Author: neilg63

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics War Crimes

Our Rulers Want War

Last month, the world’s movers and shakers met up in the Swiss ski resort of Davos. Nominally elected politicians posed with billionaire technocrats and functionaries of unaccountable global organisations like the WHO to discuss how to manage the restless plebs. Hot on their agenda, besides climate change, future pandemics and universal digital ID, was the perceived threat of disinformation, misinformation and malinformation. The last neologism is particularly ominous. They are not only concerned with information that may be factually incorrect, but with indisputable facts which, if disseminated, would incriminate them. Information must now not just be manipulated, but actively suppressed for the greater good of the elite’s long-term plans for humanity.

While the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, shared the stage with Pfizer CEO, Albert Bourla, and, without a hint of irony, welcomed the prospect of rolling out a mass injection campaigns within 100 days of the next pandemic, his colleague, Grant Shapps posing as Secretary of State for Defence, made a high-profile speech to prepare us for war with Eurasia. A week later General Sir Richard Shirreff appears on British TV screens to advocate conscription in the build-up to a military conflict with Russia allegedly to defend freedom and democracy.

How can these professional charlatans, who have both on numerous occasions revealed their ignorance on basic science and geopolitics, claim to represent the hapless citizens of the United Kingdom? Who voted to impose medical martial law and digital IDs or to wage war with Russia, Iran and/or China when our armed forces can barely defend our borders? Did we not vote to take back control? How does bombing Houthi rebels in Yemen solve any of the practical challenges we have at home? Do our political speech writers think we all suffer from collective amnesia? Have we somehow forgotten that the UK not only armed Saudi Arabia to the hilt, but the RAF helped train its pilots as they launched airstrikes over Northern Yemen? Why on earth would Houthi rebels be disrupting shipping in Red Sea as Israel flattens Gaza?

In the same week the Indian multinational, Tata Steel, announced it would close the blast furnaces in Wales, as government and opposition politicians prioritise their Net Zero agenda. Did it occur to anyone that we will need an awful lot of steel and aluminium not only to build new energy infrastructure but to fight all the wars our rulers want to pursue.

The days of US military supremacy are over. What happened to the promises of a joint NATO-Ukrainian victory over the Eastern invaders? How could Russia win if its economy is supposedly a basket case economy and its military budget only a tenth of the USA’s mighty $800 outlay? In reality, the Russian bear is only weak if we measure its power in American greenbacks. In terms of raw materials, it’s the richest country in the world with a manufacturing base now larger than France’s and a highly skilled workforce. Western sanctions have barely affected Russia as it deepens its alliances with China, India, Iran and many resource-rich African countries. What we’re witnessing is much more complex than an eastward shift in the economic centre of gravity or a transition to a multipolar world order dominated by China. Many analysts mistakenly assume the western wing of the Military-Biotech Industrial Complex wants to defeat its eastern wing. American tech giants depend on the East Asian manufacturing base. Where do you think all the servers, laptops and mobile phones we need to power the Fourth Industrial Revolution are made? If they’re not assembled in China itself, chances are they’re made in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea or Vietnam, all within China’s orbit. Re-localising manufacturing to Western Europe requires plentiful cheap energy, which is now in shorter supply. Europe’s industrial powerhouse, Germany, has had to absorb a double whammy, with the destructions of Nordstream II gas pipeline depriving it of cheap Russian gas and its government’s ideological pursuit of Net Zero policies. Germany even decommissioned its last nuclear reactors in May 2023. You need a hell of a lot of wind turbines and solar panels to power a car manufacturing plant. Unsurprisingly major manufacturers are now relocating to regions with lower energy costs. With highly automated production lines, skilled labour is less of an issue these days.

Now it appears the collective West, as some call NATO and its partners, has abandoned Ukraine to refocus its attention on securing trading routes in the Middle East. Yet Colonel Douglas MacGregor not only foresaw a Russian victory over Ukraine, he’s now predicting the humiliation of the Israeli government and its closest allies, leading sooner or later to WW3 with catastrophic consequences for millions of Europeans accustomed to the relative safety that followed the end of WW2. Amidst all turmoil, governments at loggerheads over the Ukrainian or Palestinian questions, are working almost in lockstep to trap their citizens into a digital control grid. The freest countries in the coming decades may well be those with incompetent governments, shoddy infrastructure and non-compliant citizens not dependent on the central banking system and able to fend for themselves without state handouts or NGO intervention. Adversity builds resilience and cosiness builds helplessness. Many Africans may live in ramshackle huts, but they have learned how to cope in the event of power cuts. By contrast most Europeans would be helpless without emergency generators kicking into action within hours of a power outage. When downtown Auckland (New Zealand) experienced a power failure in February 1998, most of the district’s 6000 inhabitants had to find alternative accommodation and city workers either worked from home or from relocated offices. Residents averted catastrophe only because people could easily move to well-provisioned surrounding neighbourhoods and emergency services acted promptly to deploy backup generators and restore full capacity within 40 days. A city the size of London may not be so lucky in the event of a catastrophic power failure resulting from enemy airstrikes.

I doubt Western intelligence agencies believed an outlay of over $200 billion could easily defeat the Russian occupation of Eastern Ukraine. As Julian Assange observed very astutely about the protracted Western intervention in Afghanistan, the aim was not military victory, but to transfer funds to the military industrial complex in a perpetual war against elusive enemies. Not only has the US Deep State armed and trained many of its official enemies to destabilise rival regimes, as it did with Mujahedeen in Afghanistan back in the 1980s, it needs enemies to justify its existence. “War is a Racket”, wrote Smedley D. Butler in 1935. The global elites need the spectres of Putin and Islamic Jihadists to scare the masses into submission. “If we don’t support Ukraine, defeat Houthi militias in the Red Sea or stand up to Iran, we will lose our cherished freedoms and prosperity”, cry the same neoliberals who oversaw the outsourcing of Western manufacturing to the Far East, the downsizing of the Western working classes and colluded with Big Tech to suppress all dissent to the socially and economically destructive lockdowns and biotechnological coercion of the 2020-23 pseudo-pandemic and are busy rolling out hate speech laws to ban all criticism of transgender ideology and ethnic cleansing.

The Western mainstream media has exploited the curious death of the fringe opposition Russian leader, Alexei Navalny, of a sudden cardiac arrest to beat the drums of war against Russia. Little do they care that Western support for Zelenksy's regime has led to the early deaths of over 400,000 Ukrainians and possibly over 270,000 Russian fatalities. We're being primed for World War Three, which this time may see the planned destruction of the Western World as we knew it.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Society on the Cliff Edge

Into the Levantine quagmire

Who could benefit most from civil unrest among rival factions who choose to believe radically divergent narratives?

