Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 386
August 2, 2023
Cannabis: The “Gateway Drug” Leading AWAY from Prescription Drug Addiction
by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News
There are currently over 32 million Americans using FDA-approved anti-anxiety prescription drugs (benzodiazepines), based on 2018 data. That includes almost 400,000 children under the age of 5 years old, and over 100,000 infants under the age of 1. (Source.)
According to a study published on the National Institute of Health (NIH) website in 2016, benzodiazepine prescriptions increased 4.1 percent in 1996 to 5.6 percent in 2013, a 37 percent increase, while deaths from benzodiazepine prescriptions increased from 0.58 per 100,000 adults to about 3 per 100,000 adults, or about 8,000 deaths per year, an increase of more than 500 percent. (Source.)
And these statistics are for just one class of anti-psychotic drugs, anti-anxiety (benzodiazepine) drugs. According to data from 2020, about 77 million Americans are taking some form of an anti-psychotic drug. (Source).
Over 100 people die every day in the U.S. from prescription drugs (pre-COVID, that number would be much higher today), and over 50% of all drug deaths in the U.S. are from prescription drugs. (Source.)
By way of contrast, about 52 million Americans use cannabis (marijuana), which is still illegal at the federal level and not FDA-approved, and to date there has not been a single death attributed to cannabis use, according to the NIH.
There are no reports of teens or adults dying from marijuana alone.
But the pharmaceutical companies are desperately trying to develop a drug to help people stop using cannabis, or what is referred to as “marijuana use disorder.”
That’s because the withdrawal side effects from trying to stop using cannabis are so horrible (sarcasm):
No medications are currently available to treat marijuana use disorder.
Many people who use marijuana long term and are trying to quit report mild withdrawal symptoms that make quitting difficult. These include:
grouchinesssleeplessnessdecreased appetiteanxietycravings(Source.)
Compare those cannabis withdrawal symptoms to the withdrawal symptoms of FDA-approved benzodiazepine prescription drugs:
Gateway Drug?Benzodiazepine withdrawal can bring about a wide range of symptoms such as:
Sweating.Increased heartrate (greater than 100 beats per minute).Anxiety.Agitation.Insomnia.Hand tremor.Perceptual disturbances (i.e., hallucinations).Seizures.Delirium characterized by disturbances in consciousness and cognition, with visual, auditory, or tactile hallucinations.Some people also experience anxiety and depression for several weeks or months following acute withdrawal. In severe cases, especially when untreated, benzodiazepine withdrawal may be fatal. (Source.)
The corporate media and Big Pharma have been saying for decades now that cannabis use is a “gateway drug” leading people to become addicted to more dangerous drugs.
Well, I think everyone agrees that marijuana is a “gateway drug”, but a “gateway” leading in which direction?
The evidence points to cannabis use as a “gateway” AWAY from deadly prescription drugs, such as opioids and anti-psychotics.
See some of our previous coverage on how opioid addictions DECREASE in states that legalize marijuana:
How Cannabis Can Be Used for Safe and Effective Opioid Drug Withdrawal
Opioid Pain Killer Drug Addictions Can Be Cured With Cannabis
Dr. Oz Looks at Medical Marijuana as a Potential Cure for Opioid Addiction
An article published in Boston Magazine last week interviewed educated, suburban mothers who were turning away from alcohol in favor of cannabis, referred to as “cannamoms”.
The Really High Housewives of MetroWest
Out with the chardonnay, in with the gummies—why a new generation of Greater Boston parents are choosing cannabis to cope.
How did we get from “wine moms” to “weed moms”? Obviously, the legalization of cannabis has been a key factor, leading to increased accessibility and acceptability.
We spend way more time actually caring for our children than our own parents ever did—in hopes that this highly involved approach will maximize our child’s chances of future success. But at what cost? Parents are exhausted and stressed out. Is it any wonder mothers—who still take on the majority of childcare responsibilities—need something to take the edge off at the end of a long day?
That “something” used to be alcohol. Once upon a time, my friends and I enthusiastically embraced wine-mom culture, hosting happy-hour playdates with juice boxes, Goldfish, and chardonnay. We’d giggle knowingly at memes like “Oops, did I buy wine instead of milk again?” and dab at our faces with cocktail napkins inscribed with, “Shh, it’s my turn to wine.” Mommy juice helped us cope with the stresses of parenting—but only just.
