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 Not Being Allowed to Walk Means We Are Not Allowed to Think

Our very way of thinking comes in great part from the Ancient Greek way of reasoning and seeing the world. Unlike the oriental tradition which sees value in finding a common ground between two opposing thoughts, Western reasoning postulates that at most one of two contradictory ideas can be true.

The Peripatetic school was a school of philosophy in Ancient Greece where discussions were held as one walked about. Unlike Plato (428/7–348/7 BC), Aristotle (384–322 BC) was not a citizen of Athens and so could not own property; he and his colleagues therefore used the grounds of the Lyceum as a gathering place, just as it had been used by earlier philosophers such as Socrates.

Later on German philosophers walked as they thought: Hegel along the Philosophenweg (the Philosophers' Walk), in Heidelberg; Kant along the Philosophen-damm in Königsberg. Kierkegaard walked along the Philosopher's Way in Copenhagen every day, getting ideas that he would later write down.

In England, Thomas Hobbes even had a walking stick with an inkhorn built into it so that he could jot down his thoughts as he walked. Walking sticks were until recently often beautiful objects, handsomely crafted, nothing like modern day hiking staffs, used by badly clad urbanites to simulate rurality in groups and clutter up what passes for the natural world at the weekend.

Bertrand Russell said of Wittgenstein that he would come to Russell's rooms at midnight and pace around for hours. Wittgenstein had a series of insights about language and thought that are difficult even to put into words they are so conceptual. Language is central to reasoning and it has been shown that each language lends itself to a particular form of thought. To be able to transcend the limits of one's own vocabulary and typical linguistic structures and formulate thoughts that have a universal significance requires stepping outside oneself and observing one's thought processes.

But now, with CV-19, we have our walking drastically limited. In Spain, no walking is allowed at all unless there is an immediate purpose to it, such as going to the local supermarket or taking the dog out, and both have to be frequently justified to the police. In England, you may walk so long as it is not far from your home and a maximum of an hour's walking for exercise is allowed per day. No mindless dawdling allowed.

Walking is the most natural form of transport, requiring no special kit or expenditure except for some decent shoes. The human body is perfectly suited to it and thrives through it. The body and brain is oxygenated and it is good for our lungs. If you spend enough time you can go far and see the world first hand as it is, on a scale that is relevant to humankind.

At the moment, we are not allowed to share time or space with people that are not immediate family. Yet those very conversations with people we are less familiar with, and outside set social contexts, are those that so often lead one to unexpected thoughts at the most unexpected times. Our conversations online, often tapped out on a mobile phone, are a poor substitute for the sort of deep thought and inspiration that can pop up while striding or ambling along, conversing with strangers or lesser acquaintances.

Clearly you can think without moving around - Stephen Hawking, the famous theoretical physicist and astrophysicist was an active man in his youth but almost totally immobile in his later years. But in general being crammed into the typical house or flat is not conducive to original thought, less so with the level of distraction, especially visual distraction, we all have, with our mobiles, tablets, emails, Netflix, memes, video messages...

Our current physical immobilization, with our facial expressions covered up by a mask, our capacity to touch also covered up by latex gloves, is without a doubt not the whole story of what is going on. Our future liberties, for a start, are being drastically curtailed under law for the foreseeable future.

Equally worryingly, maybe our intellectual possibilities are also being curtailed.

The germ of this idea is from the writings of Rebecca Solnit (writer and journalist).

Debt and War Metaphors

Before CV-19 struck massive debt had been built up over decades in western nations. Trickle-down theory, much propounded by Margaret Thatcher, was in fact more like Make-the-filthy-rich-even-richer, and everyone else quite a bit poorer.

In the UK, external debt is $127,000 per capita (116,135€), ie for every man, woman and child. I bet you did not know you owed quite so much! In Spain it is $48,700 but Spain is a much poorer country and this figure is equally distressing. Of course, this amount does not include what you owe within your country to banks and other lenders, so your patrimony is probably far lower.

