Author: neilg63

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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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
Power Dynamics

Systemic Breakdown or Engineered Chaos?

Some foreign observers may gloat over the disturbing scenes of rioting, arson, looting and urban warfare in the banlieues of French cities over the last week with an arrogant sense of schadenfreude, blaming the EU leadership, the French governance team, complacent left-branded politicians and naïve French voters for failing to address the root causes of the societal breakdown we see unfold before our eyes on electronic devices in the safety of our suburban neighbourhoods. Allegedly the police shooting of a Maghrebi teenager, Nahel Merzouk, triggered the destruction of billions of Euros worth of public and private infrastructure with schools, libraries and apartment blocks razed to the ground. Some will recall the brutal stabbing of 4 toddlers in the picturesque Alpine town of Annecy by a mentally disturbed asylum seeker earlier in the month. The woke left admonished some commentators for highlighting the assailant’s origin. Yet while some nationalist politicians may have capitalised on the incident to call for stricter immigration controls, we did not see riots on the streets of provincial towns still populated by autochthonous Europeans. Neither did we see violent retaliations in the wake of the horrendous 2016 truck attack in Nice that killed 86 innocent people or the 2015 Bataclan Theatre massacre with 89 fatalities. Most French citizens did not blame all Muslims for the outrageous crimes of a minuscule, radicalised minority. Indeed, the crimes were so horrific, many suspected dark forces associated either with Western secret services or with foreign actors, could have trained a small army of gullible patsies to commit acts of terror that serve mainly to spread fear and thus to justify more surveillance and censorship.

Like elsewhere in Western Europe, the French government squandered hundreds of billions of Euros on heavy-handed covid containment. They deployed riot police to suppress overwhelmingly peaceful protests against lockdowns and vaccine mandates, losing the trust of millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens. Although French pensions may seem generous by British standards, raising the retirement age amid a cost-of-living crisis with dwindling long-term career prospects for most over 40-year-olds proved to be the last straw for millions of French workers of all political persuasions. Macron could only win his second term as French President as the lesser of two evils, with the corporate media and trendy left opinion leaders smearing his opponent, Marine Le Pen, as a fascist. Ever since Manu, as many his subjects call him, has shown more interest posing on the world stages alongside WEF associates like Rishi Sunak, Joe Biden, King Charles, Volodymyr Zelensky and Ursula von der Leyen. As France burned, Macron partied with Elton John.

True to form, the gallic WEF puppet blamed the riots on social media, and wait for it, video games, both pastimes that his business buddies have been busy promoting for the last thirty years. Rather than focus on the underlying causes of social discontent, Macron opted to clamp down on free speech limiting access to the Internet in high-crime neighbourhoods and liaising with tech giants to suppress videos of mindless violence. Should we not ask instead: Who exactly benefits from the wanton destruction of shopping centres, libraries and schools? More important, who gave tens of thousands of looters carte blanche to steal luxury goods without fear of prosecution? How could acts of vandalism bring justice to the murdered teenager? I see close parallels with the choreographed overreaction to the police murder of George Floyd three years ago in American cities. One way or another French taxpayers will the price of their regime’s overspending on medical martial law, foreign wars and now mopping the mess of a civil war, either directly through tax or higher inflation.

Inevitably, as French security forces struggle to restore order, calls will grow for international peacekeepers on the streets of one of the wealthiest countries on Earth and tighter control over citizens movements. The stage seems set for the roll-out of 15-minute neighbourhoods with exit permits dependent on good behaviour. Nostalgic patriots may fantasise Macron’s resignation with early elections leading to Marine Le Pen’s victory. Socialists may dream of a general strike to bring down the government and, once in power, roll out their welfare panacea with a blend of 1960s social democracy and 21st century green technocracy. Yet the ongoing civil unrest can only benefit Macron’s international backers, eager to suppress the culture and independent spirit of the feisty French people to fast-track its transition to a billionaire’s playground with its lower-to-middle class residents confined to special reserves and suburban ghettos. The global elites may ditch Macron, but they will have another placeman or placewoman ready to fill his shoes with empty promises of reconciliation.

Despite all the bad press France has attracted of late, it remains one of Europe's more self-sufficient countries and is much less susceptible to higher global energy and food prices than its neighbours with a strong farming sector and major investments in nuclear power. At all costs, Manu's Mafia bosses must avoid a return to viable nation states.

