Biomedical. Dr Andrew Kaufman interviews Daniel Roytas about his new book, Can You Catch a Cold? I’m a quarter of the way through, having a great time reading it.
Closing the Chapter of Germ Theory with Daniel Roytas, Andrew Kaufman M.D, 7/2/24. 52 minutes.
As far as I can tell, allopathic medicine — based on the lies of germ theory — is in its final moments, until it vanishes into irrelevance.
But with Daniel Roytas’ new book, Can You Catch A Cold?, finally out to the masses, it might get there much sooner. This work of art delves into many unsolved mysteries in the search for the true cause of life-threatening diseases throughout history…… and provides some of the missing pieces we’ve been after for a long time. Reviewing more than 200 contagion studies, Roytas leaves no stone unturned in the pursuit of unravelling this age-old mystery.
After leafing through some of this new evidence — which has answered many of my remaining questions — I invited Daniel to the Healthy Living Interviews. We touched on his findings and the path that led to this eye-opening book. We also touched on the nocebo effect and how people get ill through the power of popular opinion, the true meaning of dis-ease, and why modern medicine has it all backward.
If you’re looking to expand your knowledge on terrain-based medicine and more mind-blowing disproofs of germ theory, pick up Daniel’s new book here.[Link]
My comments. HIGHLY recommended. Roytas is very well-spoken.
And, Eric Francis Coppolino’s latest weekly Planet Waves show straddles Biomedical and 4IR.
What are the implications of the Trump v. U.S. SCOTUS ruling? What if someone with a brain was president? Interview with candidate Emanuel Pastreich. Plus, the integrity of gender. Eric Francis Coppolino, 7/5/24.
Go to New Program [Link to Planet Waves dot FM page, full program is three hours and 40 minutes. The interview is also available as a separate file]
Tonight I begin with the SCOTUS ruling in Trump v. U.S. and go behind the fanfare of how exactly this ruling places the U.S president above the law. It’s not what you think. Then I continue with an astrological theme related to the United States Pluto return, which technically spans from 2022 through 2025, but which has a much wider effective time orb. Astrology charts may be useful; here they are. I did a version of this presentation on the most recent STARCAST.
My guest tonight is former Green Party and now independent candidate for president Emanuel Pastreich. What would it be like to have a worldly, intelligent person be in the White House? His interview is part of the program and also on its own player.
And the Tantra Studio series continues with a discussion about gender integrity.
A Note About Independent Media
In our time, a large majority of people have no faith in the legacy or mainstream media. In the past, commercially-supported networks and newspapers served the corporate agenda, which has translated to endless wars and psychic disturbance. Yet many “alternative” outlets have filled the power vacuum and have boldly stepped in to feed people’s seemingly insatiable desire to be lied to.
I believe that it’s vitally important that we support what we acrually trust — and not expect someone else to do so. Planet Waves has served as your devoted commercial-free source of news, commentary and intelligent astrology since 1998. Many of you know we’ve withstood our share of thick and thin, and I keep showing up for you with my calm, reality-based and reassuring presentations.
Thank you for supporting the Planet Waves FM program with a paid subscription to this Substack or by direct donation to Chiron Return. Your funds help cover costs of Planet Waves FM and other projects of Chiron Return, including our ongoing work on the chronology. If you’re into intelligent, literate astrology, or are seeking a spiritual viewpoint in the midst of the commercial orgy, we really do offer the very best.
With love,
A combination of my comments at the page, edited for continuity and clarity.
Jeffrey Strahl, Lockdown Times
Regarding the first part of the program. Excellent stuff by Coppolino regarding the bogus nature of the "COVID" Psy Op, its reliance upon the totally inappropriate PCR test, inappropriate because the protocol it uses to detect SARS-CoV-2 via detecting specific genetic sequences claimed to be from that alleged virus never been authenticated for this usage by using an actual isolated and purified SARS-CoV-2 virus. Over 220 public health agencies around the world have admitted to their lack of knowledge of any study or paper proving such isolation and purification. Yes, it's time to do another program on this matter, so many "health freedom" activists seem clueless about this.
And yes, the digital age and the age of continuous catastrophes which is co-extensive with it were born with 9/11. People need to be reminded of that event and the real story behind it over and over again, Understanding this is fundamental to understanding reality. By the way, just a few weeks before 9/11, the G7 summit in Genoa, Italy, saw unprecedented repression of demonstrations by the growing anti-globalization movement. A big reason for 9/11 was the countering of this movement, which indeed pretty much vanished in the air after the towers fell. My late colleague Tod Fletcher wrote this (using a pseud) a couple of months after 9/11.
9/11: A Desperate Provocation by US Capitalism. Max Kolskegg (pen name of my late comrade Tod Fletcher), first posted January 2002.
