In Part 1, we described how state-corporate media non-reporting of evidence relating to the sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines on September 26 was an example of how the truth on key issues is increasingly being quarantined from public awareness by ‘mainstream’ media.
At first sight, our second example might appear to contradict this claim.
To its credit, in several news reports, and in an hour-long film, ‘Under Poisoned Skies’, the BBC provided news from Iraq that will have shocked many readers and viewers (in truth, it is a shock to read any UK media news on life in Iraq):
‘Communities living close to oil fields, where gas is openly burned, are at elevated risk of leukaemia, a BBC News Arabic investigation has revealed.’
By BBC standards, the report was absolutely damning:
‘The UN told the BBC it considers these areas, in Iraq, to be “modern sacrifice zones” – where profit has been prioritised over human rights.
Some of the worst ‘modern sacrifice zones’ are found on the outskirts of Basra, in the south-east of Iraq, ‘some of the country’s biggest oil exploration areas’. Flared gases from these sites are dangerous because they emit a mix of carbon dioxide, methane and black soot which is carcinogenic.
If this sounds bad, it gets worse when we consider just who has been subordinating Iraqi human welfare to profit in this way:
‘BP and Eni are major oil companies we identified as working on these sites.’
Eni is an Italian multinational energy company. BP, of course, is one of the world’s oil and gas ‘supermajors’, and is British.
In other words, these BBC reports highlighted the rarely discussed fact that a British oil giant is deeply involved in a country that was illegally invaded in 2003, at the cost of one million Iraqi lives, on a pack of bogus claims relating to ‘national security’ and ‘human rights’. The 2003 war was, of course, waged by a coalition led by the United States and Britain. Italy was part of the coalition.
Not only did this US-UK war crime secure substantial quantities of Iraq’s oil for US and UK corporations, but BP has now been accused of creating environmental mayhem in Iraq. The BBC reported:
‘A leaked Iraq Health Ministry report, seen by BBC Arabic, blames air pollution for a 20% rise in cancer in Basra between 2015 and 2018.
‘As part of this investigation, the BBC undertook the first pollution monitoring testing amongst the exposed communities. The results indicated high levels of exposure to cancer-causing chemicals.
‘Using satellite data we found that the largest of Basra’s oil fields, Rumaila, flares more gas than any other site in the world. The Iraqi government owns this field, and BP is the lead contractor.
‘On the field is a town called North Rumaila – which locals call “the cemetery”. Teenagers coined the phrase after they observed high levels of leukaemia amongst their friends, which they suspect is from the flaring.
‘Prof Shukri Al Hassan, a local environmental scientist, told us that cancer here is so rife it is “like the flu”.’
This was a truly shocking comment; no wonder the BBC initially used it as the headline for its report:
‘BP in oil field where “cancer is like the flu”’
The News Sniffer website, which tracks edits made to media articles, found that this headline only lasted a few hours before being toned down to:
‘BP in oil field where “cancer is rife”’
Remarkably, the less dramatic headline and citation was actually fake. The relevant part of the text reads:
‘Prof Shukri Al Hassan, a local environmental scientist, told us that cancer here is so rife it is “like the flu”.’
Professor Al Hassan was not quoted as using the word ‘rife’, nor was anyone else quoted in the article. The edited headline was simply made up.
The BBC quoted Dr Manuela Orjuela-Grimm, professor of childhood cancer at Columbia University:
‘The children have strikingly high levels [of cancer-causing chemicals]… this is concerning for [their] health and suggests they should be monitored closely.’
The BBC report also gave us an idea of the nature of the ‘democracy’ installed in Iraq by the 2003 US-UK invasion and occupation. The leaked Iraqi health ministry report shows the government is aware of the region’s health issues:
‘But Iraq’s own prime minister issued a confidential order – which was also seen by BBC Arabic – banning its employees from speaking about health damage caused by pollution.’
David Boyd, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, told the BBC that people living near oil fields are ‘the victims of state-business collusion, and lack the political power in most cases to achieve change’.
Ali Hussein, a 19-year-old childhood leukaemia survivor, from North Rumaila, said:
‘Here in Rumaila nobody speaks out, they say they’re scared to speak in case they get removed.’
Indeed, the BBC reported:
‘Until now health researchers have been prevented from entering the oil fields to carry out air quality tests.’
As the BBC noted, their reports also revealed ‘millions of tonnes of undeclared emissions from gas flaring at oil fields where BP, Eni, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell work’. Major oil companies are not declaring this significant source of greenhouse gas emissions.
These were important exposés by the BBC, but what is simultaneously so shocking, and yet so normal for the media strategy of quarantine over inoculation, is that our search of the ProQuest media database for terms like ‘Iraq’ and ‘cancer’ found no articles mentioning or following-up the BBC reports in any UK national newspaper. This important story involving harm caused by powerful British interests was deemed unworthy even of mention.
In a free media environment, the report would have triggered serious reflection on whether the Iraq war really was, in fact, about oil, as honest commentators have long claimed, albeit at the margins of ‘respectable’ discourse. What does it say about Western ‘civilisation’ and its ‘rules-based order’ that UK and US oil companies like BP and Exxon have been able to profit from the vast crimes of their governments in Iraq? And what does it say that they’re able to do so without any state-corporate journalists noticing any controversy, or feeling any need to comment at all?
In a recent alert, we described how the Al Jazeera documentary series, The Labour Files, has been effectively quarantined by ‘mainstream’ media. The ban on discussion is so extreme that a caller to journalist Matt Frei’s talk show on LBC was simply cut off when he mentioned the series. More than 1,200 people supported our polite request for an explanation from Frei on Twitter, but he simply ignored them and us.
In previous alerts, we have described how whistle-blowers from within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) challenging claims of chemical weapons attacks allegedly committed by Assad’s forces in Syria have been quarantined by ‘mainstream’ media. The silence has been overwhelming. News on the grim fate of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, imprisoned in Belmarsh maximum security prison, has been similarly quarantined. Other examples abound.
Agony is piled on agony for anyone who knows and cares about the torment inflicted by the West on Iraq over the last 30 years, when we recognise the strong echoes in the latest devastation of earlier horrors inflicted in the process of conquering Iraq.
In 2010, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, a leading medical journal, published a study, ‘Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009’. Noam Chomsky described the study’s findings as ‘vastly more significant’ than the Wikileaks Afghan ‘War Diary’ leaks.
The survey of 4,800 individuals in Fallujah showed a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. It found a 10-fold increase in female breast cancer and significant increases in lymphoma and brain tumours in adults. Researchers found a 38-fold increase in leukaemia. By contrast, Hiroshima survivors showed a 17-fold increase in leukaemia. According to the study, the types of cancer are ‘similar to that in the Hiroshima survivors who were exposed to ionising radiation from the bomb and uranium in the fallout’.
The extent of genetic damage suffered by residents in Fallujah suggested the use of uranium in some form. Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster and one of the authors of the survey, said:
‘My guess is that they used a new weapon against buildings to break through walls and kill those inside.’
The truth on Nord Stream and on cancer in Iraq has been effectively quarantined – journalists are deeply reluctant to point the finger of blame at the state-corporate Establishment of which they are a part and by which they are richly rewarded.
We are not supposed to notice that the same British media endlessly packing their pages with realpolitik-friendly ‘concern’ for the plight of Ukrainian people suffering invasion and bombardment by Russia have no interest whatever in massive environmental damage and mass human suffering caused by US and British corporations profiting from the crimes of their governments. Latest media reports predict that ‘2022 profits at Britain’s BP could break the $20bn mark’ in the next week. ExxonMobil is ‘expected to report year-to-date earnings approaching $70bn’.
By contrast, all ‘mainstream’ media gave high-profile coverage over several days to allegations that a policeman in oil-rich Iran had been caught on camera committing ‘sexual abuse’. The BBC analysed video footage of the incident: ‘officer approaches her from behind and puts his left hand on her bottom’.
Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook asked: why does the West not ‘give a damn about these women’s lives, or those of their brothers, when it comes to enforcing decades of western sanctions?’
The answer: for the same reason the West doesn’t give a damn about its victims in Libya, Palestine, Iraq, or anywhere else. Western state-corporate ‘concern’ for human rights is a function of power, not of compassion.
I thought it could be inspiring to know how many allies we have. Thus, I’m sharing some of the many photos I took throughout NYC over the past two years.
Reminder: There are far more of us than you might imagine.
City Hall
Union Square Park
Times Square
Thomas Paine Park
Union Square Park
City Hall
Columbus Circle
Columbus Circle
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number–
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you–
Ye are many — they are few.
What if I told you this story connected poverty, Tony Fauci, the Military-Industrial Complex, the Prison-Industrial Complex, crack, the Civil War, Covid, AIDS, Lou Reed, and my grandfather — and that’s just for starters?
Hart Island is located at the western end of the Long Island Sound, off the coast of the northeastern Bronx. Despite being only one mile long and 1/3 mile wide, it’s home to more than one million souls. It could be the tenth most populous city in the U.S. — ranked above teeming metropolises like San Francisco, Denver, DC, Boston, and Detroit.
I say “could” because Hart Island, as a potter’s field for New York City, is actually the largest tax-funded cemetery in the world. And, until 2019, it was manned by grave-digging inmate labor shipped over from nearby Rikers Island.
(credit: Claire Yaffa)
Generally speaking, a potter’s field is where any city buries the bodies (and body parts) of those not claimed by any family members or unable to afford a private funeral. This typically includes the homeless, indigent, and people who live alone and below the poverty line. Low-income victims of epidemics and pandemics are often buried in such a location.
Near the very end of his life, my grandfather would half-jokingly implore my mother to abandon him in the hospital. “They’ll put me in a potter’s field,” he explained, “and you won’t have to waste money on a funeral.”
For the record, Mom did not take Grandpa up on his suggestion.
My maternal grandfather with me and my older sister, approximately 200 years ago.
Why “Hart” Island, you wonder? Like so many other Big Apple tales, there are a couple of interesting but questionable origin stories. The Middle English word “hart” means “stag.” This kinda-sorta makes sense when you consider that the island was once used as a game preserve. Also, deer did migrate from the mainland when ice covered this geographic region way back when.
The yarn I prefer, for its poetic license, is that British cartographers originally called it “Heart” Island due to its shape. To believe this story is to assume the cartographers to be quite inept as the island’s shape is not exactly like something you’d see in a cardiology textbook. But I’m going with it.
(credit: Claire Yaffa)
Besides being a game preserve, over the centuries, Hart Island was also, um… multi-purposed? It’s been a potter’s field since 1875, of course, but here are just a few of the many other uses the “Island of the Undesirables” has served:
Training ground for the “United States Colored Troops” during the Civil War
Civil War prison camp (235 Confederate prisoners died and were buried on the island)
The base for Nike surface-to-air missiles during the Cold War
In the 1960s, Phoenix House even ran a drug rehabilitation program on the island. They’d hold annual sober music festivals there (one year’s headliner was the Velvet Underground).
At one point, plans were made to erect an amusement park on the island but somehow, that was never built. It’s not hard to discern why so many believe Hart Island to be haunted.
Despite the myriad uses, Hart Island seemed resigned to its destiny as a potter’s field and that’s what it is full-time now. The list of famous individuals interred on the island includes:
Leo Birinski (playwright, film screenwriter, and director)
Bobby Driscoll (1950 Academy Award-winning actor in the juvenile category)
T-Bone Slim (labor activist, songwriter, and Wobbly)
During the 1980s, far too many of what came to be called “crack babies” died alone in hospitals or in other settings — often diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. These unfortunate souls were frequently laid to rest on Hart Island, lined up in tiny coffins.
(credit: Claire Yaffa)
Fear, prejudice, paranoia, and Fauci/Big Pharma criminality helped shape the heartless response to the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s. This reality was manifest on Hart Island with inmate workers being required to wear protective outfits when handling body bags containing those who were said to have died from AIDS.
Eventually, when it was accepted that no one could “catch” AIDS from a corpse, those bodies were buried in mass graves along with all the others. You can use an interactive map here to identify them.
In 2008, it was decided that Hart Island would be used for mass burials should there be something like an extreme flu pandemic on the horizon. Some 20,000 slots were made available, just in case. Twelve years later, this planning would go into effect.
Drone picture show bodies being buried on Hart Island where the Department of Corrections is dealing with the COVID-19 “outbreak” in New York City, U.S., April 9, 2020. (REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)
In 1992, a Rikers Island inmate named Michael Roman was part of a work crew assigned to bury bodies on Hart Island. Roman called the location, “an island of poor unfortunate souls, buried here in the unknown to others.”
He bemoaned: “If only I had the power to help this lost island.”
With that in mind, I urge you to please take another moment to peruse the images that accompany this article. Honor them and the anonymous victims they represent. Ponder how many unrealized moments are also buried on those 101 acres. And what about the children and all the chances they never had? Who will remember these lost souls?
This is where the Hart Island Project comes in. Here’s a little from their mission statement:
The Hart Island Project maintains an online database of people buried between 1980 and the present as well as maps of their grave locations. This database is the foundation for a system of storytelling and visualization called the Traveling Cloud Museum in an attempt to preserve the histories of who is buried for present and future generations. The Hart Island Project advocates for increased transparency of New York City burial procedures and assists individuals in gaining access to actual graves and information.
Maybe you’ll feel inspired by what you’ve learned about Hart Island — inspired to not assume you’ve got things all figured out. No one ever imagines they’ll be that person who ends up buried in a plain wooden box among a pile of such boxes in a mass grave that almost nobody is ever allowed to visit. But it can and it does happen, even amidst the best-laid plans.
Perhaps the best way to venerate the virtually anonymous million-plus humans laid to rest on Hart Island is to not take our own lives or the people in our lives for granted. To live today with compassion and self-compassion, because tomorrow is never guaranteed.
There’s nothing we can do for those buried on the “Island of the Undesirables” except to remember them and mourn them. But, a bigger question remains: What are we doing right now for those who are still here among us?
As Mary Harris “Mother” Jones urged: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”
Yellow Fever hit New York City in the late eighteenth century. The Big Apple population at the time was 60,000 and over the course of five years, eight percent of those New Yorkers succumbed to the disease (or related malfeasance).
Adjust that ratio for 2022 and the death count would approach 675,000.
Yellow fever is described by the always trustworthy World Health Organization as “an acute viral hemorrhagic disease transmitted by infected mosquitoes.” It can incubate in your body for up to 6 days but is often asymptomatic. If symptoms do arise, mild to moderate cases last for 3 or 4 days and present with:
Fever
Headache
Nausea
Vomiting
Muscle pain (usually a backache)
Decreased appetite
For some patients, there is a secondary toxic phase that occurs very shortly after they recover from the above symptoms. This phase typically commences with a return of the high fever but things quickly escalate from there, e.g.
Kidney damage
Liver problems
Jaundice (the yellowing of skin and eyes is where this disease gets its name)
Abdominal pain
Dark urine
Steady and extreme vomiting
Internal bleeding
Bleeding from the mouth, nose, or eyes
Roughly 50 percent of those who enter the toxic phase are dead within a week.
Sad reality: Pandemics and epidemics are often handled in an inexplicable, inefficient, greedy, and lethal manner. Here’s how the Museum of the City of New York described the scene more than two centuries ago:
By 1795, yellow fever was making its way through New York City. The true cause of yellow fever was unknown at the time. Many thought the disease was spread by consuming or inhaling the fumes of rotting food or coffee. Others believed the illness was imported from the West Indies. The press was reluctant to publish the extent of yellow fever due to fears of people leaving the city and the economy suffering. New Yorkers falsely believed the disease was not contagious, and by 1798, the dispersion of yellow fever had reached epidemic proportions claiming the lives of thousands. Various efforts were made to clean up certain neighborhoods most widely affected by the disease, but other than quarantining infected ships, the newly formed health department did little to prevent the sickness from spreading.
As you well know, this type of scenario is nothing new within our culture — regardless of which technology delivers the narrative.
1. Why would anyone be opposed to water fluoridation? Doesn’t fluoride occur in the water naturally anyway?
The fluoride products used in water fluoridation (sodium fluoride or fluorosilicic acid) are classified as hazardous waste products of the fertilizer, aluminum, and nuclear industries. They are even more toxic than naturally-occurring fluoride, since they contain other components, such as arsenic, lead, barium, and/or aluminum.
Water fluoridation also causes more lead to be leached from pipes into the water supply.