Then the pandemic hit, and our carefully crafted façades crumbled. Suddenly, our children and spouses were home with us 24/7, and our worlds were turned upside down. We were homeschooling, working, and trying to hold it all together. It wasn’t long before Wine Wednesdays were preceded by Margarita Mondays and Boozeday Tuesdays—followed by Thirsty Thursdays. Gathering for drinks around a fire pit, bundled up in winter parkas and boots, gave us something to look forward to during that particularly bleak period.
About two years in, though, we began to feel pickled. Even one glass of wine gave me a headache or interrupted my sleep—and I wasn’t alone. Some of my friends were also begging off a second pour—it just wasn’t worth feeling like crap the next day. That’s when I first heard of cannabis gummies making the rounds in my cloistered suburban enclave. Word on the oak-lined street was that it gave you a nice buzz without the unpleasant side effects. Better yet, you could still carry out your duties as a parent—say, watching your daughter’s strings concert—and enjoy it a hell of a lot more than you would have otherwise.
That sounded enticing, but as someone who grew up in the 1980s with Nancy Reagan telling me to “Just say no” to drugs, I’d need a little extra push to convince me to give cannabis a go. (Full article.)
While I am not endorsing recreational use for drugs, or taking drugs at all to cope with “anxiety” in life, it sure looks to me that cannabis is being used as the new “gateway” drug OUT of dependence upon deadly prescription drugs, and also alcohol abuse.
Of course that means decreased revenues for Big Pharma, and not just for anti-anxiety drugs.
Learn more about the “other side” of cannabis that threatens Big Pharma. Some of our previous articles:
New Studies Provide Hope for Using Cannabis to Treat Brain Injuries and Diseases
Medical Cannabis Has Potential to Help Arthritis Sufferers
More Seniors Rejecting Pharmaceutical Drugs for Medical Cannabis
Older Americans Turning to Medical Cannabis to Heal Cancer and Other Diseases
Study: Cannabis is Protective Against Alcoholic Liver Disease
Medical Cannabis is Healing Autism
How Medical Cannabis Changed Our Lives: A Testimonial
Can Cannabis Help Reverse Alzheimer’s?
Study: THC from Cannabis Helps Restore Memory Loss due to Aging and Dementia
Former Cancer Research Biochemist Cured His Cancer with Cannabis
Cannabis Treats Diabetes and Protects Against Obesity
Study: Medical Cannabis Cures Inflammation in Gut – Hope for IBS, Crohns, Celiac Sufferers
[…]
Cannabis: The “Gateway Drug” Leading AWAY from Prescription Drug Addiction
Startling Revelations Change Everything New Zealanders Have Been Schooled to Believe
Bombshell revelations reported this weekend by The Australian, a leading broadsheet owned by the Murdoch group, have huge implications for pandemic policy here in New Zealand. They should completely change public perceptions and understanding of the Covid landscape. These implications include legal liability, safety of public health measures, future pandemic responses, and personal health choices.
This article is available as a PDF document to print/download or share.
The Weekend Australian leads with an investigative article entitled‘Covid Cover-Up: How Science was Silenced’covering a chilling admission of guilt from Robert Kadlec—former Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Health at the US Department of Health. Kadlec told The Australian that he, Dr. Fauci, and National Institute of Health Director Francis Collins privately discussed how to turn down the heat on China in the early days of the pandemic by playing down concerns about a lab leak from Wuhan.
Kadlec said,
“I think Tony Fauci was trying to protect his institution and his own reputation from the possibility that his agency was funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers who, beyond the scope of the grants received from the National Institutes of Health, may have been working with People’s Liberation Army researchers on defensive coronavirus vaccines.”
‘Defensive coronavirus vaccine research’is a euphemism for military-funded gain of function research to mutate deadly pathogens in order to explore the creation of vaccines for use in the event of a bio-war.
Kadlec admitted, “We think vaccine research resulted in the pandemic—that vaccine research was the proximate cause.”
As a result, Kadlec said, “we decided to encourage a group of leading international scientists to calm down speculation on the origin of the virus.”
The front page Australian article dated 29th July 2023 and three other articles on subsequent pages of the same edition, all covering the explosive admissions, are hidden behind an expensive online paywall shared with the WSJ, but you can view a photo of the newspaper here and examine more detailed evidence here.