Emanuel pursued the Green nomination but didn't even come close to getting it. The highlight of his statements was his calling out the pro-Palestine movement over its failure to deal with 3 critical matters. A. 9/11. B "3/11" as we call it, the "COVID" Psy Op, in fact promoting it by wearing the stupid masks. (though he's a big confused about it). C, 10/7. i.e. the real nature of what happened 10/7/23, the false flag aspects of it. Richard Gage has called it out, and so in fact has Iain Davis, a prominent writer about 4IR. [See further down for an item by Davis about this]
His explanation of "Blackrock v Blackstone>" is a good way to describe the Biden v Trump thing's real content. But the Constitution was actually a good framework is bunk. It was a structure fronted by a document whose intent was to ensure the continued domination of the society of what had been the Thirteen Colonies by the rich elite. "Corporate power" at the time was a future event, as capital was largely concentrated among wealthy individuals. There was a lack of acknowledgement of the power of capital, but this was DELIBERATE, part of the design. The entire idea behind the Constitution came from 17th and 18th Centuries political scientists, who devised structures for creating the facade of popular participation in decision-making while the rich eltie maintained actual domination of society. See this review of "Democracy Against Capitalism" by Ellen Meiksins Wood (1995), which is unfortunately not itself online, the key chapter used to be. Renewing Historical Materialism (see the section "The Demos versus `We, the People’")
The Founders were suspicious of existing corporate imperial entities like the Dutch East India Company, because they weren't a part of it, they constituted a new independent capital accumulation center. Corporate personhood is NOT the law in Europe or Japan, or indeed anywhere outside the US, but capital totally dominates those entities too.
He brought up Moore's Law. It's really not borne out in reality, due to materials and energy realities. Yes, miracles of miniaturization of technology have been attained and computing power greatly boosted, but we're simultaneously just now bumping against the limits. When data start showing that global oil production has actually started diving, all the tech progress will lose much of its meaning.
He really clings to the idea of bio-weapons, jumping from viruses (once he picked up that you don't remotely buy them) to nano-bio-things. He insists the entire COVID-19 matter was about killing lots of people, but failed, now they'll try something else, overlooking other possibilities, e.g. it was about nudging people into the Blockchain. If this was the intent, it worked spectacularly. I think that's far more likely to be what it was about, in this instant i agree with Alison McDowell.
Regarding Tantra Studio. Coppolino NAILED it with the two factors enhancing mass gender confusion: A. environmental pollutants such as chemicals and electromagnetic emissions (one can add noise pollution). B. digital social conditions, an internet in which gender is a non-presence in any real material way. I am likewise sick of the BS being pushed 24/7, particularly on kids who're being practically told by stupid parents and teachers that there's something wrong with them if they don't question their gender.
But i don't agree with what i think is your implicit position that this is all an unanticipated consequence of our society's development and state of being. I see a very conscious *corporate-sponsored/funded effort to promote gender disorder, as "transgender" is a transition into "transhuman."
Can We Talk About JK Rowling? Rosemary Frei, 6/16/20.
And i agree, in many ways the most socially isolated and beleaguered members of this society are heterosexual men who are "hopelessly" attracted to women, especially once these guys are over 50 and if they are not members of ethnic minorities. Automatically scorned as "part of the power structure," even if they happen to be economically marginal or members of the working class. I've been doing time in that "jail" for over 30 years, sick of it.
4IR. What’s Left? returns to the Noosphere, with a special regular guest.
Return to the Noosphere (with John Klyczek), What’s Left? 7/7/24. two hours and 5 minutes.
"John Klyczek joins “What’s Left?” To share his thoughts on the Rand documents discussing the new possibilities for US global hegemony presented by the Noosphere and Noopolitik. We also debate the roles of hard power and soft power in the application of ruling class control. Check us out!” [Links]
My consolidated and edited comment.
Thanks, Alex, Andy, Kenny, and Jake!
Alex's remark about being critical of Orwell because of Alex's leftist perspective was strange: Orwell considered himself a socialist right to his deathbed, per his last letters to friends in 1949. He fought against fascism in Spain (Catalonia) to be specific. His perspective was libertarian socialist, informed by what he saw in Spain and the repressive role of the Soviet Union and its operatives and clients.
Jake's tale tying together Eisenhower, Ellsberg, the hippies/counterculture, RAND, Gorbachev..... left out a major aspect behind the creation of the counterculture, that of the Beats, who dated back to the late '40s, with roots in the political revolutionarySurrealists in the '20s and '30s. Not to mention psychedelic usage dates back thousands of years. And the "Sixties" movement rose out of civil rights protests which came out of the US South in the '50s, not out of think-tanks. The tale also left out the frequently bloody repression used by the power structure against the movement as it grew from Civil Rights to also become an antiwar movement and a cultural insurgency.
Everyone in this conversation left out the material reality faced by the world. Yes, there are the dynamics of capitalism itself which drive toward splintering and competition no matter what cybernetic plans are. But on top and bottom of all that is the physical reality, that everything rests upon sufficient supplies of energy and raw materials as well as a relatively stable ecosystem. And those are simply not there for a neat smoothly functioning global cybernetic system. Things are moving in the exactly opposite direction. This neat little package will not withstand the heat.