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Power Dynamics

Infantile Revolutionary Defeatism

On the eve of the Great War that would lead to over 22 million avoidable deaths, Lenin called the defeat of Russian Tsarism the lesser of two evils, but urged his German and Austro-Hungarian comrades to oppose their Kaisers with the same vigour. This later came to be known in both socialist and anarchist circles as revolutionary defeatism, a concept later repudiated by the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin in the fight against fascism. The idea is that you do not just refuse to fight for your imperial masters, but you actively welcome their military defeat.

Yet on the eve of the Second World War, many on the radical left from pacificists to communists in the UK, France and Netherlands, opposed the march to war with Nazi Germany. Fresh from his harrowing experiences of communist machinations in the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell broke ranks with infantile left-wing activists and his own opposition to British jingoism by supporting the war effort against Nazi Germany as the only way to defend the liberal enlightenment against the greater danger of a totalitarian descent. It was a tough call at the time for anti-imperialists who remembered the carnage of the Great War only twenty-one years earlier. Many African and Indian opponents of British colonial rule wished for the globe-spanning Empire’s defeat in the two short years between 3rd September 1939 and Operation Barbarossa, when the Nazi invasion of Ukraine led to the July 1941 Anglo-Soviet Agreement, five months before the Pearl Harbour attacks brought the USA into the war. Yet Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan may never have expanded without substantial investment from Anglo-American bankers via JP Morgan and the Bank of England. General Motors had purchased Opel in 1931 and, like Ford, kept its German factories open throughout the war.

Lost in the annals of mid 20th century history is the curious case of George Lansbury, the quaint pacifist leader of the British Labour Party after its resounding 1931 defeat at the ballot box. For three short years, he not only advocated the dissolution of the British Empire but opposed increases in military spending to counter the rise of fascism and national socialism. Mr Lansbury was not alone in wanting to appease rival powers to avert a catastrophic descent into all-out war. David Lloyd George, the prime minister from 1916 to 22, believed Hitler’s government could rebuild Germany as an economic powerhouse and thus counter the rise of communist influence in Central Europe. The National Socialists would never have won over the working classes without promising to redistribute wealth from international bankers to local communities and appealing both to patriotism and family values. Little did the German social conformists of the mid 1930s know that within ten years their dreams of an ecologically friendly and technologically sophisticated 1000-year Reich would lie in tatters with the remainder of a fragmented Germany integrated with the empires of rival superpowers. Key players switched allegiance almost overnight. Consider the case of Adolf Heusinger. He served the Wehrmacht loyally as Chief of the General Staff under Hitler, but later under Adenauer played a key role in the creation of West Germany’s Bundeswehr in 1955 before being appointed as Chair of NATO’s Military Committee.

The winning powers rewrote history to hide their own involvement in the installation of authoritarian regimes in much of Europe and Latin America. Two years after the infamous 1933 enabling act handed executive power to the National Socialist Party, a revised constitution gave Poland’s interwar Sanation movement absolute power too. The ruling classes could only keep up the pretence of multi-party democracy in Scandinavia, France, the Low Countries and British Isles. Of these only Britain, Ireland and Sweden escaped occupation. Britain had a string of National Unity governments from 1929 to 1945. Ever since we have had a Punch and Judy show of successive Labour, Tory and Coalition administrations juggling the balance of power between large corporations and state institutions. It’s hard to imagine any Western government nominally elected into office would have survived long without the full blessing of the corporatocracy. We need only look at the fate of Salvador Allende in Chile or Gough Whitlam in Australia to understand the limits of Western democracy. As long as they placated the masses with better social welfare, big business could tolerate them, but not when they tried to seize control of the means of production or openly obstructed US foreign policy.

Despite all their failings, Western societies retained two things much more precious than electoral consultations, intellectual freedom and bodily autonomy, namely our basic rights to think and breathe as autonomous human beings rather than as zoo animals. The covid scare offered a convenient loophole to override both core human rights for the greater good. However, it is ludicrous to place your trust in other regimes, such as China, with a longer track record of authoritarian overreach. We live in dangerous times. No external power is going to come to save us. NATO may very well lose over Ukraine, but that too may be a mirage ushering in a new post-American era where global Big Tech works hand in glove with regional law enforcement agencies.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics Uncategorized

Whom may you hate?

Gas the unjabbed (Send the unjabbed to the gas chambers) ! Graffiti by the radical wing of the Covid Cult in trendy post-modern Germany.

When hatred means only loathing protected categories, but it’s fine to direct your anger at new outgroups.

