In 1973, Australia’s largest computer predicted trends such as pollution levels, population growth, availability of natural resources and quality of life on earth. ABC’s This Day Tonight aired this story on 9 November 1973.
Mac Slavo
June 24th, 2019
Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk is warning of a “population collapse.” Musk says to expect the human population to noticeably and significantly drop by the year 2050.
Musk’s macabre prediction was triggered by a tweet from a page called World of Engineering that said: “1950 (historical) world population – 2,556,000,053. Current world population – 7,712,343,478. 2050 (projected) world population – 9,346,399,468.”
Replying to that tweet on Friday Musk wrote: “Real issue will be an aging and declining world population by 2050, *not* overpopulation.” According to the Economic Times,Musk also shared a Wikipedia link to an article titled, “Projections of population growth.”
Wikipedia is about as reliable as CNN (considering anyone can change the information offered at any time) so it would behoove Musk to at least have a better source.
However, he might be onto something. Population decline is becoming a concern. Life expectancy is dropping and people just aren’t having as many kids anymore.
The SpaceX CEO’s theory is that when an increasingly-elderly global populations clashwith declining birth rates around the world in the near future a “population bomb” would go off, web portal Futurism reported.
Musk first broached the topic back in 2017 when Musk replied to a publication saying, “The world’s population is accelerating towards collapse, but few seem to notice or care.” Half of the world’s countries have fallen below the replacement rate for developed nations (which is, on average, 2 children per woman), according to a 2017 article by Futurism on Musk’s population decline theory. If this trend continues on, countries like Germany and Italy will see their populations decrease by half over the next 60 years.
While an exponentially increasing population is unsustainable, culling human population growth has ethical and moral implications. But if Musk is correct, and human population collapses, we’ll avoid the ethical dilemma while being faced with economic and societal ones.
In March of 2017, Musk warned that we face a “demographic implosion,” because in many countries “you have a very high dependency ratio, where the number of people who are retired is very high relative to the number of people who are net producers.”
A series of major scientific breakthroughs demonstrate the potential for the progressive development of humanity, even as capitalism drags mankind into war and barbarism.
Source: Science and social crisis in 2019 – World Socialist Web Site
Bryan Dyne
In the opening days of the new year, a series of major scientific breakthroughs have demonstrated humanity’s immense capacity for understanding the world and using this knowledge to solve the many social ills plaguing modern life:
• On January 1, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past the Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule. It was the second astronomical body observed by New Horizons, after Pluto, and the most distant asteroid ever observed by a robotic explorer launched from Earth. The data sent back by the probe, through the combined efforts of an international team of hundreds of scientists and engineers, has already begun to inform the research describing the early history of our Solar System.
• On January 3, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) lunar exploration mission Chang’e 4 achieved the first soft landing on the far side of the Moon and successfully deployed its rover Yutu-2. The scientific payloads were developed and are operated in tandem with researchers in China, Germany, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia and Sweden. It sent back the first closeup images of the less explored half of the Moon via a relay satellite positioned so as to be able to communicate with Earth and the lander simultaneously. Both New Horizons and Chang’e 4 are among the dozens of spacecraft, landers and rovers that are currently studying the Earth, Sun, Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, asteroids, comets and even the regions immediately outside our Solar System.
• On January 4, plant scientists from the United States Department of Agriculture and the University of Illinois showed that it is possible to make genetically engineered plants that fix a “glitch” in photosynthesis. This flaw sometimes causes plants to produce toxins within themselves that must be expunged. Crops grown without this flaw could improve their productivity by 40 percent, which has the potential to help mitigate climate change and abolish world hunger.
• On January 14, scientists operating Chang’e 4 announced the successful germination of food and clothing crops on the Moon, under the very low gravity of that body and after being bathed in solar radiation. Cotton, potato and rapeseed were all grown inside a miniature, artificial self-sustaining environment that was launched as part of the spacecraft’s scientific payload. While the experiment has reportedly reached the end of its lifespan, it was a critical step towards establishing and maintaining human life on the Moon, Mars and beyond.
• Concurrently, machine learning and artificial intelligence are becoming more and more integrated with aspects of modern life, including medicine, transportation and manufacturing. Computer scientists are constantly exploring new ways to use this technology and they have encountered as yet no limits. Whole cities are steadily becoming powered by AI. Self-driving cars are on the verge of mass implementation.
Each of these advances demonstrates the potential to alleviate the need for backbreaking labor, to vastly reduce the time and human resources needed to build homes, schools and hospitals, to roboticize farming and transportation and to develop breakthroughs in medicine and human health. They are powerful rebukes to the incessant contemporary glorification of irrationalism, whether through the cultivation of backwardness and religious prejudice or the promotion of postmodernism and its rejection of objective truth. They stand as a mighty vindication of the materialist understanding of the world, that there are objective laws of nature and that humans can comprehend them and through practice based on that understanding, shape the world to improve human life.
These breakthroughs, on the other hand, contrast sharply with similar developments in society that have heralded 2019:
• The most recent data collected from UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the World Bank show that one in nine human beings, 815 million people, face malnourishment or hunger and 9.1 million people starve to death annually. These figures include 150 million children who are hungry and 3.1 million children who starve to death each year.
• There are currently 68.5 million people fleeing war, persecution and oppression. The UN estimates there are an additional 210 million people who have been displaced as a result of climate change.
• Fascist and extreme right ideologies are once again being promoted by the political establishments in every country. Far-right parties are part of the governments in Italy, Austria, Brazil, Poland, Hungary, Japan, Finland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Philippines and Greece. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been welcomed into German parliament committees and their policies on refugees and internal security have been adopted by the German state. In France, President Macron has openly praised the country’s World War II-era fascist dictator Marshal Philippe Petain.
• Thousands of scientists at NASA, NOAA, the NSF, the USDA and the National Institutes of Health are currently furloughed as a result of the government shutdown. Dozens of long term experiments that are critical to monitoring Earth’s climate, agriculture and public health are being increasingly disrupted. This disaster for scientific research comes as both Democrats and Republicans agree that the latest developments in modern technology, including drones and sensors, should be deployed against desperate refugees fleeing US-backed oppression and poverty in Central America.
These are only some of the contradictions of life in the 21st century. Even as technology is used to probe deep space, develop higher forms of global coordination and unlock the potential of key biological processes, it is being used to increase militarization, censorship and oppression at home and abroad. Every advance made in space exploration is intertwined with increased militarization internationally and the growing threat of world war. For every rocket that is aimed to study the cosmos, many more are developed and built to destroy either a part or the whole of humanity. Crop science is not used to feed the tens of millions of starving humans on six continents but to increase the profits and market dominance of a few agriculture conglomerates and to develop biological and chemical warfare. Science under capitalism is used to increase, not decrease, social inequality.
Artificial intelligence plays a particularly sinister role. It is being increasingly used by companies such as Amazon, Uber and Lyft to track every move employees make and force them to work longer and harder. Tens of thousands of jobs will be eliminated as automation becomes more and more commonplace. And it has been deployed on a mass scale by Google, Facebook and other tech companies in conjunction with US military and intelligence agencies to impose censorship on left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist publications, track down immigrants with facial recognition, spy on virtually every human being and make war against the world’s population on an ever increasing scale.
Both factions of the US ruling elite are at war with science. Trump and the Republicans deny climate change and openly promote religious obscurantism. Official liberalism and academia are in thrall to the postmodernists who reject any conception of objective truth and the application of science to human thought, society, and culture, denying in particular the revolutionary role of the working class.
In contrast, Marxists insist that science can and must be applied to society itself, above all, to the socio-economic structures in which humanity is currently trapped. This means cutting through the ideological domination of the corporate elite, and studying the unfolding events from the standpoint of the class forces at work. This means taking up a study of Marxism, which bases its revolutionary politics on an analysis of objective reality and class interests, and it means a turn toward the working class, the only progressive, revolutionary and international social force on the planet.
The working class offers humanity an alternative to the war, poverty, and social misery that are endemic to capitalism. It is noteworthy that, in the ongoing Los Angeles Teachers strike, educators are demanding not only better pay and smaller class sizes, but the defense of public education from a capitalist oligarchy intent on gutting it. While the ruling elite is set on dragging society backwards, the working class, in the struggle for socialism, offers it a way forward.
Only in a socialist society can the vast scientific and technological achievements of mankind be transformed from cudgels for enforcing class exploitation and fighting war, to the instruments of securing a prosperous and fulfilling life for all people.
Source: Over Population: One Their Plans To Destroy Us. | Video Rebel’s Blog
vidrebel.wordpress.com
Warning! This article might at first glance appear to be depressing but there are solutions to these problems. But first we must get angry enough to do something. Wall Street despises us. Never forget that.
The people who own the government deliberately over populated America. Study the writings of Leon Walras and Wassily Leontieff. The latter won a Nobel Prize in economics for his study of the American economy. He studied the inputs and outputs of American industry. Starting with an extractive industry like mining which outputs coal and iron. These outputs become inputs to the making of steel as an output. This steel in turn becomes an input to the making of cars and washing machines.