Good comments about WWI by Alex, about it being the event which led to the basic ideas behind the creation of global structures of governance, with WWII simply determining the specific forms they took. I feel a need to remind all the participants: no one survives a global nuclear war. And i agree with Alex: We are not hopeless, as long as we are living creatures capable of acting.
And, Iain Davis discusses the ramifications for these global structures of the victory of Keir Starmner in the British election. In France, meanwhile, the hard right was denied a victory, indeed was defeated, coming in third, but the result is a deadlocked parliament, paralysis at a key point.
The British Government? Iain Davis, 7/6/24.
Well, here in the UK we have a new Trilaterist….er, sorry, I meant Labour government, led by the charismatic Keir Starmer.Likened to a dish rag, and not without good reason, Keir Starmer now commands the government with a whopping 170+ seat majority after nearly 80% of the British electorate didn’t vote for either him or the Labour party.
This all makes sense because people imagine that representative democracy has something to do with democracy, which it doesn’t. Still, who cares! Government is a shit idea anyway so if we are going to be ruled by anyone, why not the man who went out of his way not to prosecute Britain’s worst ever paedophile, necrophiliac pimp and was still listed as a “former” member of the Trilateral Commission in 2022 with their little explanatory note: “former members in public service.” He’s not an active member of the Trilateral Commission. Honest, he’s not!
Why should we care you may ask? Well, the Trilateral Commission that Keir serves…sorry, there I go again, “served,” is just a Rockefeller owned—my mistake—aligned globalist think tank that promotes ideas like the “pursuit of the European unification” and brings together a global public-private partnership of policymakers, business leaders, media moguls and selected academics who have taken it upon themselves to decide what the “solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems” are.
Sure, you voted to leave the EU but now you’ve elected to rejoin it. OK, so you didn’t vote to have policy decisions forced upon you by some remote oligarch think tank either, but that’s just too bad. If you voted in the UK general election, this is what you voted for so you don’t have any right to complain.
Of course, the largest single group of voters didn’t elect any government at all. With 60% general election turnout—with a turnout below 50% in 59 constituencies—Labour’s paltry 34% of the vote was resoundingly trounced by the 40% of the UK electorate who couldn’t be arsed to vote for anyone. The most popular choice in the UK is no government. Whether it was apathy, the wet and absolutely bloody freezing July weather—global warming eh?—or just the terminally depressing prospect of having to partake in the state’s quinquennial anointment ceremony, who knows? And frankly, who gives a damn?
The government was threatening us with violence if we didn’t do as we were told yesterday—a threat it can certainly back up by the way—and the government is still threatening us with the same today. Yesterday the government was blue, today it is red, what’s the difference apart from a wallpaper change? It’s still the same government. Globalist thinks tanks like the Trilateral Commission were controlling government policy yesterday and they still are today. Your “vote” meant absolutely jack-shit. Still, It’s nice to imagine you have some sort of democratic oversight, I guess. That is, of course, if controlling other people matters to you.
So what have we got at the end of the day?
About 20.4% percent of the electorate voted for their favourite gang to be the ones who will enforce whatever policies the oligarchs want to foist on everyone. The remaining 79.6% of voters either wanted a different gang to wave flags for or no gang at all.A tiny minority, who certainly didn’t vote, think the idea of forcing someone else to do what you want by sticking a cross in a box once every five years is not only—literally—a box-ticking exercise, but also an absolutely appalling and morally bankrupt thing to do.
With 34% of the vote Labour gets 64% of parliamentary seats because reasons. This means it doesn’t have to listen to anybody at all for the next five years. Although it will certainly be listening to a bunch of parasitic oligarchs because that is who governments actually serve and always listen to. The so-called UK government, which is really just a relatively minor “enabling” partner in the global public-private partnership, has absolutely no legitimate democratic mandate at all.
Which is yet another reason, in a very long list of excellent reasons, to ignore it completely.
And, i missed this, Davis posted Part 3 of his series about 10/7/23 being a false flag.
Was Al-Aqsa Flood a False Flag? – Part 3, Iain Davis, 2/27/24. First and last segments.
In Part 1 of this series we examined the evidence that strongly suggests Hamas‘ 7th of October Al-Aqsa Flood attack on Israel was assisted by an Israeli LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose) False Flag operation. In Part 2 we looked at the potential motives of the Israeli far-right Zionist movement and Hamas for their possible complicity in an Israeli LIHOP. We also considered the vision of a New Middle East (NME), as proposed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), as a suspected LIHOP motive.
However, Netanyahu’s proposed NME model isn’t the only potential NME that could have provided motivation. In addition, there are other objectives that may have elicited widespread support for an Israeli LIHOP from global ‘influencers.’ We will examine those possible motives in this article.