For postmodern Zionists, Israel can never do any harm, only try desperately to defend Israel’s right to exist and to combat genocidal terrorists hiding among civilians who may also be responsible for aiding and abetting mass murder. Inevitably, Israeli propagandists seldom miss an opportunity to evoke the Nazi Holocaust and accuse their opponents of antisemitism. This narrative appeals not only to those who may have a vested interest in Israeli exceptionalism, but also to most mainstream politicians in North America and many in Western Europe. They choose to turn a blind eye to collateral damage caused by Israeli airstrikes and incursions and to overstress the crimes attributed to Hamas and their alleged sympathisers. Apparently, calling for a ceasefire will only empower Hamas. We must let the IDF surgically cleanse the Gaza Strip of all undesirables to save the Jewish homeland. Anything less would be antisemitic.

The trouble is many nationalists, social conservatives and Christians have fallen for this rhetoric too as they feel threatened by the growth of political Islam. Many talk of their country’s Judaeo-Christian culture. Alas they find themselves in bed with global Zionists, who have long advocated the phasing out of nation states everywhere, except Israel, promoted mass migration and alternatives to traditional two-parent families. Bibi Netanyahu may have courted Donald Trump and Eastern European nationalists like Viktor Orbán, but he also has close links with investment bankers and the upper echelons of the Biotech Industrial Complex, neither of whom believe in self-determination at any level of human organisation.

That’s not to say those on the other side of the toxic Israeli-Palestinian debate are any better. Some hardcore protesters blame the native working classes for crimes committed by the Israeli armed forces or for the repercussions of the Balfour Declaration and later Anglo-American military adventurism in the region. While we may observe Saudi Arabia has shifted its allegiances from the West to the BRICS block, it still expects the same degree of social conformity from its citizens with a strict enforcement of sharia law for the masses, but convenient exemptions for the aristocracy and wealthy ex-pat communities. As much as Muslim leaders preach solidarity and Islamic values, they’ve collaborated with international bankers and the Western military industrial complex. Until China brokered a deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the British Royal Air Force was training Saudi Air Force pilots to bomb Northern Yemen with Eurofighter typhoons. As Mark Curtis documented so well in Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, the West has often armed and funded proponents of Islamic fundamentalism as the best means of pacifying the populace and suppressing dissent. Islamic Pakistan is in the process of expelling 1.7 million Afghan refugees with barely a murmur of protest from Western NGOs. Some of us can still remember when the US and UK armed and trained the Mujahadeen, who later morphed into the Taliban, to fight the Soviet Union’s occupation. Now Saudi Arabia no longer depends on American and European money, they’re free to realign with Iran against Israel. If the Lebanese Hezbollah joins the conflict with Iranian supports, things could turn very nasty. As Scott Ritter and Douglas MacGregor have observed, given the Collective West’s current weakness in the closing stages of the war over Eastern Ukraine, Israel may well lose the war without an immediate ceasefire.

The Western ruling classes are no better than their Arab counterparts. They’re busy managing the staged downsizing of their once powerful economies with little regard to defending their self-determination or borders. The armed forces of all major Western countries are fully integrated into NATO, AUKUS and/or the EU, who over the last three decades have been mainly engaged in often counterproductive global policing operations. As the balance of power heads east and south with growing competition over strategic resources, populist leaders will seek retribution against the Old World Order or what the Neocons once called the New American Century, with the working classes paying the heaviest prices. You can bet American attitudes to foreign policy will change once Saudi Arabia imposes an oil embargo on Israel’s allies, which will drive up prices at the pump.

Delusions of Grandeur

Many self-defined British patriots, who have fallen out of favour with the UK’s globally minded metropolitan elites, have sided with the Israeli government. Some may genuinely believe they share a common struggle with Israel to defend their homeland against hostile Islamists who threaten the liberal enlightenment. Yet the most influential friends of Israel among British parliamentarians are by and large supportive of both mass immigration and multiculturalism with the mirage of gay nightclubs and casinos happily plying their trade alongside Mosques and Kebab shops. The stage is set for a turf war between rival factions of commoners identifying with different faiths. One adheres to British exceptionalism, long abandoned by the upper classes, and the other either to Islamism or some brand of international socialism, both subservient to global banksters.

Many feared the large National March for Palestine in London today would end in violence. In the event there were skirmishes with the police on the side-lines with one reported stabbing of a counter-protester holding up a sign reading “Hamas is Isis”. I fear both may have been agent provocateurs, for neither would have existed without Western military intervention and both may well have created, at least in part, by American and/or Israeli secret services.

How long can Western leaders keep up the pretence that Israel is only acting in self-defence. Emanuel Macron, the darling of global governance think tanks, has broken ranks and called for a ceasefire. Do they realise the game is up? Is this just a dress rehearsal for the next phase of destabilisation, as Sonia Poulton suggests?

Tribal Skirmishes

I've read conflicting reports of rightwing thugs attacking the police as they kept them apart from the main pro-ceasefire march and of pro-Palestine protestors harassing poppy sellers and throwing fireworks at the police. Rebel News circulated a video clip of a masked protestor claiming that "Hitler knew how to deal with the Jews". Was he an actor? Other clips on social media show Israelis, speaking in Hebrew with English subtitles, calling for the eradication of non-compliant Palestinians. Whatever happened to interethnic tolerance or the great melting pot of humanity? The mainstream media outlets still deny spreading such hatred. Pro-Israeli opinion-leaders like to claim only Hamas oppress Gaza residents, while pro-Palestinians claim many Jews both in the West and in Israel itself support their cause. Whichever way, it's hard to reason with people who believe the other side wants to exterminate them. Yet the ruling classes seem to get along fine. Netanyahu had no qualms about flying to Moscow last December to meet Vladimir Putin. Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is happy to cultivate good relations with his counterparts in Russia, Saudi Arabia, the US and Europe. By contrast, on the ground rival groups blame either Islam or Zionism for their woes. To keep the peace, our local administrators will inevitably use hate-speech laws to clamp down on dissent as they preside over falling living standards.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics War Crimes

Shifting Narratives at the Crossroads of Civilisation

Things are about to turn very nasty

Protesters at Liverpool Street Station, London.

If you believe the opinion polls, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is poised to win by a country mile at the next general election. Recent by-election results would confirm this trend albeit with very low turnouts. Yet on the ground there is little enthusiasm for the prime-ministerial candidate that BlackRock’s Larry Fink has publicly endorsed. Meanwhile, parliament has become a sideshow. When Andrew Bridgen MP dared to raise the issue of excess deaths, citing voluminous data from various government agencies of increased mortality among working age adults since the multi-billion pound jab roll-out, only a handful of MPs dared to turn up while the soundproofed public gallery was full and the BBC saw fit to add captions contradicting the MP’s well-researched evidence. Sir Keir has admitted on camera to the BBC’s Emily Maitlis that he much prefers annual WEF gatherings with like-minded global influencers at Davos to parochial shouting matches at Westminster.