However, even naturally-occurring fluoride, in areas with high concentrations (over 1 ppm) has been found to have extremely adverse health effects. Even before additional fluoride is added, the level of natural fluoride in the water in many areas in the U.S. is already equal to the amount of naturally-occurring fluoride that has been found to cause skeletal fluorosis in other countries.
Studies done in India and China found skeletal fluorosis in areas containing naturally occurring fluoride as low as 0.7 ppm. (Gupta R, Kumar AN, Bandhu S, Gupta S. (2007) Skeletal fluorosis mimicking seronegative arthritis. Scandanavian Journal of Rheumatology 36(2):154–5.) That same amount, 0.7 ppm is the current amount recommended by the CDC to be added to community water supplies.
In addition to the natural fluoride in groundwater, most people are exposed to multiple sources of fluoride (pesticides in wine and food, tea, some ceramics, anti-depressants, anti-biotics, pollution from manufacturing, soft drinks, Teflon pans, waterproof items, dental gels, mouthwash, toothpaste etc.). They presumably are being exposed to well over the equivalent of 1 ppm before any fluoride is added to the water, however no industry or government testing has ever been done to find out how much fluoride the public is absorbing from all sources. This massive exposure to fluoride did not exist in the 1950’s, when fluoride was first introduced.
2. Don’t all advanced countries fluoridate their water? And hasn’t it been proven that countries that do fluoridate their water have better dental health than countries that don’t?
No. Fluoridation has been almost completely abolished in Europe. You can read statements from government officials in those countries about why they don’t add fluoridation chemicals to water.
Statistics gathered by the World Health Organization do not show any difference in rates of dental caries in fluoridated vs. non fluoridated countries. (WHO Collaborating Center for Education, Training, and Research in Oral Health, Malmo Univ., Sweden, 2012.) Where fluoridation has been discontinued in communities like Canada, the former East Germany, Cuba and Finland, dental decay has not increased but rather has continued to decrease (Maupomé 2001; Kunzel & Fischer, 1997, 2000; Kunzel 2000; Seppa 2000).
In the U.S., the state of Kentucky, which has been fluoridating the longest, and has achieved almost complete fluoridation of its water supply, has the worst dental health of any state in the country. From an article appearing in the Lexington Herald Leader (10/14/09): “Governor Beshear said Kentucky led the nation in 2004 in terms of the number of people age 65 or older who had lost teeth. About 27 percent of Kentuckians of all ages had lost six or more teeth to decay or gum disease, compared with 18 percent in the rest of the nation.”
Yet, ‘In 2004, 99.6% of Kentucky’s public water systems were providing fluoridated water to their customers. This ranked Kentucky first among all states.” (Kentucky Epidemiologic Notes and Reports, Vol. 40. №8, Dept. of Public Health.)
Similar results were reported in Texas: “After 9 years and $3 million of adding fluoride, research shows tooth decay hasn’t dropped among the poorest of Bexar County’s children, it has only increased — up 13 percent this year.” (Conger J., 2011, San Antonio: Added to our drinking water: a chemical ‘more toxic than lead?’ KENS 5 News.)
A study of children in Canada comparing fluoridated vs. non-fluoridated communities showed dental caries decreased in non-fluoridated areas, stayed the same in fluoridated communities.
In all countries listed in the links below, as in the U.S., dental disease continued to decline, whether or not the countries were fluoridated. These non-fluoridated countries had rates of dental problems lower than the U.S.—The Netherlands, the UK (10% of the country is fluoridated), Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland. These non-fluoridated countries had rates that were about the same as the US—Italy, Finland, Iceland, France. See here and here.
For the best article analyzing the research on fluoridation worldwide, see the article by John Colquhoun, DDS, Phd (former Chief Dental Officer of Auckland, NZ): Why I changed my mind about water fluoridation (Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 41 29–44 1997, University of Chicago Press). Colquhoun studied the effects of fluoridation around the world, with the intention of proving how beneficial it was, but discovered, to his astonishment, that people in countries using fluoridation had the worst teeth. He then began crusading to put an end to the practice.
Since 2010, over 240 communities in North America have abolished (or voted to prevent) the practice of fluoridation. (See www.fluoridealert.org for a constantly updated list).
3. Where did the idea of fluoridating the water come from?
Industrialists in the aluminum and nuclear industries were under fire because of the harmful effects of the fluoride waste products being emitted from their plants — animals and people were being sickened for miles around.
They hired Edward Bernays, who was the inventor of mass public relations campaigns (Bernays also happened to be the nephew of Sigmund Freud) to convince the American people that putting toxic waste in our water supply was good for us.
Bernays had organized a successful campaign, on behalf of Lucky Strike cigarettes, to convince American women that smoking was both glamorous and liberating. He hired models to pose as debutantes in a march for women’s rights. When Bernays gave the signal, all the women lit up their cigarettes. Another successful propaganda campaign that he orchestrated was the overthrow of a democratically-elected government in Guatemala on behalf of United Fruit. The Nazis studied and made use of Bernays’ techniques for their propaganda programs. (A more in-depth discussion of Bernays’ role in the campaign to convince the public to accept fluoridation can be found in the video The Fluoride Deception, and the book with the same name by Christopher Bryson, Seven Stories Press).
For information describing the origin of water fluoridation as a way of disposing of industrial waste, see here.
4. OK, so maybe fluoridation hasn’t been proven to be effective in improving dental health, and its origins are sketchy, but what harm can it do to add it to our water supply?
First there is the cost factor. At a time when there is not enough money for schools, dental treatment for kids, support for the homeless and other basic community services, counties are spending millions of dollars to fluoridate the water. Even worse, fluoridation has been associated with increased rates of bone cancer, cardiac problems, diabetes, immune disorders, damage to the thyroid, increased bone fractures, hyperactivity, neurotoxicity, and decreased IQ:
UK study which found the rate of hypothyroidism was double the rate in a fluoridated city as compared to non-fluoridated city. Study finding patients with kidney problems cannot properly excrete fluoride.
This comprehensive review of the medical literature (including documentation) indicates a long list of harmful health effects of fluoride and discussion of ethical concerns regarding its use.
In 2016, a number of health, consumer, and environmental organizations (including Fluoride Action Network and Food and Water Watch) petitioned the EPA under the Toxic Substances Control Act, to eliminate fluoridation in drinking water due its neurotoxic effects at the level currently designated as safe by the U.S. government. The petition identified 76 (out of a total of 85) human studies that found an association between cognitive decline and higher levels of fluoride in the water supply.
After the EPA rejected their petition, the groups sued the EPA in federal court in 2017. A seven day trial was held in 2020, but the court has yet to issue a decision, as of Oct. 2022. The next hearing on the case, after much re-scheduling, is scheduled for Oct. 26, 2022 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. You can find a list of all the studies showing neurotoxic effects, and the groups’ arguments—that adding fluoridation chemicals to our water must be discontinued—here.
While adding hazardous waste to our water is not beneficial to anyone, it is particularly harmful to people with kidney disease (who can’t excrete it properly), infants (when mixed with formula it far exceeds the safe amount of fluoride), farmworkers (already exposed to fluoride in pesticides), tea drinkers, people taking anti-depressants, people with low thyroid, industrial workers who are exposed to high levels of fluoride at work, and those who have chemical sensitivities. Also adversely affected are people who drink lots of water such as diabetics, athletes, and manual laborers. The Environmental Working Group has gone on record as opposing as unsafe for many population groups the current maximum levels of fluoride set by the U.S. government.
In addition to the previously listed ailments, fluoride in the water supply can cause a disfiguring condition called fluorosis or mottling of the teeth. Because black and Hispanic children are more susceptible to fluorosis, some civil rights organizations and leaders have come out against the practice.
On July 1, 2011, The League of Latin American Citizens, the largest Hispanic organization in the U.S. passed a resolution strongly opposing the practice of fluoridating water supplies, in part because of the disproportionate harmful effects on Hispanic members of the community. See here.
Numerous studies, including a national survey by the CDC, have found that black children suffer significantly higher rates of dental fluorosis than white children. (Martinez-Mier 2010; Beltran-Aguilar 2005; Kumar 2000, 1999; Williams 1990; Butler 1985; Russell 1962).
Not only do black children suffer higher rates of fluorosis, they suffer the most severe forms of the condition, which are marked by dark brown staining and deterioration of the enamel. Black civil rights leaders in Georgia campaigned against water fluoridation due its harmful effects on black children. (See Letter from Andrew Young to Chip Rogers, Senate Majority Leader, Georgia State Capitol, March 29, 2011.)
The Journal of the American Dental Associationnoted increased detrimental effects of fluoridation on low-income and/or malnourished children.
5. Shouldn’t we leave it to the experts? Don’t they support water fluoridation?
Experts in many countries around the world concluded that the practice is harmful and supported its elimination. When the top water toxicologist in the Environmental Protection Agency, William Marcus, disclosed that the reports showing the safety of fluoridation had been doctored to hide its harmful effects, he was immediately fired. A judge later ordered him to be reinstated, since there was no basis for the firing other than his refusal to hide the facts.
Marcus’ union, which represents 1500 scientists and professionals who work for the EPA, came out with a strong position against fluoride as well, as have numerous other leading scientific, medical, judicial, and government experts. (You can find a large number of these extraordinary statements criticizing fluoridation here.) The story of William Marcus’ firing from, and re-instatement to, the EPA is documented in the movie Fluoridegate, which includes video interviews with him.
In Sept. 2017, an NIH/EPA 12-year study was released which validated the findings of previous human studies concerning the effects of fluoridation on children’s IQ. This study found that when the exposure was prenatal, even very low doses of fluoride (e.g. that found in “optimally fluoridated communities”) resulted in lowered IQ. (Bashash et al 2017).
Although dentists have been slow to keep up with the research on harmful effects of fluoridation, in 2017 the US-based International Association of Oral Medicine and Toxicology came out with a position opposing water fluoridation, with included 500 citations. Their position paper has quotes from a long list of experts which discuss the dangers of fluoridation.
6. It’s not like fluoride is actually poisonous is it?
The FDA requires a warning on all tubes of fluoride toothpaste — to immediately call Poison Control — in the event even a small amount of FL is swallowed. Fluoride is one of the main poisonous ingredients in Sarin nerve gas. As evidence, see this excerpt from The Independent, Sept. 3, 2013: “The Business Secretary… will today be asked by MPs to explain why a British company was granted export licenses for the dual-use substances for six months in 2012 while Syria’s civil war was raging and concern was rife that the regime could use chemical weapons….the disclosure of the licenses for potassium fluoride and sodium fluoride, which can both be used as precursor chemicals in the manufacture of nerve gas….”
According to the Material Safety Data Sheet for Mallinkrodt Chemicals, sodium fluoride is classified under “extreme danger,” and can be fatal if ingested.
Bizarrely, bottled “Nursery Water” for babies, which was being sold in grocery stores everywhere, has sodium fluoride added. Even the proponents of fluoridation acknowledge that it is toxic to give babies infant formula that has been mixed with fluoridated water. See, for example, the Journal of American Dental Associationrecommendation to not use fluoridated water for infants receiving formula.
The state of New Hampshire is unusual in that it specifically requires warnings about mixing fluoridated water with infant formula to be included in every water department statement sent to customers. In the unlikely event that all mothers nationwide were to be educated about the danger of giving fluoridated tap water mixed with formula to their babies, and they were able to afford buying cases of bottled water, this would add greatly to environmental pollution as a result of all the plastic being discarded in the landfill.
Until fluoridation of the water supply was introduced, the main use for fluoride was as a rat poison.
7. What was the “Halloween Death Smog Disaster”?
During the Halloween weekend in 1948, twenty people in and around Donora, PA died, and an estimated 6,000 were sickened, as a result of an accidental release of fumes from the Donora Zinc works. As Christopher Bryson describes in his book The Fluoride Deception, independent scientists who investigated concluded that fluoride emissions were the cause of the deaths. An almost identical industrial accident occurred in the Meuse Valley in Belgium, where 63 people died after a high release of fluoride emissions.
A Public Health Service report — heavily influenced by industry and cold war government leaders, who required the products of fluoride-producing industrial and nuclear plants — concluded that the deaths in Donora had been caused by the weather. The families of the dead were compensated less than $3000 each by U.S. Steel, the owner of the zinc plant, which did not admit any responsibility for the injuries and fatalities.
The head of the Public Health Service, Oscar Ewing, was a former lawyer for Alcoa Aluminum, an industry that would greatly profit as a result of selling its toxic waste for purposes of community fluoridation. It was he who wrote the introduction to the PHS report on Donora that attributed the deaths to weather conditions. Ewing announced nine months after the deadly disaster that the Public Health Service was reversing a long-held position and now was supporting adding fluoride to drinking water across the U.S.
Much like individual change, societal developments happen gradually, often painfully; even when sudden shifts take place, seemingly ‘out of the blue’, they are the result of an accumulation of incremental steps – the last straw on the camel’s back as it were. Small developments may slip by unnoticed, major events scream out and demand our attention. Take man-made global warming – going on for 70 years or so, ignored for most of that time, until one July, when, in 40°C heat people collapse, crops are wiped out, water is rationed and drought blights the land.
Whilst it’s true that change is, paradoxically, constant, dramatic shifts, life-changing developments, by their very nature, occur only rarely, at key moments. Globally, we are living through such a time of major change; a transitional time akin to that step from one age group to another, adolescence into early adulthood, for example. A moment when everything is, potentially, set to shift and evolve, when old habits and ways of living, recognized as inadequate, either fall away naturally or are rejected.
Signs that we are living through such a time have been evident for a while – decades, longer probably, and have year on year become more and more widespread and diverse. The momentum for change, and with it resistance (which is intense) from those wedded to the status quo, appears to be reaching a point of crisis. Battle lines are exposed, delineating the choices before humanity, alternative values and modes of living that are becoming more defined, and more opposed all the time.
The political-economic arena has been the primary field of conflict and resistance, and also opportunity. This all-pervasive space encompasses most, if not all, areas of contemporary life, including education and health care, the environment, international relations, immigration, defense, etc; it shapes values and determines the direction of collective travel. Differing viewpoints have become increasingly polarized, opinions hardened. And, growing out of the vacuum created by government’s inability to meet the challenges of the time, and the uncertainty caused by clinging to systems and modes of living that are day by day being drained of life, extremism has exploded; populism, on the left and most fiercely, on the right of politics. Intolerance, prejudice and hate have accompanied this political polarization, dividing societies around the world.
Cynical politicians hungry for power have fueled and exploited these splits, inflamed divisions with the politics of tribal nationalism and intolerance. Truth has been perverted, facts questioned or disregarded; democracy, limited to begin with, has been undermined and autocratic leaders/demagogues have surfaced, or intensified their stifling grip on power.
When and how?
As points of crisis draw near in diverse, yet interconnected areas – climate/ecosystems, economic uncertainty and mass migration/displacement of persons, energy supplies and war, food security and global health threats, demands for solutions intensify.
Current socio-economic-political methodologies hold no answers, and are increasingly seen to be inadequate. Rooted in the Ideologies of Division Exploitation and Greed (Imperialism and Neo-liberalism), they are an integral part of the problem and cannot therefore respond adequately to the current challenges, which are immense. Creative solutions consistent with the emerging times are called for; compassionate alternatives rooted in social justice and freedom.
Systemic change in the economic sphere is desperately needed. Neo-Liberalism, which dominates the global economy, is a poisonous unjust ideology that relies on unlimited, irresponsible consumption and promotes greed, exploitation and inequality. Once change in this area takes place, and a more humane unifying and just model is introduced, then development in a range of other related areas becomes possible – health care and education, the eradication of food insecurity and large scale action on the environment.
It is values that need to change first though, and among many people they are changing; systems, policies and structures will naturally follow. Central to shifting values is the idea of unity, a recognition that humanity is one, varied, diverse but whole. This is not some incense-coated pseudo-religious fluff, but a fact (spelled out many times by visionary figures throughout the ages) in nature that is sensed by people everywhere; a fact that the existing socio-economic ideology, with its emphasis on competition and selfishness, actively works against.
Unity is a primary quality of the time, as is cooperation and tolerance. From these primary Principles of Goodness a series of positive consequences, or secondary colors flows: social and environmental responsibility, the eradication of prejudice; sharing as an economic social principle; social justice and equality, brotherhood — talked about for at least two thousand years, known in the heart but expressed fleetingly — and understanding of self and others. Unity shatters tribalism and strengthens collaboration; working together encourages relationship and erodes fear of ‘the other’, which in turn dissolves tensions and creates a space in which conflict is less likely. These are the values and ideals of the time, not radical, not new, perennial values that have been long buried and are now re-surfacing, influencing thinking in all areas of society. Coloring social and environmental initiatives, empowering popular action and driving change.