Leontieff determined that American wages were a third higher than Europe because we had abundant natural resources to which we added value through the employment of skilled labor.
The fly in the ointment for the American economy was that when our population went above 150 million in 1950, we were supposed to cut wages every time we added a few million people through legal and illegal immigration. The people who owned the government decided to print money by the trillions to:
1) pay for foreign wars and the occupation of foreign lands
2) to buy things for free from overseas, such as, oil, cars, electronics,
food, toys, clothes and even vacations paying for it all with I Owe You Nothing Federal Reserve Notes. They did this so voters would not know that the Elite had planned to cut the value of their wages, pensions and savings. That future pay cut is coming soon.
3) to hire 31 million federal, state and local government workers including contractors to make it appear that Americans had high paying jobs with benefits despite over population.
China is dumping US Treasury bonds all over the world financing ports, railroads, and other projects. One day in the near future people overseas will refuse to sell for dollars. They will demand commodities, oil, gold, silver, foreign currencies or anything of value. Half of all US dollars are overseas. Their forced repatriation will double prices over night and permanently cut the value of wages, pensions and savings in half.
3 million Americans starved to death in the 1930s. We have added 225 million people to this nation since then. I think the Elite want us wake up one morning after the Dollar had Reset the Night Before. One that day the Uber Rich fervently hope the commoners awake on the Morning After to a circular firing squad which kills everyone who is black, Latino or white. In their dreams the Billionaires are safely tucked away in underground fortresses.
Not likely. More than 100 million Americans could die. And they all will have had friends and relatives who did not make it. Worldwide the death count could easily pass 3 billion. Lots of angry people are in the futures of our Banking Elite.
Kamala Devi Harris wants a $76 billion to subsidize rents in states impacted by immigration. She spoke favorably on ABC’s The View of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez’s plan to raise federal taxes to 70% which is 82 to 83%in total for residents of New York City or California. Liberals have failed to learn the lesson that the Uber Rich can exempt themselves through especially designed loophole legislation written for them by the finest Congress money can buy. That just means the tax collectors will target professionals with a salary in the 60% bracket and all skilled workers will be pushed into the 50% tax bracket. And the illegal aliens can collect benefits that are non-taxable.
Clearly, the Elite created a future that does not work for us.
There are three things (amongst others) that we can do.
First. The greatest scientist of the 20th century was Nikola Tesla. He died on January 7, 1943. He left behind 155 boxes and trunks of papers and lab equipment. His papers were evaluated by an MIT physics professor named John G Trump. Donald Trump is his nephew. If we are to survive, it would be helpful if someone inside the US government would release the hitherto Above Top Secret Tesla research that our scientists and engineers have never seen. Nikola Tesla died 75 years ago. If Tesla did invent cheap, if not free, energy, we could use it to heat our homes and to raise crops indoors and to eliminate pollution.
Second. We need to end our insane banking system. It caused 3 million Americans to starve to death in the Great Depression. The Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Warburgs gave us the Federal Reserve Bank. It gave Bankers the right to charge us interest on money they created out of nothing. This system generates Unpayable Debts which when cancelled en masse cause a Great Monetary Contraction or Depression. The next Depression could easily kill a few billion people worldwide.
Alternatively, we could arrest the Bankers and seize the money they stole from us and use those assets to fund Debt Cancellation. The world economy could recover in 90 days after the we complete the Great Cancellation. We could issue what Dr Irving Fisher called 100% money. It begins by issuing a non-interest bearing currency like President Lincoln’s Greenbacks. It also forbids fractional reserve banking which allows Bankers to loan out 10 times as much money as they have on deposit. This creates lot of Bad Debts which in turn, as I said, leads inevitably to another Great Depression.
I should mention in passing that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered on the 53rd anniversary of the first meeting in 1910 the Bankers held to draft the legislation that became the Federal Reserve. Maybe the Bankers were sending us a message by killing the President on that anniversary. Dr Martin Luther King Jr was murdered on the first anniversary of his anti-war speech at New York’s Riverside Church. Maybe their message was that no man should have enough power to go to Washington and shut down the town until the government stopped an unpopular war.
Third. We are heading into a Grand Solar Minimum. In the Maunder Minimum wheat prices rose 400% in the UK. Dr Valentina Zarkova noted that during the Maunder Minimum scientists counted fewer sunspots which resulted in an slight global cooling. But with modern technology we now know that the magnetosphere of both the sun and the earth are greatly reduced. The sun’s reduced magnetosphere allows more cosmic rays to strike the earth. The earth’s reduced magnetosphere allows the Jet Stream to wander about dumping rain, hail and snow on one area and causing a drought in another. Clearly, we need Tesla technology so the poor don’t freeze to death and we can raise food indoors even if there is a blizzard raging outside.
Related Articles:
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https://vidrebel.wordpress.com/2011/11/18/israel-shahak-the-laws-against-non-jews-in-2-minutes/
Conversations With Young Assimilated Jewish People
https://vidrebel.wordpress.com/2011/10/22/conversations-with-young-assimilated-jewish-people/
If You Do Not Learn Real History, You Will Be Dead Really Soon.
First published by Global Research on April 20, 2017
On the day that you read this article, 200 species of life on Earth (plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects, reptiles) will cease to exist. Tomorrow, another 200 species will vanish forever.
The human onslaught to destroy life on Earth is unprecedented in Earth’s history. Planet Earth is now experiencing its sixth mass extinction event and Homo sapiens is the cause. Moreover, this mass extinction event is accelerating and is so comprehensive in its impact that the piecemeal measures being taken by the United Nations, international agencies and governments constitute a tokenism that is breathtaking in the extreme.
And it is no longer the case that mainly ‘invisible’ species are vanishing: those insects, amphibians and small animals about which you had never even heard, assuming they have been identified and given a name by humans.
You and I are on the brink of driving to extinction some of the most iconic species alive today. For a photo gallery of threatened species, some of which are ‘critically endangered’, see ‘World’s wildlife being pushed to the edge by humans – in pictures’.
If you want to read more about some aspects of the extinction threat, you can do so in these recent reports: ‘World Wildlife Crime Report: Trafficking in protected species’ and ‘2016 Living Planet Report’ which includes these words: ‘The main statistic from the report … shows a 58% decline between 1970 and 2012. This means that, on average, animal populations are roughly half the size they were 42 years ago.’
And if you want to read just one aspect of what is happening in the world’s oceans, this recent UN report will give you something to ponder: ‘New UN report finds marine debris harming more than 800 species, costing countries millions’.
Of course, some of what is happening is related to the ongoing climate catastrophe and there isn’t any good news on that front. See ‘What’s Happening in the Arctic is Astonishing’.
But not everything that is going badly wrong is well known either. Did you know that we are destroying the Earth’s soil? See ‘Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues’.
And did you realise that even nitrogen is now a huge problem too? See ‘Scientists shine a spotlight on the overlooked menace of nitrogen’.
Of course, military violence has devastating consequences on the Earth’s ecosystems too, destroying land, water and atmosphere (not to mention killing human beings) in the fight over resources. You will get no joy from the article ‘Iraq’s oil inferno – government inaction in the face of eco-terrorism’ or the website of the Toxic Remnants of War Project.
But every single aspect of military spending is ultimately used to destroy. It has no other function.
While 2.5 billion human beings do not have enough to eat. See ‘One in three people suffers malnutrition at global cost of $3.5 trillion a year’
As you read all this, you might say ‘Not me’! But you are wrong. You don’t have to be an impoverished African driven to killing elephants for their tusks so that you can survive yourself. You don’t have to be a farmer who is destroying the soil with synthetic poisons. You don’t have to be a soldier who kills and destroys or a person who works for a corporation that, one way to another, forces peasants off their land.
You just have to be an ‘ordinary’ person who pays your military taxes and consumes more than your share of world resources while participating without challenge in the global system of violence and exploitation managed by the global elite.
‘Why is this?’ you might ask.
This is because the primary driver of the human-induced mass extinction is not such things as some people hunting a particular lifeform to extinction, horrendous though this is. In fact, just two things drive most species over the edge: our systematic destruction of land habitat – forests, grasslands, wetlands, peatlands, mangroves… – in our endless effort to capture more of the Earth’s wild places for human use (whether it be residential, commercial, mining, farming or military) and our destruction of waterways and the ocean habitat by dumping into them radioactive contaminants, carbon dioxide, a multitude of poisons and chemical pollutants, and even plastic.
And do you know what drives this destruction of land and water habitats? Your demand for consumer products, all of which are produced by using land and water habitats, and the resources derived from them, often far from where you live. The most basic products, such as food and clothing, are produced on agricultural land, sometimes created by destroying rainforests, or taken from the ocean (where overfishing has savagely depleted global fish stocks). But in using these resources, we have ignored the needs of the land, oceans and the waterways for adequate regenerative inputs and recovery time.
We also participate, almost invariably without question or challenge, in the inequitable distribution of resources that compels some impoverished people to take desperate measures to survive through such means as farming marginal land or killing endangered wildlife.