It comes on top of leaked private communications showing that leading scientists, very publicly debunking the lab leak theory, in actuality believed it was almost certainly correct. At the time, my own communications with top scientists working in the gene therapy field showed that it was widely understood that the genetic structures associated with the Covid spike protein were man made, yet saying so could lose you your job.
If you are new to this kind of discussion, you are probably asking why haven’t we seen articles like these here in New Zealand? The answer is revealed by a reporter from ABC News, talking with colleagues from the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian which was inadvertently caught on a hot mic. One describes it as ‘annoying and amazing’ that the lab leak theory now looks to be correct. The journalists admit that they never looked at the lab leak theory dispassionately, but relied on their ideological rejection of those asking questions. In other words, there was no credible investigation of the facts by mainstream media.
The Implications for New Zealand of the Latest Covid RevelationsFor three years, we have been divided as a nation along the lines of vaccinated versus unvaccinated. It is now abundantly clear that both Covid and Covid vaccines originated from risky biotechnology research on mutated deadly pathogens.
Rather than a divided nation, we could have been a united nation, standing shoulder to shoulder against novel biotechnology experimentation.
There is a need to spell out the technical implications of this. The engineered spike protein has features which are completely foreign to our immune system. At the start of the pandemic, our physiology had no evolutionary context or memory of fighting off these novel genetic sequences. It is now apparent that the spike protein has a toxic profile, especially for the heart and circulatory system. Thus Covid infection had both short and long term unquantified implications for health. The various Covid vaccines were designed to teach our cells to produce Covid spike proteins in quantity, therefore the vaccines inevitably also had significant short and long term implications for health dictated by their pathogenic design.
If we had known that Covid was an engineered pathogen, we would have recognised that concerns about Covid vaccine safety were legitimate.
New Zealand was misled by the US administration. The lesson here is very clear. New Zealand must be more circumspect to scrutinise the health information supplied to our nation from nations and institutions who are clearly tied to commercial endeavours seeking to profit from actions and policy decisions resulting from this information. This includes information received from the WHO, ICMRA, FDA, CDC, WEF, and possibly through Five Eyes. It is now clear that some information we received during the pandemic from these sources was unreliable. False and/or misleading information was received at multiple levels of government, including Medsafe, the PM’s office, and probably our intelligence organisations. Yet New Zealand adopted a trusting perspective and vigorously acted upon it, possibly more stringently than other nations. The result has not just been policy missteps, but high rates of vaccine injury, excess deaths, economic hardship, and lasting social division.
There is no doubt that PM Jacinda Ardern curated misplaced trust in foreign official sources. We now know these sources were editing scientific dialogue and results to suit commercial and geopolitical agendas.
In a gross error of judgement, Ardern’s department created a policy of exclusion aimed at those questioning the severity of Covid, the lab leak hypothesis, and Covid vaccine safety. This legitimised actions at every level of government and the judiciary to cancel those raising concerns. The Ardern government, with the approval of opposition parties, framed this as a moral crusade and pursued agreements with social media companies to exclude legitimate science and debate. In actuality, we were being played by foreign interests. Our sovereign independence was being undermined to an extent it never has been before. We were losing our right to choose as a nation, and thereby our right to choose as individuals. This illustrates the inherent bankruptcy of the globalist outlook as opposed to our traditional New Zealand outlook of self-determination. It highlights the need for extreme caution in a world of globalised information and media dilution of science.
How Serious Are the Potential Dangers?In a globalised world, we have to be very circumspect of foreign interests, which certainly do not coincide with those of New Zealand. Consider this article—New evidence of Beijing’s Covid cover-up and possible Wuhan lab leak revealed: China’s public health authorities cracked virus’ genetic code five DAYS before the world knew about the disease, scientist claims. China, like the US, was not sharing information, rather they were sharing disinformation, and they are likely to do so again in the future.
The freewheeling attitude to biotech risk management was underlined this week by a horrifying article entitled “Unassuming warehouse in California turns out to be illegal Chinese-run virus laboratory that was genetically engineering mice and experimenting with HIV, herpes and malaria“. The safety rules governing biotechnology experimentation are simply inadequate for the task. Risky experimentation involving deadly pathogens at poorly secured locations are proliferating around the world. Worse, many are being funded by governments and legally sanctioned. The entire gene editing enterprise, whether safely contained or not, is fraught with unacceptable levels of risk and rife with accidents. Much publicity generated by commercial biotech interests is aimed at persuading the public that these serious risks are non-existent.