Some have accused Sir Keir of sitting on the fence on the key controversies of the day, but nothing could be further from the truth. He merely had to bide his time as Boris waffled over the first two and half years of the corona regime. He offered no opposition to the massive government overspend on covid containment policies. Indeed, under his stewardship Labour wanted to lock down sooner and harder. The lavishly funded Behavioural Insights Team did Labour’s dirty work for them by engendering a climate of helplessness and hyper-dependence on remote authorities, setting the stage for the next phase of the Great Reset. Unsurprisingly, the Labour-run fiefdom of Wales is running the first major trial of Universal Basic Income with funding from a penny-pinching Tory government.

What frightens me most about Keir Starmer is not his devotion to the institutions of technocratic control, but his staunch opposition to intellectual freedom. We heard hardly a whisper of opposition to the Orwellian Online Safety Bill from the Labour front bench and only murmurings of dissent from Corbynite left. If you can censor scientists who disagree with the WHO’s directives, you can censor peace activists who disagree with the Israeli government. If can censor opponents of mass migration because of their alleged racism, you can censor historians who disagree with official fact-checkers. If you rewrite history and send dissident historians to quarantine camps, you can literally get away with mass murder.

In the wake of the war over Gaza, Labour faces an enormous challenge. Large sections of its members and electoral base disagree profoundly with the leadership. Labour needs the block votes of Britain’s growing Muslim community and the wishful-thinking caring classes (teachers, nurses, social workers etc.). While Sir Keir may get away with his slavish parroting of the covid narrative, feelings run high about the mounting death toll in the Levant. Millions of Labour supporters can easily access Aljazeera with 24/7 coverage of Israeli war crimes and now distrust the British MSM more than ever, although for different reasons than social conservatives, libertarians and nationalists. Many have also questioned whether Hamas beheaded babies or whether the IDF’s heavy-handed response could have boosted the high civilian death toll in the horrific October 7th attacks on innocent Israelis. If the British telecommunications regulator, OfCom, attempted to ban Aljazeera in the same way as they silenced dissent over covid or banned RT, hundreds of thousands more would be out on the streets protesting and people will quickly find other means to access alternative news sources. That explains, at least in part, why the BBC has been more balanced on Palestine than it was on the covid regime.

One minute we all have to isolate and stay at least 2-metres apart, the next we all have to huddle into densely populated refugee camps sharing a toilet with hundreds of other people. One minute we ostracise the unvaccinated, the next we welcome undocumented refugees into our homes. One minute we welcome refugees from all over the world, the next we arrest them for protesting against Israeli war crimes.

If you believed the lockdowns were about public health, you might also believe Sir Keir Starmer wants peace in the Middle East. If he did, why would he align himself so closely and visibly with the Tony Blair Institute? As noted elsewhere the Biotech Industrial Complex is an extension of the better understood Military Industrial Complex. Unsurprisingly, both have close links with the Tony Blair Institute, the WEF, the White House and the Israeli government.

Infantile Pro-Palestinians

It is not just the Labour Party that’s split down the middle on Gaza, but the whole international woke movement. All of a sudden, I find myself sympathising with the likes of Greta Thunberg as her pro-Palestinian stance has given her a bad press in some quarters. However, George Soros’ openDemocracy foundation has long championed the Palestinian cause. His organisation has openly funded many pro-migration NGOs and open-borders campaign groups. Global technocrats can play both sides against each other. Tails you lose, and heads you score a pyrrhic victory. The Chinese Communist Party is realigning with the BRICS alliance and has given diplomatic support to the Palestinian side, but they have also recently wined and dined California’s lockdown king, Gavin Newsom. Of the big geopolitical powers only India, traditionally pro-Israeli, seems to be hedging its bets, while many pro-NATO European politicians, like Guy Verhofstadt better known for his rants against Putin and Brexit, are now distancing themselves from the US administration’s resolute opposition to a ceasefire. Why? Because they can feel the winds of global change. If Israel wins the battle of Gaza, it will do so at the expense of a weakened Collective West, morally obliged to accommodate millions more refugees. It would be a lose-lose situation for both Palestinians and ordinary Israelis (i.e. not the 20% with dual citizenship). An alternative outcome could bring Russia, Iran and China into the conflict and enforce a radical two-state solution based on the 1948 borders policed by international peacekeepers with the removal of all US military bases in the region. This scenario would not only humiliate the US/UK alliance with a heavy price in terms of human lives, it would inevitably lead to a mass exodus of Jewish Israelis. We might even see both sequences of events play out in quick succession. European workers will be expected to foot the reconstruction bill, but the Israeli and Arab elites will do just fine as will their friends in the arms and surveillance industries.

Who could benefit most from an intensification of community hostilities in cosmopolitan towns and cities across the Western World? With competing narratives about the causes of the Middle East conflict, I think we need more dialogue and fearless open debate, but alas our WEF-compliant politicians see things in terms of hate speech, which they get to define, and the parallel spectres of antisemitism and Islamophobia. Sir Keir Starmer has succeeded in annoying not only most Labour supporters sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but also many staunch Zionists, by calling for urgent action against, wait for it, Islamophobia a day after making a speech against a ceasefire. In Sir Keir’s world, you may not insult the prophet Mohamed or complain about Pakistani grooming gangs in your neighbourhood, because that would be Islamophobic, but it’s fine to support Israeli airstrikes on refugee camps in Gaza, because otherwise you would deny Israel’s right to exist and that would be antisemitic. All we need is a handful of rogue agitators at a pro-Palestinian rally calling for an armed insurrection against Zionists and the Home Secretary has a pretext to ban all peaceful protests because they may incite violence. If the government can ban comedians for telling jokes about Gays for Palestine being thrown off rooftops, it can also ban protests against Israeli war crimes, lockdowns or gender-bending lessons in primary schools.

Are we being played?

Unlike Rishi Sunak or Sir Keir Starmer, Scottish First Minister, Humza Yousaf and Scottish Labour Leader, Anas Sarwar, both of Pakistani descent, have called for a ceasefire and, almost in the same breath, urged Scots to welcome Palestinian refugees. Yet only yesterday, both politicians seems perfectly aligned with the global establishment. The Scottish Government has no say in the UK's foreign and migration policies. Meanwhile, GB News and the Daily Mail, the bad boys of the British mainstream media, have a distinct pro-Israeli bias with their regular opinion leaders advocating a ban on Pro-Palestinian protests on Armistice Day (11th November). The Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has also indicated that anti-terrorism and anti-hate-speech laws could outlaw any protests glorifying Hamas and, by extension, Hezbollah, which enjoys greater support in the wider Muslim world. This may lead to a standoff between two rival factions, both funded and manipulated by major global players. On the one hand we have the Israel-sympathising pro-American faction, allied with many British patriots, and on other we have a fragile alliance of the internationalist radical left, most Muslims and critically thinking peace activists. In a cruel twist of fate, many critical thinkers are now in the same camp as trendy lefties, while many social conservatives now welcoming a clampdown on freedom of expression in the name of antisemitism and honouring our forebears who helped defeat the Nazis. With organisers planning for as many as a million to attend next week's National March for Palestine in London coinciding with the traditional poppy-festooned Armistice Day memorial services, the stage is set for a showdown with the police. We may then only need a real or false flag terror attack, allegedly to revenge a mounting civilian death toll in Gaza, to justify martial law on the streets of London.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics War Crimes

Spiked Opposition

Imagine being invited to debate disinformation on the BBC, after three and a half years of non-stop covid lies, and the best example of BBC fake news you can cite is one of the few cases of objective reporting.

