Hello folks! I have a lot to say again, but I'm going to need a couple of posts. Been thinking a lot about the big picture, our fundamental human weaknesses, and the hubris that underlies so many of the problems we're facing. I'll be sending out more next week I think, hopefully with a new podcast episode too.
CONTENTS
- Comedy Covid Commission - billionaires to perform worthless 9/11 redux
- Stanford study - masks are both useless and dangerous
- Hubris I - social distancing is pseudoscience + the immune system is too complex to imitate or replace
- New media links - don't miss Whitney Webb explaining how Facebook and others are DARPA mass surveillance projects in disguise
- Hubris II - metals on the brain aren't a good thing, Alzheimer's link being established.
- Hubris III - geoengineering with B*ll G*t*s - stratospheric stupidity
- Hubris IV - GMOs, both the old and the new types are worthless/dangerous
- Low Tech is fun tech; puncturing technological solutionism every day
- Hubris V - AI on the battlefield is nonsense, with Scott Ritter
- Ivermectin, again - it's not going to go away...because it works
- UN Food Summit - A Growing Culture is running events on the attempted corporate takeover of global ag
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COMEDY COVID COMMISSION
So, Gates and his billionaire chums have decided to have an "independent" investigation into the Covid scandal. https://news.virginia.edu/content/qa-philip-zelikow-911-commission-leader-take-stock-covid-lessons
First of all, the obvious question: why are these the people/orgs who should be trusted to investigate?
This dross is going to be overseen by Philip Zelikow, who headed the 9-11 Commission, which produced one of the blandest reports I've ever had the misfortune to read. You can predict the kind of outcome that will be generated by this effort by taking a (brief) look at that waste of everyone's time, which concludes with a series of recommendations on how to reconstruct management of responses and intelligence as well as how to step up intrusions into the civil liberties in the name of security. As we all know, the ongoing stupidity of airport security persists to this day. The PATRIOT Act was followed by ever more astonishing efforts at data harvesting as we all remember, I'm sure.
For a sample of the kind of recommendations they made, page 406, is a call for a "linking biometric passports to good data systems and decisionmaking." The COVID commission will probably use this exact sentence again. Different enemy, same goals, almost the same means.
On page 377, the report says that this is "an Agenda of Opportunity" which can be used to "stress educational and economic opportunity." It's the illiteracy of the Middle East that caused 9-11, you see. Of course. What else could it be?
The 9-11 report omitted any and all analysis of the simple fact that terrorism on US soil is an inevitable outgrowth of US foreign policy. I searched the document for mentions of Donald Rumsfeld, whose role on the day is described blandly as something like 'he went down to the car park to help out.' Never mentioned is Rumsfeld's dizzy excitement at the potential for exploiting the event, as revealed in a memo that he sent on the afternoon of the day itself. You can see the memo here. "Go massive, sweep it all up; things related and not," Rumsfeld writes, betraying all the imperialist intent behind everything that followed. The commission's report tries to push such things down the memory hole.
This is the kind of self-serving, vacuous nonsense you can expect from the elite arseholes who are going to write up this new investigation. An attempt to formally ossify the lies for the historical record and implement massive biosurveillance in the name of keeping you "safe." When Zelikow states that the current crisis is "an opportunity for America to offer a new kind of leadership for a new kind of world crisis," he is already thinking in the Rumsfeldian mode. Hey, Phil. Your "leadership" is the last thing we need.
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STANFORD MASK STUDY
It saddens me to have to write this in the face of ongoing mask use and the continued deliberate misleading of the public on this issue. But here's a new summary of work out of Stanford which concludes that long-term use of masks may have "strong potential for devastating health consequences" while at the same time being completely ineffective at stopping viral spread: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306987720333028
Please, please, please, if you have a choice, don't use one. And don't you dare insist on others wearing one. It's been a feature of the past year to see people shouting "it protects other people, duh" at those who don't wear them. Not only is there no good evidence this is true, the report also notes that "encountering people who [are] wearing facemasks activates innate stress-fear emotion, which is fundamental to all humans in danger or life threating situations, such as death or unknown, unpredictable outcome." The long-term effects of this stress on other people could be severe. It might sound trivial on one person but we're doing this indiscriminately on a global scale.