On top of this, we have to consider that politicians have little ability to reliably sort the significance of varying evidence when considering any complex scientific advice they receive. Consider this paper published in the Annals of Internal Medicine entitled “The Effect of Influenza Vaccination for the Elderly on Hospitalization and Mortality”, which studied 170 million episodes of influenza care and 7.6 million deaths among those over 64. It concluded back in April 2020:
“No evidence indicated that flu vaccination reduced hospitalisations or mortality among elderly persons. The estimates were precise enough to rule out results from many previous studies.”
Do we hear about this when being urged to take our flu shots? No. The media and the government have long since stopped caring about the exaggerations and profiteering of the pharmaceutical industry.
Across the board, the globalist agenda and the associated information network is driven by ideological priorities remote from our national interests.
[…]
In the wake of this weekend’s revelations we must appreciate that there are outstanding questions of legal liability.
We have covered some of these in our previous articles:
Were we sufficiently warned by Pfizer of the results of trials and post-marketing data indicating very high levels of vaccine adverse effects across a range of conditions? Apparently not.Did our government decide to ignore concerning and unprecedented levels of domestic adverse effects of Covid vaccines because the US and UK authorities were spreading propaganda designed to dampen concerns around biotechnology in order to protect their commercial domination in the field of vaccine research, development and marketing? It appears so.As a result, did the New Zealand Government, our health service, and the Accident Compensation Commission unfairly deny the existence of Covid vaccine injuries, dismiss patients without investigation or testing and withhold compensation? Yes, they did.Did our courts trust government sources without requiring cross examination of government witnesses, and thereby disadvantage appellants? Yes, repeatedly.Is the NZ government still funding a disinformation project driven by ideology aimed at cancelling anyone asking questions about Covid origins, vaccine safety and pandemic policy? Yes, vigorously.[…]
Vandana Shiva: Bill Gates and Silicon Valley Behind Push for ‘Farming Without Farmers, Food Without Farms’
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. On the latest episode of Russell Brand’s “Stay Free,” scholar, environmental activist and food sovereignty advocate Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., discussed food fascism, the power of “philanthropy,” digital enslavement and how people can free themselves from this system.
“Human beings cannot have a relationship with nature, land and one another, it seems increasingly, without the intercedence of this corporate power,” comedian and political commentator Russell Brand told scholar and environmental activist Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., on the latest episode of his “Stay Free” podcast.Brand asked Shiva, a food sovereignty and environmental activist, to explain how this corporate takeover of nature happened.
Shiva said the privatization of land and resources under colonialism was the first step in transforming nature into “either a mine or a dump.”
Today, she said, privatization has become so entrenched that mega-corporation Cargill can own every chicken, chicken production facility, and every input needed to raise chickens, and then dump all of its waste into public rivers.
The situation we face today could not have happened, she said, without the criminalization of farmers — for which she held media organizations like The Guardian responsible because they attack farmers instead of the corporations.
“If the drivers are the corporations,” she said, “you have to have the guts to bite the corporations. You don’t target the victims. The farmers are victims of this system.”
Preorder Now! ‘Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak’Who are the real ‘food fascists’?
Brand asked Shiva why the global uprising of farmers — from Sri Lanka and India to Germany, England and the Netherlands — against the globalization of agriculture had come to be cast as a right-wing idea by the press.
Shiva said Mussolini himself defined fascism as “the convergence of economic and political power.” “Food fascism,” she said, “is the recent control over our food systems by giant corporations and the billionaires.”
Under colonialism, the British controlled the land, she said, but they didn’t control the food. The advent of agricultural industrialization, the green revolution and globalization made it possible for corporations to take control of food.
The call for “food sovereignty,” she said, “came as the call as opposite to the food dictatorship and food fascism.”
Now, she said, those people want to complete the separation of people from the land that began with colonialism.
Today, they want “farming without farmers.”
Being able to plant a seed, input love, knowledge and sun and produce food, “is the only truly independent production system and it’s that freedom they want to attack,” Shiva said, because they are threatened by it.