The Multipolar New Middle East Motive
Following the International Criminal Court’s (ICJ’s) provisional measures order stating that South Africa’s accusation of genocide against Israel is “plausible,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the UN Security Council: "Last week’s clear and repeated rejection of the two-state solution at the highest levels of the Israeli government is unacceptable. [. . .] This refusal, and the denial of the right to statehood to the Palestinian people, would indefinitely prolong a conflict that has become a major threat to global peace and security. The entire population of Gaza is being subjected to destruction on a scale and speed unprecedented in history. Nothing can justify the collective punishment of the people of Gaza."
With some considerable justification, the Palestinian Authority (PA) permanent representative to the UN, Riyad Mansour, said that the world was calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. Indeed, that appears to be the case. A full ceasefire is something few people on this planet would disagree with. But with Netanyahu’s far-right government stubbornly refusing to budge, how is that possibly going to happen?
An influential Western think tank called the Lowy Institute believes the situation in Gaza and the Middle East warrants a re-imagining of the international order. With Rothschild & Co. as its “partner” organisation, the Australian-based Lowy Institute is funded by the Rothschilds, by British-Australian multinational company Rio Tinto, and by the Australian government. Other Lowy members and contributors include KPMG, Google, Amazon, HSBC, Mastercard and the Australian central bank.
Noting how the slaughter in Gaza had been broadcast to television audiences globally, the Lowy Institute stated:
"The conflict in Gaza has become the latest theatre of nightmares in an increasingly fragmented and chaotic world. The sheer horror of Hamas’ terrorist assault on southern Israel, and the mounting number of Palestinian civilian casualties arising from the Israeli response, have stunned television audiences around the globe and left policymakers flatfooted. [. . .] [T]he conflict has become a microcosm of global disorder and anarchy. It has highlighted the breakdown of international norms, the diminished authority of the United States, and the growing divide between the West and the Global South. [. . .] Hamas’ brutal actions have revealed the limits of American authority, in the Middle East and beyond. The United States remains by far the strongest power in the world, but its relative influence is much diminished. [. . .] [T]he liberal vision of a US-led “rules-based international order” has suffered another devastating setback. Outside Washington’s allies, few believe this order possesses either moral legitimacy or political credibility. Its “rules” are seen as self-serving — a code of the West, by the West, for the West. Rarely has the United States, and the West in general, seemed more out of sync with the rest of the world. [. . .] [T]here is no replacement on the horizon. The “multipolar order” dreamt up by Russian and, to a lesser extent, Chinese policymakers is an illusion. [. . .] [T]he usual recipes for international problem-solving are no longer fit for purpose. Looking ahead, the choice is stark. Leaders can cling on to anachronistic tropes — the “rules-based order,” the illusion of “universal” values, the myth of great power (“multipolar”) governance, and an obsessive preoccupation with geopolitical competition. Or they can get real and accept that today’s threats and challenges — from conflict in the Middle East to anthropogenic climate change — require fundamentally different, more inclusive and cooperative approaches."
It is very important to understand the argument presented by this Rothschild think tank. It is firmly stating not only that the global geopolitical dominance of the US-led “rules-based international order” is over but also that the “diminishing authority of the United States” is observable through the lens of the conflict in Gaza and the West Bank.
It notes that, other than “Washington’s allies,” the whole world now knows the “rules-based international order” has no “moral legitimacy or political credibility.” Unlike previous conflicts, such as the destruction of Libya or of Iraq or the use of terrorist proxies in Syria, all of which equally revealed the lack on any Western “moral legitimacy,” Western audiences have now been shown this evident fact on their TV screens. Having completely ignored or denied the violent crimes of Western imperialism for generations, finally, on this occasion, at this time, the Western legacy media has decided reveal the full horror of Western military power.
According to the Lowy Institute, acceptance of the seemingly intractable conflict in the Middle East now means that “the usual recipes for international problem-solving are no longer fit for purpose.” A new system of global governance is required, Lowy contends.
The Institute asserts that “more inclusive and cooperative approaches” to international order are now necessary. It further claims that the alternative of the multipolar world order has been “dreamt up” by the Russian government and, “to a lesser extent,” the Chinese government.But that isn’t true at all. The notion of a multipolar global order can be traced back to the “three-power world” envisaged by the Rhodes-Milner Group between WWI and WWII and also to the regionalised world envisaged by the Rockefellers in the 1960s and, more recently, to the WEF’s so-called Great Reset, which outlines a world of smaller regions, or poles.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said the Iran-Saudi agreement was an exemplar of the “wave of reconciliation” spreading throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). With Syria rejoining the Arab League and Saudi Arabia agreeing to end its blockade of Qatar—a major financier of Hamas—Wang’s hopes seemed well-placed. The Chinese-backed Iran-Saudi deal was followed in September 2023 by publication of the Chinese government’s vision for a new model of global governance, titled “A Global Community of Shared Future: China’s Proposals and Actions.
