massive transfer of wealth going on upwards, as central banks print money, sorry "inject", that is going to the business sector, ie corporations that will, with interest rates at 0 or below, return to buying back their bonds, bolstering their stock price, and laying off workers.

There were some theories at the start of all this that China put the whole thing in motion in an attempt to cull its excessive population. Think about this. If you want to reduce your population there's no point killing old people. They are not going to have children and they are going to die soon anyway. If you wanted population control you would go for young people, who are incidentally those not particularly affected by the virus.

The current hysteria will only die down once the mainstream media stops scaremongering, and that will be once a vaccine is ready and once it has been imposed on all the world's population they can get their hands on. As a correlative fact, western populations, which are very widely vaccinated from birth, are not breeding well (this could actually be a good thing in the larger scheme of things). It may surprise you to hear this, but the fact that almost every corner in every city has an assisted reproduction centre is not a sign of good genetic health in the population. A new coronavirus vaccine will be produced, making Bill Gates and a few laboratories very rich, and people will rush to get it, despite coronaviruses being notorious for mutating, and despite this year's vaccine being useless against next year's virus. In any case, lots of people will want it, and illogically they will feel aggressive towards those that try not to be vaccinated. After all, if it works, why worry about those who do not get it?

The risk to old and infirm people that is inherent in most coronaviruses will be exchanged for a vaccine risk, however small, to everybody else, plus a huge reduction in young people's fertility, I believe. It seems to me that vaccination does reduce a population's fertility, and it seems to me that this particular vaccine will be allowed to skip any serious testing of its secondary effects, or may even have a birth control component built into it.

We have, after all, allowed Artificial Intelligence to make us almost redundant to the elite and they must be wondering if they actually need us any more. We have been distracted by this coronavirus from noticing that capitalism was crashing long before it arrived and that inequality and herd thinking are the biggest problem for human and planetary health.

¿Qué pasa con la desobediencia civil?

Mire a tu alrededor. ¿Se están acumulando los cadáveres por todas partes? Ah, Ud. responde, es importante aplanar la tasa de infección por coronavirus para no sobrecargar nuestros servicios públicos sanitarios, los únicos que le tratarán gratis por el coronavirus. (El mismo sistema de salud que se destrozó y se privatizó sin tregua durante décadas). ¡¡¡Hay que "aplanar la curva"!!! Por lo tanto, tenemos que aislarnos.

Tengo dos cosas que decirle:

1. Sería bueno asegurarnos en el futuro de que nuestro servicios públicos no estén funcionando a plena capacidad, o más, en tiempos normales, de modo de que los nuevos brotes de algún virus no creen el armageddon.
2. La implacable propaganda que se arroja desde cada pantalla de televisión y periódico es precisamente lo que ha hecho que las personas sobrecarguen el sistema de salud con unos síntomas que mejor se tratan permaneciendo en la cama, no propagando los gérmenes.

El bombardeo mediático ha sido más parecido a la caída de las Torres Gemelas que cualquier otra cosa. Donde quiera que mire, los medios de comunicación están gritando "¡Virus!" y "Pandemia!", señalándolo con enormes letras rojas, en imágenes estridentes y repetitivas. Recuerde que la baja tasa de mortalidad de Corea del Sur por el virus se debe a que las autoridades allí identificaron con gran eficacia a quienes tenían el virus en primer lugar. La tasa de mortalidad de la OMS del 3% es, en sus propias palabras, "ingenua y engañosa", porque depende del número de casos reportados del virus, que es un pequeño reflejo del número real de casos. No se registra la gran cantidad de casos leves; las personas que mejoran solas o con un par de paracetamol no están allí. La cifra total de casos de la OMS es solo de aquellos que se enfermaron gravemente por el virus y terminaron en el hospital, desproporcionadamente los ancianos y los enfermos, y su tasa de mortalidad es más alta. Las personas en países sin un sistema nacional de salud generalmente solo van al hospital cuando están muy enfermas, especialmente aquellos que son pobres y desfavorecidos.