So don’t sit back waiting for some miracle by the United Nations, international agencies or governments to solve this problem. It cannot happen for the simple reason that these organizations are all taking action within the existing paradigm that prioritizes corporate profit and military violence over human equity and ecological sustainability.
Despite any rhetoric to the contrary, they are encouraging overconsumption by industrialized populations and facilitating the inequitable distribution of income and wealth precisely because this benefits those who control these organizations, agencies and governments: the insane corporate elites who are devoid of the capacity to see any value beyond the ‘bottom line’. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane’.
If you want action on the greatest challenge human beings have ever faced – to avert our own extinction by learning to live in harmony with our biosphere and equity with our fellow humans – then I encourage you to take personal responsibility.
If you do, you need to act. At the simplest level, you can make some difficult but valuable personal choices. Like becoming a vegan or vegetarian, buying/growing organic/biodynamic food, and resolutely refusing to use any form of poison or to drive a car or take an airline flight.
But if you want to take an integrated approach, the most powerful way you can do this is to systematically reduce your own personal consumption while increasing your self-reliance. Anita McKone and I have mapped out a fifteen-year strategy for doing this in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.
You might also consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ which obviously includes nonviolence towards our fellow species.
One of the hidden tragedies of modern human existence is that we have been terrorized into believing that we are not personally responsible. See ‘The Delusion “I Am Not Responsible”‘.
For a fuller explanation, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.
It isn’t true but few people feel powerful enough to make a difference.
And every time you decide to do nothing and to leave it to someone else, you demonstrate why no-one else should do anything either.
Extinction beckons. What will you do?
Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com
I try to remain objective on global warming , but we must admit the evidence is starting to build. China is planning a polar silk road. Cape Town is one of millions of cities being stressed by overpopulation and limited natural resources. Perhaps South Africa could exchange its unlimited, but controlled and manipulated, supply of diamonds for ship loads of water?
The Associated Press
Posted: Jan 26, 2018
People queue to collect water from a natural spring outlet in the Cape Town suburb of St. James on Jan. 20. Residents are being advised to reduce daily water usage by over 40 per cent to avoid a Day Zero scenario that could happen in the coming weeks. (The Associated Press)
Long lines of South Africans collect water daily from a natural spring pipeline in an upscale suburb of Cape Town, illustrating the harsh impact of a drought that authorities say could force the closure of most taps in the country’s second largest city in just over two months, an occasion ominously known as Day Zero.
The prospect that large sections of South Africa’s showcase city, famously perched near two oceans, might go without running water has induced anxiety as well as resolve among its nearly four million residents. It has attracted scrutiny from scientists and city managers worldwide who also face the dual challenge of ballooning populations and shrinking resources. If it goes dry, Cape Town would become the world’s first major city to do so.
“There are a lot of people who have been in denial and now they suddenly realize this is for real,” said Shirley Curry, who waited to fill a plastic container with spring water from one of several taps outside a South African Breweries facility in the Newlands suburb.
The spectacle of people scrounging for water could become more common as Day Zero approaches in Cape Town, whose natural beauty has made it a coveted spot for international visitors. While the city urges people to restrict water usage, many living in poor areas already have limited access to water. They use communal taps in gritty neighbourhoods such as Blue Downs on the Cape Flats, where people washed clothes outside and carried buckets of water to shack dwellings on a recent afternoon.
People collect water from a communal tap at an informal settlement near Cape Town on Tuesday. While the city urges people to restrict water usage, many living in poor areas already have limited access to it. (The Associated Press)
Cape Town’s leaders have instructed residents to use only 50 litres of water daily from Feb. 1, down from the current 87-litre limit. Day Zero is projected to arrive on April 12, but some fear it could come sooner, while others hope it won’t happen if rationing works and rains eventually come.
With permission from
by: Mike Adams
August 20, 2017
(Natural News) A hotly-debated study led by Professor Gerardo Ceballos at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico warns that the human population explosion is leading to the widespread contamination and destruction of the planet, ultimately collapsing life support systems upon which human civilization depends. As reported by The Times of Israel:
Human overpopulation and over-consumption are leading Earth to its sixth mass extinction faster than was previously thought, with the human race likely to be eradicated along the way, a new study warns…
These findings indicate nothing short of “biological annihilation,” the scientists conclude, “a massive anthropogenic [human-driven] erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilization.”
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was co-authored by Paul R. Ehrlich, a population control advocate.
Adding to the controversy of the study, Paul Ehrlich’s views have also been cited by population control advocates like Bill Gates, who calls for an engineered depopulation of the planet in order to achieve long-term sustainability. Bill Gates has donated millions of dollars to infertility technologies and vaccine “innovations” that include vaccines in Africa being covertly laced with infertility chemicals to achieve a race-based “medical cleansing” / genocide by making sure black people don’t reproduce.
To some, the warnings of Paul Ehrlich echo the hysteria of globalists like Al Gore, who claims that climate change, not chemical poisoning of the planet, will destroy human civilization unless everybody agrees to pay him $15 trillion dollars. In truth, “climate change” only predicts oceans rising less than a meter in a hundred years, yet the mass chemical poisoning of our world will collapse human civilization long before rising oceans becomes a relevant issue (and that’s assuming the temperature data are accurate, but we know much of those data are routinely faked by the pro-climate change science hustlers).
What’s my take on all this? The real threat to sustainable life on our planet isn’t so-called “climate change,” it’s the mass contamination of our world with pesticides, herbicides, pharmaceutical runoff, hormone-disruptor chemicals, genetically engineered crops, heavy metals in medicine (such as mercury in vaccines), industrial chemicals and biosludge. Yet, astonishingly, no mainstream environmentalists seem to care about any of these threats. The entire environmental movement has become nothing more than a mindless climate change echo chamber, totally clueless about the real threats to our world that are destroying sustainability right now.
For example, left-leaning environmentalists are now openly denying the chemical gender-bender effects of atrazine because they all want to believe that gender is a “choice” rather than something that can be altered by chemical exposure. So they deny all the science surrounding atrazine because it conflicts with their LGBT narratives. In a similar way, the same Leftists who warned about cigarette smoke causing cancer now believe that marijuana smoke is somehow harmless, even though it contains many of the exact same carcinogens as tobacco smoke. Meanwhile, California’s hemp farms are producing massive tonnage of toxic runoff, poisoning thousands of acres of land across the state. And nobody seems to care, since it’s all being done in the name of “pot legalization.”
In my view, if we don’t stop the mass chemical poisoning of our world — and of ourselves — we will of course destroy ourselves in the process. That’s why I’ve dubbed humanity a “suicide cult.” In the name of corporate profits, humans are poisoning their food (pesticides), poisoning their minds (psychiatric drugs), poisoning their agricultural soils (glyphosate) and even poisoning their children (toxic vaccines).
Watch this Natural News video to learn more, and see all Natural News videos at this Vimeo link.
Source: Staving Off the Coming Global Collapse | The Tyee
William E. Rees is professor emeritus of human ecology and ecological economics at the University of British Columbia.
July 17, 2017
Humans have a virtually unlimited capacity for self-delusion, even when self-preservation is at stake.
The scariest example is the simplistic, growth-oriented, market-based economic thinking that is all but running the world today. Prevailing neoliberal economic models make no useful reference to the dynamics of the ecosystems or social systems with which the economy interacts in the real world.
What truly intelligent species would attempt to fly spaceship Earth, with all its mind-boggling complexity, using the conceptual equivalent of a 1955 Volkswagen Beetle driver’s manual?
Consider economists’ (and therefore society’s) near-universal obsession with continuous economic growth on a finite planet. A recent ringing example is Kaushik Basu’s glowing prediction that “in 50 years, the world economy is likely (though not guaranteed) to be thriving, with global GDP growing by as much as 20 per cent per year, and income and consumption doubling every four years or so.”
Basu is the former chief economist of the World Bank, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and professor of economics at Cornell University, so he is no flake in the economics department. But this does not prevent a display of alarming ignorance of both the power of exponential growth and the state of the ecosphere. Income and consumption doubling every four years? After just 20 years and five doublings, the economy would be larger by a factor of 32; in 50 years it will have multiplied more than 5000-fold! Basu must inhabit some infinite parallel universe.
In fairness, he does recognize that if the number of cars, airplane journeys and the like double every four years with overall consumption, “we will quickly exceed the planet’s limits.” But here’s the thing — it’s 50 years before Basu’s prediction even takes hold and we’ve already shot past several important planetary boundaries.
Little wonder. Propelled by neoliberal economic thinking and fossil fuels, techno-industrial society consumed more energy and resources during the most recent doubling (the past 35 years or so) than in all previous history. Humanity is now in dangerous ecological overshoot, using even renewable and replenishable resources faster than ecosystems can regenerate and filling waste sinks beyond capacity. (Even climate change is a waste management problem — carbon dioxide is the single greatest waste by weight in all industrial economies.)
Meanwhile, wild nature is in desperate retreat. One example: from less than one per cent at the dawn of agriculture, humans and their domestic animals had ballooned to comprise 97 per cent of the total weight of terrestrial mammals by the year 2000. That number is closer to 98.5 per cent today, with wild mammals barely clinging to the margins.