That document states: "After the launch of reform and opening up in 1978, China asserted that peace and development are the underlying trends of the times. It advocated multipolarity and greater democracy in international relations [. . .]. China has initiated a range of visionary initiatives, including [. . .] the Belt and Road Initiative, the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and the Global Civilization Initiative, and promoted a set of approaches to global governance."
In their 2020 book, COVID-19: The Great Reset, WEF representatives Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret wrote:
"In this messy new world defined by a shift towards multipolarity and intense competition for influence, the conflicts or tensions will no longer be driven by ideology (with the partial and limited exception of radical Islam), but spurred by nationalism and the competition for resources. If no one power can enforce order, our world will suffer from a global order deficit. — [C19: TGR: P76]"
Just three years later, the Chinese government wrote:
"The governance deficit is more severe. The world is facing multiple governance crises. The energy crisis, food crisis, and debt crisis are intensifying. Global climate governance is urgently needed. [. . .] The Covid-19 pandemic is a mirror through which we have observed that the global governance system is falling further behind. [. . .] It has to be reformed and improved."
In order to fix the “global governance” or “global order” deficit, the Chinese government stressed its desire to: "[M]ake sure that the future of the world is determined by all, that international rules are written by all, that global affairs are governed by all, and that the fruits of development are shared by all."
Of course, by “all,” China didn’t literally mean “all” of us. The world numbers eight billion humans. We can’t “all” decide what every single one of our fellow human beings can or cannot do, should or should not do. Thus, when the Chinese government says the future will be “determined by all” it does not genuinely mean “all.” It simply means that our (s)elected representatives will decide everything for us in a supposedly “new” system of multipolar global governance.
The Chinese government is not proposing to upend the existing global governance system. China’s Global Community of Shared Future “does not mean that the international system should be dismantled or started afresh.” Instead, its aim is to make “global governance more just and equitable.” This will be achieved by ridding the world of “might is right” in a “zero sum game” of winners—but mainly losers. In its place, every nation will work together for the “common good.” China’s approach is relatively straightforward:
"China maintains that for the world, there is only one system, which is the international system with the United Nations at its core, that there is only one order, which is the international order based on international law, and that there is only one set of rules, which is the basic norms governing international relations based on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. China actively participates in and leads the reform of the global governance system."
Naturally, some of us might feel that global governance is an appalling idea and one of the most dangerous and oppressive concepts ever conceived by humanity. But our view is no more up for discussion in the Chinese government’s “Shared Future” than it is in the WEF’s “Great Reset.”
The model of multipolar global governance advocated by the Chinese government is set to be “only one [global] order” with just “one set of rules.” According to its “Shared Future” document, this multipolar global governance system “is the international system with the United Nations at its core.” The only proposed difference between this vision and the so-called US-led “rules-based international order ” is allegedly that the supposed “international rules” will be “written by all.”
This is exactly the “more inclusive and cooperative” approach to “global order” that the Lowy Institute claims is essential. Clearly, the Lowy Institute is trying to create a false dichotomy between the Western vision of the new global order and multipolarity. This claim by Lowy appears to be part of the Russia and China blame game favoured by the Western establishment. Acknowledged agreement would undermine the adversarial narrative that the Lowy Institute evidently wants Western electorates to believe. But the agreement between East and West on humanity’s “shared future” is glaringly obvious.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin famously said, “[T]here are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” While the constantly shifting post-WWII regional geopolitics of the Middle East could never be described as uneventful, decades of US domination in the region have been overturned in what feels like a matter of months.
First, Al-Aqsa Flood and the Israeli response ended any possibility of Abraham Accord-like “normalisation” between Saudi Arabia and Israel without a firm commitment from Israel on negotiating a genuine independent Palestinian state. The UAE, while more enthusiastic about the Abraham Accords, can no longer ignore the Palestinian issue either.
If Hamas’ objective was to drag Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and hence the Arab League, back to its 2002 Beirut summit commitment, it succeeded. Or, rather, it is more accurate to say, Israel’s response to Al-Aqsa Flood ended any prospect of “normalisation” without establishing Palestinian sovereign rights. Or so it would seem.
On 1st January 2024, Egypt, the UAE and Iran officially joined the BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—economic bloc, forming a new and yet to be formally named BRICS+ group. Saudi Arabia initially seemed hesitant to join. For a country so closely aligned to US regional interests, its wavering was perhaps understandable.
Saudi Trade Minister Majid al-Qasabi made comments at Davos in mid-January indicating that the Kingdom had let the 1st January deadline pass without officially accepting the invitation. For its part, Russia, through presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov, said it considered Riyadh’s membership “very important” and was working to ensure Saudi accession. The diplomatic efforts bore fruit: On 31st January it was announced that Saudi Arabia had officially joined the BRICS+ alliance………...