The secret of our capitalist world's functioning is debt, which is just another way of saying that our wealth will have to be paid for by future generations (be it money, depleted resources, dealing with climate breakdown, species extinction, pollution...).

The US debt clock is a scary thing to look at, and more so if you look at the bottom and see that unfunded liabilities, ie those with nothing to back them up, are running at $147,506,000,000,000 ($148 trillion) at the time of writing. By the time you look at the clock, it will be far higher. We have, over decades of neoliberal creed and austerity (what an Orwellian term that is!) built up the sort of debt that in other times would have been the result of war and destruction.

Our economic system is also one that mercilessly pits one person against another, where we see others as competitors for resources (be it money, housing, the latest iPhone...), not as collaborators in a common project and certainly not as allies in order to stand up to the real enemy, the 1%, whose lifestyle is trashing the planet and which purchases power and ensures that our democracies, with their two competing and identical parties, cannot function as such. We live in a permanent state of literal war (all the large Western nations are participating continually in diverse wars in which yesterday's ally is very often today's enemy), and in a metaphorical permanent war as we compete with others and against our very selves, battling against disease or punishing ourselves with arduous workouts on a treadmill.

Our current belligerent vocabulary of fighting the virus, being all in it together (the little people, that is), taking it on the chin, etc provides a fitting metaphor for the huge debt, ie fitting for a war economy. The debt itself in turn requires a continual state of austerity for the 99%, itself a state of war against the poor and the very vulnerable. As your birth will largely determine your level of wealth, or in other words as meritocracy is a lie, the idea that the poor should shoulder almost all austerity is truly gross.

When I was a child I had a funny graphic-novel T-shirt that had an ill-looking man and his girlfriend asking him, "Is it angst, Jim, or too much beer?" Now, we are indeed most of us almost clinically alcoholic, like the inhabitants of the USSR at the moment of its decline, enjoying nothing - literally nothing - as much as sinking wearily onto the sofa with a glass, or bottle, of wine. But angst? - there is no room in our world for artistic or alternative visions. Those who cannot man up and march off to work (no CV-19 problem there) and then hurry home, never interacting with others, whether because of street crime or CV-19, to drink a bottle of wine, those people are today termed mentally ill. They will be ruthlessly medicated with antipsychotic drugs that will make them depressed, mad and bad; or thrown out into the street - either way the contribution they could have made to our overly predatorial and funcional society will have been neutralised.

Today's belligerent words, whether it be "war on terror", "battling cancer" or the "war against the coronavirus", these are all empty concepts, but full of emotion nonetheless. Edward Bernays built on Freud's insights, and created the propaganda industry, what we like to call advertising. We are animals manipulated by our emotions and fear overrides everything. We now, in our CV-19 panic, have a war on death!

The physical War on Terror was called, rather aptly "Shock and Awe", synonyms of what we were supposed to be fighting against, although we were in fact inflicting great harm (and shock and awe) on the planet's poorest people. Those who have cancer and die just haven't "fought" enough, although the problem is their own body, parts of which are removed and taken away in a futile show of making them whole again. And governments fighting against a virus - what does that even mean?

Almost the only ones who are dying in this war are old, infirm people, dying alone, scared witless by the incessant propaganda on TV and by the Star Wars-clad medical personnel around them, intubated, inarticulate and in horrendous loneliness, without so much as a cup of tea and chocolate biscuit to ease their passing. This is what our decadent civilisation has to offer as quality of life: useless, repetitive studies, followed by unmeaningful, precarious, stressful work, followed by illness, followed by painful and terrifying death.

Did the 3,000 years following the Ancient Greeks' ideal of a "good life" lead us to this?

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.

Women's Bodies and the Coronavirus

Emma Barnett writes in The Guardian that "State control over women's bodies is an unforeseen outcome of the coronavirus crisis". There's so much wrong with the title, let alone the article itself, that it bears some scrutiny.