The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.

I don’t really like ad feminam or ad hominem attacks. I sympathise instinctively with anyone who has put their head above the parapet and argued eloquently against the madness of covid-themed tyranny. In the end, the debate over covid restrictions boiled down to a battle between technocracy and natural humanity that transcends complex and emotionally charged geopolitical conflicts.

I began writing this blog over a week ago after I saw a clip of Laura Dodsworth discuss misinformation and censorship in the context of the UK’s new Online Safety Bill with BBC veteran Paul Mason. To her credit, Laura argued against the bill, but missed a golden opportunity to expose the BBC’s grotesque bias over covid. I held off publishing this post last week because Laura still comes across as an eminently likeable and honest person. Unlike many noteworthy covid dissidents such as Dr Peter McCullough or Prof Sucharit Bhakdi, Laura does not have a dedicated Wikipedia page. Her own website reveals little information about her past political affiliations and has yet to be subjected to a media smear campaign. Then I caught a glimpse of Baroness Claire Fox pushing almost the same line asking a Pro-Palestinian activist why he did not dissociate himself from extremists chanting ” From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” or waving Hamas flags. This is rich coming from an unrepentant IRA apologist. Then Scottish comedian and free speech advocate, Leo Kearse, toed the same line with his mildly amusing quip about Gays for Palestine not being thrown off buildings in Gaza because they've all razed to the ground. Lo and behold, Leo also has a column on Spiked.

Have you ever wondered why the pseudo-progressive intelligentsia has devoted so many resources to vilify some dissident thinkers, while they give others a free pass? As the former head of Pfizer’s research division specialising in respiratory diseases, Dr Mike Yeadon is certainly well-qualified to contribute to scientific debates over the efficacy of covid restrictions, but Wikipedia dismisses him as a conspiracy theorist who has made unfounded claims about vaccine harms. In trendy metropolitan elite circles, any mention of some outspoken covid critics, such as the late Nobel Laureate, Prof. Luc Montagnier, or investigative journalist Dr Naomi Wolf, is to invite ridicule. Yet some regular pundits on mainstream TV seem to get away with deceptively bold critiques of government policies. This leads us to the curious case of Laura Dodsworth and her association with Spiked Online.

The Spiked sect grew out of the tiny Revolutionary Communist Party, which disbanded in the early 1990s. When I briefly flirted with this grouplet as a naïve and disillusioned student in 1985, they positioned themselves to the left of the larger neo-Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party. While the SWP supported a United Ireland, but condemned all attacks against civilian targets, the RCP gave its unconditional support to the IRA in the struggle against British imperialism. Fast forward 40 years and the Spiked Gang now give their unconditional support to the State of Israel in the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the escalation of hostilities in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict has already poisoned community relations in many cosmopolitan cities. Whatever the truth about Israeli or Hamas war crimes may be, there is no justification for intimidating other civilians either for their religious affiliation or their stance on this conflict. There is no excuse for vandalising Jewish-owned shops, but who is stoking all this hatred and, more important, who will benefit most from the ensuing culture of fear and intimidation? That’s the common thread between the covid and Middle East crises. The mainstream media suppresses rational discussion over objective truth, while spreading fear of your neighbours by redefining hate speech as anything that runs against the mainstream narrative. Thus, it was hateful to oppose mask mandates as bare human faces may have exposed some vulnerable people to airborne pathogens, but it was not hateful to ridicule and ostracise anyone who refused to take government-injectables. As for British Muslims, they can quickly go from heroes to zeroes in the eyes of the bien-pensant establishment left. One minute they are victims of Islamophobia, racism, foreign wars or the legacy of British imperialism, the next they are reactionary homophobes and/or antisemites.

Now I do not claim to know the whole truth about the tragic explosion at the Al-Ahli Hospital that caused hundreds of deaths, but aerial footage shows vast swathes of the densely populated Northern Gaza Strip have been flattened. Both the IDF and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad as well as Hamas itself have denied responsibility. Could a makeshift surface-to-surface missile hit a car park or could it only have been Israel’s more advanced Iron Dome System?

The question is why would the author of a State of Fear and Free Your Mind cite the Al Ahli hospital blast as an example of BBC fake news? Why would she be so certain that the IDF did not fire missiles into Northern Gaza with massive civilian casualties, but yet failed dismally to cite countless outright untruths spouted by BBC talking heads during the covid era? What about the endlessly repeated claims that the mRNA jabs prevent the spread of covid and saved millions of lives, based on wild exaggerations of the numbers who might have died of/with covid, or Devi Sridhar’s infamous claim on children’s TV that the mRNA shots were safe and effective for children, despite the fact that no healthy children had died with covid before 2021 and there has since been a marked rise in children and young adults with myocarditis and a disturbing number of unexplained sudden deaths.

Andrew Bridgen MP had the courage to raise these issues in the House of Commons and has been the target of a concerted smear campaign. Although Ms Dodsworth attended a few anti-lockdown protests and boycotted the 2021 Spectator’s Festival of Ideas over their covid pass policy, she’s steered clear of all scientific questions relating to the jabs that governments wanted to inject into us at all costs. Did Laura ever ask why governments would go to such extreme lengths to impose medical martial law or was it just the woke left latching onto the latest fad?

Future historians may well debate why the BBC suppressed dissident voices much more strictly on the covid fiasco than on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Leo Kearse may have a point in claiming that Palestinian Lives Matter, with Greta Thunberg’s full blessing, is the new Black Lives Matter. The only trouble with this analogy is that countless thousands of Palestinians have lost their lives in Gaza at the mercy of the IDF over the last ten days, while the US and the Israeli air forces bomb neighbouring Syria. On cue, Joe Biden reads a speech calling for another $106 billion to help Ukraine and Israel to defeat the enemies of freedom and democracy. Meanwhile, Russian and Chinese warships have quietly sailed to the Eastern Mediterranean as President Xi Jinping promises to defend Iran in the event of a US or Israeli attack. World War Three is sadly no laughing matter. We’re not talking about the sad case of a former drug addict, George Floyd or scenes of disaffected urban youngsters looting and burning down retail outlets. We’re talking about an escalation of the Middle East quagmire that could cost millions of lives. I fear many analysts fall into the trap of siding either with the Collective West, aligned with Israel, or with the new Collective East and South, aligned with the Palestinian cause. Neither side will win. The Chinese are still doing big business with the USA. President Xi Jinping was happy to welcome California Governor, Gavin Newsom to Beijing the other day. What we are witnessing is the demise of the American World Order and the rise of a global technocracy. The elites are quite happy to see much of the Middle East go up in flames and then to build their brave new network of smart cities modelled on Doha and Dubai. Affluent Israelis can easily migrate to Ukraine, while poorer Israelis may perish if Iran ever retaliates with Chinese support.