Let’s recap: Since 2020, we have been asked to believe that the alleged pandemic required governments to lock us in our own homes and shut down our functioning economies. These government orders inevitably led to us conducting more aspects of our daily lives on the internet, which naturally increased our online activity. In particular, we shifted even further toward digital transactions. Although the UN has only “limited data” to back up its claims, it alleges that “terrorists” exploited this uptick in digital activity to spread recruitment propaganda and to gather funds by capitalising on weaknesses in the digital payment infrastructure. Shortcomings in the Customer Due Diligence (CDD) processes of private financial institutions supposedly exacerbated this purported increase in the financing of so-called terrorists.
Not only does this scenario supposedly require that international organisations like the EU censor online communications, in keeping with UN Sustainable Development Goal 16.9, the EU also contends that it is now necessary to roll out digital identity wallets. These wallets have been developed by the EU in partnership with European defence contractors, such as Thales. The EU claims its needs to use digital ID to control and monitor our access to both public and private services, such as banking and the internet, for the purpose of improving CDD and tackling the alleged terrorist financing problem.
We have used the EU as a case study here, but this information control agenda is not confined to the EU; it is global. For example, in a joint statement issued just weeks before Russia formally entered the eight-year-long war in Ukraine, Presidents Xi and Putin declared: "The sides [Russian Federation and Chinese governments] reiterate their readiness to deepen cooperation in the field of international information security and to contribute to building an open, secure, sustainable and accessible ICT [information and communication technology] environment. [. . .] The sides [. . .] support the work of the relevant Ad Hoc Committee of Governmental Experts, facilitate the negotiations within the United Nations for the elaboration of an international convention on countering the use of ICTs for criminal purposes.:
What is this proposed convention the leaders of China and Russia referred to? Its full name is the International Convention on Countering the Use of Information and Communications Technologies for Criminal Purposes, but it’s commonly referred to as the UN Cybercrime Treaty. The purpose of this envisaged UN Cybercrime Treaty is to criminalise the sharing of information that “may have an adverse impact on States, enterprises and the well-being of individuals and society.” As we can see by the above statement, this is an objective that the Russian and Chinese governments equally support.
The “Ad Hoc Committee” that they mentioned and that the Chinese and Russian governments endorse, is not comprised of only “governmental experts,” however. The claim in the joint Russian and Chinese statement, that just governments are making these decisions, is deceptive. Proof lies in this UN statement: "[. . .] [N]on-governmental organizations in consultative status with the Economic and Social Council are invited to participate in the work of the Ad Hoc Committee [. . .]. [C]ivil society organizations, academic institutions and private sector organizations [. . .] are also invited to participate in the sessions."
The list of “stakeholders” currently participating in the “Ad Hoc Committee” and formulating a Global Cybercrime Treaty include Microsoft, Google, and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC UK), whose members include Deloitte, HSBC, IBM, AIG and the Bank of China. The Chinese government is among those entities eager to use the proposed treaty to criminalise the “dissemination of false information.” What constitutes “false information”? The answer will be decreed by worldwide governments, intergovernmental organisations and their private partners (the G3P).
So, as we can see, the EU is by no means alone in its dictatorial wish to censor and control information “both online and offline.” Nearly every government and major corporation on Earth supports the implementation of global digital ID and all other oppressive components of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Governments insist that using digital ID to monitor and control all our transactions and financial activity is essential to prevent ostensible terrorist financing. As governments and their corporate partners see it, Al-Aqsa Flood was another “terrorist” attack that greatly benefited their interests.
What we have laid out is the “Shared Future” that multipolarity promises to deliver. All “stakeholders” and all nation-states are eager for us to accept—even eagerly embrace—multipolarity. Al-Aqsa Flood has evidently provided a massive boost in this multiyear transitional process—certainly to the Middle East’s transformation.
Truly, as Ursula von der Leyen advised, we should “observe very closely those who stands to gain from a perpetuating conflict in the Middle East.”
And, a key material factor which stands in the way of the 4IR, namely energy and raw materials supplies.
Let’s Stop Arguing About An Imaginary Energy Transition, Art Berman, 7/6/24. Segments.
How did adoption of renewable energy become the drug of choice to treat the disease of climate change? No one knows. Wind and solar energy policies evolved over several decades without planning, leadership, effective communication, or stakeholder engagement. There was not—and is not—any vision, resource allocation, communication strategy, governance structure, or change management plan. In other words, none of the elements for a successful transition have been considered or implemented. That’s why emissions and temperatures keep rising. We’re on a trip to Abilene led by a clown car of energy-blind politicians.
The oil crises of the 1970s and early 1980s—especially the 1973 oil embargo—provided the wake-up call that ignited a global push towards alternative energy sources. Governments around the world began funneling resources into renewable energy research and development. The motivation for these policies was to reduce dependency on oil by substituting some amount of renewable energy for fossil energy. Climate change and the environment were not part of the plan but were bolted onto the scheme later. Eventually full or nearly full energy substitution became the objective for those who supported an energy transition.