Momentum is building and, despite entrenched resistance from fearful forces determined to maintain control and ensure the perpetuation of systems and attitudes that breed division and suffering, the question is no longer will there be fundamental change and the inauguration of new modes of living, but when and how.
The ‘when’ is not a fixed moment in time but a dynamic flow expanding throughout the now; the ‘how’ is a creative explosion of collective action, examples of which are all around us, in every country of the world.
Wherever voices are raised in praise of social justice there is the how and the now; when people, young and old, stand together, despite the risks, demanding freedom from suppression, that is the how and the now; it’s individuals forming groups, acting in unison, crying out for substantive environmental action; it’s the rise of Trades Unions; it’s thousands of community initiatives, large and small, throughout the world; it’s Citizens Assemblies and the fall of demagogues – some, not all; it’s the growing influence of so-called Green Politics and demands for equality in all areas.
These are the signs of the times; diverse worldwide manifestations of ‘the how’, occurring within ‘the now’. Daily they multiply and strengthen, and the forces of resistance falter; they are the seeds of evolving socio-economic-political forms; they are the promise of things to come, the forerunners of The New time, which, no matter how the forces of resistance kick and scream, cannot, and will not, be held at bay.
W.E.B. DuBois: ‘To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.’
Patrick Duffy of ‘Dallas’ Fame Lists Oregon Ranch for $14 Million
Imagine a world where smart cohesive thinkers come together and work with these multimillionaires and get some break on the property and then get a community going there: people who want to learn how to farm-raise animals; how to preserve foods; how to construct tiny homes and microhomes; how to grow food; how to heal; and how to bring together so many types of people who want to heal trauma and get better. I am not just talking about those rough sleepers you might run into, AKA, homeless, many times men of all ages, opting to get off the bureaucratic grid (they too are humans and global citizens, lest we forget). Not just folks who are really down and out, or who just want to be left alone. Although many of those would fit well on a property like this — a river there, ponds, fields, trees, and central outbuildings.
Includes 49 Acre Campus with 6+ Buildings totaling approx. 130,000 SF:
Expansion Hall- Administration Building with Auditorium, Classrooms and Offices
Harmony Hall- Girl’s dorm with 67 rooms, 7 offices, lounge, chapel, commercial kitchen, dining room, bath suites, etc. and attached 3-bedroom Dean’s house
Devotion Hall- Boy’s dorm with 49 rooms (19 rooms need sheetrock finished and painted), apartment with kitchen, bath suites, rec room, lounges, etc. and attached 5-bedroom Dean’s house
Gymnasium/Music Building with Stage
Science Classroom Building with Library
Industrial Arts Building with Auto Shop, Wood Shop and Welding Shop
Extensive Updates during current ownership include:
Administration Building has newer metal roof, updated windows, new insulation, remodeled auditorium and meeting rooms, new HVAC, electrical service and lighting
New windows, high efficiency hot water system, new HVAC, new kitchen appliances and walk-in refrigerator, insulation, paint, lighting and carpeting in Harmony Hall (Girl’s dorm)
New windows, insulation in 49 rooms plus new sheetrock in 30 rooms of Devotion Hall (Boy’s dorm)
New and repaired roofs and new electrical services
Domestic water system and sewage system for campus
Includes separate 4.69 acres (Tax Lot 1301) with Spring and water rights– domestic water source for campus
Adjacent 151 +/- acres well suited for low density residential development with 30 LA water co-op certificates
Vineyard soils & Beautiful Views
South Fork Hill Creek flows through property
Rural location approximately 14 miles south of Hillsboro near Gaston
That was August 2021. I have had many intersections with places like that, where there is raw land, established multiple room buildings, with commercial kitchens, and gardens, even equestrian building, rivers and springs, and alas, up for sale, and, in the scheme of capitalism and the end rot of nonprofit do-gooders and the inability to get things going that would actually help people, including adults and families who have faced housing challenges, and then also bringing together students, and retirees, and others to create a triple-healing community where people live, eat, think, create and recreate together, yes, IMPOSSIBLE in capitalism. In a wooded and riverside area, throughout the land, thousands of locales, ready for a new paradigm!
There are literally tens of thousands of opportunities like the one listed above, and also that 395-acre ranch Duffy has put on the market.
In capitalism, using county coding as a blunt anti-do hammer, in the scheme of things, getting anything this creative off the ground is almost impossible. You know, getting maybe art students and social worker majors, journalism majors, filmmakers, construction and engineering students, nursing students and others out there to do theses in situ with the very people and situations they may have studied.
Encampments, visiting elders programs, and permanent housing in the form of tiny homes, with tons of support, tons of community connectivity, and then, of course, mental and physical health practitioners, nurtritionists, farmers, and construction gurus on the spot assisting people to learn how to do for themselves.
The template is easy to produce, and that letter I wrote to Jeff Bezos’s ex, MacKenzie Scott Tuttle, in reference to another property for sale in Oregon, 200 acres, for $7 million. Now, just replace that location with this new location:
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Dear MacKenzie Scott-Tuttle:
RE: Satellites of Tierra Firma – Some Look to Mars and the Moon, We Look to Soil Here
& Medicine Wheel of Healing, Growing, Learning, Living
People and land need healing which is all inclusive – holistic.
Reverence is an emotion that we can nurture in our very young children, respect is an attitude that we instill in our children as they become school-agers, and responsibility is an act that we inspire in our children as they grow through the middle years and become adolescents.
— Zoe Weil, p. 42, Above All Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times
Oh, the naysayers tell me and my cohorts to not even try to break into the foundation you run, that this concept of having Mackenzie Scott Tuttle even interested in becoming a placeholder for an idea, and for this land that a group of visionaries see as an incubation collective space for dreams to become reality.
We place our hopes in your ability to read on and see the vision and plans driving this solicitation, this ask. And it is a big ask.
This is figuratively and literally putting the cart before the horse. Here we have 200 acres, and the vision is retrofitting this center that is already there, Ananda, into a truly holistic healing center, youth run, for a seven generations resiliency and look forward ethos of learning to steward the land, learning to grow the land, toward biodynamic farming, all mixed in with intergenerational wisdom growing.
We are seeing this, as stated above, as a medicine wheel. A circle of integrative thinking, education, experimentation and overlapping visions of bringing stakeholders from around the Pacific Northwest (and world) into this safe harbor. There are already facilities on this property as you can see from the real estate prospectus. There are 120 rooms in a great building. There are outbuildings, a gymnasium, barns, and spring water.
It is unfortunately up for sale, and the danger there is a developer with a keen eye to massive profits and turning a spiritual and secular place of great healing and medicine wheel potential into “dream homes” for the rich.
Good land turned into a gated community? We are asking your philanthropy to take a deep dive into helping put this property on hold from those nefarious intentions and allow our group to develop this circle of healing – education across disciplines, elder type academy mixed with youth directed programs; farming; food production; micro-home building and construction facility; trauma informed healing.
Actually, more. Think of this as a community of communities.
Young People Need Hope, a Place (many places) and Leadership and Development
So many young people are done with Industrial and Techno Capitalism. They know deep down there is more to a scoop of soil than a billion bacteria, and they want to be part of healing communities.
We are proposing the Foundation you have set up invest in this property, as a placeholder for our development plan – actually it is an anti-developer plan. This property will be scarfed up for a steal by land and housing developers who want McMansions out here in this incredible eco-scape. Just what we do not need in the outlying areas of Portland. Or in so many other locations across this country.
We are a small group ready to do what we can to get food growers and producers at the table to invest in intellectual and sweat and tears capital to make this 200 acres work as a living community of new farmers, people living and learning on the property, incubating ideas for, we hope, to include a micro-home building project, crops, vineyards, learning centers for farming and preserving, marketing and engaging in food healing.
We come at this with decades around food systems, learning from Via Campesina/o or Marion Nestle, Alice Waters, Winona LaDuke, Rachel Carson. We believe in biomimicry, that is, learning how nature settles scores, survives and thrives. We come at this as deeply concerned about ecological footprints, life cycle analyses, the disposable culture and the planned and marketed obsolescence.
We are also coming at this as educators – earth teachers, who know classrooms in prison like settings, with rows of desks, do not engender creative and solutionaries– young people ready to go into the world, even a small community, with engaged, creative and positive ways to deal with climate chaos and the impending shattering of safety nets, including biological and earth systems “nets” and “webs.”
This property is unique, as all of our earth is. This is firstly Kalapua land, first, and that is the Grande Ronde and Siletz, as well as the Atfalsti, too. We call it Gatson, near Hillsboro, Oregon, but the land is the essence of the spirit givers of this continent before “discovery.”
Rich, in the wine country of the new people to this region, this land is about applying our ethos and yours, Ms. Scott-Tuttle, toward a real healing, a real stewardship and real intergeneration ethos around carrying the wisdom of tribes and growers and educators to the youth. We believe women are at the center of many of the themes already listed – farming, educating, healing, human stewardship.
Think of this project as the cart before the horse because the old system, the horse, was always the money, the source of power, and with power comes strings attached. The people involved in this project are looking to have a multistoried community of farmers, learners, youth learning trades and people skills, as well as elders, both Native and new arrivals, to understand that a farm is more than that, as well as a vineyard is more than the sum of the grapes. It is about a reclaiming of the sacred – soil, air, photosynthesis in a truly sustainable fashion.
The only “green washing” we can imagine this project will carry forth is the washing of the greens, the other harvests, in tubs of clear spring water.
Some of us on this project have traveled to other parts of this continent, and spent time with coffee growers and understand that shade grown coffee and beyond fair trade are the only elements to a truly fair and equitable system. Train the people of the land, who are the true stewards, to not only grow, but to roast and market the bounty. Grow the community with water projects, irrigation, schools, and globalized sharing of people, visitors.
This project needs a placeholder, to keep the land out of the insane real estate market. We will do the rest, we solutionaries. There are so many growers and investment angels who want to be part of the Seventh Generation solution.
Clearly, the lessons for people to be in this 200 acre community, farm-soil-healing satellite, are lessons you, Ms. Scott-Tuttle, the fiction writer, know, which you capture deftly with Luther Albright. The world for young people in the Pacific Northwest is that crumbling home and crumbling dam of Albright. The healing we need is more than the structures and infrastructure. It is inside, at the heart of the soul of imagination. Some of us on this project are soliciting from your charity a placeholder purchase of the property are tied to the arts, believing STEAM is the only way forward, and that S.T.E.M. is lifeless and dangerous without the A – arts. We believe the true voice of people are those who believe in asking “what should we do” rather than what is currently on superchargers – “What Can We Do?”
We realize that for many young people, politics have failed them. Many youth I speak with and work with, believe this country is in the midst of an empire of chaos in steep decay. Alternatives to the decay is building communities that would fit the model here on 200 acres – agroecological farming; nutritional centered living; housing; long-term care assistance; youth directed entrepreneur projects; bringing in local and state businesses leaders to be part of a design from the grassroots up.
The catch for most of the youth we have engaged is — to paraphrase and level a composite point, “We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.” This simple statement is packed full of context and frightening reality for millions of students and adults who feel disconnected and neutered by both government agencies and corporate policies.
First, who wants to be “ruled” by anyone? That we have this class system of elite, middle managers, the elite’s high ranking servicers, and then, the rest of the citizens, the so-called 80 percent who have captured less than the overall 10 percent of “wealth” in this country. The very idea of an elite out of touch, or completely out of touch speaks to an ignorance that is dangerous to the world, to the 80 percent, and also speaks to a possible planned ignorance. That we have millions of amazing people, to include nonprofits, community-led organizations, educational institutions, journalists, and others, who can speak to what those “travails” are, and yet, the elites failing to grasp those challenges, or failing to even acknowledge them, this is what many believe is the decay of this society.
This may not sit well with you or your philanthropy, but we as a group have dozens of years experience working with K12, higher ed, farming groups, social services/mutual aid movements, and have systems thinking in our backgrounds, and we underscore youth and community-driven projects and designs. This medicine wheel/circle land trust we are asking you to consider with a follow up meeting, well, this is the only way to a model-driven set of safety nets to move into some challenging times for this Empire in a world that is no longer USA centric.
We are solutionaries, that is, we look for solutions by taking apart problems and then applying holism and deep experimentation in design, but using tried and proven systems that do work.
Healthy food, healthy relationships to culture, people, nature, healthy work, worthy work, with an eye always on the arts. Just as a farming and tiny home community, where biodynamic farming and food preserving and from nail to roof to complete tiny home design are part and parcel the key elements for this community to thrive under, well, there are no better classrooms and transferable skills.
Some of us have seen youth and adults learn the crafts needed to design, plan buildings, and market tiny homes that would be used to seed communities that are, again, centered around farming, centered around healing, centered around Native American healing, and local community values. A young woman who finishes the hands-on learning of building a tiny home – with windows, skylights, plumbing, furnishings, electricity ready, all of that which a home entails – is a remarkable, valuable person. All those skills, again, like a medicine wheel, teach deeper lessons, and transferable skills.
This is what this property would also “house.”
All Tied Together – School, Outdoors, People, Action, Solving Food Insecurity and Housing
The should is an educational-farming-entrepreneur-solutions incubator on these 200 acres. Proving that this could be one of a thousand across the land. There are literally thousands of similar properties around the US, within their own cultural-community-ecological-historical milieus, but again, this project is one that Luther Albright would have thrived inside as a “New Engineer for Growing Communities,” as opposed to river-killing dam builder.
Our earthquake is here now, with all measure of tremors and aftershocks — that is the climate chaos, wildfires, food insecurity, and alas, the New/New Gilded age of deep inequities that are criminal, as you well know, Ms. Scott Tuttle.
Here, the cart (before the horse): this amazing collective piece of land and buildings with a multiversity of spiritual under girders . The horses are ready, but they need the cart, the home, the fabric of incubation. Those stallions and mares are engaged, ready, who are willing to take a leap of faith here and risk being outside the common paradigm of predatory and consumer-driven capitalism that has put many millions in a highly precarious position.
It’s amazing, the current system of philanthropy which forces more and more people to beg for less and less diverse money for fewer and fewer truly innovative ideas. Funding a project like this is a legacy ad-venture, the exact formula we need (scaled up to a 1,000 different locales) to break the chains of Disaster and Predatory Capitalism. We need that “capital,” the cart, to help those stallions and mares to break for the field of ideas and fresh streams of praxis.
There are any number of ideas for sustainability communities. Co-ops, growers groups, or mixed communities for young and old to exchange knowledge, capacity, growth, sweat equity — called intergenerational living. This is about a pretty inventive suite of concepts and practices:
learning spaces, inside and outside
buildings to develop micro home (unique, easily packaged and ready to put together) manufacturing and R & D
food systems – farming of sustainable food, herbs and those vines
husbandry
learning food systems, from farm to plate
ceramics, painting, music, dance, theater and writing center
speakers’ bureau
farmers, restaurateurs and harvesters with a stake in the community
healing center
Youth directed outdoor education and experiences
sustainability practicums for students
low income micro home housing
day care center, early learning center
How does this make any sense to a billionaire, who has devoted her life to “giving away” half of her wealth in her lifetime? Well, we see this project – this land-property – as a legacy for many of the avocations and interests (passions) you have articulated over the years. Your vision and commitment to education and women-centered projects are admirable. This is one of those projects.
There is that emotional and sappy Movie, Field of Dreams, and the statement – “if you build it, they will come.” We have found that over the years teaching in many places – Seattle, Spokane, Portland, El Paso, Auburn, Mexico – that young people and nontraditional students want mentoring, leadership and the tools to be mentors and leaders. They need the cart before the horse can herald in the new ideas, and the new way to a better future. If the classroom and master facilitator allows for open growth, unique student-led ideas and work, well, that person has BUILT the field of dreams from which to grow.
There are so many potentials with this project, and it starts with the land, holding it as a Scott-Tuttle placeholder. From an investment point of view, as long as you have people wrangling other people and professionals to get this satellite of sanity, the medicine wheel with many spokes radiating out and inward, the property increases in monetary value. Land is sacred, but just as sacred are the ideas and the potential that land might germinate and grow. It is the reality of our country – too few control too much. We see it in the infamous “Complex” – not just military, but, Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Media, Big Business, Big Education, Big Medicine, as well as private prisons, for profit social services, AI , and Big Tech, so called Surveillance Capitalism. Who in the 80 percent has the funds to purchase a $7 million project?