As the antithesis to love, hatred is a natural emotion as old as humanity itself. We hate people who, we believe, mean us harm. By “us” I mean our immediate in-group, ourselves, our family and our wider community. Hatred has its roots in distrust of perceived enemies and fraudsters, something we learn from an early age for the purposes of survival. There’s a reason we teach our children not to accept sweets from strangers. Can we ever justify hateful feelings? Can we ever forgive the perpetrators of heinous crimes? Some may argue that we should only hate evil deeds and give criminals a chance to repent and beg forgiveness. Others argue that some psychopathic criminals are beyond redemption and fully deserve lifelong imprisonment or early death. It may be culturally acceptable to hate irredeemable mass murderers and serial rapists, but organised criminals get others to do their dirty deeds. They also tend to have influential legal and public relations teams to protect them against any likelihood of prosecution.

Hatred is very problematic when it comes either to collective guilt or the demonisation of outgroups at odds with mainstream society, however defined. It may be wrong to tarnish a whole ethnic group with the crimes of their ruling elites, but such divisive tactics often serve the interests of the new ruling classes. The old British upper crust appealed to patriotism and civilisational superiority. They were happy for British settlers to displace the natives in far-off lands when it suited their expansionary purposes. To justify colonialism, the dominant organs of propaganda unpeopled the restless natives. Today they exploit migratory flows in the opposite direction for almost the same reasons, to undermine traditional ways of life, suppress self-sufficiency and subjugate everyone to their rebranded corporate dictatorship.

Back in the 1950s and 60s it was okay to hate practising homosexuals. As late as 1983 the mainstream media vilified Peter Tatchell, an openly gay Labour candidate, posing on the radical left, in the inner-city Labour stronghold of Bermondsey. He lost to the Liberal candidate, Simon Hughes, who later admitted his bisexuality, after attempting to deny such rumours for over 20 years as a high-profile politician. Today, the same treatment is meted out to alleged transphobes, namely people who believe in natural procreation and biological definitions of man and woman. We witnessed this in the Scottish National Party’s recent leadership election contest. The same corporate media that 40 years ago had hounded Peter Tatchell as a dangerous extremist conducted a smear campaign against Katie Forbes, a devout Christian who had opposed the ill-fated Gender Recognition Reform bill.

Yesterday’s protected categories can become today’s outcasts. Germaine Greer has transitioned from being a celebrated feminist author, admired by the radical chic left and regularly appearing on TV, to a reactionary old bat that transgender rights activists want to de-platform. It’s now politically correct to hate TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) as we can observe in countless videos of screeching blue, green or pink-haired demonstrators attempting to stop natural-born women, such as the courageous Kellie-Jay Keen, from defending their gender-based rights.

It seems only yesterday when the woke left defended Muslims against Islamophobia. Now the spectre of Islamophobia has served its purpose in justifying the more surveillance and censorship as well as shutting down rational debate on mass migration, social engineers feel empowered to target fragmented religious communities who oppose the teaching of gender theory in primary schools. The Scottish government’s new hate speech law encourages children to report parents who express homophobic or transphobic beliefs. This pretty much incriminates followers of all leading faiths that preach the virtues of motherhood in the context of stable two-parent families.

Last but not least, we have the sizable minority of adults and teenagers who consciously decided not to succumb to unrelenting coercion to get vaccinated in order to participate fully in society. For the best part of two years, TV talking heads, celebrities, employers, politicians, academics, trade union bosses, social media influencers and religious leaders not only evangelised mRNA injections, they lampooned antivaxxers as ignorant, selfish and anti-science. Even Noam Chomsky supported the isolation of the wilfully unjabbed. At stake was much more than vaccine safety, but bodily autonomy, transparency and accountability. All of a sudden, people lost the right to disagree with state-mandated pseudo-scientific dogma. The left-branded progressive media now targets not so much the unvaccinated as those who question the vaccine narrative, including people like Dr Aseem Malhotra or Andrew Bridgen MP who had initially backed the vaccine campaign. It’s okay to hate the enemies of the Biotech Mafia.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Progressive Sycophants

Hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised freedom fighters protest against technocracy (London, June 2021), ignored by the mainstream media and the establishment left. There was not a single SWP placard in sight.

How billionaire transhumanists captured the middle-class left

I’m so old I recall when the left stood up against the ruling classes with their endless war games and knavish tricks. Now they screech against the spectre of the evil far right, amplify voguish mainstream propaganda and demand the suppression of all traditional outlooks. It only seems yesterday when the radical left championed investigative journalists like Julian Assange and Seymour Hersh and demanded greater transparency from the military industrial complex. We also instinctively distrusted any large multinationals with multi-billion-dollar marketing budgets. Many Western socialists never really forgave the working classes in the 1970s and 80s for their newfound love of cars, gadgets and package-tour holidays that only free-market capitalism seemed able to provide. They fell out of love with the great unwashed and turned their attention to new victim groups.