There was never a moment, a discussion or a decision that established renewable energy as the primary solution to climate change. It was an Abilene moment. The Abilene Paradox describes how a group is swept by momentum into a situation that no member has thoughtfully considered. “On a hot summer day in a small town in west Texas, a family is sitting on a porch, enjoying some fresh cold tea, when the grandfather suggests they all take a ride to Abilene for dinner.
“The family’s father feels it’s a bad idea but is afraid to offer his opinion, so he foolishly says, ‘Sounds like a great idea to me.’ Then everyone else chimes in with their enthusiasm for the drive, and before long, they are on the dirt highway headed for supper. When they return after a long, hot ride and some horrible food, the mother-in-law says, ‘That wasn’t a great trip.’ Then her daughter adds, ‘I just went along because I wanted to keep the group happy.’ The husband, who first supported the idea, says he only went because he didn’t want to disappoint anyone.”
The Abilene Paradox
Did any world leader ask if switching to renewable energy was a good idea or whether modern civilization could be sustained by electricity, let alone by intermittent wind and solar power? Political leaders have largely taken a market approach to climate change. This means that governments have offered economic incentives in the form of tax credits, research grants and direct subsidies to stimulate markets to solve the problem. The resulting firehose of public money favors misallocation of capital for short-term corporate rather than long-term public benefit—privatize the profits and socialize the costs.
In a recent opinion article, Martin Wolf observed that market forces will probably not remedy climate change. “At the heart of attempts to halt damaging climate change is a pair of ideas: decarbonise electricity and electrify the economy. So, how is it going? Badly, is the answer. The atmosphere responds to emissions, not good intentions. In 2023, the production of electricity generated by fossil fuels reached an all-time peak.” —Martin Wolf, Financial Times.
It seems that our flawed proxy for a global energy policy misses a critical point: renewable energy, while beneficial, is predominantly applicable to electric power generation, which accounts for a mere twenty percent of overall energy consumption, and only about thirty-five percent of total carbon emissions. This oversight reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the broader energy needs and consumption patterns that drive modern economies.
Renewable energy advocates routinely highlight a narrow and selective set of information to create the illusion that an energy transition is moving forward with shocking speed and effectiveness. Figure 1 shows an impressive thirty-two percent decrease in U.S. CO2 emissions from electric power generation since 2006. Unfortunately, power generation is only thirty precent of U.S. emissions. What about the other seventy percent of energy consumption?
Moreover, one-third of lower carbon emissions in the U.S. is because of switching from coal to natural gas. Wind and solar have also contributed to emissions reductions, but to a lesser extent than natural gas. Wind energy accounted for about nineteen percent of the reduction, while solar contributed around four percent.[Charts]
But these charts only reflect electric power generation. In April, energy expert Vaclav Smil provided this perspective. “Contrary to common impressions, there has been no absolute worldwide decarbonization. In fact, the very opposite is the case. The world has become much more reliant on fossil carbon. We have not made the slightest progress…We cannot expect the world economy to become carbon-free by 2050. The goal may be desirable, but it remains unrealistic."
In fact, world CO₂ emissions and energy consumption continue to rise. Emissions have increased at twice the rate so far in 2024 as in 2022 or 2023 (Figure 3). May 2024 CO₂ concentration increased to 426.9 ppm from 421.9 in December 2023. May 2024 CO₂ concentration increased to 426.9 ppm from 421.9 in December 202 Sadly, the future may be worse than historical data trends suggest.
For wealthy countries like the United States, the trajectory of carbon emission reductions is poised to level off around 2030. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) anticipates that significant cuts in CO2 emissions from electric power generation will largely cease after 2030 (Figure 4). Moving forward, total U.S. emissions are projected to stabilize, averaging around 4,000 million tons per year through 2050.
The capacity for further reductions is constrained by the finite number of coal-fired power plants that can be decommissioned. Additionally, the EIA has a rather conservative outlook on emissions cuts in the transportation sector and other areas. Despite the extensive publicity surrounding electric vehicles, the EIA forecasts that CO2 emissions from transportation will decrease only 150 million tons by 2050.
When it comes to global electric power, CO2 emissions are projected to climb by 600 million metric tons, or five percent, by 2050 (Figure 5). Coal, as the primary offender, will contribute an additional 590 million tons. Emissions from natural gas will also see an uptick, adding 450 million tons. On a slightly more optimistic note, emissions from liquid fuels are anticipated to drop by 424 million tons.
This underscores the persistent reliance on fossil fuels despite the push for cleaner energy. The larger problem is that emissions will continue to rise as long as electric power use increases. Despite a four-fold expansion of wind and solar electric power generation by 2050, world carbon emissions are expected to climb because total generation will rise 14 gigawatt hours by then (Figure 6). The EIA expects world CO2 levels to increase 5 billion metric tons (fourteen percent) by 2050 (Figure 7). Emissions from electric power will increase 600 mm tons but fall as a percentage of total emissions from thirty-five percent in 2023 to thirty-two percent in 2050.