The “competitive displacement” of other species is an inevitable byproduct of continuous growth on a finite planet. The expansion of humans and their artefacts necessarily means the contraction of everything else. (Politicians’ protests notwithstanding, there is a fundamental contradiction between population/economic growth and protecting the “environment.”)
Ignoring overshoot is dangerously stupid — we are financing growth, in part, by irreversibly liquidating natural resources essential to our own long-term survival.
And things can only get worse. Even at today’s “lacklustre” three-per-cent global growth rate, incomes/consumption would double in just 20 years and produce — in this century — dramatic climate change, widespread extinctions, the collapse of major biophysical systems, global strife and diminished prospects for continued civilized existence.
But even this threat isn’t enough to move the world community to act sensibly to save itself. Like a mind-altering drug, the compound myth of perpetual growth and continuous technological progress obscures reality. Economists thicken the fog by insisting that the economy is “decoupling” from nature — another illusion resulting from faulty accounting, modelling abstractions and the fudging effects of globalization (for example, wealthy countries “offshoring” their ecological impacts onto poorer countries and the global commons).
The biophysical evidence — that is, reality — shows that material consumption and waste production are still increasing with population and GDP growth. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide is accumulating at accelerating record rates in the atmosphere and the years 2014, 2015 and 2016 sequentially shared the distinction of being the warmest years in the instrumental record.
Source: The conversation between plants and soil
phys.org/news
By Daryl Holland
June 6, 2017
To a child, soil is just dirt – a home for worms. To a gardener, soil is a collection of organic matter and nutrients. But to plants, soil is a hotbed of chemical activity. And plants don’t just observe, they actively participate in this activity.
Plants release chemicals into the soil, called exudates, that tell microbes to turn on or turn off certain chemical processes. Scientists are beginning to understand these signals and are hoping to exploit them to improve the efficiency, sustainability and environmental impact of the trillion dollar agricultural industry.
The three main nutrients plants need to grow are carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus. A plant’s carbon needs come from air in the form of carbon dioxide, but the nitrogen and phosphorus needs come from the soil, and often nitrogen is the element in shortest supply naturally – and so to increase their yields, farmers add nitrogen to the soil.
Artificial nitrogen fertiliser is an essential component of an agricultural system that feeds more than 7 billion people, but it comes with a huge environmental cost. As the population grows, and as feeding habits change to more meat-based diets, nitrogen pollution looks set to become even more of a problem.
Combatting nitrogen pollution
“The extent to which we’ve meddled with the nitrogen cycle globally is astonishing,” says Professor Herbert Kronzucker, head of the University of Melbourne’s School of BioSciences.
“210 million tonnes of nitrogen per year are taken from the atmosphere and turned into a solid form of nitrogen through human activities. And most of this ends up as fertiliser in agricultural soil.
“But less than half of this can actually be captured by plants. The rest is lost to the atmosphere as nitrogen gas or the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, or leaches into waterways where it is a major pollutant.
“In the US, more than half of all lakes are badly impacted by too much nitrogen or phosphorus.”
But what if instead of adding more and more nitrogen to the soil, we help plants to better use the nitrogen that’s already there?
Professor Kronzucker and his colleagues at the University of Toronto, Laval University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences are looking for crops that communicate with the soil in a way that reduces their nitrogen requirements.
“We became interested in the relationship between chemicals from plants and the impact these have on soil microbes,” says Professor Kronzucker.
Human meddling
Nitrogen takes many chemical forms. The most useful forms for plant growth are nitrate (NO3-) and ammonia (NH3). Chemical processes in the soil transform nitrogen between these and other forms.
One example is a process called nitrification, which turns ammonia into nitrate. Nitrate is problematic in the soil because, while plants love it, it doesn’t stick around like ammonia does. It tends to dissolve in water and is washed out of the soil through rain and groundwater. Also, soil microbes turn nitrate into nitrogen gas, which is useless to plants.
All of these processes are reversible, and eventually nitrogen gas is returned to the soil through another microbial process called nitrogen fixation, but this process is too slow for industrial agricultural systems. Farmers have to keep adding more and more nitrogen, and usually this is in the form of artificial nitrogen fertilisers.
These fertilisers are produced using an energy intensive industrial process that ‘fixes’ nitrogen gas by turning it into ammonia. This process, called the Haber-Bosch process, was a major factor in the Green Revolution that began in the 1960s and now provides food for more than 7 billion people.
“Never before in US history has the welfare of the upper crust of society taken so much precedence over the health of everything, including the 99% middle/poor class as well as the only inhabitable planet in the solar system. It’s the only one!”
Source: The Great Acceleration and Obliteration
With permission from
May 16, 2017
Homo Sapiens live in an epoch unlike anything throughout history, figuratively speaking, as far back as Adam and Eve, especially since 1950 “the times they are a changin’” with headlong speed. In fact, ever since 1950, The Great Acceleration has taken off like a spaceship destined to hit warp speed, accelerating faster and faster. As this evolves, humanity risks becoming “a bug looking for a windshield.”
Here’s the issue with The Great Acceleration: “Only after 1945 did human actions become genuine driving forces behind crucial Earth systems” (J.R.McNeill/Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London, 2014, pg. 208).
Still, Earth spins within the solar system at the same rate as it has for eons, whereas in stark contrast to that steady timeless global spin, humanity’s anthropogenic spin turbocharges the entire planetary ecosystem. This has never happened before, and thus, people need to brace themselves for a major jarring to the ecosystem. In fact, it’s already started!
Silently unreported by mass media, The Great Acceleration inadvertently destroys life systems. It happens right before our eyes. Not only that but regrettably, Trumpeters will assuredly accelerate that destructive capacity. That’s guaranteed, a “done deal” for sure. The “bug looking for a windshield” has never looked more certain than when world leaders (ahem), like Trump, look away from and ignore and downplay and denigrate everything about the ecosystem, which is referred to as “home” by pretty much everybody.
Curiously, overcrowding the planet has turned the planet small, as electronics and air travel shrink the world: “In the span of one human lifetime, 1945 to 2015, global population tripled from about 2.3 billion to 7.2 billion. This bizarre interlude, with sustained population growth of more than 1 percent per annum, is of course what almost everyone on Earth now regards as normal. It is anything but normal,” Ibid, pg. 41.
The tripling of population “within only one lifetime” is remarkable, sobering, breathtaking. Woefully, that is only the beginning of a process that may run out of control because unpredictably the repercussions of The Great Acceleration are like a drunken driver on the Italian Amalfi Coastline dangerously close to going over cliff’s edge at each and every turn.
In fact, death traps already exist, as for example, from 1950 to 2015 one of the principal byproducts of The Great Acceleration, air pollution, killed 30-to-40 million people, mostly Chinese as of late, which is roughly equal to the death toll from all wars throughout the world since 1950 (source: Ibid, pg. 24).
Furthermore, industrialization is on a tear, goosing up The Great Acceleration. Since WWII, motor vehicles increased from 40 million to 850 million and plastics production increased from one million tons to 300 million tons. Those numbers are not only signals of acceleration but off the charts! Still, everybody assumes it’s normal, except for climate scientists.
Normality is belied by the conditions of the biosphere itself as human activity shifts carbon stored over millennia from the lithosphere (Earth’s upper mantle and crust) into the upper atmosphere at unsustainable rates running from 1,200 million tons per annum in 1945 to 9,500 million tons in 2015, 8xs faster within only 70 years. Eight times anything is a big number, e.g., if everyone’s wages multiplied 8xs, everyone would be rich.
Even at the unsustainable rate of 8xs, carbon emissions continue accelerating, pre-Trump, post-Trump, forever-Trump, getting a huge boost ever faster during Trump days. For example, CO2 emissions during the 2000s have been running at a 3.3% annual rate of increase versus a rate of 1.3% during the 1990s. That’s a 150% increase within only one decade. Meanwhile, the atmosphere is already filling up with CO2, the primary cause of global warming. It can only take so much before the thermostat gets stuck wide-open… relentless heat scorching agriculture.
As such, humanity has become a vast experiment; nobody’s been here before, nobody. Meanwhile, the United States, under the direction of Trumpeters, cut public links to information about the crucial carbon cycle by cutting NOAA’s budget “to the bone.” Either that’s an honest mistake or it’s a mean-spirited mistake; chose your poison. Regardless, scientists are out of favor: According to a USA Today headline: “Trump’s Proposed NOAA Budget Cuts Rattle Scientists” d/d March 6, 2017.
Meanwhile, at the core of The Great Acceleration, capitalism works… at the top! Proof: Everything is accelerating as if there are no limits to growth and more growth. That’s capitalism par excellence. But cautionary flags are ubiquitous, e.g., according to certain academic circles, there is another side to the story: “The Great Acceleration in its present form cannot last for long,” Ibid, pg. 5. Expanding balloons eventually pop.
One major risk within the context of The Great Acceleration is human behavior itself because people have a tendency to dither away precious time when it comes to life-threatening issues that appear too big to tackle and too difficult to wrap arms around, like the planet: “Whilst the US and China fiddled for 20 years from 1995-2015, arguing about terms and conditions of the Kyoto agreement, the total tonnage of global carbon emissions from the energy sector nearly equaled that of all human history prior to 1995,” Ibid, pg. 78. That’s big league acceleration!