Tenga en cuenta que los menores de 30 años en Corea del Sur tienen una tasa de mortalidad del 0%. Y con 66 muertes de 7.869, la tasa de mortalidad es solo del 0,84% entre los casos de infección detectados, con un nivel más alto entre los hombres debido al tabaquismo. En Inglaterra y Gales, según el British Medical Journal (una de las revistas médicas más prestigiosas del mundo), el número total de muertes NO aumenta, el número de muertes respiratorias NO aumenta, el total de muertes NO ha aumentado y las muertes respiratorias NO han aumentado. Entonces, dado que la tasa de mortalidad por coronavirus es más o menos similar a la de los otros coronavirus que padecemos cada año durante la "temporada de gripe" en alcance y objetivo, la histeria mostrada por los medios, el gobierno y la población hace mucho más daño que la enfermedad misma. En España, vi en la televisión nacional a un reportero que mostraba una "terraza" con gente tomando cerveza (¡ay, ya no más!), que los llamaba irresponsables y mencionaba con gran contundencia que estaban en un espacio abierto cerca de otras personas y "comían aceitunas usando la mano". La OMS tardó mucho en llamarlo "pandemia", mientras que los medios masivos lo hicieron desde el primer día implacablemente. ¿Sin embargo, es la crisis realmente una pandemia? En realidad no existe ningún definición cuantificada de "pandemia", que es sencillamente una epidemia que se ha extendido a varios países. ¿Llamarías el refriado común "pandemia"? La Fundación Bill y Melinda Gates es ahora el segundo mayor donante de la OMS, después del gobierno de los Estados Unidos (piénselo). También ha financiado una vacuna que dice que podrá estar lista en abril. No hay conflicto de intereses allí entonces. Llámeme cínica, pero apuesto a que Bill y Melinda no se vacunarán. Las medidas drásticas y burguesas que se toman, confinar a la gente en sus hogar, prohibir las visitas a amigos, cerrar todos los espacios públicos, etc., son extremadamente perjudiciales para las personas vulnerables: las personas mayores que pasan días sin ver a nadie y ven contenido incesantemente aterrador en la televisión, los niños que dependen de las comidas escolares, las personas que viven con familiares con enfermedades mentales o violentos, etc. Sin mencionar a las personas sin hogar. El cierre de escuelas y guarderías significa que muchos trabajadores sanitarios se quedarán en casa para cuidar a sus propios hijos o familiares dependientes. Ya Ud. no puede salir, ni siquiera a un parque, aunque nadie nunca haya contraído un virus al caminar por el parque. Sus hijos deben permanecer en el interior en un futuro previsible. Se le permite tomar el metro o autobús abarrotados para ir al trabajo, o hacer teletrabajo codo con codo con otros trabajadores, y usar auriculares que otros han usado minutos antes. Ud. no puede ir de compras a menos que vaya solo al supermercado, pero puede comprar golosinas y tabaco. Está previsto que los drones y personal militar harán cumplir la ley. Mientras tanto, 30,000 soldados estadounidenses están llegando a Europa en su mayor operación militar de los últimos 25 años, sin medidas sanitarias y con absoluta libertad de movimiento en su tiempo de ocio. (La postura agresiva de los EE.UU. ha puesto a Rusia en alerta máxima). Ahora que el desorden obsesivo de lavarse las manos repetidamente se ha vuelto prescriptivo, una orden incluso, ahora que nuestras propias manos se han vuelto intocables, ahora que ya no debemos contactar físicamente con otras personas, excluyendo el ridículo saludo de codo, ¿no hay nada que no esté prohibido o obligatorio en este nuevo régimen totalitario? En tan poco tiempo, hemos sucumbido al lavado de cerebro y a la mentalidad de rebaño que dicta que es irresponsable, o incluso un abandono del deber cívico, encontrarse con otras personas, hablar cara a cara y tocar a otros seres humanos, todo esto cosas ahora potencialmente sancionables con severidad. ¿Dónde está el derecho a la libre circulación en nuestro planeta común, a la asociación pública o privada con otros, y a la manifestación pública contra la corrupción y el poder que se ha extralimitado? ¿Quién defenderá a los perseguidos o los discriminados? El verdadero desinterés y el sacrificio se han convertido de la noche a la mañana en comportamiento peligroso, subversivo y desconsiderado que debe detenerse a toda costa. En cambio, estamos obligados a mostrar un patriotismo de manada aplaudiendo desde nuestros balcones en solidaridad con los trabajadores de la salud, aplaudiendo junto a todos aquellos que votaron una y otra vez por los partidos políticos que destruyeron los servicios públicos sanitarios. No existe suficiente nivel de amenaza para la salud -y el coronavirus actual está muy lejos de ser una amenaza importante para la salud pública-, para justificar que las élites dicten quién puede reunirse dentro o fuera de su hogar, o dónde pueden ir. Los ricos, como están las cosas, no han restringido sus movimientos, sino que se han marchado, empleados domésticos y todo, para disfrutar durante las próximas semanas en el lujo de sus segundas residencias y en compañía de sus amigos gángsters. Tampoco se arriesgan a perder el sustento. Mientras tanto, los bancos centrales acaban de inyectar otra auténtica fortuna a los bolsillos de los muy ricos. Tenga en cuenta que no han decidido perdonar la deuda estudiantil o la deuda hipotecaria de quienes pierdan sus empleos. Por ejemplo, el Banco Central Europeo ha inyectado unos 120 mil millones de euros ($135,28 mil millones), todo lo cual desapareció en minutos. El monto de la Reserva Federal de EE.UU. fue de $1.5 trillones. Ud. podría tirar un dólar por segundo durante casi 50,000 años (piénselo). Este dinero, en esencia recién impreso, será pagado por usted y por mí en servicios públicos reducidos, la pérdida de valor de nuestros escasos ahorros, la pérdida de nuestros trabajos o una mayor reducción de nuestros derechos laborales restantes. De hecho, las cantidades son mucho más altas. Han estado inyectando dinero subrepticiamente durante meses, parcheando un sistema económico en ruinas que ahora ha encontrado el chivo expiatorio perfecto. Al mismo tiempo, hemos perdido el derecho ganado con tanto esfuerzo -murieron muchos por ello- de manifestarnos contra la desaparición de nuestros derechos más básicos de movimiento y asociación. Agregue a eso el derecho fundamental a la integridad corporal, que pronto será tirado por la ventana cuando se nos vacune a la fuerza, bajo pena de arresto o peor (y posteriormente vacunación) por no querer aceptarlo. Al igual que 11S, que también tuvo un antes y un después en lo que respecta a los derechos civiles, estamos sucumbiendo sorprendentemente fácilmente al bombardeo pasivo-agresivo que estamos recibiendo. De hecho, los dos mensajes son incompatibles, pero no deje que eso le desanime. El mensaje: "No se preocupe, mantenga la calma, siga trabajando y luego enciérrese en el interior de su casa"; seguido del otro: "¡Pandemia! ¡Virus! ¡Ud. va morir!" No caiga en la trampa.