Broad left-of-centre coalitions may have exposed grotesque injustices and challenged the vested interests of regional elites in the great civil rights campaigns against segregation in the United States and South Africa. Yet when the international corporatocracy embraced racial and sexual diversity in the 1990s after the eclipse of the Soviet Union, affluent trendy lefties moved onto new cultural battles setting themselves at odds with the reactionary working classes, whom they held responsible for centuries of misogyny, homophobia and racism. They even blamed the underclasses of European descent for the historic wrongs of slavery and cultural imperialism. Ironically the forebears of the socially conservative lower classes in the British Isles, the kind of people who supported Brexit, endured extreme hardship and had to work ten to twelve hours a day to feed their families. By contrast, many virtue-signalling progressives can trace their roots to the well-to-do professional and missionary classes who helped administer the Empire and civilise the restless masses for the greater good. All that’s changed is the church has gone high-tech and woke, while the rebranded rainbow empire now spans the whole globe. Today’s progressive managerial classes promote LGBTQ+ Pride month and climate alarmism with the same zeal that their forebears once spread Christianity and allegiance to the monarch among pagans. Indeed, even the new British King struggles to hide his allegiance to the World Economic Forum. One could be forgiven for believing King Charles III has the same speech writer as Greta Thunberg.

The Big Switch

Many argue the Western left began to cast aside its traditional blue-collar base in the 1960s. However, most leftists still believed in a fairer and kinder world with a substantial transfer of power away from boardrooms to grassroots organisations. The Green Left, as it evolved in the 1980s and 90s, attempted to offer an alternative to unsustainable economic growth and rampant greed. They seemed to stand against the vested interests of the big corporations who wanted to expand markets and lock workers into a vicious cycle of debt and mass consumerism. Lower living standards have never been great vote winners, especially when car manufacturers, supermarkets and airlines collude to sell the dream of automotive bliss and fashion fetishism. Throughout the New Labour years (1997-2010), the economic growth mantra reigned supreme. If dissident economists dared to suggest that endless debt-driven expansion of the money supply will ultimately implode with catastrophic social consequences, they soon got shouted down. Despite all the green rhetoric, car ownership and foreign travel continued to rise in Western Europe until the 2008 credit squeeze. Sales crept gradually up again until 2020. Since then, there’s been a steady decline.

Twenty-twenty may go down in history not just as the beginning of a virus-themed technocratic coup, but also as Peak Car. It was the year the big global banks decided to put mass motoring into reverse gear. For decades, lenders literally created money out of thin air to help young adults onto the car-owning ladder. Governments spent billions on multilane highways intersecting an urban sprawl of housing estates and retail parks hostile to humble walkers and cyclists. Now the big banks and energy cartels advertise the wonders of the green economy and our transition away from the era of material growth with effortless travel to a low-consumption digital future with compact 15-minute neighbourhoods serviced by drones. The tech giants support universal basic income because they know most monotonous clerical and manual jobs will soon be fully automated. Last but not least, the same biotech industry that facilitated covid tyranny also bankrolls the transgender and neurodiversity lobbies. The Wellcome Trust funds both the purported neurodiversity movement and transgender inclusion. While the old ecology movement backed local organic farming and herbal remedies, the new green-branded corporate left champions genetic engineering, global supply chains and lifelong dependency on dodgy pharmaceutical products.

Collectivism is the main thread that binds the old based anti-establishment left with the new woke conformist left, but they appeal to very different collectives. The old left of my youth still sought to emancipate oppressed peoples exploited as workers or colonial subjects.