How does it end? Regrettably, not very well with Trumpeters at the helm. They’ve publicly denounced any and all concerns about the health of the planet and/or its inhabitants, as for example, the American Health Care Act, an oxymoronic title after reading its contents, makes deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, by $800 billion. “Donald Trump is attacking low- and middle-income families, children, seniors and people with disabilities in order to hand a $6 trillion tax break to his wealthy friends―the largest tax break in U.S. history” (Source: socialsecurityworks.org).
Never before in US history has the welfare of the upper crust of society taken so much precedence over the health of everything, including the 99% middle/poor class as well as the only inhabitable planet in the solar system. It’s the only one!
Still, as it happens, within the context of The Great Acceleration, Trump’s 1% have opted to go out in flaming glory, as they are the primary beneficiaries of all that floats to the top, but then again, some of the 1% are attempting to “get out of Dodge” by escaping to planets far, far away, leaving the hordes behind to fight over tillable land.
Evidence of The Great Acceleration is far and wide. After all, it was only one generation ago in 1986 when the eminent biologist E. O. Wilson (Harvard) presciently sounded the alarm in a book titled Biodiversity (The National Academies Press): “It carries the urgent warning that we are rapidly altering and destroying the environments that have fostered the diversity of life forms for more than a billion years,” Ibid, pg. 84.
Alas, there’s no way E. O. Wilson could have foreseen Trump would come along to “seal the deal” for his prognostications and in the process actually speed up the negative aspects of The Great Acceleration, as America becomes great again, maybe/probably not, but if so, for very, very short duration.
Withal, don’t stand underneath national monuments. Those are subject to severe budget cuts, poor maintenance, and unexpectedly crashing down forevermore as the nation loses its soul.
Postscript: Disastrous breaking news out of Alaska: The following is a synopsis (quotation) of a horrifying scientific release d/d May 11, 2017 that is extraordinarily relevant to The Great Acceleration:
“The study, based on aircraft measurements of carbon dioxide and methane and tower measurements from Barrow, Alaska, found that from 2012 through 2014, the state emitted the equivalent of 220 million tons of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere from biological sources (the figure excludes fossil fuel burning and wildfires). That’s an amount comparable to all the emissions from the US commercial sector in a single year.”
“The chief reason for the greater CO2 release was that as Alaska has warmed up, emissions from once frozen tundra in winter are increasing – presumably because the ground is not refreezing as quickly. Now what? Sit in a circle and hold hands, or get to work to find what (if any) options we’ve got?”
That is horrific news, almost as bad as it gets especially this early in the repercussions cycle of The Great Acceleration. It now appears that nature is competing head-to-head with humans, overflowing the atmosphere with heat-trapping greenhouse gases. That’s a perfect script for an apocalypse film project.
Looking ahead, one option scientists cannot rely upon is help from the anti-science Trump administration. Ipso facto, The Great Acceleration fallout is about to leap forward like never before. Batten down the hatches!
And, Trump thinks health care is tough…
Source: APOCALYPSE SOON: CATACLYSMIC DISASTERS AND MASS DEATH ARE IN HUMANITY’S FUTURE |
Are we on the verge of the worst times in all of human history? We live at a moment when prominent leaders in the scientific world and in the religious world are both urgently warning that humanity could soon be facing a nightmarish apocalyptic future. Weather patterns are rapidly changing, the crust of our planet is becoming increasing unstable, “superbugs” that are resistant to antibiotics threaten to completely render our best medical treatments obsolete, the number of global terror attacks continues to rise year after year, and thanks to weapons of mass destruction humanity now has the capability of completely destroying itself several times over. They often disagree about why it will happen, but an increasing number of scientific and religious leaders have come to the exact same conclusion that the future of humanity is very bleak.
Despite the fact that technology is increasing at an exponential rate, many top thinkers in the scientific community now believe that there is a very good chance that the human race will be facing extinction by the end of this century. The following comes from an outstanding Salon article…
The late microbiologist Frank Fenner, for example, whose virological work helped eliminate smallpox, predicted in 2010 that “humans will probably be extinct within 100 years, because of overpopulation, environmental destruction, and climate change.” Similarly, the Canadian biologist Neil Dawe reportedly “wouldn’t be surprised if the generation after him witness the extinction of humanity.” And the renowned ecologist Guy McPherson argues that humanity will follow the dodo into the evolutionary grave by 2026.
Those are some very sobering words.
Perhaps you have never heard of any of those guys before, but I know that virtually all of you have heard of Stephen Hawking. According to Hawking, we have now reached “the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity”…
“Now, more than at any time in our history, our species needs to work together. We face awesome environmental challenges: climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans. Together, they are a reminder that we are at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity. We now have the technology to destroy the planet on which we live, but have not yet developed the ability to escape it.”
The last 100 years have been unlike any other era in human history. We have constructed towering cities all over the planet, we have developed remarkable technologies that have enabled us to make the impossible more than possible, and the population of this planet has shot up to a staggering 7 billion people.
But in order to feed our exploding population, we are going to need another miracle. According to Megan Clark, the head of Australia’s national science agency, more food will need to be produced over the next 50 years than has been produced throughout the rest of human history combined…
“It is hard for me to comprehend that in the next 50 years we will need to produce as much food as has been consumed over our entire human history,” she said.
“That means in the working life of my children, more grain than ever produced since the Egyptians, more fish than eaten to date, more milk than from all the cows that have ever been milked on every frosty morning humankind has ever known.”
These are the types of things that keep scientific thinkers up late at night. At this moment, great famines are already hitting places such as Venezuela and Yemen, and this trend is only going to accelerate in the years ahead.
Hopefully mass death for the human race will be delayed for as long as possible, but one thing that is already happening is widespread species extinction among wild animals all over our planet. The following comes from one of my previous articles…
It has been called “the long extinction”. Our planet is in the process of dying, and as you will see below, this process of death and destruction appears to be accelerating. According to a report that was put out by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London, the number of wild animals around the globe appears to be decreasing at a rate of about 2 percent a year. 2 percent may not sound like a lot to you, but over 10 years that would mean that 20 percent of all wild animals in the world would be gone. And according to that same report, it is being projected that the total loss of wildlife during the 50 year period from 1970 to 2020 will be a staggering 67 percent.
For religious leaders, the concerns are often more spiritual in nature.
Many Christians are convinced that the return of Jesus Christ is rapidly approaching, and meanwhile many Muslims are expecting a figure known as “the Mahdi” to come back soon. Here is more from the Salon article that I quoted earlier…
Returning to religion, recent polls show that a huge portion of religious people believe that the end of the world is imminent. For example, a 2010 survey found that 41 percent of Christians in the U.S. believe that Jesus will either “definitely” or “probably” return by 2050. Similarly, 83 percent of Muslims in Afghanistan and 72 percent in Iraq claim that the Mahdi, Islam’s end-of-days messianic figure, will return within their lifetimes.
As I discussed in The Rapture Verdict, I certainly believe that anyone that is able to stay alive through the cataclysms that are coming will have the opportunity to witness the return of Jesus Christ. So many ancient prophecies found in the Bible are being uniquely fulfilled in our generation, and it is truly an exciting time to be alive.
Unfortunately, many are not prepared for the great challenges that we will have to face before Jesus comes back. The following prophecy was recently given by Jeff Byerly…
There are a lot of men who are taking puzzle pieces and forcing them in places they do not go and it is making the picture unclear. The end of this season will bring clarity and you will understand exactly where you are when the fiery “kickoff” event happens. The financial collapse will soon follow. Then food will be hard to come by and many will starve but my remnant will feed even greater multitudes than I did, for I have gone to the Father. The whole world shall once again go to war and over one fourth of the inhabitants of the earth shall be killed by guns and bombs, by famine, disease and the beasts of the land. There will be many martyred during this time and I will avenge their deaths when the number of them has been fulfilled.
All this will happen before the day of the LORD. The great day Our indignation, vengeance, retribution and wrath shall be poured out upon the children of disobedience. No man shall hide from Us. We shall find all those deserving just punishment. There will be a global earthquake caused by an asteroid hitting the sea. There shall be tsunamis worldwide and every mountain shall be moved and every island will be out of place. The very atmosphere will be ripped open and recede like a rolled up scroll. The sun will be black and the moon will be blood, gross darkness shall cover the people and the whole earth for three days as in the time of Exodus, but My the houses of My people shall have light and people shall become light for they will be changed and My glory shall be shown on them. My children will be shown clearly to the world who they are!
Of course many other men and women of God have been warning about many of the exact same things, but most people are choosing not to listen.
Personally, I am entirely convinced that we are living during one of the most critical times in all of human history. The years ahead will be incredibly difficult, but for those that are part of the Remnant they will also be incredibly thrilling.
Great shaking is about to begin.