Big ideas like this cooperative land medicine wheel (a first of many satellites) might be common, but the web of supportive and cohesive things tied to this property is unusual, to say the least. With the failing of small businesses throughout the area, with the food insecurity for women, children and families, with the housing insecurity, added to debt insecurity — with all those insecurities young and old face, this project could be the light at the end of many tunnels. We have connections to Oregon Tilth and Latinx Farmers, and large biodynamic vineyards. We have connections to women’s veteran groups, to aging in place experts. We have connections to trauma healers and growers and interested folk who know construction and design. Additionally, the Pacific Northwest, from Puget Sound to Gold Beach, OR, is full of innovators, and those include the dozens of colleges and universities just in these two states – Oregon and Washington. We intend to trawl for investors – farms, food purveyors, wineries, restaurants, schools and various college programmers – to put into this project. A soil plot to test perennial wheat, a al the Land Institute, to Amory Lovins, Novella Carpenter, and so many more, finding a place of integrated living, ag, permaculture and ever-evolving cultural understanding of the finite planet we are on.
We are hopeful, even under the current Sixth Extinction.
It is telling, this entomologist and educator’s perspective after three decades of teaching:
Diana Six, an entomologist for 30 years who teaches at the University of Montana, took her students to Glacier National Park on a field trip and reported the following:
Life doesn’t just deal with this. When I went up Glacier with my students a few weeks ago, the flowers were curling up. At some of the lower elevations, glacier lilies were shriveled, lupins didn’t even open. The flowers should extend for another three weeks and they’re already gone. Any insects or birds that depend upon them, like bees or hummingbirds, are in trouble, their food is gone. Bird populations have just baked… People seem to think of extinctions as some silent, painless statistic. It’s not. You look at birds that can no longer find fish because they’ve moved too far off shore. They’re emaciated; they’re starving to death. We are at the point that there’s nothing untouched.
How contradictory and illustrative that this student experience took place in a “protected national park.”
Referencing how climate change impacts life, Diana said:
Somewhere along the way, I had gone from being an ecologist to a coroner. I am no longer documenting life. I’m describing loss, decline, death.
We are hopeful that our youth can document life on this Medicine Wheel Land Satellite, and instead of describing “loss, decline, death,” this one satellite can help individuals to describe resurgence, restoration, holism, and growth. A model, like the one we propose, could be the incubator and inspiration for other similar projects throughout the land. So many empty buildings, so many abandoned farms, so much good land about to be grabbed up by McMansion developers, or those who have no vision toward a resilient and communitarian existence.
We are thinking of a medicine wheel since so many people can utilize the Farm, from horse therapists, to gardening as trauma healers; from alternative medicine experts, to restaurants with a connection to growers. This is Terra Firma Robusta, for sure, with so much potential to integrate a suite of smart, worldly, localized and educational programs, permanent, long-term, and short in duration. This would be the linchpin of inspiration, an incubator for similar projects, and we’d make sure that the Philanthropy you head up would be in some form of limelight – imagine, a billionaire placing a property with a deep spiritual history into a land trust of perpetuity. I know another billionaire has purchased farmland and is now the largest farm land holder in the US, but this one here we propose would fit an entirely different model, having nothing to do with industrial farming, genetic engineering and monocultures. Like all good societies, the cornucopia of life and backgrounds and people and land is what makes them dynamic, healthy and resilient, as well as fair.
We propose a grand idea, but we need that field of dreams, that field, that farm, before we can engage a hundred people to be part of this medicine wheel of land healing and hope.
Please let our team discuss this further. Truly, we have both the passion and persistence to get this Medicine Wheel of Healing Farm Community to an unimaginably vibrant level. Will you be part of our field of dreams?
Sincerely,
Paul Haeder
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Here it is, yet more second, third and fourth homesteads for the stars, up for sale!
A therapy pool and then a sweat lodge somewhere on the property? Think big, man.
Get garbage warriors out there, man:
Here’s the photo layout for this place: on a website called, Mansion Global.
Imagine, the Rich and Famous, a site (there are hundreds) to sell mansions, castles, private jets, yachts, and more.
Getting access to MacKenzie or Duffy or any of these star chamber superstars is one issue, but then getting through the red tape, the endless litigation, all the NIMBY retrogrades complaining, and really, getting people to sign onto a community-centered project, one where a lot of sweat equity is expelled, it is so so tough in predatory, dog-eat-dog capitalism. Getting the project off the ground, and getting the resources to keep it sustainable, well, that is the $1 Billion Question.
We are scattered, atomized, factionalized, silo-centric, contrarian. Hyper competitive, dog-eat-dog, and letting the rich and the connected and the bureaucracies of bad government run things, most people have no center, no ability to move along great ideas and projects.
This is primo property for any multilayered approach to trauma healing, getting young and old to do something as in a going concern tied to making tiny home kits, growing organic food, etc.
As they purchased adjacent properties over the years, they acquired eight more houses and several pastures that are rented out to local ranchers. One of the homes was demolished, six are rented to tenants, and one is used as the ranch manager’s house, according to Mr. Duffy.
“We became a working ranch but not with our own animals,” he said. “It added the most beautiful, bucolic sense of the place.”
A homestead that dates back over 100 years still sits at the entrance to the property, he said. In it he found an old stove, which he restored and put in the main house. But the majority of the roughly 390 acres remains wilderness. The property now has approximately 2 miles of river frontage, according to Mr. DeVries.
These villages or centers are easy to build, in the ten or twenty houses clusters, or bigger. But imagine, on land, growing food, working in soil, campfires at night.
Again, not just chronically homeless, but people who are about to be homeless. Imagine an amazing community, a pop-up village, a sort of “charter town,” without the negative implications of “charter anything” involved. For every 100 households of renters in the United States that earn “extremely low income” (30 percent of the median or less), there are only 30 affordable apartments available, according to a 2013 report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition. It is getting worse, and people are burned out on capitalism. Easily designed, that mock up below. Imagine that as one of several nodes on the Duffy Property.
Efforts to break through the red tape and raise money to house the homeless almost always pay off for a community. Even the most expensive tiny-house projects—such as a new, ambitious $6-million campaign to build a 200-person tiny-house park this year in Austin, Texas—can’t rival the cost of homelessness to taxpayers, which was more than $10 million per year in Austin, for example, as YES! reported in December 2013.
“Chronically homeless people—people who have disabilities and are homeless for long periods of time—can be very expensive to systems of public care,” explains Roman. In 2007, the National Alliance to End Homelessness compiled three studies showing that it costs the same or less money to provide permanent housing as it does to allow people to remain homeless. In Denver, Colo., a housing program for the homeless reduced the costs of public services (including medical services, temporary shelter, and costs associated with arrests and incarceration) by an estimated $15,773 per person per year, saving taxpayers thousands of dollars.
Here, just one organization:
In a wooded area behind Ithaca’s commercial strip, there is a location known as “the jungle.” Here, individuals experiencing homelessness gather and make what home they can. Second Wind’s journey began when our founder, Carmen Guidi, started to build relationships with the residents, bringing pizza and listening to their stories. It was when one of his new friends, who had been asking for help, committed suicide that Carmen knew he needed to do more. Acting as an advocate, Carmen was able to find housing for all but nine men.
With his own money, Carmen purchased campers to provide shelter for the men who were still in The Jungle come winter. He placed these on his land and paid for the utilities, but it became clear that living in campers in the winter was still uncomfortable and very expensive. Through a process of collaboration, Second Wind evolved from campers to cottages and became an official 501(c)(3). Programs have expanded to include a house for women and a formalized Homeless Crisis Alleviation team. In 2020 the “cottages” was dropped from our DBA to better represent all that Second Wind does. Each of the projects we manage is further described on their own pages under the “About Us” tab.
Second Wind’s vision is to house and walk with people towards restored lives. To this end, SW seeks to improve the relationships with self, family, and the larger community. Accomplished by our mission to
Provide housing, support, and encouragement to homeless and at-risk people in our community.
Mentor residents in life skills needed to reintegrate into society and, when possible, family life.
Practice living as good neighbors by building relationships amongst residents and the surrounding community.
Sustain relationships and support residents who have moved on from Second Wind.
Future projects include an on-site community center, a multi-unit house for women, and a multi-bay work garage.
Here, a higher end way to age and die in place.
Even some churches are attempting to get into the act!
Churches across the US are building tiny houses on spare land to accommodate homeless people, The Associated Press reported.
A number of faith leaders are working with nonprofits and affordable housing organizations to create the micro homes. They typically have a single bedroom and a small kitchen area and are being built on vacant land belonging to churches.
Tiny homes are becoming an increasingly popular solution to help tackle the homelessness crisis. More than half a million people were homeless in the US in 2020, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness’ most recent report, and 70% of those were individuals. (source)
Of course, that was 2020, and now we see Europe in the sewer for what has been happening with the U$A dictating how EuroTrashLandia will slide into more and more recession, joblessness, and homelessness. Finland ends homelessness and provides shelter for all in need
Yes, adults, seniors, so to speak, are in very precarious positions:
Over the years, the number of homeless seniors aged 65 years and older in the U.S. has been increasing. Homelessness among older people aged 50-60 years is also increasing. Not all seniors have enough income and money saved to pay for a safe and stable place to live and other necessities such as food, utilities, and medication.
Homeless elders can face many challenges—especially health issues. Many don’t have enough money or insurance coverage to go to the doctor and get treatment. Some don’t trust health care and social services providers. Accessing public assistance programs can also be daunting to homeless elders. Some get discouraged by application processes, have a hard time getting to places to receive care and services, and refuse help.
The key to stable housing for older people and seniors is preventing eviction. State and local departments of social services often help with housing emergencies for the elderly and by providing housing for low income seniors. In many communities, religious organizations help homeless senior citizens by providing emergency housing assistance, case management, and money management services to maintain housing and prevent homelessness.
And,
In May of 1990, the Citizens Committee for the Homeless, a Santa Cruz County nonprofit, began a new project by opening the gates of an organic garden on Pelton Avenue.
The Homeless Garden Project would provide job training and meaningful work in a therapeutic environment. The Homeless Garden Project began as a place to provide sanctuary, refuge, and meaningful work within the healing space of the organic farm. Blossoming over time and furthering the project’s benefits, the farm harvests have provided an opportunity to support our vision and community through our CSA program, farm stand, and crafts, which are sold at our local Santa Cruz stores and on-line.
We are genuinely humbled by the profound transformations our trainees make in our program, and the generous support provided by our community. Our purpose-driven nonprofit has proven to be a benefit to our neighbors in need, our community, and our environment. We couldn’t have done this without the continual generosity and support of our donors, volunteers, and CSA members. We are so grateful for each one of you.
• Outcomes from the SCO meeting
• Challenges for China’s “sandwich generation”
• China releases a report on food and nutrition
• Archaeological work on ancient Chinese civilization
Those who say Congress is too corrupt to create a publicly funded system of universal health care are likely to be in for a surprise. Recent developments suggest that Americans may see Medicare for all within the next decade. However, since our system of privately funded elections inevitably leads to Congress putting profits over people, this is not likely to be a good thing.
The death spiral of insurance costs
Some advocates of a publicly funded universal health care system have predicted that its creation is inevitable because of the “death spiral” of insurance costs. This term refers to the fact that as costs of insurance rise, fewer people can afford it, leading to a new round of rising premiums and out-of-pocket costs. If this cycle were allowed to continue indefinitely, it would be only a matter of time before the medical insurance industry priced its product out of existence.
In a rational world, this simple fact would lead Congress to do what every other industrialized nation has done; create a publicly funded system of universal health care either through a government-run system such as Medicare for All, or through a tightly regulated system of non-profit insurers that offer a defined benefit package specified by the government, as in Germany. Of course, politics in the US is rational only in the sense that it follows the logic of profits over people. The desires of the donor class come first, and the corporations of the Medical-Industrial Complex have lots of money to give.
But if the insurance industry seems destined to price itself out of existence, how is Congress going to save its deep-pocketed friends?
The Affordable Care Act is a bailout for a failing insurance industry
Obamacare increased coverage primarily through 1) subsidizing private insurance purchased through the Exchange and 2) covering most of the costs of a huge expansion of Medicaid. Because most of the money didn’t come from employer profits or wages of average workers, this massive taxpayer subsidy of a private industry served to partially mask the fact that insurance costs are still exploding. Of course, as anyone with private insurance knows, it didn’t eliminate medical cost inflation. It just alleviated it enough to make people who have insurance complacent enough to not protest.
Since the Affordable Care Act went into effect, many of its inadequacies have become obvious to even its most ardent supporters. As a result, progressives have built substantial support for a publicly financed system of universal health care in the last decade. Unfortunately, Wall Street has made enormous progress toward privatizing Medicare at the same time. If they succeed, we may end up with a tremendously expensive form of Medicare for All that has all the defects of private insurance. These include reduced provider choice, inflated billing, and inappropriate denials of care and payments that lead to delays in treatment that have been associated with increased morbidity and mortality.
Privatized Medicare is a blatant giveaway to the medical insurance industry
During the Trump Administration, the insurance industry-controlled Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation developed the Medicare Direct Contracting program. This was a plan to give exorbitant sums to corporations to pay bills from doctors and hospitals, which traditional (government-run) Medicare does now with a 2% overhead. These contractors, the majority of which are investor-owned, are given a lump sum of money to cover medical bills and allowed to keep up to 40% as profit and overhead. That’s why private equity funds are salivating to get at those profits by acquiring contracts and subbing out the work. It’s a straight-up wholesale transfer of tax money to the pockets of the wealthy, with the same perverse incentives as Medicare Advantage to maximize profits by denying care.
But it gets worse. The pool of money contractors are given to pay providers is inflated by a method that essentially constitutes fraud. Called up-billing, it’s a trick developed by Medicare Advantage insurers to artificially elevate the acuity of their covered members. Under Medicare guidelines, this allows them to pay medical providers more for the same services. Since total payments determine the size of the pool of money from which they can extract their 40%, the more they pay out, the more they make.
According to a recent report, this scam cost US taxpayers over $12 billion in 2020 alone in excess payments to insurers offering Medicare Advantage. Since MA covers only about 40% of the Medicare population and is limited to taking 15% in overhead and profits, the amount that taxpayers would be forced to fork over to Wall Street if all Medicare beneficiaries are transferred to the direct contracting program is staggering. The plan is for this to happen by 2030. That’s what makes addressing this problem so urgent.
Loss of choice under the direct contracting plan
One of the most outrageous provisions of the direct contracting scheme is that seniors and the disabled who have chosen to enroll in traditional Medicare are being forced into direct contracting entity without their informed consent. If they have seen any primary care provider in the previous two years who currently works for a direct contracting entity, they are automatically transferred.
Most never realize this because the notifications are so difficult to understand. Even if you realize that your Medicare claims will now be handled by a for-profit corporation, your only way out is to switch doctors. Since a rapidly increasing majority of doctors now work for hospitals or corporations, it is going to become increasingly difficult to do so. In addition, independent medical providers receive financial incentives to participate. This is how CMS plans to meet its goal of forcing every beneficiary into one of these plans by 2030.
Only Biden can prevent this scheme from completely privatizing Medicare
The bottom line is this: Compared to Medicare Advantage insurers, these new contractors are able to increase the amount they skim off what taxpayers give them from 15% to 40% of an inflated pool of funds for doing a job that traditional Medicare does with 2% of payments based solely on services provided. No wonder almost all major insurers currently offering Medicare Advantage have applied to become contractors. Since the goal is 100% enrollment of Medicare patients, it’s clear that the rest will soon follow.
Any program so profitable for Wall Street is sure to achieve bipartisan support, especially since this is the only way for the medical insurance industry to avoid the death spiral of insurance costs. That’s why Biden has embraced it with all the enthusiasm of any other politician in the pockets of Wall Street investors. His response to a campaign led by Physicians for a National Health Program was to change the name of the program from Medicare Direct Contracting to ACO-REACH, while keeping all the essential provisions of the original version intact.
Biden will ultimately be responsible for the privatization of Medicare if we can’t get him to kill ACO-REACH, because the bill that created Obamacare barred Congress from challenging programs created by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. (While the Supreme Court could rule that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation lacks the power to create such a sweeping program without congressional approval, as it stripped the EPA of the power to regulate carbon emissions, the corporatist-dominated Court is, of course, unlikely to challenge a program that serves Wall Street interests).