The author mixes up the health crisis, which is almost in its entirety an intentionally created phenomenon as can be seen by anyone who wishes to look up the present death rate in comparison to the same week or month in previous years. It can be done for any country with varying degrees of reliability. The UK is reasonably up to date on this and the UK Gov register shows that the pandemic is largely, if not entirely, of political making. The media's frenzy from Day 1 is not supported by the facts. Don't take my word for it, look it up yourself.

Now onto the second issue, of control over women's bodies.

In the UK, as elsewhere, pregnant women who are in jobs that have not been trashed or postponed by the current crisis are generally having to carry on working. The threat from this coronavirus is no different to working alongside anyone who has bad flu, parasites, aids, sores, fungal infections, etc, and, like all the above, you may not even be aware they are ill. Additionally, this year's coronavirus is particularly virulent only if you are old or with an impaired immune system, in which case you are unlikely even to be working. Pregnant women, especially in the second half of a pregnancy should, in a better world, have the option of parking their job, or changing to a less taxing one, if their job holds dangers for pregnancy. This is often not the case, coronavirus o not.

But the title of the article refers to "state control" over women's bodies, and the risks involved in working are not proportional to state control. Indeed, quite the contrary: more state control would be a good thing, in the sense that women might not need to continue working in a dangerous job merely to keep the salary going, if the state were more involved and if a job did not depend entirely on the economic whims of the company owners. The same could be said for men and children - no one should be forced to work in a dangerous environment.

Marx (yes, you won't die if you mention his name) understood that reproduction is a form of production and should be recognised as such. When women get maternity leave, the state recognises that the creation of the next generation of citizens is necessary and useful, and companies collectively should also value the creation of the next generation of workers.

Then, in the same article, there is the question of whether the UK government should allow medical abortions at home or not. The right to abortion was won only relatively recently and after a great struggle (and is an ongoing struggle in many places). There are so very few women who, if they receive a decent education on sexuality and have the means to control their reproduction, would choose to have an abortion unless they had extremely good reasons for it (malformation in the baby, risk to the mother, or unforeseen circumstances, financial or otherwise).

All evidence shows that the means should be facilitated to the woman who wishes or needs to abort, the earlier the better. But, as any form of abortion brings risks of many sorts to the mother, and bodily harm to the foetus, it should not be treated as if it were an entirely insignificant matter. The government could easily allow doctors to evaluate their patients via an interview conducted online and prescribe medical abortion without the woman having to see the doctor in person. The coronavirus is no excuse for abortion rights being denied.

But to assume that medical home abortions are not a form of control over women's bodies is a mistake. To douse your body with hormones is not in fact having much control over your body. We all of us have given our governments a great deal of control over our bodies, starting with the sort of food we eat and the effects it has on our health; and the type of society we have, which puts huge demands on women especially, as the functions of producing babies, nurturing them, caring for other members of the family, etc are all but incompatible with the demands of an industrial, or post-industrial, society. If you think this is refuted by the many men who do the nurturing, you have not understood why women in general are paid less and given less rewarding jobs. The causes are systemic.

In the same article, we are told that the government is currently suspending IVF treatments, while the crisis lasts. I should imagine that all elective plastic surgery has also been postponed. There is a range of procedures that could well be viewed as bodily harm in a more perspicacious sort of society: unnecessary plastic surgery, caesarians, episiotomies, tooth veneers. There are so many of them, and the majority affect women disproportionately.

IVF is nowadays treated almost as routine, despite the very considerable side-effects of this "toxic cocktail of hormones and hope", including a significant increase in female tumours, lower fertility of the offspring, and the medicalisation of pregnancy and birth. More importantly, why are so many couples (or individuals) needing IVF treatment in the first place? What are we doing as a society to make people so infertile? If whatever-it-is isn't an extraneous control of women's bodies I don't know what is.

The current "coronavirus crisis" is maybe a different control of women's bodies. It is, in a wider sense, a control of almost everybody's body. The rich seem to be able to move around as they like, but the poor's bodies are increasingly confined to being indoors or at work. But in the narrower sense, women's bodies are being controlled more or less as they always have been.