This is not the time to support Israel or Hamas, but to avert World War Three before it’s too late. Alas Spiked talking heads, as edgy as they may appear to the uninitiated, are controlled opposition. That’s why they’re always on the telly.

Categories
Power Dynamics War Crimes

Can we let the War Party win again?

Who benefits from more death and destruction in the Middle East?

Rubble litters a street between smoldering buildings hit by an Israeli airstrike in Jabaliya, Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)

It’s easy to jump on bandwagons in righteous indignation against the latest demons guilty of unspeakable crimes against humanity. Alas recent history has taught us over and over again that we cannot trust the objectivity and impartiality of the mainstream media to verify the authenticity of some of the most gruesome videos of crimes attributed to either side.

The technocratic coup of early 2020 that saw the roll-out of medical martial law amid a coordinated propaganda campaign gave rise to a new alliance among critical thinkers. We buried our differences over complex geopolitical matters in a battle between the Biotech Mafia and natural humanity. For three short years, the Middle East conflict almost disappeared from our TV screens with blanket wall-to-wall propaganda over novel respiratory viruses, Ukraine and climate change. Many heroes of the fledgling medical truth movement such as Mark Steyn and Robert F Kennedy Jnr. have sided firmly with the Israeli government and given their unconditional support for any military actions it may have to take to defend Israel’s right to exist. I find this stance very disturbing in the light of the recent Ukrainian quagmire for a heavy-handed invasion of Gaza could well backfire, with hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides. In an increasingly unstable world, we should never assume the Collective West will always win. Let us not forget Benjamin Netanyahu used his own people as guinea pigs by enforcing one of the strictest covid regimes.

Sadly, many on the other side of the Palestinian debate fell for the covid psyop hook, line and sinker. As much as I believe Israel has committed many war crimes against the Palestinian people (namely the descendants of the region’s pre-1948 inhabitants), I can’t help but notice the Palestinian liberation movement’s close links with the illiberal forces of Islamic fundamentalism and the neo-Bolshevik left with many still donning facemasks. How can they advocate self-determination for Palestinians if they want to abolish all nation states? How can they support the religious rights of Muslims if they also want to impose gender-bending ideology on young children? Besides, does self-determination mean anything at all if we do not have fundamental freedoms such as bodily autonomy or intellectual freedom? Did Socialist Worker sellers care much about free speech when censorship only affected dissident scientists and gender-critical feminists? Oddly the same BBC that failed to report massive anti-lockdown protests in its main news bulletins and spent countless millions on propaganda against antivaxxers, gave extensive coverage of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London, Glasgow and elsewhere yesterday. Far be it from me to praise the BBC, but its journalists have questioned the morality of collective punishment and interviewed many critics of the Israeli government, much to the chagrin of staunch Zionists. By contrast, on covid we only ever heard one side of the argument with only guarded critiques of lockdowns, but not a whisper of uncontested criticism of the mRNA injections.

On the subject of corporate disinformation, who would butcher innocent babies and senior citizens to defeat an imperialist occupier? In the age of high-definition TV screens bringing selective heart-rending imagery of atrocities into living rooms across the westernised world, it beggars belief that any combatants could not be aware that beheading new-born babies would be a public relations disaster and would inevitably embolden Israel with the full support of its Western allies to crush Hamas and Hezbollah by inflicting collective punishment on all Gaza residents. Two wrongs do not make one right when it comes to targeting civilians. If it’s wrong for Hamas to target revellers at a music festival, it’s equally wrong to bomb densely populated areas of the Gaza strip where collateral damage is unavoidable or to force over a million Gazans to leave their homes within 48 hours despite the lack of infrastructure in neighbouring Egypt.

The claims and counterclaims on both sides of the decades-old conflict over the self-determination and livelihoods of rival ethno-religious groups have exposed the ideological hypocrisy of many mainstream politicians. For once, the progressive alliance of green, social democratic and neoliberal parties that championed global convergence with the phasing out of nation states are divided. How can they advocate open borders and multiculturalism in the West, but also support ethnic cleansing in the Middle East, either to defend Israel’s right to exist or to evict Jewish settlers on land once owned by Palestinians. Alas lasting peace will only come to the Levant when the diverse Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities can reconcile their differences and agree to difficult compromises. Historically, Christian and Jewish communities were spread over a wide area of the Ottoman Empire, which would later become Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. All this changed with the emergence of Israel as a Jewish state, the protracted Lebanese civil war and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism amid a battle for control over copious oil reserves and decades of Western interventionism. The Middle East is probably the world’s most militarised region. Saudi Arabia alone, spends more than the UK or France on its armed forces. Tiny Qatar has a huge $15 billion defence budget representing 7% of its GDP and Israel spends around $23 billion on defence or 4.5% of its GDP, but can count on generous logistical support from the US. Yet despite its massive military budget and substantial soft power, the world’s leading superpower has suffered a series of embarrassing setbacks in Afghanistan and Syria. Their long occupation of Iraq succeeded only in enriching military contractors like Haliburton, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and McDonnell Douglas, and fomenting Islamic militias like ISIS and Al Qaeda. Over $100 billions of military aid has failed dismally to thwart the Russian occupation of Eastern Ukraine. With Saudi Arabia now selling oil in yuan and rupees and poised to join an expanded BRICS alliance, the petrodollar era is over.

Slowing but surely, we’re inching towards a post-American world. While the Anglo-American cultural legacy will live on in the same way as Latin survived the fall of the Roman Empire, the global Deep State owes no special allegiance to North Americans or Western Europeans. Indeed, Israel itself may have outlived its purpose as an outpost of the US-centred world order that grew out of the ashes of the Second World War.  Benjamin Netanyahu’s government may soon find itself isolated if it overplays its hand in the coming ground offensive against the Gaza insurgency, scuppering any chance of reconciliation and potentially drawing other big players such as Iran and Russia into the fray, with the tacit support of China.

I’d much prefer a more innocent world with a mosaic of diverse self-governing communities living side by side with full mutual respect for each other’s different ways of life. I’d love to believe in a peace-loving democratic Israel besieged by primitive Arab neighbours eager to “drive the Jews into sea”. Alas today’s Levant has been shaped by centuries of rival empires, rapid urbanisation, immense oil wealth and, dare I say, population growth. The latter challenge may be one of the most controversial, especially in the light of the recent covid regime that saw us divided into essential and non-essential workers and reclassified human beings as bio-hazards. Saudi Arabia’s population has grown from 3 million in 1950 to 36 million today with most of its citizens concentrated in a few urban areas surrounded by inhospitable desert. The people count of Israel (without the West Bank and Gaza) has grown from just 1.4 million in 1950 to 9.6 million today. That increases reliance on expensive irrigation systems and energy-intensive desalination plants to tackle water scarcity. While the nomadic herders of North Yemen can cope with rudimentary technology, the 2.3 million residents of the compact Gaza Strip cannot survive long without clean drinking water, electricity and imported resources essential to modern life. A complete blockade of Gaza is effectively a death sentence for those unable to flee or take advantage of emergency supplies.