Promoters of renewable energy rarely mention its cost but never miss an opportunity to state that it’s the cheapest form of energy. It’s not but that misses the larger issue that the approach is simply not working. The energy transition is imaginary. Energy substitution became the guiding principle of the initial renewable energy push following the oil shocks half a century ago. This approach was validated and reinforced with the advent of Peak Oil concerns in the late 1990s. The paradigm failed to evolve as climate change took center stage in the energy debate, and that is where the problem lies.
Renewables cannot sustain our current civilization. This is not a matter of opinion or preference; it’s what the data consistently shows. While renewables have the potential to supply a significant portion of our electric power and can help displace coal—the worst carbon emitter—that scenario is far from the reality we face. The future, as indicated by the data, is not aligning with the optimistic projections for renewable energy……...
An aggressive program to develop a balanced mix of natural gas and nuclear for base load power should have been initiated at least two decades ago. The urgency of climate change has since closed that window of opportunity. There’s a time for hope, but also a time for honesty. Under the current strategy of international conferences and public spending on wealth transfer schemes disguised as green deals, there is no realistic scenario for successful decarbonization.
What’s truly necessary won’t come to pass—rigorous top-down programs that make the consumer-polluter accountable for their energy consumption. It’s far too late for convoluted carbon-credit systems or tax maneuvers. The market-based approach is already proving to be a losing strategy. The idea of simultaneously backing multiple solutions is a misallocation of resources at this point—ranging from somewhat plausible ideas like electric vehicles to wildly impractical concepts like carbon capture, hydrogen, or geothermal, which remain unproven on a large scale. In a parallel universe where planetary health was prioritized over GDP, only a direct end-user penalty would be effective.[SNIP]…..
Ending this segment and this edition, EI exacerbating climate chaos. By the way, Hurricane Beryl, which slammed into the Texas coast today, inundating the massively populated Houston area, was the first ever Cat 4 storm in the Atlantic in June, and the first Cat 5 storm in July.
Can the climate survive the insatiable energy demands of the AI arms race? New computing infrastructure means big tech is likely to miss emissions targets but they can’t afford to get left behind in a winner takes all market. an Milmo, Alex Hern and Jillian Ambrose, 7/4/24. Segments.
The artificial intelligence boom has driven big tech share prices to fresh highs, but at the cost of the sector’s climate aspirations.
Google admitted on Tuesday that the technology is threatening its environmental targets after revealing that datacentres, a key piece of AI infrastructure, had helped increase its greenhouse gas emissions by 48% since 2019. It said “significant uncertainty” around reaching its target of net zero emissions by 2030 – reducing the overall amount of CO2 emissions it is responsible for to zero – included “the uncertainty around the future environmental impact of AI, which is complex and difficult to predict”.
It follows Microsoft, the biggest financial backer of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, admitting that its 2030 net zero “moonshot” might not succeed owing to its AI strategy. So will tech be able to bring down AI’s environmental cost, or will the industry plough on regardless because the prize of supremacy is so great?
Why does AI pose a threat to tech companies’ green goals?….
What do experts say about the environmental impact?……..
Will AI’s demand for electricity grow for ever?
Normal rules of supply and demand would suggest that, as AI uses more electricity, the cost of energy rises and the industry is forced to economise. But the unique nature of the industry means that the largest companies in the world may instead decide to plough through spikes in the cost of electricity, burning billions of dollars as a result.
The largest and most expensive datacentres in the AI sector are those used to train “frontier” AI, systems such as GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 which are more powerful and capable than any other. The leader in the field has changed over the years, but OpenAI is generally near the top, battling for position with Anthropic, maker of Claude, and Google’s Gemini.
Already, the “frontier” competition is thought to be “winner takes all”, with very little stopping customers from jumping to the latest leader. That means that if one business spends $100m on a training run for a new AI system, its competitors have to decide to spend even more themselves or drop out of the race entirely.
Worse, the race for so-called “AGI”, AI systems that are capable of doing anything a person can do, means that it could be worth spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a single training run – if doing so led your company to monopolise a technology that could, as OpenAI says, “elevate humanity”.
Won’t AI firms learn to use less electricity?
Every month, there are new breakthroughs in AI technology that enables companies to do more with less. In March 2022, for instance, a DeepMind project called Chinchilla showed researchers how to train frontier AI models using radically less computing power, by changing the ratio between the amount of training data and the size of the resulting model.
But that didn’t result in the same AI systems using less electricity; instead, it resulted in the same amount of electricity being used to make even better AI systems. In economics, that phenomenon is known as “Jevons’ paradox”, after the economist who noted that the improvement of the steam engine by James Watt, which allowed for much less coal to be used, instead led to a huge increase in the amount of the fossil fuel burned in England. As the price of steam power plummeted following Watt’s invention, new uses were discovered that wouldn’t have been worthwhile when power was expensive.
We humans are very susceptible.
Don't tell anyone that they look pale or you will make them a cot case for the day.