Whatever Happened to Reducing Plastics?

We're extremely susceptible to manipulation, to be sure. Today I see in The Guardian's lead headline that there are people in parks that are not keeping a minimum of 2m away from others and are "very selfish". In practical terms it would be all but impossible to get the virus at a distance of 2m outdoors. The Guardian is, of course, campaigning to get people confined indoors, in a state of virtual martial law like in Spain or Italy, although clearly the measures taken in these countries have not proved helpful. And no one spares a thought for those whose homes or family members (if they even have homes and families) will make confinement far more unhealthy or unsafe than being in the park.

Only a few weeks ago we were obsessing over plastics, finally and rightfully ditching the throw-away plastic bag for a reusable bag and changing over to less packaged purchases at the shops. We were fretting over plastics bobbing about in the sea as, even more seriously, our planet burned. Now we're eyeing others with distrust, even dislike, as we glide past each other at the supermarket, throwing millions of flimsy plastic gloves away every day, and the planet is still burning.

Our present model of life, neoliberalism, has been going for some 50 years. It ratcheted up previous forms of capitalism and preached the infantile notion that greed was good, that rich people were successful and worthy of great respect and emulation, and that the world was a huge playground that could be trashed because a new toy would always come along once it was economically viable to produce one.

We have elevated real freaks to economic positions they should never have reached in the natural order of things. These odd-looking, unempathetic weirdos have been allowed to run riot and buy political power or directly run the world. Think Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Mnuchin (Goldman Sachs banker, currently US Secretary of the Treasury), the list could include just about anyone who is close to power and they are all aberrations. We have idiots and buffoons who have won political positions of importance solely because they were born rich and because we have a political system that generally opposes two candidates from two parties that are in fact the same party: the Corporate Party.

If you think that the coronavirus crisis is simply a health crisis and that once we are past it life will go on more or less as before, stop reading right here. Things are not going back to where they were a few weeks ago. The coronavirus is in fact a minor health event being used to reset our western world to a new world order. Our economies were already lurching from one huge crisis to another. We were barely patching things up after the 2008 meltdown, when the new crisis struck, long before the coronavirus arrived on the scene. Western economic markets were already falling heavily when the coronavirus appeared, and MSM propaganda outlets duly started ramping up the panic, while there were in actual fact only a handful of affected people. We now, of course, have a truly huge economic crisis, not remotely caused by the coronavirus which has only brought it forward.

The perfect storm of environmental degradation and climate breakdown, along with economic meltdown, together with AI having made almost all of us obsolete, and 5G making us easily controllable, means that we are on the cusp of an enormous change, one that has been chosen without our participation in the debate. Capitalism is entirely indifferent to our fate. If our existence becomes unprofitable for the very rich, we will be eliminated.

We have had an opportunity to seize this unique moment, in which nothing, absolutely nothing, about the current order is working for the 99%, and do something about it. Once we are contained within our homes, not allowed to associate with others, that moment may well be lost. Any solution to all these truly massive problems will be imposed from above and will not be to our benefit.

We allowed huge inequality to arise, hoodwinked by the absurd analogy that a rising tide raises all boats, absurd because wealth is a zero sum concept. If we all have a million euros, then a million euros is no longer worth very much. If we want to think that money is merely the equivalent of what you can buy with it, this finite planet is the limit of our collective wealth. The huge inequality we did not stop in time allowed an new plutocracy to arise, global in many senses, and they will do literally anything to protect their wealth. We have become collateral damage.

Once the coronavirus crisis is over, when we finally notice that the overwhelmed hospitals we are seeing on TV were already overwhelmed before it started, the merry-go-round will not start up again. We might think it has but we have now shown how easily manipulated we are, and how easily controlled.

The Generational Divide

There has been a lot of intentional confusion about the Baby Boomer generation so I am going to start with a bit of history and a few definitions taken from Wikipedia.