We live in dangerous times and my voice in the wilderness will ineluctably fall on deaf ears. However, only an immediate cease-fire agreed by the Israeli Government, its Arab neighbours, Iran and Hamas can save us from an all-out war that could kill millions more and potentially go nuclear.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Do 7 million British children need more drugs?

In the recent spat over Laurence Fox’s crass remarks on GB News about journalist Ava Evans, most pundits have completely missed the woke journalist’s most outrageous assertion on prime-time BBC TV and it did not relate to sexual desirability. When asked in a panel discussion with comedian, Geoff Norcott, why she opposed the idea of a Minister for Men to deal with issues that disproportionately affect men such as suicide, Ms Evans, also known online as Ava Santina, opined in her usual condescending manner that it just fed into the culture wars, but we needed a more inclusive Minister for Mental Health, before claiming that 7 million children were awaiting prescriptions for mental health. These words just rolled off her tongue. Was I listening to a radical feminist or a representative of a pharmaceutical multinational? True to form, this weekend the venerable BBC ran a story about the shortage of ADHD medications, rather than questioning why so many youngsters need to be on stimulants or given subjective psychobabble labels at all. The establishment has normalised mental illness in the same way as they are now trying to normalise non-binary gender identities.

Let’s put things into perspective. In the UK as a whole there are around 13.5 million under 18-year-olds. In England alone, that’s around 12 million. Is Ms Evans suggesting over half of children should be on psychoactive drugs? Does she think they best way to deal with naughty boys is to drug them into submission?

Unsurprisingly, Ms Evans bought the pandemic narrative hook, line and sinker, uncritically promoting mRNA jabs for under 11s as a regular contributor to left-branded Joe. When the mask mandate ended, she told her social media followers she would keep wearing a face mask to protect herself against the worst virus of all, men. Seriously, what has happened to the cultural left? Their most enthusiastic supporters are wealthy professionals and corporate executives. Statistically, the richer you are in the UK, the more likely you are to support toxic woke ideology. The Tories may still try to appeal to their socially conservative base by talking tough on immigration or giving petrol vehicles another five years on the roads, but they’ve gone along with World Economic Forum diktats with the same zeal as most other Western countries. In power, the Tories, Labour, LibDems, Greens and SNP are little more than different flavours of the same UniParty. They let local authorities and big businesses roll out socially disruptive policies not because of any groundswell in grassroots support, but because paid experts  wanted them. Your primary school children are not learning about anal sex because the gay couple next door, minding their own business, petitioned parliament, but because lavishly funded transnational pressure groups, such as Stonewall, have infiltrated local and national administrations. The mass medication of atomised children is probably one of the biggest scandals of our times. Yet nobody picked up Ms Evans on her desire to drug over half of Britain's children or dared question the long-term effects of lockdown-era isolation. Children need friends, family, outdoor adventure and, above all, hope of a future worth living independent of busy-body control freaks.

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Uncategorized

Early Post-modern Wokeness

Virtue-signalling woke warriors welcoming biomedical apartheid and pretending to care about black lives.

How I adopted a social justice warrior mentality long before it became fashionable and then grew out of it.

If the global boiling alarmists are correct and humanity is doomed unless we drastically reduce our collective carbon footprint, don’t blame me. I’ve long cycled or walked to work, share a car and only fly around once a year. During my 7 year stay in London I survived carfree and I didn’t buy my first motor vehicle until the age of 26 in provincial Italy. If mainstream historians, after the demise of Anglo-American exceptionalism, accuse British and American corporations of committing heinous crimes against humanity on an unparalleled scale, don’t hold me responsible. I’ve opposed every single UK military escapade in my lifetime. I would have opposed British imperialism and the 1914-18 Great War. Only British involvement in the Second World War had a moral justification. The Nazis had to be defeated, but who funded them?

Don’t pick a fight with me if Uganda kills gays or California legalises paedophilia. I’ve merely explored the malleability of human behaviour with a special regard to the alienated misfits among us. I embraced neurodiversity in a good way before I realised the WEF-aligned Biotech Mafia exploited mental health to manipulate the underclasses in the age of AI bots. My only regret, in terms of my humble low-level political activity, is to have voted for lying politicians in the vain hope they could undo some of the damage caused by other professional purveyors of mistruths.

Of late I’ve reached the conclusion that climate alarmism as well as virus scaremongering serve only as narratives to justify a massive transfer of power to the technocratic elites. That doesn’t mean we don’t face environmental challenges or there are no limits to growth on a finite planet, but that the world’s powerbrokers now view most of humanity as superfluous. There is a big difference between investigating the long-term impact of our industrial activity to avert catastrophes and dystopian outcomes on the one hand and exploiting fear of pathogens or extreme weather events to consolidate your control over the rest of humanity on the other.

I’ve always believed we should live with nature and not subvert it, but I’ve also had to reassess many earlier stances I openly espoused that in the light of new evidence when earlier assumptions turned out to be based either on flawed analysis or on wishful thinking. No matter how much we may want to change the world around us, we have, as isolated individuals, limited means to override the fundamentals of geophysics, human biology or complex societies that evolved over millennia. Larger groups can over time change society for the better, but the ideas and technologies we need to improve the lives of future generations usually come from a relatively small subset of intellectuals and inventors.

Idealism stems from a deep sense of injustice on a personal and communal level, often combined with a perception of powerlessness or alienation from our wider circle of close relatives, friends and neighbours who might help us find our way within the current system. Your success in life may depend on natural traits such as your physique, health or intellectual aptitude as well as environmental factors like inherited wealth, economic opportunities, caste or socio-economic infrastructure (schools, roads, welfare provision etc.). Some factors such as personality or emotional wellbeing depend on a mix of nature and nurture. We may attribute someone’s lack of success to their immutable inherited traits, their behaviour and/or their integration in wider society, but whom or what do we blame for personal misery? Idealists blame society either for suppressing personal freedom and creativity or for failing to empower disadvantaged citizens. Pragmatists take into account human nature, which thrives on social competition favouring the survival of the fittest.

There’s a big difference between counterculture idealism, however impractical, misguided or open to manipulation it may be, and mainstream idealism, actively marketed to gullible students and wishful thinking middle managers by powerful lobbies who hijack progressive causes to justify more top-down social engineering. We cannot compare a revolutionary socialist in 1930’s America at the height of the Great Depression with a loyal communist party member in the Soviet Union of the same era. The former stood up against the concentration of power in big banks and corporations, while the latter worshipped the new ruling class. Institutions with ulterior motives can easily co-opt virtuous causes to pursue hidden agendas. In many ways woke totalitarians, with their intolerance of intellectual diversity and traditional values, follow in the footsteps of Soviet-era Bolshevik activists in wanting to suppress all reactionary opposition to the ongoing cultural revolution, for the greater good. We need merely substitute humanitarian NGOs and spurious campaign groups like Extinction Rebellion and Antifa for the Communist Party. They see dissidents as traitors to the causes of environmental sustainability, pandemic preparedness, sexual liberation or the equality and diversity cult. Just like religious fundamentalists, they chastise anyone who fails to sing from the same prescribed hymn sheet or is somehow out of tune when it comes to the latest pronouncements on identity politics or medical treatment.  If you dispute the new orthodoxy on a sensitive issue, the ultimate arbiter of truth is not open debate, but the Ministry of Truth camouflaged as fact-checkers.