Do not let anyone tell you that masks don't hurt people. They most certainly do. Read the table in that report. Attempting to bully others into wearing them is a horrible thing to do. It's most common in those liberal social justice warriors who don't seem to actually understand any of the battles they purport to be fighting.
By the way: Twitter is censoring this study. Peer-reviewed science doesn't support the narrative? Just ban it!
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HUBRIS I - THE IMMUNE SYSTEM CAN BE IMPROVED UPON
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/17/e2018995118
You've probably seen or heard about this one from MIT since its results caused uproar. Anyone who thought critically about social distancing would have realised very quickly that when transmission occurs over very long distances, as it does with this virus or anything carried on aerosols, the 6-foot rule is pseudoscience. Didn't stop these idiots from plastering the world with social distancing stickers did it? What an excellent use of time and resources. Well done, humanity.
Indeed it is pseudoscience, as this paper carefully explains.
But none of this matters anyway because extensive and rapid viral spread is a good thing.
I'll say it again: RAPID VIRAL SPREAD IS A GOOD THING.
Why? Because the only truly effective means we have to suppress the virus is the natural immunity of the healthy. All this other crap, including the jabs, is techno-fantasist nonsense. Unadulterated hubris.
Nature has supplied us with a bottomlessly complex and robust immune system. A key part of that system is now understood to be that our individual immune systems also work collectively to provide maximal protection in concert with the immune systems of other people. We need to be together for the system to function properly. Good health is a function of our social activity.
It is hubris to interfere and unnecessary except in the most dire of situations. Social distancing, masks and experimental jabs are as dumb, unpredictable, and clumsy as our other earlier interventions in complex systems. I'm thinking in particular of our inadvertent destruction of ecosystems with measures that we thought were clever, such as agriculture and introducing invasive species. Our tendency to think too much of ourselves gets us (and the planet) in trouble time and again.
Nature is wonderful, while corporate profiteering that causes blood clots in the brains of those who are young, healthy and utterly impervious to SARS-CoV-2, is about as ugly as it gets. For the liberal social justice warriors, this poor girl made a noble sacrifice. Repulsive attitude that needs to be met with vocal opposition.
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NEW MEDIA LINKS
It's taken me a while to adjust to the new media landscape and figure out where most of the independent investigative journalists are these days. The places I used to go for commentary and reporting are now stuck on a track to nowhere. That's particularly true of the leftist websites upon which I used to rely for alternative views. A combination of Trump and post-modernist academic nonsense has hollowed out the left almost completely.
Fortunately, independent journalism is alive and well, albeit a bit scattered:
https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/
https://www.deathinthegarden.org/
https://www.greanvillepost.com/
https://www.projectveritas.com/
Of particular interest to me is the fact that many of the new media people seem to be explicitly non-partisan. The political reality of most nations - that the political divide is largely illusory, that multiple parties are basically singing the same song in a different key, that voting is largely an irrelevance - is being addressed directly by people who simply reject this system outright. It's been obvious to a lot of people for a long time and has been much talked about on the left but we don't seem to act like it's true. We are continually and very easily distracted by partisan bickering.
Throughout my life it's been frequently acknowledged by other people that the Dems and Republicans are barely separable on most issues and that the really important stuff continues on its course regardless of which party wins. Wars continue. Business continues. The health system doesn't get reformed. Wall Street get away with murder. Corruption continues. The intelligence and security services lie, manipulate and set their own agendas almost entirely without public oversight. Corporate power deepens and the needs and desires of the public are mostly ignored.
The shift in outlook is leading to some amazing journalism which instead brings the focus back to the most important questions about the world's real power centres. About private and corporate power and how it's wielded, where and by whom. I can't say enough good things about the work of Whitney Webb. Enjoy 'The Military Origins of Facebook' which should drive anyone who reads it right off that platform, never to return.