For those that know who they are, who they belong to and where they are going, that is actually very good news.
https://www.intellihub.com
HOLLYWOOD (INTELLIHUB) — The editor-in-chief of Intellihub News Shepard Ambellas managed to capture chemtrail researcher, activist and renown filmmaker Michael Murphy for a one on one interview.
Some of the footage made Ambellas’s new documentary film SHADE the Motion Picture, a film that exposes sinister globalist operations taking place worldwide.
Source: These unsettling images from NASA show just how fast Earth is changing – ScienceAlert
ww.sciencealert.com
We know that Earth is changing in dramatic ways on a daily basis, but sometimes you need a bird’s eye view – or a satellite feed – to really appreciate the evolution of our planet.
That’s exactly what you get with a new set of images recently released by NASA, showing dramatic shifts in forest sizes, water levels, and ice cover over the last 40 years.
Some of the pictures really are shocking, like the comparison below of Lake Urmia in Iran, showing its shrinking size and changing colours.
This distinct green/brown contrast took place over just a few months, and was caused by summer heat and growing populations of algae and bacteria:
Lake Urmia, Iran. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
“Some of these effects are related to climate change, some are not,” says NASA. “Some document the effects of urbanisation or the ravage of natural hazards such as fires and floods. All show our planet in a state of flux.”
Check out the shrinkage of the Great Salt Lake in Utah between 1985 and 2010, caused by reduced snowmelt and rainfall:
Great Salt Lake, Utah. Credit: US Department of the Interior/US Geological Survey
Or the reduction in size of Owens Lake, California, over the same time frame, prompted by diverted water and toxic chemicals:
Owens Lake, California. Credit: USGS Landsat Missions Gallery
Several of the images show how the spread of our towns and cities has impacted the natural landscape.
Take these shots of the Baban Rafi forest in Niger, showing huge chunks of forest disappearing between 1976 and 2007:
Baban Rafi forest. Credit: United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
Much of that forest was cleared to make way for farming land – the country’s population increased by 40 percent across the same time period, according to NASA.
The effects of urbanisation can also be seen in these 1991 and 2016 pictures of New Delhi in India:
New Delhi, India. Credit: US Department of the Interior / USGS and NASA
A UN agency says the world’s population grew to 7.4 billion in 2016 from 7.3 billion last year, with a substantial youth bulge challenging political and social systems across the planet. The report focuses on the well-being of 10-year-old girls as indicators of development success or failure.
Source: Global population grew to 7.4 billion in 2016, UN report finds – World – CBC News
The Associated Press Posted: Dec 01, 2016
The world’s population grew to 7.4 billion in 2016, according to a newly released UN report. (Stefan Wermuth/Reuters)
A UN agency says the world’s population grew to 7.4 billion in 2016 from 7.3 billion last year, with a substantial youth bulge challenging political and social systems across the planet.
The report said the world’s population grew 1.1 per cent to 7.433 billion from 7.349 billion the previous year, according to the United Nations Population Fund’s 2016 State of the World Population report, released Thursday in Amman, Jordan. About 26 per cent of the global population is under age 14.
Canada’s population grew to 36.3 million from 35.9 million last year, with 16 per cent of the population under 24.
Daniel Baker, regional humanitarian co-ordinator and head of the fund’s Jordan country office, highlighted the potential fallout — and gains — to be had by overcoming the world’s clear gender inequality among global youth.
“Failing to invest in girls is nothing less than planned poverty. Unless we invest in girls, we’re planning to have a poorer future,” Baker said.
The report focuses on the well-being of 10-year-old girls as indicators of development success or failure.
“Failing to invest in girls is nothing less than planned poverty. Unless we invest in girls, we’re planning to have a poorer future,” Baker said.
Refugee schoolchildren receive their new books on the first day of the new school year at one of the UNRWA schools at a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan. Investing in girls’ education is key to boosting economic development, the UN says. (Muhammad Hamed/Reuters)
The report estimated that developing countries could generate or lose at least $21 billion US depending on their investments in the health and education of their 10-year-old girls today.
Alleged humanitarian efforts have always been a rather important aspect of the state propaganda campaign carried out by the White House and its media. We’ve seen Washington using its proxy NGOs to fight against the alleged “humanitarian crimes” of the Syrian government, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and other states that Washington has declared its enemies.
This large-scale campaign that is said to be driven by “common human values” has been supported by a number of modern American oligarchs.
Among those “humanitarian champions” one may find the founder of Microsoft and one of the richest businessmen in the world, Bill Gates. He is a figure who likes to be presented as a benevolent philanthropist of sorts. By using the so-called “Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,” this American oligarch attempts to put on the mask of the official representative of the US political elite, carrying on the fight against poverty, food shortages and diseases in Africa and other poor regions of the world.
However, in reality these “activities” of Bill Gates and the White House are focused on the use of progress to reverse the effect of humanitarian projects, namely to reduce the population of the planet, or, in other words – to pursue eugenics.
This statement is confirmed by Gates’ remarks to the invitation-only Long Beach, California TED2010 Conference, in a speech titled, “Innovating to Zero!” Along with the scientifically absurd proposition of reducing manmade CO2 emissions worldwide to zero by 2050, approximately four and a half minutes into the talk, Gates declares, “First we got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.” (emphasis added).
Thus, one of the most powerful men in the world has openly declared that he expects vaccines to reduce the world population. Mind you, that when Bill Gates speaks about vaccines, he knows what he is talking about. In January 2010 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Gates announced that over the next decade his foundation would allocate 10 billion dollars to develop and deliver new vaccines to developing countries.
We’ve heard this position regarding the control of the world population through the “reduction of the number of third-world inhabitants” before. Australian microbiologist and Nobel Price laureate Macfarlane Burnet in 1947 urged the Australian government to develop and unleash biological weapons against “over-populated countries of Southeast Asia.” In particular, during a closed meeting in 1947 with The New Weapons and Equipment Development Committee, the microbiologist recommended the creation of a group with a mandate to create secret biological weapon components that could affect food in such a way that it would allow Canberra to control the population of Indonesia and other Asian countries.
A similar objective was pursued by a secret program codenamed Project Coast, during which US intelligence agencies started testing such viruses as Ebola and Marburg fevers on South Africa’s black population. The US Centers for Disease Control was delivering those viruses from its secret laboratories to Africa in a bid to create biological and chemical weapons, which were aimed at sterilizing and even exterminating the black population of this African country, while at the same time, murdering political opponents of the apartheid.
Today, in the age of high-tech novelties, Bill Gates has pioneered the electronic direction of eugenics, offering to implant the “undesired” part of the population with an electronic chip that would deprive women of reproductive capacity for a total of 16 years.
However, this is hardly the whole truth about the “humanitarian concerns” of the White House and its “humanitarian patrons”, who, under the guise of fighting for the greater good, continue searching out ways to control the population of the planet, using both the advances of modern science and armed conflicts, like those that we’ve witnessed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and other countries.
Jean Périer is an independent researcher and analyst and a renowned expert on the Near and Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine
“Exponential growth, everywhere: the terminal cancer of this civilization.”
Sha’Tara
Sept 19, 2016
Thoughts from ~burning woman~
In my introduction on ~burning woman~ blog I wrote: “I think that every problem is an invitation to all of us to work out the solution, and I believe that no problem exists that does not contain a solution within itself. All we are asked to do is unravel it. Life is like a Rubik’s Cube. There is a solution, it’s just a willingness to work at it until it emerges.”
Taking it from “now” here’s a bit of reality check: (from this blog)
Source: Researchers Say Society Is Doomed. Can We Save Ourselves in Time?undergroundreporter.org – Christina Sarich – September 7, 2016
Clues unearthed by archaeologists suggest that our society is doomed for collapse. Researchers from University College London and the University of Maryland recently studied 2,378 archaeological sites from Neolithic Europe to discover some tell-tale signs indicating when an ecosystem was shifting into instability. After looking at the data, it seems that every single civilization gave clues to its own impending demise — including our own.
Signs that a society is about to collapse, or undergo a massive reorganization, included fragility in systems that had undergone ‘slowing down’ or ‘flickering’ from impacts such as disease, warfare, resource degradation, or crop failure.
The researchers describe ‘flickering’ as a change in a society’s response to these perturbations resulting in the society becoming caught in a socio-ecological trap that reinforces the same bad behaviour that caused the issues to begin with, and prevents adaptation with new action.
Every time a society ‘flickers’ it loses recovery time, and you could consider it as moving closer to destruction. The team found that these flickering signs signified an eventual demise of the society, all showing up well before the actual collapse.
Undeniably our current world is severely handicapped by serious and intensifying problems. I don’t think I need to name them, we all know what we’re facing, as a global society, and as individuals. It is my nature to seek solutions to problems and the more obvious those are, the more I find myself focusing, perhaps even fixating, upon them. “Find a solution… Think!” And it’s what my mind does.
It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention. What I’ve been learning lately is that “invention” need not be a strictly forward motion: in looking for solutions it can move backward. And this is where I’m at: how far back must man, as a species, go to solve his current life-threatening problems? To explain that backward move, it is necessary to delve into the main cause of man’s current crisis.