Since this scheme has been promoted by both Republican and Democratic administrations, the only way to stop it is to put pressure on members of Congress to speak out publicly against the program. We have to kill this thing by dragging it out into the sunlight, where taxpayers can see it and become appropriately outraged. If Congress can’t stop the program by direct action, they can certainly bring pressure to bear on Biden to do so.
This may be one issue where public outrage will make a difference
It may seem that trying to whip up outrage over government corruption is a quaint idea, but recent events have made this a prime time to make this a major issue. Biden, who has a long history of favoring Social Security privatization, recently received a great deal of negative attention for nominating a long-time champion of privatization to a position on the Social Security Advisory Board. Public awareness of the fact that he is promoting privatization of both programs may be more effective at stoking public anger than would either issue by itself. If you doubt it, consider the huge hit in popularity that George Bush took when he tried to privatize Social Security in 2005.
It’s time to go out on the street and raise some hell. Call, write, and visit your members of Congress. Question them at appearances during the August recess. Write to your local paper. We have to apply maximum pressure on them to lean on Biden if we want to stop this travesty and save any chance of creating a publicly funded system of universal health care that will put people over profit.
Medicare has been a highly successful, popular and treasured government program that provides health care for seniors, for those with disabilities and for those with end-stage renal disease. The Traditional Medicare (TM) approach spends 98% of its funds on health care and only 2% on administration. A key part of TM is that beneficiaries don’t have to jump through all the hoops that the private health insurance industry often requires of its enrollees who are trying to obtain care.
Private health care insurance has already made inroads into the Medicare program through the Medicare Advantage (MA) approach. MA is primarily implemented through health maintenance organizations and preferred provider organizations. The opportunity for profits is clear as the MA industry is only required to spend 85% of the Medicare funds it receives on health care.
Unfortunately, additional plans are underway to turn Medicare into a cash cow for Wall Street and the private health insurance industry to the detriment of the almost 64 million Medicare enrollees and the rest of the US population.
The CMMI
How is this happening? Well, the 2010 Affordable Care Act established the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI). This Center’s claimed goal was identifying “ways to improve healthcare quality and reduce costs in the Medicare, Medicaid, and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) programs.”
Incredibly, this Innovation Center was granted the authority to test alternative payment and service delivery models on a national scale without Congressional approval. Being able to avoid Congressional politics may make some sense as long as the public’s health isn’t harmed and the public’s money is protected.
CMMI’s Direct Contacting model
Initially the CMMI focused on relatively small pilot projects. However, under former President Trump’s appointees, the CMMI extended the scope of the pilot project idea and focused on greatly expanding the reach of a direct contracting entities (DCEs) model. According to Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), these DCEs are essentially third-party middlemen that receive a capitated monthly payment for covering some defined portion of enrollees’ medical expenses. Shockingly, estimates are that the DCEs may keep up to 40% of the monthly payment as overhead and profit. We have had a long and painful experience with health insurance companies; i.e., middlemen, and the profit-based incentive for denying or delaying care. Unfortunately, this terrible experience is still ongoing.
It appears that this horribly problematic and complicated DCE approach makes gaming the system attractive and easy to do. This gaming increases the cost to Medicare while also increasing the profits for investors and the participating private insurance companies. Making matters far worse, the goal seems to be to bring all of Medicare enrollees, with or without their knowledge or approval, into this system by 2030. In effect, if this goal is achieved, this treasured public program will be privatized at the expense of the public’s health and its pocketbook.
The Biden Administration and DCEs
Disappointingly, the Biden administration didn’t end the implementation of the Trump administration’s DCE model. Instead, it made some minor changes and also changed the program’s name to REACH (Realizing Equity, Access and Community Health). Fortunately, in January 2022, 54 members of Congress signed onto a letter to Xavier Becerra, Secretary of Health and Human Services, essentially calling for an end to the DCE program. Representatives Joe Neguse and Jason Crow of Colorado were among the signers and they deserve our thanks and support.
What you can do
We need to pressure the rest of the Colorado delegation to join the effort to stop the REACH program. Unless there is huge public opposition and increased pressure on Congress and the White House to this planned privatization of Medicare, it will happen. Please call your member of Congress at (202) 224-3121 and, as suggested by PNHP, request they: 1) bring this proposed REACH to the light of day by holding hearings on it; 2) call on Health and Human Services Secretary Becerra to end the REACH program; and 3) establish Congressional oversight of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation.
We see the hospital as a factory and our hospitalist group as an assembly line that is in the business of manufacturing perfect discharges.”1 These words are not hyperbole. They are the exact words written by David J. Yu, MD, MBA, Medicare & DSNP Medical Director, Presbyterian Health Plan, Albuquerque NM. Yu cites the work of management guru W. Edwards Deming as a major authority for this approach to patient care. Deming’s business principles have been given much of the credit for Japan’s industrial revival after World War Two…Theory is not practice. Ever since management and business school “experts” took charge of health care in the 1970s and 1980s not only have medical costs not decreased they have skyrocketed. There was no health care crisis in the 1970s and 1980s.2 It was manufactured by the medical industrial complex composed of hospitals, insurance companies and drug companies for their own financial gain.
I recently spent 12 days in a large hospital in the state of Virginia and 16 days in a rehabilitation center in the same state. I had contracted COVID and went to the emergency room on July 3 at the suggestion of a doctor at a walk-in clinic. An EKG screening showed that I had atrial fibrillation and I was admitted to the hospital for observation and treatment. Another illness (colon cancer) reared its head and I ultimately went into hypovolemic shock and required emergency surgery to remove a tumor, clean up infected lymph nodes,and generally repair my insides. I now have colon cancer with liver metastasis in addition to prostate cancer with metastasis which has traveled to portions of my skeletal system.
You might say I’ve “doubled my pleasure and doubled my fun.” Hey! You have to have a sense of humor about these matters!
The hospital care system is, in fact, an industrial, assembly line operation. Because of this, doctors and nurses do not have time to develop relationships or spend a lot of time with patients. Doctors must make rounds that allow maybe 5-10 minutes of time with the patient. Floor nurses are overworked having to respond to calls from different patients and they must prioritize those calls based on critical need. Wait times for assistance from a nurse can feel like a long time when you are sick.
The time that the health professional has with the patient, and the time spent communicating with the next health professional in the chain (often a significant part of the overall cost of a distinct episode of care) is now rationed to that which is deemed essential. This hinders professionals’ ability to establish a significant therapeutic relationship with the patient. Concerns that may arise with the patient that are not easily quantified, and consequently not documented, may also be lost.
The hospital system has become a depersonalized manufacturing process based on Total Quality Management (TQM), or some form of quality control, deriving from Toyota’s Lean Engineering or Just in Time (JIT) manufacturing popularized in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Health care these days is truly an industrial manufacturing process which is tied in many cases to Medicare requirements and billing. TQM/Quality Control Practices are supposed to “manufacture” increased customer/patient satisfaction but the hospital experience made me feel like I was little more than a damaged automobile traveling the assembly line and being worked on by different mechanics.
TQM is described as this:
Total quality management (TQM) is an administration attitude of uninterruptedly refining the quality of the goods/services/processes by concentrating on the customers’ (patients’) requirements and anticipations to augment consumer (patient) contentment stable performance. Successful TQM implementation leads to improved organizational performance success.
— Devika Kanade, Shailendrakumar Kale, “Significance of total quality management practices in improving quality of services delivered by medical and dental hospitals”, Journal of Dental and Medical Research, October, 2021.
If the goal is to improve the organization’s quality/patient manufacturing process, a baseline of measurements must be created. It is likely that unmeasurable metrics; for example, wellness, family access, intangible mental states are too nebulous to measure, as opposed to surgical procedures performed (every procedure aligns to a numerical code), exiting the patient in x amount of time from the hospital, recovering fees from the US government/patients, etc.
The continued equating of quantity with quality and the redesign of work processes leads to continued fragmentation of health care work, loss of autonomy for the health professions, and a potential increase in hospital misadventure. The very act of breaking up an episode of care into a number of steps that may, or may not, add value to the overall process allows for parts to become lost. Of particular concern is the appraising of value so that perceived non-valuable aspects of care can be discounted.
How can a healthcare system that views patients as pieces of a manufacturing process be personal or caring? It can’t. Doctors and nurses are not to blame. In TQM, Lean Engineering or JIT, time is of the essence in producing a product, or patient exit, before your competitors can. Hospitals are pushing the notion that they are more competitive than other health care systems nearby in the state of Virginia. How do you measure competitiveness: How many patients did you see today? How many calls did you make for patients “on the floor.” What was the amount of time you spent with the patient and how does that correlate to TQM? How many patients live or die? How many patients do you push out the door?
My Experience
It is likely that were it not for one of the many nurses badgering her colleagues and physicians, I would have bled out. Earlier, another nurse noticed my bleeding and suggested a colonoscopy which I initially refused but I ultimately relented which proved critical to my survival.
My blood pressure nearly hit the deck. As I was wheeled into surgery, I vaguely remember that the nurses in the operating room were incredibly coordinated in their individual tasks akin to a perfect offensive play in US football where all 11 players know their assignments and execute them to near perfection. I uttered something to the surgeon about sewing me up which he was able to honor. Then, the anesthesia took full hold and I was out in the darkness somewhere.
When I awoke I was in the intensive care unit (ICU) being looked after by the nurses. I had a device which allowed me to inject pain killers into my body every few minutes. The time I spent in the ICU was like being trapped n in dense fog bank with a face appearing out of the gloom every now and then. Ultimately, I was moved to a room where I could be safely isolated as I had COVID. The room seemed to me to be at the far end of the hospital. My family could not visit me or even look through plexiglass windows at me. The experience was terrible.
My primary physicians visited with me as much as they could and those visits were most welcomed. My prognosis is not good and so palliative care physicians came to visit and spoke with me about the limited options available to me.
As the hours dragged by, I began to feel like I was, indeed, on an assembly line.
The nurses and their assistants that came with my treatments all had specialties. For example, a different nurse each time would open the door and say, “I’m with Respiratory and I’ve come to give you your inhaler.” I would take one hit from it and then the nurse would lock it away and leave. At other times someone from Respiratory also would show up to give me a ten minute treatment with a nebulizer. Those treatments could take place at any time of day and night. I received nebulizer treatments sometimes at three o’clock in the morning after being awoken from a sound sleep.
On that note it was impossible to get a decent night’s sleep. Nurses would come into the room to administer medications seemingly every four hours. And then blood work was done sometimes three times a day to include the early morning AM hours.
Other nurses would take care of other matters such as changing sheets and bed pan issues. I was not presented with any physical therapy options to be able to get up and walk to the in-room bathroom which I really didn’t know was there.
And so I lay there in bed stewing, not watching the junk on television, with a dead cell phone and no options to get out, at least I thought. I did have an in-room phone which I could use to talk with my wife and son.
Is Anyone Out There?
Buzzers seemed to go off repeatedly and not be turned off for sometimes a half hour. And if you needed to call a nurse using a device akin to a remote that controlled the bed, call device and television, it would invariably take what seemed like an eternity for the nurse to arrive. I had little appetite and didn’t eat much during those twelve days but no one offered me any alternatives for nutrition.
Perhaps the saddest, and humorous, event happened when I received a Transesophageal echocardiogram (TEE), designed to check out the heart function. They put me to sleep, of course, and when I awoke I was alone in the procedure room. They had put me in a fetal position buttressing me with cushions and tie down straps so that I couldn’t really move. I figured it would be a matter of minutes before they came to get me but the “matter of minutes” turned into 20 minutes. I began to yell out, calmly, “Hello, hello, is anyone out there,” (borrowing from Pink Floyd). My shoulder began to cause me some pain and so I kept repeating my words but still, no one came. I could see people walking by so I figured they could hear me. Wrong. So I increased the decibel level until someone opened the door and asked, “What’s wrong?” I said my shoulder hurt and I’ve been stuck in here for 45 minutes with no clue as to what went on during the procedure. I received a sort of “whoops!” look and finally was brought back to my intolerable hospital room having been forgotten.
Escape!
I had no idea how long I would be stuck in the hospital but then on July 15 a nurse came in the room to remove my stitches. She said, “Did you know you are going to be released today to a rehabilitation facility?” I said I had not been told by any one of the news, which I viewed with caution. But I was excited to learn that I’d be off the assembly line. I was scheduled to leave at 4:30 PM that day but as that time rolled around I had not been cleaned up or changed into my street clothes. As the clock struck 5:00 PM, I heard a commotion outside the door. The medical transport driver was reading the nurses the riot act as he was on a tight schedule to pick up other patients. Two males nurses in shirts and ties rushed in and got me all set to get transferred to the rehab facility. Right up to the very end, I was forgotten, like a lost part, that fell off the assembly line.
The rehab facility was like heaven. I got full nights of sleep, physical therapy, decent food and very personalized care. I was up and walking within ten days and doing the little things (making the bed, brushing teeth, shaving, showering) that we all take for granted. My family and grandson were able to visit and it was just great! That went a long way to bolstering my recovery.
A friend from a family of doctors told me that: “It is not safe to get sick in America. It’s a crap shoot,” he said.
Another buddy commented that: “I’m not too high on the medical profession. It used to be a vocation but now it is just a job, all process oriented.”
COVID-19 mRNA vaccine BNT162b2, developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, points to a fast up-take of into human liver cells where BNT162b2 mRNA is reverse transcribed intracellularly into DNA in as fast as 6 h upon BNT162b2 exposure. PDF of study.
I feel fortunate to be reaching so many new people. Thank you. It inspires me to start revisiting articles I wrote before I started this Substack. For example, here are some edited excerpts from something I penned in April 2021.
On April 6, 2021, I got an email from the offices of AOC (she’s my congressperson) informing me that “those who lost loved ones to COVID-19 will be able to apply for retroactive reimbursements for burial costs.” A little further down in the email, something really caught my eye:
To apply for funeral reimbursement, you must provide “relevant documentation,” e.g. “a copy of the death certificate.” This certificate, we’re told, “must indicate the death ‘may have been caused by’ or ‘was likely a result of’ COVID-19 or COVID-19-like symptoms. Similar phrases that indicate a high likelihood of COVID-19 are also considered sufficient.”
I immediately hit “reply” to ask: If “phrases that indicate a high likelihood of COVID-19 are considered sufficient,” what do you think this says about the accuracy of the official death count?
I never heard back from AOC’s office.
At that point — 13 months into the “pandemic” and full swing into jab-mania — so much of the world had been conditioned to fear a virus based on the numbers: cases and deaths.
Those paying attention already knew that the testing process was (and still is) monumentally flawed. Literally, no one knows how many individuals actually “had” Covid. That number will never be accurately known and this should count as criminal negligence.
To add to the mix, in April 2021, we were being blatantly told that in order to be considered a “Covid death,” you only need to show something like “may have been caused by” or “was likely a result of.” Even “COVID-19-like symptoms,” they stated, are proof enough of Covid.
How many dozens of symptoms have been associated with Covid in the past 2.5 years?
Serious question: What isn’t a “COVID-19-like symptom”?
Sixteen months after I wrote about AOC’s email, the powers that shouldn’t be are hiding the vaccine adverse events, creating a monkeypox scare, and still diligently invested in playing the insane game of “pandemic.”
If you haven’t started questioning yet, what will it take?
If you have been questioning — whether since yesterday or since March 2020 — thank you. Please keep going, never comply, and do not stop spreading the word and leading by example.
In an appeal to the European Union, more than 180 scientists and doctors from 36 countries warn about the danger of 5G, which will lead to a massive increase in involuntary exposure to electromagnetic radiation. The scientists urge the EU to follow Resolution 1815 of the Council of Europe, asking for an independent task force to reassess the health effects. Link to the full-text PDF
The Horn of Africa (HoA) is once again being battered by climate change induced drought, with the UN report, over “20 million people, and at least 10 million children facing severe drought conditions.”
Desperately needed support from UN agencies (World Food Programme (WFP), UNHCR and UNICEF) is limited due to lack of donations from member states. WFP have been forced to halve food rations due to the “lowest levels of funding on record”. Leading to what UNICEF describes as a “humanitarian catastrophe……. Urgent aid is needed to prevent parts of the region sliding into famine.” The disruption caused to supply chains and food production by the war in Ukraine is adding to the crisis, dramatically increasing food prices and limiting availability.
The region’s agriculture has been decimated by year on year rising temperatures and decreasing rainfall. Food insecurity, in a region with some of the poorest people in the world, is intensifying with the threat of famine looming, and food prices have sky rocketed. Livestock have perished – in Ethiopia alone 2.1 million livestock have died and 22 million are at risk, emancipated with little or no milk production – the primary source of nutrition for young children.