We could broadly split the old radical left into two main camps. Syndicalists, who viewed workers as the main vehicle of change, and idealists, who appealed to the collective conscience through political activism and cultural vanguardism. They came in various flavours, from Christian socialists to pacifists and anti-imperialists. Many, especially in the trade unions, sympathised with the former Soviet Union, China or Cuba. Others took their lead from the disciples of Leon Trotsky or fantasised the Swedish model of luxury social democracy. Yet despite these differences, the various factions on the left agreed on the need to redistribute power from the rich to the poor.  In the West, the mainstream media regularly ridiculed and smeared left-wing dissident thinkers who challenged the hegemony of vested corporate interests. I recall vitriolic media campaigns against the former leader of National Union of Miners, Arthur Scargill, and his communist ally, Mick McGahey, during the bitter 1984 Miners’ strike. The NUM leadership seriously misjudged the Tory government’s resolve. Their year-long battle, mythologised by the student left across Europe, helped the British ruling classes downsize the mining industry and clamp down on trade union rights. To add insult to injury, the Thatcher government imported cut-price coal from Socialist Poland, as it repressed strikes by the anti-establishment Solidarność  movement. Yet, a hard core on the Western left still believed workers could only be masters of their destiny by seizing control of the commanding heights of the economy. Arthur Scargill remains unrepentant to this day. As the leading light in the tiny Socialist Labour Party, he speaks out against the insanity of closing coal mines, but seems oblivious to the struggles against technocracy, hailing the disputed election of Lula da Silva as a victory for international socialism. Yes, that’s the same Lula who wants to jail people for spreading counter-information about mRNA-injectables. In his heyday, Arthur represented a mainly male workforce, believed in families and seldom uttered a word about gay rights. I recall as a student visiting a group of striking miners near Swansea in South Wales. Over breakfast our host expressed his dismay over the antics of a gay rights group, who, he claimed, had brought his struggle to save his community into disrepute. While the student left yearned for a rainbow revolution, most militant trade unionists wanted to protect their communities against global corporatocracy.

The Corbynite left drew most of its active support from the social management classes angry about obvious injustices. They may have championed the Palestinian cause or protested against wars, but all too often they served as gullible foot soldiers in the woke revolution that ultimately only benefits the technocratic classes. With a few noble exceptions such as Jeremy Corbyn’s lesser-known brother, Piers, the trendy left swallowed the covid narrative hook, line and sinker, calling only for more PPE (an acronym seldom heard in everyday speech before 2020), more generous furlough pay and longer lockdowns. As usual, the BBC, Guardian and assorted high-profile influencers guided their groupthink. Not a single trade union leader called for strikes against lockdowns or opposed jab coercion. The opposition came from a new alliance of free-thinkers and social conservatives that transcends the old left-right divide, uniting small business owners, many of whom belong to Labour’s beloved ethnic minorities, libertarians and latter-day hippies who still respect mother nature and bodily autonomy. Aerial footage showed hundreds of thousands at the big London protests against vaccine passports of 2021. Yet they barely figured in mainstream news bulletins. Any reports in the legacy media referred to a few thousand antivax protesters and highlighted peripheral scuffles with the police. Unlike other large demonstrations I’ve attended over the years, there were no printed placards from the trade unions or suspect organisations such as Socialist Workers Party. On the way back from a freedom protest in Glasgow, I encountered a masked Socialist Worker seller. The SWP’s main bone of contention with Big Pharma related to the perceived shortage of their mRNA products in the developing world and not to the safety, efficacy or purpose of the multi-trillion-dollar global injection campaign. I asked whether the SWP now supports UBI (universal basic income) and, not entirely to my surprise, they do as a transitionary measure on the road to the full socialism. The next question flummoxed the humble young Trotskyist: “How could people on UBI go on strike if the managerial classes were, heaven forbid, to abuse their power?”. She had no answer other than to claim we could rise up and seize control of the means of production, but I quipped they “could just declare a health emergency and block people’s bank accounts or access to any form of transport if they protest, you know, just like they do in China”. The conversation ended there. While organised groups of essential workers may counteract the hegemony of mega-corporations, the welfare classes can only beg for more social credits.

Noam Chomsky’s support for biotech apartheid was the last straw. I could forgive him for taking different stances on the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy or on the demolition of NYC’s iconic World Trade Center, but how could the author of Manufacturing Consent fail to question the extreme bias of the corporate media over medical martial law? How could libertarian socialists turn a blind to the biggest and fastest transfer of wealth and power from the working classes to a bunch of super-billionaires? Yet this is what happened. With rare exceptions, the whole conventional left from Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand to Lula Da Silvia in Brazil and from eco-vegans to the remnants of the Fourth International embraced the covid cult and, in doing so, aided and abetted Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset. Pseudo-intellectual neo-Marxist rhetoric makes little practical sense if you have effectively delegated humanity’s future to BlackRock and Vanguard.

Unlike its forerunners, the new corporate left seeks to exploit racial, sexual and neurological identities to guide the masses towards a micromanaged welfare utopia in lockstep with corporate NGOs. At best the postmodern left can demand higher taxes for the rich and more generous handouts for the poor, but the workless masses cannot go on strike. They are at the behest of the technocratic classes who seek to consolidate their control not just over the means of production, but over the whole of humanity. Rather than empower the working classes, the elitist left wants to phase out the labour force altogether.

The battleground no longer pits left against right, but bottom against top or rather natural human beings against technocrats. We need to build a new movement to challenge the greatest concentration of wealth and power in human history.