The common thought is that solutions are found in new, forward-looking discoveries. For every action (which comes from a previous reaction) there is a new reaction. Thus the clumsy reciprocal “chug… chug… chug…” movement of civilization moves itself forward and each time, like the old coal fired steam trains, the machine picks up speed. A new “disease” (caused by a previous reciprocal movement) gets a new drug treatment which causes more problems to be met with more drugs. That has been the way, and it’s the accepted way. Except that it doesn’t work, and never did, because there never was any track built past the tunnel. But that’s all beside the point as long as we chose, as a collective, to exist in total denial of history and observation and believe that any “new and improved whatever” would solve any current crisis, or make any current burden easier to bear. Thus we blindly entered the age of science as god; the age of technocracy: of technology, of robotics, of machines, of medical interventions and heaping drug prescriptions, of faster communication and travel, of ever-expanding cities to house an exponentially growing population. We entered the age of top-down, system driven, totalitarian collectivization and we were taught in public school, in college, by the media and the corporate world that its called progress. Therefore we progressed into a progressively worsening societal condition, right up to the end of the track which in today’s parlance we call “the unsustainable society.”
In 1972, yes, that far back, the Club of Rome and others commissioned computer simulations dealing with unrestrained growth versus availability of space and resources.
From Wikipedia, (excerpt): “The Limits to Growth” is a 1972 book about the computer simulation of exponential economic and population growth with finite resource supplies. The original version presented a model based on five variables: world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resources depletion. These variables are considered to grow exponentially, while the ability of technology to increase resources availability is only linear.
And a footnote to the article: With few exceptions, economics as a discipline has been dominated by a perception of living in an unlimited world, where resource and pollution problems in one area were solved by moving resources or people to other parts. The very hint of any global limitation as suggested in the report The Limits to Growth was met with disbelief and rejection by businesses and most economists. However, this conclusion was mostly based on false premises. – Meyer & Nørgård (2010).
It’s important to understand what “exponential growth” versus “linear growth” mean. You’ve all seen graphs showing exponential growth: that smooth line at the bottom that begins to rise ever so slowly, then higher and higher as each segment doubles itself until the line shoots right off the top of the chart. Linear on the other hand shows a steady growth rate, predictable, logical, sustainable. Man’s civilization today is of the exponential kind, and we’re very close to the top of the chart. So close that the system sustaining the growth is failing – AT EVERY POINT and not just on some. We’ve not only reached the limits to growth, we have surpassed them and now we can’t stop our train from shooting off the end of the tunnel of progress we created from our lusts and greed and passion for cheap and easy and entertaining.
Now for a very, very brief history lesson beginning with a question: which of mankind’s many civilizations not only succeeded, but continued on and remains “operative” and growing to this day? And the answer is… none. Not a single one. Each civilization that rose from nothing, or from the wrack and ruin of another has in its turn collapsed utterly.
A reminder from none other than the famous poet, Percy Shelley:
“Ozymandias”
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
What better comparison could one make of this current prideful and shallow civilization than to the boastful one of the great king “Ozymandias?” Oh yes, it is said that science with the faithful and uncanny help of technology can, and will, solve all of man’s current problems. Stupid to worry, to be concerned, about such things as climate change which “Right” thinking people know to be a hoax; about over population (why, the earth can sustain twice our current numbers!); availability of food and sustainability of edible crops (what about GMO’s and fish farms, etc.?) and simple living space (ah, hmm, well, we can live closer together, build higher highrises and we can go live on the moon, or on Mars with a bit of technological fixing!) and wars (a one-world government will fix that, along with a one-world economy!)
Wonderfully childish reasoning that is desperately held onto by billions of desperate individuals: desperate for things to continue as they are; desperate to ignore, hide, mock, the reality that is threatening to destroy not only most of mankind, but much of his living environment and those “others” nature symbiotically “intended” for space to be shared with. Simply put, quality has given way to quantity – it’s always what happens when values are determined by numbers – and numbers only work when fed more quantities of numbers. Exponential growth, everywhere: the terminal cancer of this civilization.
Annunaki
Somewhere way back in prehistoric times man “happened” on this world. I really don’t know how that came about and I’m not a strong proponent of Darwinist evolutionary theories, while holding the creation concept equally at arms length, but man “was” here. From what I gather this “man” creature was living a natural life on a natural world. And as we observe of other animals, all was, relatively speaking, well with that.
Then something amazing and terrible happened: man came face to face with a choice. There was a fork on the road of life, the left continuing the natural pattern of life, and the right promising a much brighter, exciting, morally and technically uplifting future. Man was offered the fruit of civilization. Some saw it as a marvelous opportunity for advancement and took that path. Most did not, but it would be “civilized” man that would rise to conquer and subdue the earth and all that dwell therein. Man became “Ozymandias” the king of kings, ruler of all creation. Then one civilization after another rose suddenly, then fell slowly until hardly anything remained, and then another took its place, or surfaced somewhere else on the planet and “great” works were accomplished; marvels were created and built, then that too collapsed utterly, leaving only remnants in stone or bits and pieces of clay to mark the passage of civilized man. And on and on it went, until history began to be recorded on clay tablets and parchments, then in books and now in digital information. This is but another of those suddenly risen only to fail, civilization. And no, this civilization isn’t too big to fail – quite the contrary: it is too big to sustain itself and must fail.
This is about a solution to our current dilemma. Believing as I do that nothing can fix this toppling purposeless global civilization build on nothing but exploitation, oppression and bloodshed, my solution is eloquent by its simplicity: man must (not should) return to that prehistoric fork in the road and turn back to the left hand path, putting a clear sign on the right hand one that says: “This is the path to hell. It is forbidden for man to enter therein for this path can only be sustained by oppression and bloodshed, that is, by death.”
Yes: man must give up his pride filled attempts at creating new civilizations and return to his proper, natural, non-exploitative roots. The collapse of this civilization, since it is global in scope, is likely man’s last chance at redeeming himself; at rediscovering humility in compassion, in sharing, in becoming truly a human being to live in peace and harmony with all others on this little world. No amount of “civilizing” can do that for man, only a return to nature.
Source: Stephen Hawking Gives Interview on Larry King
Stephen Hawking discusses air pollution, overpopulation and concerns about the correct usage of artificial intelligence.
In a recent interview with Larry King, Stephen Hawking discusses what the biggest threats to mankind are and expresses his concerns about artificial intelligence.
“Back in 2010 you mentioned that ‘greed and stupidity were the biggest threats to mankind’, do you still feel the same?” King asks.
“We certainly have not become less greedy or less stupid”, Hawking says, “Six years ago I was warning about pollution and overcrowding, they have gotten worse since then. The population has grown by half a billion since our last meeting, with no end in sight. At this rate, there will be 11 billion by 2100. Air pollution has increased over the past five years, more than 80% of inhabitants of urban areas are exposed to unsafe levels of air pollution.”
“Increase in air pollution and the emission level increase in carbon dioxide. At this rate, it will be too late to avoid dangerous levels of global warming,” Hawking says.
(While the World Health Organization surely confirms Hawking’s concerns about air pollution in urban areas, TrueActivist cannot confirm or deny the “stupidity” of humanity.)
Larry King goes on to ask Hawking about the dangers of artificial intelligence. “How seriously are governments taking this warning?” he asks.
“Governments seem to be engaged in an AI arms race, designing planes and weapons with intelligent technologies. The funding for projects directly beneficial to the human race, such as improved medical screening, seems a somewhat lower priority,” Hawking responds. “I don’t think advances in our artificial intelligence will necessarily be benign, once machines reach the critical stage of machines being able to acknowledge themselves, we cannot predict whether their goals will be the same as ours. Artificial intelligence has the potential to evolve faster than the human race, beneficially I could coexist with humans and augment our capabilities, but a rogue AI could be difficult to stop. We need to insure that artificial intelligence is designed ethically with safeguards in place.”
Stephen Hawking may express a valid concern when it comes to the possibility of governments involving themselves in an artificial intelligence arms race. According to the White House government website, they mention that their goals with AI “plays a key role in self-driving vehicles, which have the potential to save thousands of lives, as well as in unmanned aircraft systems, which may transform global transportation, logistics systems, and countless industries over the coming decades.”
They mention medical and cancer research, stating that “In healthcare, the President’s Precision Medicine Initiative and the Cancer Moonshot will rely on AI to find patterns in medical data and, ultimately, to help doctors diagnose diseases and suggest treatments to improve patient care and health outcomes.”
If you take a look at the US budget proposals for 2017 (suggestion: download the summary tables for the best side-by-side view of budget proposals) you’ll see if they “put their money where their mouth is” so to speak. In short, nothing tops the United State’s federal budget for Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, but the US defense budget follow’s quickly behind.
According to the Defense Department, they specifically want to invest at least $12-$15 billion in the year 2017 for developing end-game strategies. ““Artificial intelligence can help us with a lot of things that make warfighting faster, that make warfighting more predictable, that allow us to mine all of the data we have about an opponent to make better operational decisions,” he said. “But I’m leaving none of those decisions at this moment to the machine,” states US Air Force General Paul Selva earlier this year.
Do you think artificial intelligence will save lives, or is humanity playing a very dangerous game?