Child malnutrition is increasing and huge numbers of people are being displaced. Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti and Eritrea are all impacted by the most severe drought in forty years.
The effect on rural communities, and children specifically, is devastating. UNICEF estimate 2 million children are in need of treatment for “severe acute malnutrition,” particularly in Ethiopia and in the arid lands of Northern Kenya and Somalia, where the drought is most severe.
As well as decimating food production, drought is intensifying the water crisis in the area – with, the UN say, 8.5 million people (including 4.2 million children) facing water shortages. In Ethiopia, where around 60 per cent of the population (roughly 70 million) do not have access to clean drinking water with or without a drought, the situation is dire. Streams, wells and ponds, that people living in remote areas rely on, are either drying up or are completely parched. Such sterile water sources become contaminated by animal and human waste, increasing the risk of water borne diseases, cholera and diarrhea, which are the leading causes of death among children under five in the country; cases of measles have also been increasing at alarming rates in Ethiopia and Somalia, resulting in some cases in deaths.
Desperate families are being driven to extreme measures to try to survive, with hundreds of thousands leaving their homes in search of food, water, fresh pasture for animals and assistance. This is creating and intensifying numerous issues: Access to health care, education and protection/reproductive services is made difficult, or impossible. Children are forced out of school – approximately 1.1 million; schools close (in a region overflowing with children where 15 million children are already not in school); girls and women are made more vulnerable to physical coercion, sexual/child labor and forced marriage; displacement of persons explodes. Already a massive problem throughout the region, specifically in Ethiopia, where, according to UNHCR (as of March 2022) “an estimated 5,582,000 persons” were internally displaced due to armed conflict and natural disasters.
“Natural” disaster no longer natural
As the world heats up due to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) pouring into the lower atmosphere, the inevitability of extreme weather patterns including drought increases.
Like forest fires, heat waves and monsoon rains, drought was historically regarded as a “natural disaster”, but the frequency and intensity of such events is no longer “natural” and must now be understood to be man-made. Far from being freak happenings, such catastrophic climate explosions are becoming commonplace, and despite producing virtually none of the poisons that are driving climate change, those most affected are the poorest people in the poorest countries or regions.
The seed of the deadly drought in the HoA was planted and fed by the behavior of people in the US, in Europe, Japan and other rich countries. It is the materialistic lifestyles of wealthy developed nations (and disproportionately the richest people within such countries), rooted in irresponsible consumerism (including diets centered around animal food produce), that has caused and is perpetuating the environmental crisis. But to their utter shame the governments of such nations refuse to honor their debt, their responsibility to clean up the mess. On the contrary, because economic health is dependent on rapacious consumption, they continue to promote modes of living that are deepening the crisis.
Commitments made 12 years ago in 2009 by rich nations to give 100 billion USD a year to developing countries are yet to be fulfilled. In 2019 a high of 79.6 billion USD was reached, 71% of which was in the form of loans. Loans – for some of the poorest nations in the world, to mitigate the impact of climate change that they haven’t caused; loans that enable donor nations political and economic influence, perpetuating post-colonial exploitation and control, and ensuring Sub-Saharan Africa remains impoverished, and, more or less enslaved.
Imperial powers have outsourced the most severe effects of climate change; they either refuse to act at all or offer limited support with strings to countries and regions most at risk. At the V20 Climate Vulnerable Finance Summit in July 2021, heads of state demanded that higher income nations do more to meet their promises and called for grants not loans. UN Secretary General, António Guterres said that in order to “rebuild trust, developed countries must clarify now how they will effectively deliver $100 billion in climate finance annually to the developing world, as was promised over a decade ago.” But four months later at COP 26 in Glasgow, where climate finance was a primary issue under consideration, once again the rich nations failed. Failed to honor their word, failed to act responsibly in the interests of poorer nations, failed to stand for the collective good and the health of the planet. Shameful, but predictable. Politicians cannot be and, in fact, are not trusted; national and international climate pledges should be legally binding and enforceable.
Climate change and the environmental emergency more broadly is a global crisis; as such, it requires a global approach. This has been said many times, and yet national self-interest and political weakness continue to dominate the policies and priorities of western governments/politicians. If this crisis, which is the greatest issue humanity has ever faced, is to be met, and healing is to begin in earnest, this narrow nationalistic approach must change. As with other major areas of concern – armed conflict, inequality, displacement of persons, poverty – united, coordinated global policies and a powerful United Nations (UN) are urgently needed, but the single most significant change that is required is a fundamental shift in attitudes; a move away from tribalism, competition and division to cooperation and unity. A recognition, not intellectually or theoretically, but actually, that humanity is one, that we form part of a collective life that is the planet.
As the UN has said the men women and children in the Horn of Africa whose lives are being ravaged by drought need “the world’s attention and action, now.” Sustained action rooted in the realization of our individual and collective environmental responsibility. This requires governments to honor commitments: the $100m billion mitigation fund (as grants not loans), and making up the cumulative shortfall; it means funding the UN properly so emergency humanitarian aid can be supplied to those currently affected by drought in the HoA; it means supporting countries most at risk of man-made climate change in drawing up plans and initiating short and long term projects to minimize where possible the social and economic impact of extreme weather events; and individually, it means living thoughtful, conscious lives, in which the effect on the natural world is at the forefront of daily decisions, including diet, shopping and travel. It is our world, the people displaced by drought in Ethiopia and Somalia are our brethren, and we are all responsible for them.
The single most irrigated crop in the United States is (drum roll, please) lawn.
Yep, 40 million acres of lawn exist across the Land of Denial — and Americans collectively spend about $40 billion on seed, sod, and chemicals each year.
And then there’s all that water. Lawns in America require nearly 9 billion gallons of (usually drinking-quality) water per day. Nearly a third of all residential water use in the U.S. goes toward what is euphemistically known as “landscaping.”
We have become a robotic nation of pawns with lawns.
As described by Ted Steinberg, author of American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn, when it comes to lawns, social and ecological factors often work in coordination.
“Perfection became a commodity of post-World War II prefabricated housing such as Levittown, NY, in the late 1940s,” writes Steinberg. “Mowing became a priority of the bylaws of such communities.”
Lawn mowers produce several types of pollutants, including ozone precursors, carbon dioxide, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (classified as probable carcinogens) — adding up to five percent of all air pollution. In fact, operating a typical gasoline mower produces as many polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons as driving a car 95 miles. However, some folks are legally required to maintain a lawn (more about that shortly).
Besides the air and noise pollution of mechanized mowers, there’s another form of toxicity directly related to America’s lawn addiction.
“Lawns use ten times as many chemicals per acre as industrial farmland,” writes Heather Coburn Flores, author of Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community. “These pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides run off into our groundwater and evaporate into our air, causing widespread pollution and global warming, and greatly increasing our risk of cancer, heart disease, and birth defects.”
“If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials,” wrote Rachel Carson six decades ago, “it is surely because our forefathers could conceive of no such problem.”
We now produce pesticides at a rate more than 13,000 times faster than we did when Carson wrote Silent Spring in 1962. The EPA considers 30 percent of all insecticides, 60 percent of all herbicides, and 90 percent of all fungicides to be carcinogenic, yet Americans spend about $9 billion on over 20,000 different pesticide products each and every year.
As mentioned above, maintaining a noxious and unproductive lawn isn’t just a simple case of one-size-fits-all conformity in the face of all logic and evidence; it’s often the law. Here are but two of countless examples of life in the Land of the Free:
Jim Ficken from Dunedin, Florida was out of town tending his late mother’s estate. Here’s what happened from there: “The handyman he hired to mow his lawn during his absence also died, and the grass exceeded the city’s 8-inch height restriction. Unknown to Finken, he was racking up fines of $500 per day.”
The fines reached $29,000 and the city has attempted to foreclose on his house. At the end of April 2021, a federal judge ruled that Finken must pay the fines, but he isn’t giving up and plans to appeal.
How about Joseph Prudente of Beacon Woods, Florida? He was sentenced to jail for failing to sod his lawn as required by the local homeowner covenants. Before you label Mr. Prudente a modern-day insurrectionist, take note that the reason he failed to live up to his suburban obligation was predictable: he couldn’t afford to replace his sprinklers when they broke.
“It’s a sad situation,” said Bob Ryan, Beacon Woods Homeowners Association board president. “But in the end, I have to say he brought it upon himself.”
I’m guessing Mr. Ryan has never heard of Food Not Lawns.
Imagine each house not with a lawn but instead with a small organic “Victory” garden from which the entire family is fed. Imagine those without a lawn joining their local community garden to re-connect and grow their own.
Be warned: Gardening is now being touted as the cause of all the “sudden deaths” since 2021. After all, what else could possibly be responsible for seemingly healthy people “suddenly” dropping dead?
The sterile lawn — complete with its requisite sprinkler, a cocktail of chemicals needed to “maintain” it, bug zapper, and “keep off the grass” sign — is an ideal symbol for America’s pathetic cookie-cutter culture.
Lawns, writes Ted Steinberg, are “an instrument of planned homogeneity.” He asks: “What better way to conform than to make your front yard look precisely like Mr. Smith’s next door?”
Fuck homogeneity and fuck conformity.
The powers that (shouldn’t) be are dedicated to controlling your mind, destroying your health, and enslaving/dehumanizing you. When will you have the courage to think your own thoughts and stand up to their illegitimate power?
This process goes further than just self-identifying as oppositional to the architects of a global nightmare. Instead, the truest form of rebellion is creation. In this particular example, it’s rejecting the lawn paradigm not because it makes you feel like a badass. But rather, do it because it is the future path you want to carve.
President Dwight Eisenhower gave his first major presidential speech, The Cross of Iron, on April 16, 1953. He laid out several important precepts guiding US conduct in world affairs as well pointing out the cost of military spending in very concrete terms. Eisenhower stated:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
In 1957, General Douglas MacArthur also warned about military spending when he said:
Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.
Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address warned about the military-industrial complex He said:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
The military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned about has certainly gained unwarranted influence. For many years, the military has received about half the discretionary budget at the expense of domestic programs and public well-being. The latest budget proposal shows Congress allocating about $840 billion for the military, an increase of around $40 billion over President Biden’s already huge increase. Note that the recent US military spending of $738 billion is more than the next nine leading military-spending nations combined, most of whom are US allies. A competitor, China, spends slightly more than 1/3 of the US $738 billion amount and Russia spends less than 9% of the US total.
A legitimate question is what have these huge expenditures done for our safety and well-being. Has the world become a safer place? Given the current situation with Russia over Ukraine and the possibility of a nuclear exchange being all too real, I’d answer no. Was this reality preventable? Certainly! The Minsk II Agreement was a path towards a diplomatic settlement brokered by Germany and France, and signed by Ukraine, the Ukrainian separatists and Russia. This agreement was also supported unanimously by the UN Security Council in 2015. However, the US did not push Ukraine to implement the terms of the agreement. Instead, the US provided weapons and more military training, and fighting continued for 8 years before Russia invaded.
Was this spending for our defense and security or for some other purpose? It is hard to accept the idea that, for example, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama and Iraq were such threats to our national security that they warranted our criminal attacks on them. In addition, how did the US-aided coups against democratically-elected governments in, for example, Iran, Guatemala, Chile and Ukraine make us more secure?
Unfortunately, it appears as if little has changed regarding the US approach to foreign policy and selling wars to the US public since Major General Smedley Butler explained things in his excellent 1935 book War is a Racket. This most highly decorated US Marine said:
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
Butler added: “Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the “war to end all wars.” This was the “war to make the world safe for democracy.” No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits.”
Has the US public been shortchanged by all this spending for making war? Our crumbling physical and social infrastructure, the lack of affordable housing, homelessness, the lack of mental health support for many, unaffordable health care for tens of millions, the high cost of college education and the lack of training support for skilled trade workers are examples that together indicate the sacrifice of public well-being and our real security for unnecessary and criminal war making. People in many other highly developed nations enjoy the rights specified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whereas many of these rights are not provided in the US. In addition, people of these other nations don’t worry about going bankrupt due to, for example, medical bills or the cost of education.
As the words of Eisenhower, MacArthur and Butler suggest, it’s past time to reconsider our nation’s priorities. It is time to focus on constructive projects instead of destructive ones. It is time to benefit public well-being instead of enriching the few. It is time to focus on cooperation instead of competition between nations if we are to ameliorate the impacts of climate change and other global problems. The National Priorities Project provides material useful for this reconsideration of priorities.
In May and June of 2022 two milestones were passed in the world’s battle with Covid and were widely noted in the press, one in the US and one in China. They invite a comparison between the two countries and their approach to combatting Covid-19.
The first milestone was passed on May 12 when the United States registered over 1 million total deaths (1,008,377 as of June 19, 2022, when this is written) due to Covid, the highest of any country in the world. Web MD expressed its sentiment in a piece headlined: “US Covid Deaths Hit 1 Million: ‘History Should Judge Us.’”
Second, on June 1, China emerged from its 60-day lockdown in Shanghai in response to an outbreak there, the most serious since the Wuhan outbreak at the onset of the pandemic. The total number of deaths in Mainland China since the beginning of the epidemic in January 2020 now stands at a total of 5226 as of June 19,2022.
To put that in perspective, that is 3042 deaths per million population in the US versus 3.7 deaths in China due to Covid. 3042 vs. 3.7! Had China followed the same course as the US, it would have experienced at least 4 million deaths. Had the US followed China’s course it would have had only 1306 deaths total!
When confronted with these numbers, the response of the Western media has all too often been denial that China’s numbers were valid. But China’s data have been backed by counts of excess deaths during the period of the pandemic as the New York Times illustrated in a recent article. Actually this is old news. The validity of China’s numbers, as shown by counts of excess deaths, was validated long ago in a February 2021 study by a by a group at Oxford University and the Chinese CDC. This was published in the prestigious BMJ (British Medical Journal) and discussed in detail here.
What about the economy?
Clearly China put the saving of lives above the advance of the economy with its “dynamic zero Covid policy.” But contrary to what was believed in the West at the time, saving lives also turned out to be better for the economy, as shown in the following data from the World Bank:
During the first year of the pandemic, 2020, China’s economy continued to grow albeit at a slower rate. In contrast the US economy contracted dramatically, dropping all the way back, not simply to 2019 levels, but to pre-2018 levels!
Interestingly the plot also shows the year that the Chinese PPP-GDP surpassed that of the United States, 2017, heralding a new era for the Global South.
The World Bank has not yet released data for 2021, but the IMF has PPP-GDP data for 2021 shown here. The U.S. economy grew at 5.97 percent and China’s at 8.02 percent. Unlike the World Bank data shown in the graph above for the years up to 2020, these data for 2021 are not corrected for inflation which for 2021 ran at 4.7% in the U.S. whereas China’s was 0.85%. So China’s growth would be even greater in comparison to the US, were inflation taken into account.
The bottom line is that for the first two years of the pandemic through 2021, China’s growth was always positive and greater than that of the US. China’s policy not only saved lives but protected the economy. Win-win, one might say.
Is China’s dynamic zero Covid policy “sustainable”in the face of the Omicron variant? The Shanghai Lockdown.
The period of the recent Shanghai lockdown which we can date from April 1, 2022, ended on June 1, and was the second largest outbreak in China since the original outbreak in January, 2020, in Wuhan. Each resulted in major lockdowns, the first in Wuhan lasted about 76 days and the second in Shanghai about 60 days. The first in Wuhan was due to the original variant and the second was due to the much more infectious Omicron.
During the recent lockdown in Shanghai, the Western press was awash with proclamations, all too many laced with an unseemly Schadenfreude, that China’s dynamic Zero Covid policy was not sustainable. This is all too reminiscent of decades of predictions that China’s extraordinary success in developing its economy to number one in the world in terms of PPP-GDP was a passing phase, a Ponzi Scheme that was – what else – “not sustainable. Recently the same press has gone silent, always a sign that China has met with success. So what are the results?
The Shanghai Lockdown ended on June 1 and from that day until today, June 19, there have been no deaths due to Covid on the Chinese Mainland. Cases nationwide are also way down to 183 per day from the peak of 26,000 on April 15. That was the largest number of cases in a single day for the entire period of the pandemic in China. For comparison, the peak in the US was 800,000 in a single day.