She shows how public surveillance programs were shuttered, seemingly taken off the books, but quietly revived in the private sector. Facebook aligns very neatly with one such shuttered project, called LifeLog. DARPA pros who were involved are quoted on the obvious parallels. Facebook and Google and others are well known to be sharing their data with intelligence.
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HUBRIS II - METALS ON THE BRAIN
Two new studies on metals from the team of Chris Exley at Keele.
Examines brain tissue for signs of aluminium deposits near other deposits linked with Alzheimer's: https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease-reports/adr210011
Compares claimed volume of metals in popular vaccines with actual volumes as measured (the results are not good): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0946672X21000523?via%3Dihub
Yes, injecting metals into the bloodstream may not be all that clever after all. I didn't know what adjuvants were a few months ago. I assumed, like most people, that we just wouldn't do anything this foolish. I was wrong. We're really capable of being astoundingly dumb.
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HUBRIS III - GEOENGINEERING
Good to see this nonsense being stopped. All these crass attempts to engineer our way out of trouble. It's time to accept the following: industrial civilisation is the problem and more industrial solutionism isn't going to solve a damn thing.
Guess who's on the list of funders? https://geoengineering.environment.harvard.edu/funding
Gates. He's always there, pouring money into the next stupid, dangerous, life-threatening idea. Hubris. Arrogance. He has them in spades. He's putting all of us at risk.
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HUBRIS IV - GMOs
Excellent statements here as two independent scientific organisations step up to point out the problems with some industry-infested reports that are calling for opening up everything to GMOs. https://gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/19777
Some of the comments are fantastic. I particularly enjoyed:
"[Gene editing's] limits for causing harm are none other than those we impose upon ourselves."
And this concise statement on hubris that could apply to so much of what's going on right now:
"Unregulated gene technology is kindling for the fire of human folly and fanned by our natural overconfidence in our competence.”
And then: "[Gene editing] cannot and will not help to reduce hunger for two reasons. One, the latest basic understanding from molecular genetics tells us that both current transgenics and ‘genome editing’ simply have not and cannot deliver the complex traits and organisms with whole networked genome functioning in response to the environment at their basis (e.g. higher intrinsic yield, drought tolerance, pathogen / disease resistance). Second, the indisputable fact that GMOs have not had any role in reducing hunger anywhere in the world since a quarter of a century is not due to regulations, but explained by natural, social, economical, cultural, historical and political science. ‘Genome editing’ will not improve on this record as it ignores the causes of hunger."
She's saying that gene editing falls well short in performance terms because it's a simplistic, mechanistic approach that attempts to isolate one aspect of the gene from the full, complex system. Also a good analogy for how we're treating our interventions in the immune system...
Her colleague extends our understanding:
"The latest understanding in the field of molecular genetics tells us that complex traits have the functioning of many genes, or even the entire complement of the organism’s genes, at their basis. As ‘genome editing’ can only manipulate one or a few genes, it is beyond the ability of this technology to deliver these complex traits."
Clever it may be, but gene editing is nowhere near as clever as its proponents want it to be. Compared to nature, it is ham-fisted garbage.
In spite of all the above and all the warnings, gene editing-fanciers have decided to release a couple of billion gene-edited mosquitoes on Florida:
https://foe.org/news/genetically-engineered-mosquitoes-released-in-the-florida-keys/
A perfect example of "kindling for the fire of human folly and fanned by our natural overconfidence in our competence," isn't it?
It's important to understand just how potentially dangerous gene drives are. This is a good primer on the matter. As they note, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is investing in the technology, which should tell you plenty. It's a dual use field of research, a phrase which regular readers may remember from our time spent looking at gain-of-function research. Could be civilian, could be military.
Could gene drives be weaponised and how? They could be used to try to wipe out whole species or to spread pathogens, according to that document. They also remark that "In systems theory, the result would by definition be unpredictable, or nearly impossible to compute; and assessing gene drive risks thus ascends to an unprecedented and potentially intractable level of complexity."