First of all, the Baby Boom Generation is the demographic cohort following the Silent Generation and preceding Generation X. The generation is most often defined as individuals born between 1946 and 1964, during the post–World War II baby boom.

The preceding generation, the Silent Generation is defined as individuals born between 1928 and 1945. This generation was comparatively small because the financial insecurity of the 1930s and the war in the early 1940s caused people to have fewer children.

The modern welfare state was initiated in the United Kingdom with the National Insurance Act in 1945, creating compulsory contributions from employees and relief for unemployment, death, sickness, and retirement, followed by laws shortly afterwards to provide cover from the "cradle to the grave". All this was initiated while Britain was burdened with a 400% debt to GDP, due to the Second World War, a huge amount, and it was achieved through political will and immensely talented politicians, almost entirely from the Labour Party, and the foresight of a generation that understood the value of solidarity in any human endeavour.

(That said, the Spanish Second Republic long before, in 1931, brought in popular sovereignty and universal suffrage, freedom of meeting, association, and expression, divorce, co-education of
boys and girls and the end of religion as a mandatory subject taught in schools, among other things.)

In the USA the beginnings of a true welfare state, brought in by the F D Roosevelt government (1933-1945) were well initiated but effectively pushed back later on by the far Right.

The Silent Generation was a small, motivated and solidarious generation that won the rights that we most value now. It was an altruistic generation that had gone through a terrible war, with the spirit of them being all in it together.

They were followed by the Baby Boomers in two large demographic waves: the first cohort from 1946 to 1955 was far larger than the second from 1956-1964. Both have proved to be staggeringly selfish and lacking in empathy (especially the first cohort), short-sighted (both) and intellectually inept (especially the second). The successful 1987 film Wall Street emblemized the Baby Boomer creed with Gordon Gekko saying, "Greed is good", and telling us that it was all a game. Trickle Down Theory could never have worked but it sounded good to greedy people, that all would benefit from each of us grabbing as much as we could. Many of the most influential of them avidly gobbled up turgid prose and half-baked ideas from Ayn Rand that gave credence to their inner desires, that selfishness and lack of consideration were good things in the greater scheme of things.

During their lives the Baby Boomers, especially the first cohort, have ruled the roost every time they've voted, whether they voted for Ronald Reagan (President of the USA in 1981) or Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister of the UK in 1979), and when they later voted for Bill Clinton in the US or Tony Blair in the UK.

Reagan and Thatcher brought in the entirely common-sense idea that a government should balance its books. It sounded good, although it is in fact grossly unfair. The same large generation that had cost a previous generation so much to nurture and educate, when it came to their productive years, the years they would pay taxes, voted to reduce those taxes and "balance the books". Not a word about balancing the books when they have retired, and they are once again a massive drain to the state (pensions are 13% of GDP in the EU, not taking into account healthcare, free public transport or other costs). During decades, states were hollowed out, ensuring that politicians in the main represent the Corporate Party and that welfare and decent jobs are now absent for large parts of the population.

The second cohort has been passive to an extreme, generally being led by the first on all matters of opinion. Generations that have followed have been small enough to ensure that their political opinions are irrelevant, leading all but the old to be entirely passive as concerns voting and politics. At this stage, many of the second cohort have not yet reached retirement age and some may have potentially little pension to look forward to nor substantial savings, unlike those of the first cohort.

These years have been of neoliberalism, of sociopathic leaders supporting imperial and corporate interests, and have been years of shocking corruption and decadence. It is a well-known fact that left-wingers and young people do not vote in the main, in many cases because they are the same people and time has shown them that nothing will ever change whether they vote or not. The official left-wing opposition is left-wing in name only, it talks the talk but does not walk the walk. There is so much money from vested interests mixed up in politics and the mainstream media that it would be difficult to imagine any politician who won power being in a condition to change things anyway.