As an adjective woke comes from African American Vernacular English and means awakened or aware of social injustice in terms of economic deprivation and racial discrimination. However, in the 2010s the trendy left adopted the term in its new culture wars against traditional societies. While the epithet embraced the struggle of a rainbow coalition of real and perceived victim groups, its new adherents are mainly affluent upper-class students, young professionals and celebrities with an over-representation of white Americans. Post-modern wokeness combines white guilt with moral superiority over the reactionary working classes.

Woke warriors have hijacked old struggles against racism or fascism to justify a new form of ecological and biomedical totalitarianism. They are often at loggerheads with many of the communities they claim to support. How can you preach diversity when you do not respect diversity of thoughts and beliefs? How can you preach equality when you turn a blind eye to the biggest transfer of wealth to the hyper-rich in history while scapegoating small business owners for their failure to comply with new health and safety edicts? How can you care about black lives if you don’t support the self-determination of African people without interference from globalist NGOs? The list could go on forever, but you get the picture.

Woke cultists have adopted a potpourri of virtuous causes that are often mutually exclusive. How can they champion free movement across national borders, but not outside your 15-minute neighbourhood (unless you have enough social credits)?

Today’s self-identifying wokerati support all causes that suit the hidden agendas of billionaire technocrats intent on weeding out most plebeians alive today.

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Power Dynamics

The UniParty

The emergence of the polymorphic One-Party State

Why would Costa Coffee, probably one of the UK’s blandest brands, suddenly decide to champion self-harm in the name of the new-fangled gender-bending cult? Surely, they should steer clear of ideological controversies and stick to their primary business of serving wholesome non-alcoholic beverages and snacks. Yet their marketing team decided to feature a topless transman with visible mastectomy scars. I have nothing against us celebrating the natural diversity of human bodies, but the operant adjective here is natural. It’s one thing to raise awareness of medical conditions that may warrant the removal of body parts, but it’s quite another to celebrate and normalise body mutilation among vulnerable young people. I very much doubt Sergio Costa had this in mind when he opened a coffee roastery in London 52 years ago and later set up a chain of family-oriented Italian-themed coffee bars. Today only the brand remains. In 1995 the Whitbread group took over the business and oversaw a large expansion with thousands of outlets, franchises and vending machines popping up around the UK and abroad. In 2019 the Coca-Cola Company acquired Costa in a $4.9 billion deal. Only big organisations can afford to go woke. Smaller for-profit businesses would go broke if they alienated 99% of their clientele.  That’s because large corporations care more about the extra funds they get from major investment banks to promote Environmental, Social and Governance or ESG for short, which is about more than filling the countryside with delightful windmills and solar panels to provide clean renewable energy. What, you may wonder, has gender-bending got to do with environmental sustainability?

In the age of abundance and consumer-driven growth, manufacturers had to satisfy the needs and desires of their broad customer base, which included millions of ordinary workers with families. In our pursuit of happiness, we had to strike a balance between the competing demands of economic expediency, social wellbeing, and a healthy environment. In the years of plenty, the political debate in the prosperous world centred on the relative merits of laissez-faire free-markets and state intervention to ensure minimum safety standards, protect disadvantaged groups and combat corruption. Alas governments and large corporations have for all intents and purposes merged. They now all sing from the same hymn sheet, but with a cruel twist. The big banks with their NGOs and think tanks pose on the far left. It is hard to distinguish the policies of Europe’s Green parties from the wishes of George Soros, Larry Fink, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates. They agree on climate change, UBI, gender theory and biosecurity and, of course, they all worship St Greta Thunberg.

The spectacle of pluralist democracy is kept on life support with WEF-aligned parties appealing to the emotional sensitivities of different sections of the electorate. Just as Labour had thirteen years to upskill young adults in deprived welfare-dependent communities, the Tories have had 13 years to stabilise migratory flows to more sustainable levels. The opposite happened despite all the rhetoric. Indeed, the only rallying cry Labour have left is the mirage of our NHS, as if the enforcers of covid-era midazolam protocols and purveyors of puberty blockers have our best interests at heart. Likewise, the Tories still lend lip service to the concept of self-determination as expressed in the 2016 referendum on EU membership, but then signed the UN’s Global Compact for Migration and are poised to approve the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty with principled opposition restricted to Reclaim Party MP, Andrew Bridgen, with murmurings of dissent of Tory Party backbenchers like Esther McVey, Sir Christopher Chope, Sir Charles Walker or Desmond Swayne.

An eye-opener for the state of British politics was the Tony Blair Institute’s recent Future of Britain event, hosted with barely a hint of irony, by two journalists from the nominally impartial BBC, Jon Sopel and Emily Maitlis. It featured alongside international leaders such as Emanuel Macron via video-link, Sir Keir Starmer and Tory Secretary of State for Defence, Ben Wallace. As they mapped out our transition to a low-carbon AI-enhanced world, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were watching a creepy parody of a WEF event discussing how to micromanage the useless eaters outflanked by smart robots at the bottom of the labour market. You may wonder why we should accept advice from the guy who misled us over the real reasons for the 2003 US/UK-led invasion of Iraq and why anyone would trust a conference because it has the blessing of two BBC stalwarts. That’s because the target audience is not the general British public at all, but younger members of the globalised managerial classes working for NGOs and thinktanks who will oversee the kind of change the Global UniParty wants to see.

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All in the Mind

Alternate Reality in the Post-Enlightenment Era

Is scientific censorship leading us back to the Dark Ages?

Flying over Antarctica's ice wilderness.

I’m all for challenging orthodoxy, especially when powerful forces seek to enforce their narrow interpretation of observable reality to protect their vested interests and drive hidden agendas. I’ve long argued that intellectual freedom is the best way to let good science, grounded in verifiable reality, win over bad ideological science. It’s the ultimate form of democratic peer-review. Yet at the dawn of the artificial intelligence revolution, many opinion leaders would have us believe only a select group of authorised experts may decide on the key scientific questions that affect our everyday lives as free-thinking autonomous human beings. Once we lose the right to challenge authority over matters such as healthcare, farming or town-planning, our technocratic masters hold the power of life or death over us. This foreboding sense of helplessness leads critical thinkers to distrust all official information.