Put another way, we don't know what we're doing and we never will. But hey, it's only trying to wipe out a whole species on purpose, why not just roll the dice? Sounds wonderful. Going live in Florida right now. "Innovation" at its absolute best.
We've completely lost our primitive little minds.
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LOW TECH
I'm thoroughly enjoying this publication: Low Tech magazine, "Doubts on progress and technology". Gets this neo-luddite's approval.
For example, this piece on how little tiny little chips used in your devices actually require a lot of energy to make: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of-digital-technology.html
And this, a careful dissection of the hubris of circular economy, now highly popular in policy circles: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/11/how-circular-is-the-circular-economy.html
As noted at the conclusion: "The concept of the circular economy is intended to align sustainability with economic growth – in other words, more cars, more microchips, more buildings. For example, the European Union states that the circular economy will “foster sustainable economic growth”."
The circular economy concept is not the same as the idea of aligning human activity with cyclical nature. The comments on that piece are a decent summary of typical reactions to this kind of analysis: I don't agree with this article because I don't like the conclusions. That sort of thing.
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HUBRIS V (AI with Scott Ritter)
Former UNSCOM weapons inspector and all-round decent chap Scott Ritter writes here about why AI will fail on the battlefield: https://thealtworld.com/scott_ritter/despite-the-rise-of-ai-super-brains-that-help-tanks-and-robots-target-the-enemy-humans-will-always-triumph-over-machines-in-war I continue to maintain that to call what these things do 'intelligence' is hype. Don't get me wrong, it's horrific and all that, but AI will never think the way people do. Prove me wrong.
They're all drunk. They're going to cover the world in data centres and processors to drive this AI crap. Drunk and on acid.
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IVERMECTIN, AGAIN
Another little study on ivermectin, here shown to be highly effective as a prophylactic for healthcare workers. Taking a cheap, harmless pill provides good protection against infection but we should all definitely volunteer for the experimental GM injection. Great idea everyone! The statement, above, about systems theory also applies when carrying out genetic experimentation on people.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.10.21255248v3?%253fcollection=
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UN FOOD SUMMIT BOYCOTT
A Growing Culture ( https://www.agrowingculture.org/ ) is hosting events about the corporate takeover of the upcoming UN Food Summit, which looks set to be a feast of fake solutions to fake problems (see the gene editing stuff above).
"WHO DO WE STAND WITH TO GROW OUR FOOD — FACELESS CORPORATIONS OR THE FARMERS OF THE WORLD?"
Both the UN and EU are heading towards giving in to the centralisation of the food system and the dominance of Big Ag. Whatever stories the corporate ag businesses are telling seem to be working at that level. But it will be a disaster for human health and planetary ecosystems if they're allowed to succeed by a lack of public awareness.
Climate change is now the primary excuse for change. And yes, we need to act on carbon emissions, but by separating that out from all the other problems, we only stand to make things worse. Whatever the solutions they offer, be it GMOs (see above), fake meat, industrial insect production, are fake solutions which are being promoted to create new industrial markets. They are unlikely to do much to address climate change. The goal of zero carbon is to be achieved, at least in the case of the EU, by moving carbon costs elsewhere. Inspect these alleged solutions very closely, that's my advice. I'll have a bit more to say about these things in agriculture soon.
AGC are focusing on the rejection of the UN event by a huge volume of independent food campaign groups and their efforts to deliver a more appropriate alternative event. With a little luck you should be able to get the details at this link:
https://app.getresponse.com/view.html?x=a62b&m=aKal4&mc=99&s=DqU8pj&u=yh029&z=EtLLGmC&
Or search their website if that doesn't work :)
UPDATE: A few minutes after the above was first published, the European Commission announced it had no interest in safety testing for gene edited plants:
https://www.gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/19779-eu-commission-backs-removing-safety-checks-for-new-gmos