Both the Wuhan and Shanghai lockdowns demanded sacrifices and patience over the roughly two-month period for each. However, these difficulties are generally exaggerated In the West and based on anecdotes of the worst of the difficulties encountered. Such sordid journalism reached rock bottom in a NYT piece equating China’s hard working health care workers to Adolph Eichmann!
As an antidote to this kind of hit piece and to gain a feeling of life in the cities that were under lockdown during the Wuhan outbreak, Peter Hessler’s March, 2020, account in the New Yorker, “Life on Lockdown in China,” is enlightening and will dispel many misconceptions. Hessler was living and teaching in Chengdu, Sichuan, at the time.
For the moment China’s approach has succeeded although we cannot say what the future holds. But the public health measures that have worked so well in Mainland China should not be lightly dismissed let alone be the subject of mean-spirited attacks. Such measures may be a means of saving millions of lives when the next variant or the next pandemic strikes.
The US Needs a People’s Tribunal on the Handling of Covid-19.
Turning again to the US, what does it say when the US, one of the richest nations in the world, spending over $1 trillion a year on its “national security” budget, could not muster the means to deal with Covid-19 and ended up with more deaths than any other nation on earth? China’s handling of the pandemic certainly shows a completely different outcome is possible. The US death toll was not an inescapable act of nature.
That being so, should there not be a People’s Tribunal to investigate those in charge in the US government over the course of three administrations? That, and not an official white wash, is certainly needed? And should not punishment appropriate for a crime against humanity be meted out? The one million dead deserve no less.
CB is short for polychlorinated biphenyls — a group of manmade pollutants that were banned by the U.S. Congress in 1979. Despite this ban, the many PCBs that were used in the construction of school buildings from the 1930s to the 1970s are still exposing kids to a dangerous threat.
PCBs are listed as a possible carcinogen in humans and have caused cancer in other animals. They were once widely used in products ranging from TVs and refrigerators to window caulking.
In schools, PCBs in window caulking is typically activated by sunlight. This creates an invisible fog that permeates a classroom full of children all day, almost every day. U.S. school districts are required to test for asbestos and lead. There are no laws mandating any tests for PCBs.
PCB exposure is linked with negative effects on the
endocrine system
immune system
nervous system
reproductive system
It’s been associated with health effects like:
Permanently depressed IQ
Increased risk of attentional deficits
Hormonal and immune disruptions
Melanomas
Cancers of the liver, gall bladder, biliary tract, gastrointestinal cancer, and brain
After the latest school shooting, plenty of parents expressed genuine concern about their children’s safety. Keep in mind: Almost certainly, as you read this, there is not a school shooting in progress. But, as you read this, innumerable school kids are being placed in harm’s way — day after day after day — thanks to corporate indifference and the ignorance of the general population.
Speaking of ignorance…
Diisononyl phthalate (DINP) is used as a plasticizer (which means it makes products softer and more pliable). It impacts all of us but please allow me to stick with the theme of this post. DINP reaches our children before they are even born.
It’s found in products like:
Cosmetics
Perfume
Nail polish
Hair spray
Soap
Shampoo
Skin moisturizers
Detergents
Food packaging
When pregnant women use these ubiquitous products, DINP has been shown to impact babies in utero. This is associated with:
Learning, attention, and behavior problems
Lower IQ
Memory problems
Record rates of autism
Once those children are born, they can again encounter dangerous DINP at home and in schools via:
Building materials
Flooring
Wire and cable insulation
Wood finishes
Plastic plumbing pipes
Adhesives
DINP impacts the sexual development of children. For example:
Decreases sperm motility
Increases malformations of the testes and other organs
Feminizes boys in terms of their sex organ placement and size (e.g. smaller penises and testes)
Can make boys infertile when they reach adulthood
More generally, DINP and other phthalates have been shown to cause:
Fertility issues
Miscarriages
Birth defects
High blood pressure and insulin resistance (can lead to diabetes)
Testicular, kidney, and liver cancers
So, where’s the “March For Our Lives” for the victimized children?
The information stated above offers just a tiny sampling of the world we’ve enabled while distracted by fake news, celebrities, sports, video games, reality TV, porn, etc.
Suggestions:
Stop fixating on the problems (e.g. gun control, Ukraine, etc.) being marketed to you by the media
Do not EVER trust a corporation (Big Pharma, Big Tech, etc.) or any of their well-paid media shills
Recognize the two-party deception for the deadly con game it is
Rediscover the subversive pleasure of thinking for yourself.
Protect your children and all children by any means necessary
Do you remember the iconic Union Carbide image from the 1950s or early 1960s? The one with the giant hand coming from the sky, pouring pesticides onto Indian soil.
The blurb below the image includes the following:
Science helps build a new India – India has developed bold new plans to build its economy and bring the promise of a bright future to its more than 400 million people. But India needs the technical knowledge of the western world. For example working with Indian engineers and technicians, Union Carbide recently made available its fast scientific resource to help build a chemicals and plastics plant near Bombay. Throughout the free world, Union Carbide has been actively engaged in building plants for the manufacture of chemicals, plastics, carbons, gases and metals.
In the bottom corner is the Union Carbide logo and the statement ‘A HAND IN THINGS TO COME’.
This ‘hand of god’ image has become infamous. Union Carbide’s ‘hand in things to come’ includes the gas leak at its pesticides plant in Bhopal in 1984. It resulted in around 560,000 injured (respiratory problems, eye irritation, etc), 4,000 severely disabled and 20,000 dead.
As for the chemical-intensive agriculture it promoted, we can now see the impacts: degraded soils, polluted water, illness, farmer debt and suicides (by drinking pesticides!), nutrient-dense crops/varieties being side-lined, a narrower range of crops, no increase in food production per capita (in India at least), the corporate commodification of knowledge and seeds, the erosion of farmers’ environmental learning, the undermining of traditional knowledge systems and farmers’ dependency on corporations.
Whether it involves the type of ecological devastation activist-farmer Bhaskar Save outlined for policy makers in his 2006 open letter or the social upheaval documented by Vandana Shiva in the book The Violence of the Green Revolution, the consequences have been far-reaching.
And yet – whether it involves new genetic engineering techniques or more pesticides – there is a relentless drive by the agritech conglomerates to further entrench their model of agriculture by destroying traditional farming practices with the aim of placing more farmers on corporate seed and chemical treadmills.
These corporations have been pushing for the European Commission to remove any labelling and safety checks for new genomic techniques. The European Court of Justice ruled in 2018 that organisms obtained with new genetic modification techniques must be regulated under the EU’s existing GMO laws. However, there has been intense lobbying from the agriculture biotech industry to weaken the legislation, aided financially by the Gates Foundation.
Since 2018, top agribusiness and biotech corporations have spent almost €37 million lobbying the European Union. They have had 182 meetings with European Commissioners, their cabinets and director generals. More than one meeting a week.
In recent weeks, Syngenta (a subsidiary of ChemChina) CEO Erik Fyrwald has come to the fore to cynically lobby for these techniques.
But before discussing Fyrwald, let us turn to another key agribusiness figure who has been in the news. Former Monsanto chairman and CEO Hugh Grant recently appeared in court to be questioned by lawyers on behalf of a cancer patient in the case of Allan Shelton v Monsanto.
Shelton has non-Hodgkin lymphoma and is one of the 100,000-plus people in the US claiming in lawsuits that exposure to Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller and its other brands containing the chemical glyphosate caused their cancer.
His lawyers argued that Grant was an active participant and decision maker in the company’s Roundup business and should be made to testify at the trial.
Why not? After all, he did make a financial killing from peddling poison.
Bayer acquired Monsanto in 2018 and Grant received an estimated $77 million post-sale payoff. Bloomberg reported in 2017 that Monsanto had increased Grant’s salary to $19.5 million.
By 2009, Roundup-related products, which include genetically modified seeds developed to withstand glyphosate-based applications, represented about half of Monsanto’s gross margin.
Roundup was integral to Monsanto’s business model and Grant’s enormous income and final payoff.
Consider the following quote from a piece that appeared on the Bloomberg website in 2014:
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Hugh Grant is focused on selling more genetically modified seeds in Latin America to drive earnings growth outside the core US market. Sales of soybean seeds and genetic licenses climbed 16%, and revenue in the unit that makes glyphosate weed killer, sold as Roundup, rose 24%.
In the same piece, Chris Shaw, a New York-based analyst at Monness Crespi Hardt & Co, is reported as saying “Glyphosate really crushed it” – meaning the sales of glyphosate were a major boost.
All fine for Grant and Monsanto. But this has had devastating effects on human health. ‘The Human Cost of Agrotoxins. How Glyphosate is killing Argentina’, which appeared on the Lifegate website in November 2015, serves as a damning indictment of the drive for “earnings growth” by Monsanto. Moreover, in the same year, some 30,000 doctors in that country demanded a ban on glyphosate.
The bottom line for Grant was sales and profit maximisation and the unflinching defence of glyphosate, no matter how carcinogenic to humans it is and, more to the point, how much Monsanto knew it was.
Noam Chomsky underlines the commercial imperative:
… the CEO of a corporation has actually a legal obligation to maximize profit and market share. Beyond that legal obligation, if the CEO doesn’t do it, and, let’s say, decides to do something that will, say, benefit the population and not increase profit, he or she is not going to be CEO much longer – they’ll be replaced by somebody who does do it.
Syngenta’s CEO is cut from the same cloth as Grant. While Monsanto’s crimes are well documented, Syngenta’s transgressions are less well publicised.
In 2006, writer and campaigner Dr Brian John claimed:
GM Free Cymru has discovered that Syngenta, in its promotion of GM crops and foods, has been involved in a web of lies, deceptions and obstructive corporate behaviour that would have done credit to its competitor Monsanto.
Some weeks ago, Fyrwald called for organic farming to be abandoned. In view of the food crisis, brought on by the war in Ukraine, he claimed rich countries had to increase their crop production – but organic farming led to lower yields. Fyrwald also called for gene editing to be at the heart of the food agenda in order to increase food production.
He stated:
The indirect consequence is that people are starving in Africa because we are eating more and more organic products.
In response, Kilian Baumann, a Bernese organic farmer and president of the Swiss Small Farmers’ Association, called Fyrwald’s arguments “grotesque”. He claimed Fyrwald was “fighting for sales”.
Writing on the GMWatch website, Jonathan Matthews says the Russian invasion of Ukraine seems to have emboldened Fyrwald’s scaremongering.
Matthews states:
Fyrwald’s comments reflect the industry’s determination to undermine the European Union’s Farm to Fork strategy, which aims by 2030 not just to slash pesticide use by 50% and fertilizer use by 20% but to more than triple the percentage of EU farmland under organic management (from 8.1% to 25%), as part of the transition towards a ‘more sustainable food system’ within the EU’s Green Deal.
He adds:
Syngenta view[s] these goals as an almost existential threat. This has led to a carefully orchestrated attack on the EU strategy.
Mathews quotes research that shows GM crops have no yield benefit. He also refers to a newly published report that draws together research clearly showing GM crops have driven substantial increases – not decreases – in pesticide use. The newer and much-hyped gene-edited crops look set to do the same.
Syngenta is among the corporations criticised by a report from the UN for “systematic denial of harms” and “unethical marketing tactics”. Matthews notes that selling highly hazardous pesticides is actually at the core of Syngenta’s business model.
According to Matthews, even with the logistical disruptions to maize and wheat crops caused by the war in Ukraine, there is still enough grain available to the world market to meet existing needs. He says the current price crisis (not food crisis) is a product of fear and speculation.
Matthews concludes:
If Erik Fyrwald is really so concerned about hunger, why isn’t he attacking the boondoggle that is biofuels, rather than going after organic farming? The obvious answer is that the farmers being subsidised to grow biofuels are big consumers of agrichemicals and, in the US case, GMO seeds – unlike organic farmers, who buy neither.
Fyrwald has a financial imperative to lobby for particular strategies and technologies. He is far from an objective observer. And he is far from honest in his appraisal – using fear of a food crisis to push his agenda.
Meanwhile, the sustained attacks on organic agriculture have become an industry mainstay, despite numerous high-level reports and projects indicating it could feed the world, mitigate climate change, improve farmers’ situations, lead to better soil, create employment and provide healthier and more diverse diets.
Transnational agribusiness has lobbied for, directed and profited from policies that have caused much of the above. And what we now see is these corporations and their lobbyists espousing (fake) concern (a cynical lobbying tactic) for the plight of the poor and hungry while attempting to purchase EU democracy to the tune of €37 million. Cheap at the price considering the financial bonanza that its new patented genetic engineering technologies and seeds could reap.
Various scientific publications show these new techniques allow developers to make significant genetic changes, which can be very different from those that happen in nature. These new GMOs pose similar or greater risks than older-style GMOs.
By attempting to dodge regulation as well as avoid economic, social, environmental and health impact assessments, it is clear where the industry’s priorities lie.
Unfortunately, Fyrwald, Bill Gates, Hugh Grant and their ilk are unwilling and too often incapable of viewing the world beyond their reductionist mindsets that merely regard seed/chemical sales, output-yield and corporate profit as the measuring stick of success.
What is required is an approach that sustains indigenous knowledge, local food security, better nutrition per acre, clean and stable water tables and good soil structure. An approach that places food sovereignty, local ownership, rural communities and rural economies at the centre of policy and which nurtures biodiversity, boosts human health and works with nature rather than destroying these.
Fyrwald’s scaremongering is par for the course – the world will starve without corporate chemicals and (GM) seeds, especially if organics takes hold. This type of stuff has been standard fare from the industry and its lobbyists and bought career scientists for many years.
It flies in the face of reality, not least how certain agribusiness concerns have been part of a US geopolitical strategy that undermines food security in regions across the world. These concerns have thrived on the creation of dependency and profited from conflict. Moreover, there is the success of agroecological approaches to farming that have no need for what Fyrwald is hawking.
Instead, the industry continues to promote itself as the saviour of humanity – a hand of god powered by a brave new techno-utopian world of corporate science, pouring poison and planting seeds of corporate dependency with the missionary zeal of Western saviourism.
Recently, as I neared my local C-Town supermarket, I saw a middle-aged man standing near a recycling redemption machine. In front of him were several massive clear garbage bags teeming full of the cans and bottles he had collected.
The man looked bloated, exhausted, defeated — his skin grayish as he went through the motions of securing a few bucks. He reached into one of the bags and pulled out an empty, crumpled liter-sized bottle of Coca-Cola.
My eyes happened to meet the man’s eyes just as he lifted the dirty bottle to his mouth. Without any hesitation, he wrapped his lips around the opening and blew air inside. The plastic bottle inflated to a somewhat normal size. (Apparently, the bottles need to be close to their original shape for the machine to accept them.)
I tried to hide it but he saw my grimace. With so much of the world scrubbing any exposed inch of their epidermis in a futile attempt to feel safe, this poor soul had reached an entirely different state of mind. “Taste the feeling” indeed.
There are multiple supermarkets within a 15-minute-walk radius of my apartment. The prices and selections vary. How friendly the employees are can also fluctuate. The cleanliness level is usually consistently okay. What all these establishments have in common, however, is a recycling station.
Just outside the entrance are a couple of machines at which locals can load the bottles and cans they’ve gathered. Once the metal and plastic are in the machine, the loader gets a receipt to bring to a cashier inside in exchange for “deposit” money.
Here’s how the New York Department of Environmental Conservation explains the concept:
New York’s Returnable Container Act requires at least a 5-cent deposit on carbonated soft drinks, beer and other malt beverages, mineral water, soda water, water, and wine cooler containers. A deposit is required on glass, metal, and plastic containers that hold less than one gallon or 3.78 liters.
Unfortunately, due to poverty and the ongoing popularity of unhealthy items like soda, this is a common activity. Even during the widespread fear frenzy in NYC during the pandemic, the lines at the redemption machines remained long. Concerns about the virus were easily outweighed by a desperate need for whatever income was available.
The dull-eyed man blowing into a used, germ-ridden Coke bottle was obviously not concerned about where that bottle might have been. Who touched it? What touched it? How many mouths had been on it? “Germophobia” is a luxury, I suppose.
Over the past decade or so, bottles and cans have become a form of currency in my neighborhood. I walk to a local gym each day before 6 A.M. At that time, it’s often just me and can collectors alone on the streets (excluding a few stragglers still staggering home from clubs). You can hear the collectors long before you see them. They use supermarket shopping carts to transport their “currency” and the rattling sound is both loud and unmistakable.