The result of all this greed, competitiveness and self-preening has been the trashing of the lives of those that are weak, be it other people or those unfortunate animals that come into our cross-hairs. A generation has trashed the environment, ditched hard-won human rights, waged constant war, voted for unbelievable corruption, denied later generations a decent education beyond regurgitating useless data, and by its sheer force of numbers made sure that nothing ever changes, at least until it is no longer around to face the music.

And now we have the mother-of-all economic crises upon us, brought about by the mother-of-all pandemic propagandas (and I wonder if that itself was caused by the underlying mother-of-all climate crises). We are happily ditching the economic future of the young and those of working age in order to supposedly safeguard the health of the very old and infirm, locked up and terrified as they are, watching scary TV on their own, hour after hour. The rest of us, those who still had a future a couple of weeks ago, are being thrown into the trash can, and for nothing. Because once again, the Baby Boomers have got it all wrong and they are being taken for a ride.

They are at it again!

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?

Robber Barons and the Black Death

There is a mind-blowingly large transfer of money from the 99% to the 1% going on right at this moment and no one seems to be noticing it.

Central banks are "injecting" an enormous amount of money into the "economy", to "stimulate the markets". These terms are simply not explained to the general public, nor what these astronomical amounts actually mean. There is now no waffle about "quantitative easing", in case we should wonder why we had all that quantitative easing over the last 12 years just to end up in the mother of all crises yet again. A few days ago the ECB surreptitiously injected some some 120 billion euros ($135.28 billion), all of which upped share prices during a few minutes before they fell again. The Fed's amount was $1.5 trillion. The Bank of England has just printed up £330 billion. You could throw a dollar out of the window every second for 143,000 years and still not get to the end of the amounts that these three central banks have thrown at the markets in one day. Not to mention the pounds, euros and dollars that have been "injected" on other days too numerous to mention.

The "economy", despite the constant mismatch, is NOT the stock market. The stock market is vital to bolster capitalism's workings but does NOT translate into a better life for the vast majority of its citizens. It does make some people very wealthy, and they will and do use that wealth to make sure that things generally keep getting a little bit worse for everybody else.

These obscene amounts of money were ostensibly not available over the years for a top-class health or education service, nor for decent homes and jobs. Instead, when capitalism starts to stumble, money is quickly thrown at the business community, ie given to corporations, that then spend it on buying back their own shares as so many of their top directors depend on the share price for their jobs and bonuses. They do not buy bonds as interest rates are kept so low; but they do accumulate debt for themselves, for the same reason, meaning that indebtedness soars even as money is thrown at them. This money, in essence just printed up, will be paid for by you and me and the next generations in reduced public services, the merming of our scant savings, the loss of our jobs and the further reduction of our remaining rights. It will not save the stock market this time in any case. Money will be thrown at the markets but the system is now so rotten to the core that it will be like throwing money at a black hole. High inflation is on the horizon, good for those who have debts, bad for those who have managed to save a bit (but are not owners of large tracts of land).

We are locked in our homes, being bombarded with scary messages, being led to believe that this coronavirus is like the Black Death - although the number of fatalities is risibly low -, or like the misnamed Spanish flu. Curiously Wikipedia has just revised downwards its mortality rate for Spanish flu and its new rate is now entirely incompatible with the number of people who actually died. Some have suggested that Wikipedia has done this in order to make people think that the current coronavirus is as dangerous as Spanish flu and that hundreds of millions will die. They will not. We live in regions where there is clean water, for a start, and conditions have absolutely nothing to do with the Late Middle Ages or with countries devastated by war and hunger.

But the capitalist venture continues apace meanwhile, undebated and not voted for. I notice that Mike Pompeo in the US is once again ramping it up about human rights in Iran (at the very moment that we are in lock-down over here and ostensibly without so many of our most basic rights); and that the British MOD (Ministry of Defence) has just ensured that the crimes soldiers commit abroad, as they trample over the rights of people in foreign lands in search of plunder, now expire after 5 years. This legislation is, apparently, to stop ‘vexatious’ claims.

No lock-down for the military it seems.

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.