Source: Operation Barbarossa 2: ‘Overpopulation’ and the Funding of World War III | Humans Are Free
By Peter Koenig, Global Research
March 20, 2016
“Wars are horrible. The only good thing about wars is that they help reduce the world population.”
These are the words flung in my face not too long ago, by a person I thought was close to me. I was in shock and asked what do you mean?
“Well, don’t you think the world is over-populated?” – I couldn’t believe that these were the thoughts of somebody I had respected. They may well be the thoughts of common people in my close vicinity.
By opening my eyes to a dimension I ignored until then – the secret thoughts and dreams of people, maybe of the masses began revealing themselves; thoughts that are expressed only in an ambiance of familiarity, or perhaps when ‘under the influence’, when often the inner-most truths come to the fore.
Over-population is a western ego-centric phantasy. Western Comfort is afraid of having to share some of their excesses with the poor under-humans of so-called developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America – the slowly emerging Continents that have been raped for hundreds of years by precisely the same western colonialists which today claim over-population and wage war around the world in a new form of colonialism.
According to FAO – the UN’s World Food Organization – the globe’s current agricultural potential could feed at least 12 billion people, if only the food would not be subject to speculation and would be properly distributed.
But it isn’t. Food crop speculators in the US and in Europe, command the price – they literally control who may live and who must die – by famine.
According to the World Bank, 80% of the food-price hike induced famine of 2008 / 2009 that precipitated the death of 2 million people in Asia and Africa was the result of food speculation.
Three weeks ago, the Swiss Government recommended its electorate to reject a Swiss socialist-led people’s initiative against food speculation. Their main arguments were denial that food speculation caused famine; and “if we forbid food speculation, the speculators will leave Switzerland and make their profit elsewhere”.
With the prevailing neoliberal thinking: Profit über Alles, ethics has no place. The Swiss populace indeed complied and rejected the initiative with a margin of almost 2:3.
The financial centers of Switzerland in Zurich and Geneva control some of the largest food speculators in the world. The nefarious speculative business practices of Place Finance Suisse are alive and well.
Thoughts and clandestine desires of population reduction and faraway wars are most likely the unconscious results of decades of horrendous western propaganda seeking in one way or another popular consensus that wars are necessary, wars are normal, wars is what people had since ‘the beginning’.
What beginning? – Most certainly the beginning of the atrociously violent and greed driven Judo-Christian era, some six thousand years ago.
Wars are the quintessence of our western existence, the final quest for power over the universe. And wars are essential for the survival of our western growth-based economic system.
Wars create needs for more wars and armed conflicts – wars propel a vicious spiral of conflict dependency. We have in our western economies created a war dependency that is so crass that for example the US economy (sic) could no longer subsist without wars.
Wars kill and destroy; and reconstruction creates growth. Mass killing helps diminishing the world’s population, a key objective of the elite’s cream of the crop, like the Rockefellers, founders of semi-occult organizations like the Bilderberg Society.
The justification for continuous conflicts and killing is precisely what the western media are propagating day-in-day-out – terror that has to be fought by wars. If there is not enough terror to rationalize a war, terror has to be manufactured – by false flags.
The west has perfected the science of constructing false flags – so credibly that the masses are screaming for more police and military protection; so credibly that the masses want more wars in far-away overseas places, more wars for their protection, for the protection of their comfort; so credibly that western societies gladly give away their civil rights for more police and military protection.
As an example, following the January and November 2015 ‘terror attacks’ in Paris, President Hollande is attempting to put a State of Emergency permanently into the French Constitution. So far it has been blocked by Parliament.
The propaganda now, as well as then, spreads fear. When man is fearful, he is most vulnerable and can easily be manipulated.
Picking up on Christopher Black’s excellent analysis on western preparations for attacking Russia – i.e. starting WWIII – which he calls “Operation Barbarossa 2: The Baltic Gambit” (published by NEO and Global Research), here are some complementing thoughts on how this Operation resembles the original “Operation Barbarossa” – code name for Hitler’s attack on Russia during WWII. (see maps below)
Today, similarities between what Chris Black calls Barbarossa 2 and the original Barbarossa abound. Starting with Corporate Big Business (CBB) and Wall Street (WS) supporting the fascist drive for world power, to the propaganda and lie campaign of six mega- Zionist-Anglo-Saxon media corporations, to the funding of the war operations itself.
WWII has killed more than 50 million people, about half of whom were Russians – funded by the FED via WS and the Bank for International Settlement (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland in German; the book on which this German newspaper article is based, “Bankgeschäfte mit dem Feind – Die Bank für Internationalen Zahlungsausgleich im Zweiten Weltkrieg” (1997), by Gian Trepp, describes the transactions in details – but, surprisingly it is no longer available, and it has apparently never been translated into English.
However, “The Tower of Basel” complements and corroborates Gian Trepp’s account quite well).
Both of WWs I and II – and God forbid, WWIII, were and would be directed towards the east. The first target being Russia. China is already in the mire of attack and conquer of these class one elitists. The CBB elite are steering the Pentagon and by extension Washington’s NATO vassals.
This cream of the crop pretending to run the world is hiding behind such nefarious organizations like the Bilderberg Society, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Chatham House, the World Economic Forum – and more.
The Clintons, Kerrys, Obamas, Hollandes, Camerons of this world, as well as the heads of the Washington Consensus instigators, the FED, World Bank, IMF; of the so-called European Central Bank, joined by the CEOs of WS, the military industrial complex, the medias of mass communication, the pharma – to name just a few – are members of most of these semi-secretive inter-laced organizations.
Many of these leaders are Zionists or supporters of world Zionism. They are all joined at the top, through one of the opaquest and most sinister pacts: The Freemasons, symbolized by the triangle with the watchful eye in the upper center, as depicted on the dollar bill.
They are the creators of the FED and our western fraudulent casino monetary system. They are already ruling the world. Their grip is tightening every day to the point of no return, if We, the People, let it be.
Here we come to the analogies between WWII and the preparations for WWIII. In the 1930’s and throughout WWII, IBM, then one of the largest US corporations, collaborated closely with Hitler, helping him organizing the Holocaust by accounting, registering and finally transporting Jews to their death camps of Auschwitz and others, through the first punch-card computers — read more here.
Hitler awarded to IBM founder Thomas Watson the Merit Cross (Germany’s second-highest honor).
Other collaborators included Ford and General Motors, DuPont, the chemical giant, as well as the Randolph Hearst media empire, to name just a few, who admired the Führer for his disciplinary leadership.
They turned a blind eye to the Nazi atrocities when profitable business loomed. Corporate America provided the arsenal for Hitler’s Nazism.
Today, similar to then, corporate America, corporate Europe, and corporate western media, hand-in-hand, promote and support a fascist approach to denigrate and squash independent and non-aligned Russia, then China – all with the PNAC’s (Plan for a New American Century) objective of Full Spectrum Dominance of all the world’s resources and all the world’s people.
One of the most recent physical onslaughts began with the by now well-documented western instigated Nazi coup against the democratically elected leader of Ukraine, Mr. Viktor Yanukovych, replacing him by a fascist government, in the bloody Kiev Maidan coup of February 2014 – and blaming Russia for the ensuing ‘civil war’; actually it is a NATO supported massacre in Ukraine’s eastern Donbass area, killing at least 40,000 people mostly civilians and causing some 2 million refugees.
The objective of this murderous western initiative is two-fold: moving NATO closer to Moscow – and privatizing the rich agricultural and mineral lands of Ukraine by wester capital.
Who is funding ‘Barbarossa 2’ – the US / NATO war adventure in preparation of WWIII?
The cost is difficult to assess but could easily reach a trillion dollars, or above. This is where the FED and the ECB may come in – and the similarity with Operation Barbarossa, where the FED via WS and the BIS funded Hitler’s Holocaust and war on Russia.
Could this be the reason for ECB’s tolerance vis-à-vis some Eurozone countries’ – France and Italy, probably Poland and others – in the last couple of years producing more Euros than ECB rules would allow?
This ‘new’ money, generated at the tune of at least 500 billion euros (in excess of the allowed Eurozone quotas) buys government bonds, thus, financing government debt.
With what we now know on how WWII was funded, would it surprise if the FED / WS-run ECB (remember, Mario Draghi is a former Goldman Sachs exec) would follow instructions from Washington to turn a blind eye to the Eurozone’s debt-ratio limitations, to produce, as does the FED with dollars, worthless euros to fund a future WWIII?
This would be merely copying the formula of the FED / WS / BIS funding of WWII.
The Empire of Chaos is as always dancing on two weddings: funding a new war with Russia through debt imposed by Washington on its EU vassal allies, sanctioning Russia through the same EU vassals, which willingly accept the nefarious economic consequences for themselves, while the war machine of the exceptional nation of the US of A will reap the benefits of her arms industry; and while Obama did not prevent US business representatives to attend Russia’s International Business Forum last June in St. Petersburg.
When do “We the People” open our eyes to these flagrant human atrocities and deceits of an ever manipulating elite?
About the author: Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, CounterPunch, TeleSur, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.