Some locals see them as a nuisance. Others diligently leave their cans and bottles where the collectors can easily find and access them. Just the other day, I saw a woman run after a collector with a large bag of plastic bottles. It was such a sweet interaction, it brought me to tears — of joy and sorrow.
Social media is filled with examples of such “positive news.” Don’t get me wrong, I get weepy at some of these stories, too. But it doesn’t change the fact that we mostly aim our energy at cheering individual acts of charity but rarely (if ever) point out structural and institutional indifference.
Projects like mine, for example, should not be necessary for a nation as wealthy as the U.S. But, in the Home of the Brave, they are required and woefully insufficient. Our government is a failure for everyone below the top few percent.
Speaking of failures: “Traditional recycling is the greatest example of modern-day greenwashing,” declares Ross Polk, an investigative journalist specializing in environmental issues. “Recycling is championed as the strategy to enable a cleaner, healthier world by those businesses that have profited the most from the extractive, take-make-waste economy. In reality, it is merely a cover to continue business as usual. Corporations espouse the efficacy of recycling via hollow ‘responsibility commitments’ to avoid examination of the broader negative consequences that their products and business models have wrought. Recycling is good for one thing, though — it helps us dodge the responsibility of our rampant and unsustainable consumption.”
Polk concludes: “After nearly 50 years of existence, recycling has proven to be an utter failure at staving off environmental and social catastrophe. It neither helps cool a warming planet nor averts ecosystem destruction and biodiversity loss.”
He could’ve added that recycling is also not a moral or effective way of helping poor people achieve any sense of financial security. The business of recycling is a facade. Any belief that redeeming cans and bottles will help individuals “get by” is equally as deceitful and self-serving as the recycling scam itself.
We’ve spent much of the past two years fearing each other, dreading the act of breathing itself. We went months without seeing smiles, depriving loved ones of hugs, starving children of valuable and necessary non-verbal social input, and viciously turning on anyone who does not march in strict lockstep with the algorithm-induced views.
Some might say the dull-eyed man at the redemption machine has sunk to a different level. In many ways and for many reasons, he certainly has. I might suggest that he’s also transcended some of what passes for normal.
Trust me, this is not some misguided fantasy that the poverty-stricken have it “better.” I’m not Mother Teresa who once despicably stated: “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.” My supposition is merely a musing about letting go of the illusion of control and “order.”
If only we could recycle the entire damn culture and start over.
Despite mandates dropping around the world (Canada a notable exception) many people, as is their right, continue to don masks whose prophylactic effective is dubious.
Begin then with a fracture, a cesura, a rent; opening a crack in this fallen world, a shaft of light.
— Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body
Being sick for the past few weeks has had its advantages. It has forced me to take a break from writing since I could not concentrate enough to do so. It has gifted me with a deeper sympathy for the vast numbers of the seriously ill around the world, those suffering souls without succor except for desperate prayers for relief. And it has allowed thoughts to think me as I relinquished all efforts at control for a few miserable weeks of “doing nothing” except napping, reading short paragraphs in books, watching some sports and a documentary, and being receptive to the light coming through the cracks in my consciousness.
I suppose you could say that my temporary illness forced me, as José Ortega Y Gasset described it, virtually and provisionally to withdraw myself from the world and take a stand inside myself – “or, to use a magnificent word which exists only in Spanish, that man can ensimismarse (‘be inside himself’).”
But as I learned, being “inside myself” doesn’t mean the outside world doesn’t come visiting, both in its present and past manifestations. When you are sick, you feel most vulnerable; this sense of frailty breaks you open to strange and familiar thoughts, feelings, dreams and memories that you must catch on the fly, pin with words if you are quick enough. I’ve pinned some over these weeks as they came to me through the cracks.
“Broken flesh, broken mind, broken speech,” wrote Norman Brown when he argued for aphoristic truth as opposed to methods or systematic form. These days the feeling that everything is broken is the norm, that madness reigns, that truth is being strangled and all we have are lies and more lies. Carefully constructed arguments fall on deaf ears as dissociation of the personality, post-modern attention-disorder, gender confusion, and corporate/intelligence mass media propaganda techniques are used daily to sow confusion. In simple colloquial language, people are badly fucked up.
Much of the world is suffering from megrims. Bob Dylan puts it simply:
Broken lines, broken strings
Broken threads, broken springs
Broken idols, broken heads
People sleeping in broken beds
Ain’t no use jiving
Ain’t no use joking
Everything is broken.
Who can disagree? Everyone’s mind seems to be at the end of its tether.
Why? There are obvious answers, and while so many are true, they are insufficient, for they usually scratch the surface of a worldwide crisis that has been developing for at least a century and a half. That crisis is spiritual. Many can feel it rumbling beneath the surface of world events. It’s a rumbling in the bowels. It’s unspoken. It’s something very dark, sinister, and satanic. It seems to be a form of systemic evil almost with a will of its own that is sweeping the world.
For many decades I have studied, written, and taught in an effort to grasp the essence of what has been happening in our world. My tools have been philosophy, theology, literature, art, and sociology – all the disciplines really, including a careful study of popular culture. It was always a personal quest, for my “career” has been my vocation.
Being trained in the classics from high school through college, and then the scientific method and textual analysis, I adhered for the most part to logical analyses in the classical style. Such an approach, while possessed of a certain elegance and balance, has serious limitations since it suggests the world follows a neat Aristotelian logic and that there is a method to the world’s madness that is easy to capture in logical argumentation. Romanticism and existentialism, to name two reactions to such thinking, arose in opposition. Each offered a needed corrective to the reductive, materialist nature of a scientific method that became deified while dismissing God, freedom, and the spiritual as leftover superstitions from olden times.
But I have no sustained argument to offer here, just some scraps I gathered while enduring weeks in the doldrums. I sense these bits of seemingly digressive little flashes in the dark were telling me something about what I have been trying to understand for many years: the grasp the demonic has on our world today.
It is easy to dismiss the use of such a word, for it sounds hyperbolic, and it easily plays into the ridiculous themes of popular Hollywood and tabloid entertainment, which have also become staples of the formerly “serious” media as well. It’s all entertainment now, life the movie, the unreality of endless propaganda, sick, sordid, and what can only be termed “The Weirdness,” a term my friend the writer and playwright Joe Green has suggested to me. I think it would be a serious mistake to dismiss the demonic nature of the forces at work in our world today.
Like Rip Van Winkle, I awoke one recent day, a few weeks after I wrote my last article before I got sick, to see that the corporate media/intelligence narrative on the war in Ukraine had taken an abrupt turn. I had written on May 13, 2022 that certain leftists were parroting the official U.S. propaganda that Russia was losing its battle with the Ukrainian forces. Noam Chomsky had claimed the U.S. media were doing a good job reporting Russian war crimes in Ukraine and Chris Hedges had said that Russia had suffered “nine weeks of humiliating military failures.” Now The New York Times, the Washington Post, etc. – mirabile dictu – have suddenly changed their tune and the Russians are winning after all. Who was asleep? Or was it sleep that prompted such obviously false reporting? For the Russians were clearly winning from the start. Yet we can be assured the authoritative voices will continue to flip the switch and play mind games, for shock and confusion are keys to effective propaganda, and American exceptionalism with its divine mission, its manifest destiny, is to demonically try to destroy Russia.
The slogan that I learned when I was a Marine before becoming a conscientious objector came to me when I was feverish. “My rifle is my life.” I never thought so, but I did recall how when I was ten-years-old my cousin killed his brother with a rifle, and how I heard the news on the radio while talking with my father. The New York Times reported: “A 9-year-old boy was fatally wounded last night by his brother, 7, while the two were playing with a rifle in a neighbor’s apartment in the northeast Bronx….[the rifle] “was secreted in a bedroom” [under the bed] and was loaded.
Report: Don McLean cancels his singing performance at the National Riffle Association’s convention following the Uvalde school shooting. What an act of moral courage! Ah, Don, “Now I understand/What you tried to say to me/And how you suffered for your sanity/And how you tried to set them free/They would not listen, they did not know how/Perhaps they’ll listen now” Let’s hope not to you.
Watched the new documentary about George Carlin – “George Carlin’s American Dream.” I have always had a soft spot for George, a fellow New Yorker with a Catholic upbringing, and a good-hearted guy who generously offered to help me years ago when I was fired from a teaching position for ostensibly playing a recording of his seven words that you can never say on television. The real reasons for my firing were that I was organizing a teacher’s union and had brought well-known anti-war activists to speak at the school. But what struck me in this interesting documentary was George’s facile dismissal of God – “the God bullshit,” as he put it. Funny, of course, and correct in certain ways, it was also jejune in significant ways and threw God out with the bathwater. It was something I had not previously noticed about his routine, but this time around it hit me as unworthy of his scathing critiques of American life. It got laughs at the expense of deeper and important truths and probably has had deleterious effects on generations who have been beguiled and besotted by how George’s God critique consonantly fits with the shallow arguments of the new atheists. George was overreacting to the ignorance of his superficial religious training and not distinguishing God from institutional religion.
Half-awake on the couch one day, I somehow remembered that when I was teaching at another school and involved in anti-war activities, a fellow teacher stopped me on a staircase on a late Friday afternoon when no one was around and tried to get me to join Army Intelligence. “You are exactly the type we could use,” he said, “since you are so outspoken in your anti-war positions.” I will spare you my reply, which involved words you once could never say on TV. But the encounter taught me an early lesson about distinguishing friend from foe; how treachery is real, and evil often wears a smiley face. The man who approached me was the head of social studies curricula for the Roman Catholic Brooklyn Diocese of New York.
Al Capone, while speaking to Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr. in 1931: “People respect nothing nowadays….It is undermining the country. Virtue, honor, truth, and the law have all vanished from our life.”
I also read this from Literature and the Gods by Roberto Calasso: “… all the mythologies now pass a largely indolent life in a no-man’s-land haunted by gods and vagrant simulacra, by ghosts and Gypsy caravans in constant movement. They learn only to tell their stories again …. Yet it is precisely this ability that is so obviously lacking in the world around us. Behind the trembling curtains of what passes for ‘reality,’ the voices throng. If no one listens, they steal the costume of the first person they can grab and burst onto the stage in ways that can be devastating. Violence is the expedient of what has been refused an audience.”
Lying in bed after a feverish night early on in my sickness, I looked up at the ceiling where a fly was buzzing. I remembered how years ago, when my father was in the hospital after a terrible car accident in which he smashed his head, he told me he was seeing monkeys all over the ceiling of the hospital room. Later, when I was out of bed, I heard the news reports about monkeypox and thought I was also hallucinating. I started laughing, a sardonic laughter brought to a feverish pitch after more than two years of Covid propaganda. These are the same people who hope to create a transhuman future – mechanical monkeys.
On a table lay the third volume of a trilogy of books – Sinister Forces – by Peter Levenda. I opened it to a bookmarked page. Anyone who has read these books with a half-way open mind will be shocked by the amount of documented history they contain, history so bizarre and disturbing that reading them is not advisable before bedtime. Sinister forces that run through American history, indeed, but Levenda presents his material in a most reasonable and fair-minded way. I read these paragraphs:
The historical model I am proposing in these volumes should be obvious by now. By tracing the darker elements of the American experience from the earliest days of the Adena and Hopewell cultures through the discovery by Columbus, the English settlers in Massachusetts and the Salem witchcraft episode, the rise of Joseph Smith, Jr. and the Mormons via ceremonial magic and Freemasonry, up to the twentieth century and the support of Nazism by American financiers and politicians before, during, and after World War II, and the UFO phenomenon coming on the heels of that war, we can see the outline of a political ectoplasm taking shape in this historical séance: politics as a continuation of religion by other means. The ancillary events of the Charles Manson murders, the serial killer phenomenon, Jonestown, and the assassinations of Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Marilyn Monroe are all the result of the demonic possession of the American psyche, like the obscenities spat out by little Regan [The Exorcist], tied to her bed and shrieking at the exorcists. It is said that demonic possession is a way of testing us, and making us aware of the real conflict taking place within us every day….
The more I looked, however, the more I found men with bizarre beliefs and involved in questionable, occult practices at the highest levels of the American government, and buried deep within government agencies. I also discovered that occultism was embraced by the American military and intelligence establishments as a weapon to be used in the Cold War; and as they did so, they unleashed forces upon the American populace that cannot be called back….
One inevitably was forced back to the CIA and the mind-control experiments that began in the late 1940s and extended nearly to the present day [no, to the present day]. Coincidence piled upon coincidence, indicating the existence of a powerful, subliminal force working at the level of chaos – at the quantum level – and struggling to manifest itself in our reality, our consciousness, our political agenda.
If that all sounds too bizarre for words, unbelievable really, I suggest that one read these books, for if only a minority of Levenda’s claims are true, we are in the grip of evil forces so depraved that fiction writers couldn’t imagine such reality.
As I finish these notes, I am sitting outside on a small porch, watching the rain subside. The sun has just emerged. It is 5:30 P.M. and across the driveway and a lawn of grass, eight foxes have come through the bushes. The parents watch as the six kits jump and scamper around the ground level porch of a cottage that is unoccupied. The foxes have a den under the porch, and every day for a few months we have been privileged to watch them perform their antics in the mornings and evenings. Cute would be an appropriate word for the kits, especially when they were smaller. But they are growing fast and suddenly one sees and seizes a squirrel and worries it to death by shaking it in its mouth. Soon they are ripping it to pieces. Cute has turned deadly. But as the aforementioned Ortega Y Gasset says, while people can be inside themselves, “The animal is pure alteraciόn. It cannot be within itself.” This is because it has no self, “no chez soi, where it can withdraw and rest.” Foxes always live in pure exteriority, unlike me, who is sitting here with a small glass of wine and thinking about them and the various thoughts that have come to me over these past few weeks.
Before I came outside, I read this from a powerful new article by Naomi Wolf – “Dear Friends, Sorry to Announce a Genocide” – “It is a time of demons sauntering around in human spaces, though they look human enough themselves, smug in their Italian suits on panels at the World Economic Forum.”
In this piece she writes about what is in the 55,000 internal Pfizer documents which the FDA had asked a court to keep under wraps for 75 years, but which a court has released as a result of outside pressure. These documents reveal evil so depraved that words would fail her if not for her moral conscience and her growing awareness – that I share – that we are dealing with a phenomenon that demands an analysis that is theological, not sociological. She writes:
Knowing as I now do, that Pfizer and the FDA knew that babies were dying and mothers’ milk discoloring by just looking at their own internal records; knowing as I do that they did not alert anyone let alone stop what they were doing, and that to this day Pfizer, the FDA and other demonic “public health” entities are pushing to MRNA-vaccinate more and more pregnant women; now that they are about to force this on women in Africa and other lower income nations who are not seeking the MRNA vaccines, per Pfizer CEO Bourla this past week at the WEF, and knowing that Pfizer is pushing and may even receive a US EUA for babies to five year olds — I must conclude that we are looking into an abyss of evil not seen since 1945.
So I don’t know about you, but I must switch gears with this kind of unspeakable knowledge to another kind of discourse.
That discourse is religious, for Naomi has realized that our world is in satanic hands, and that only a recognition of that fact offers a way out. That those who wield weapons both medical and military can only be defeated by those who realize that a key part of the killers’ propaganda has been a long campaign to convince people, not only that God does not exist, but that Satan doesn’t either. This, while they assume the mantle of the evil one.
She says:
This time could really be the last time; these monsters in the labs, on the transnational panels, are so very skillful; and so powerful; and their dark work is so extensive.
If God is there — again — after all the times that we have tried his patience — and who indeed knows? – will we reach out a hand to him in return, will we take hold in the last moment out of this abyss, and simply find a way somehow to walk alongside him?
We will, but only if we also recognize the deeper forces informing our hidden history and haunting our present days. Sometimes an illness can crack you open to being receptive to shafts of light that can lead the way. Yet to do so we must go deep into very dark places. And since everyone and everything seems broken now – let’s say everyone is just sick in some way – maybe courage is what we need, the simple courage to open ourselves to the voices of the hungry ghosts that haunt this country. Norman O. Brown referred to them and our stage set this way:
Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.
The U.S.A. and its allies are waging war on many fronts. It is a form of total war – cold, hot, medical, military, mind-control, spiritual, etc. – that demands a total response from us. None of us is completely innocent; we are all part of the deep evil that is happening all around us. But if we listen carefully, we might hear God asking for our help. For we need each other.
I watch in horror as the cute foxes kill their prey. I must remind myself that that is their nature. As for my fellow humans, I know that it isn’t nature that drives them to kill, maim, hurt, lie, etc.
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