I fear the more trend-setting influencers push alternate realities at variance with our first-hand experiences, the more a growing minority of confused malcontents will begin to question the very foundations of the scientific enlightenment that enabled modern civilisation to thrive. If new schoolbooks redefine basic human biology by teaching impressionable young children gender is merely assigned at birth rather than being an immutable trait embedded in every cell of our bodies, why should we believe mainstream cosmology? When science becomes dogma, enforced by an army of censors, fact checkers and skewed statistics, some will fall prey to deceptive but superficially appealing counternarratives that serve only to bewilder us.

It should hardly surprise us that just as gender theory goes mainstream with primary school children exposed to drag queen story time, flat-earthism and young-earth creationism have made big comebacks on social media, especially among devout Christians, and perhaps in an ironic twist of fate, among many strict Muslims too.

In a make-believe world where men can become pregnant, why should we not fantasise the boundless opportunities of a flat disc extending infinitely beyond an ice wall that globalist geographers have apparently mislabelled Antarctica? With the advent of AI-enhanced interactive virtual reality, almost anything is possible. Tartan army foot soldiers might want to relive the 1978 World Cup with Scotland beating Iran and Peru to qualify for the second round and then to go on to beat Argentina in the final. Such a fantasy might also feature the Winter Olympics in the majestic snow-capped Cairngorms with 4000-metre peaks and state-of-the-art cable cars outclassing the best the Swiss Alps may offer. Indeed, why bother spending a small fortune to experience the natural wonders of remote Pacific atolls, the Amazonian rainforests or idyllic Tibetan villages, when we could explore idealised three-dimensional simulations of these locales via VR-goggles and haptic suits. Modern technology can easily simulate weather and terrain too, but I anticipate brain implants may do away with the need for complex machinery altogether and send haptic feedback signals straight to our cerebrum as if we were walking, running, swimming, kissing or even making passionate love with an erotic deity. We could, with new superhuman powers, climb Mount Everest, dive deep into the Great Barrier Reef and enjoy an exquisite feast of freshly caught lobsters washed down with champagne aboard our private yacht from the safety of our bedroom, with our atrophied flesh-and-blood body reduced to a life-support system for our online activities. Future transhumans could re-enact almost any alternate reality with radical revisions of history and geophysics to suit our cultural predilections and belief systems.

You may wonder why I bother debating with pseudo-intellectual flat earth theorists. For all I know, they could be either AI bots or digital agent provocateurs sowing the seeds of confusion in an age of heightened media manipulation. A few may be genuine biblical literalists or victims of subterfuge. Yet I feel strongly anyone concerned with objective truth amid so much deceit should call out both official and unofficial pseudoscience.

In my brief online exchanges, random flat earthers have questioned why passenger aeroplanes do not fly over Antarctica. The real reason is the only viable commercial route to cross the Southern polar region, from Sydney in Australia to Santiago of Chile, follows a natural path that skirts around the unforgiving ice-clad continent with much higher survival rates at sea in the event of an emergency landing. However, for a mere $100,000 (USD) you can buy a chartered flight to the South Pole and stay at the Amundsen-Scott Station. If you stay long enough to the start of long polar night, you may observe in an extreme cold of -60ºC at 2835m above sea level the night sky with its aurora rotate at 24 hour intervals.

While observations of sunrises, sunsets and lunar phases at different latitudes and longitudes led ancient astronomers to adopt the Round Earth model long before the development of modern navigation instruments, flat earthers persisted with their literal interpretations of sacred manuscripts, with heaven above us and hell below us. It is simply a myth that medieval scholars believed sailors would fall off the edge of the Earth if they ventured into unchartered territory. Ancient maps often portrayed the known world as a disc or segment of a larger sphere. In the second century BC, Ptolemy argued that the Earth is a stationary ball surrounded by a larger celestial sphere revolving uniformly around it along with the stars, planets, Sun, and Moon, thus explaining their daily risings and settings. Indian and Chinese astronomers visualised a dome rotating above a flat earth floating in a larger ocean. The worldview of earlier civilisations centred on a small portion of a surface that seafarers would later chart onto a sphere with amazing precision by the late 16th century.

The modern technology we take for granted relies on detailed knowledge of our geophysical and biological environments that has taken us thousands of years to acquire. We may yearn to expand our horizons to new undiscovered continents lying beyond a mythical outer ice shelf, but we have to make do with the 149 million square kilometres of land and 361 million km² of sea we have within the Earth’s atmosphere. The oceans below a depth of a few hundred metres remain largely unexplored as does the earth’s outer mantle. While new discoveries have called into question previous orthodoxies, such as the Big Bang or mathematical abstractions behind the hyper-dimensions of string theory, we can be pretty certain our home planet has a spheroidal shape and orbits our nearest star, the Sun.

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All in the Mind

Pronoun Creep

Sex is embedded in the DNA of every cell of our bodies

As a living language, English has no shortage of quirks and ambiguities but tends to adapt over time to fill the semantic gaps. However, there is a big difference between the natural evolution of language and compelled speech.

Unlike some other European languages, English lacks a generic gender-neutral pronoun such as the German “man” or French “on” for the third person singular, although the formal impersonal pronoun “one” may sometimes meet these needs. By and large, we find ourselves having to choose between he/him/his and she/her/hers when referring to an abstract third person.

Someone, anyone and everyone may take the third person singular verb, but have long, especially in everyday speech, been combined with they, theirs and them, e.g. “Someone has left their keys on the table” or “Everyone should take their belongings with them”. Older style guides recommended third person singular pronouns with “someone” or ”anyone” when they refer to one person only and until recently he/him/his was the default even if it could involve a woman. By contrast, "everyone" always refers to more than one person. Besides, the inclusion of “someone” or “anyone” in a sentence removes any potential ambiguity when combined with “they/them/their”, but this is not the case when a pronoun acts as a placeholder for a singular gendered woman or man.

Yet on the back of the gender-bending craze, third person plural pronouns are creeping into contexts where we’d expect singular forms unless many people are involved. I now get emails from LinkedIn with phraseology like “Angela Green has accepted your invitation. Message them now!”. As Angela is clearly a singular woman, will my private messages to her be sent to more than one person?

I’ve long observed that modern English has a stronger tendency to use people’s names in sentences where other languages would omit them, partly to avoid ambiguity in sentences like “Michael drove Bill to York in his car” where “his car” may be Michael’s or Bill’s. What happens if misplaced political correctness leads us not to assume Michael or Bill’s gender identities and instead opt for phraseology like “Michael drove Bill to York in their car”. Does this mean Bill and Michael share a car, but Michael drove on that occasion?

How could a language evolve without a means to identify a gendered person in a respectfully neutral way? The answer is simple. Human sexual dimorphism plays a central role in all traditional societies. Besides, gendered singular pronouns are deeply ingrained in everyday speech. Most suggested alternative gender-neutral pronouns either clash with common names or just sound hackneyed, especially as most people still like their natural gender identity.

The growing use of they/them/theirs for singular males or females dehumanises people. It promotes a rejection of our natural heritage as the offspring of a long line of women and men and blurs key distinctions between a group of people and a free-thinking autonomous individual rather than a mere subject of a genetic experiment.