So they discredit farmers by calling them “fascists” and “right wing.”
“And anybody who facilitates that is essentially doing the work of these globalists,” she said, “they’re the fascists.”
How ‘philanthropy’ buys control
Today, people who talk about the disproportionate power and influence that billionaires like Bill Gates have over global agriculture and health are regarded as “conspiracy theorists,” Brand said.
He asked Shiva to explain Gates’ rise to power in plain language and with facts.
Shiva said people like Gates became wealthy through neoliberal trade liberalization, where trade in information, in the software and other forms of data Gates produced, went completely untaxed.
Then, she said, they used that money “philanthropically” to gain control of other sectors.
By donating massive sums of money to the global seed bank, to the World Health Organization and to media organizations such as The Guardian and the BBC, Gates and other billionaires took control of those institutions.
It even gives them the power to control governments, she said, who have been made desperate for money through indebtedness.
Gates and Silicon Valley, she said, “are very big players in the fake food future of farming without farmers, food without farms.” And they get journalists such as The Guardian’s George Monbiot to promote it.
Chasing enslavement
Shiva said this vision is built on “an imagined promise of an imagined future that we are never gonna arrive at. Because when you get there, you’ll find it doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to them.”
The systems that support their vision of the future appear to offer us convenience, but in reality, she said, maintaining them takes all of our time.
Many indigenous people, she said, still have a lot of time to enjoy life “because they’re not chasing enslavement through consumption.”
Shiva wondered why people would want a “smart home,” where, for example, “the fridge will tell you your milk is getting old. How dumb are we getting that we can’t open the door of our fridge and know our milk is getting old?”
“All that is surveillance data,” she said.
And processing that data takes big servers. “The tiny bits of enslavement we are getting into is [producing] 4% of greenhouse gases, which is more than the aviation sector,” she said.
She added:
“So, not only is it a very foolish kind of slavery, it’s a huge ecological footprint on the planet. Yes. And we can’t afford it. So we have to learn to walk lightly.”
Data is the new oil
Brand said he was alarmed at the increasing pace of “desacralization” where people prioritize materialism over spirituality and lose control over their lives. He asked Shiva how she thought censorship, the inhibition of free speech and the ability of the media to shut down dialogue, fed into this process.
Shiva said it was part of “a system of total control,” that makes that control highly profitable.
What’s new in this system according to Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” is that today, human beings themselves have been turned into raw material whose data can be extracted.
“That is the capital of today. Big data is the new oil, and then it’s used to manipulate us,” she said, adding “Any system that allows you the awareness of your real freedom must be censored.”
The strange thing, Brand said, is that this system of technological domination was sold to people as a way of empowering them and giving them their freedom.
Technology should be a tool, she said, but it “has been elevated to a god” and those opposed to that transformation are discounted, through Orwellian doublespeak, as “right wing.”
But, Shiva said, the last few years have shown there are three things people cannot give up:
“First, your ability to know and distinguish between truth and untruth. … And not allow post-truth to be projected as truth and the truth speakers to be projected as conspirators.
“The second is our ability to relate to each other without the intervention of a surveillance state and surveillance corporation.
“And third, because food is what makes us, it becomes our blood, ourselves, our brain.”
In other words, Brand said:
“Speak freely. Tell the truth. Communicate freely. Grow your own food. Don’t eat things grown in labs. Don’t eat bugs. And don’t listen to people who want to promote it.”
[…]
Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/vandana-shiva-bill-gates-fake-food-farming-rb/
Who’s in charge of EV chargers—and other power grid additions?
photo credit Michael FousertYears ago, I heard the engineering principle that no technology is safe until proven safe. To prove safety, professional engineers (PEs) evaluate a proposed technology with due diligence: they study all questions—including ones from non-engineers like me. PEs carry liability for their reports about infrastructures like substations, water treatment facilities, buildings and bridges. After comprehensive due diligence, they certify that a technology’s hazards have been mitigated—or not.
Our techno-society’s safety and functioning depend on engineering due diligence.
In The EV Transition Explained (published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), Robert Charette reports that charging an electrical vehicle (EV) can overheat a transformer—and shorten its typically 30-to-40-year lifespan to three years. (Transformers reduce electricity’s voltage when it’s transmitted from a substation to a residence or business; above-ground transformers look like trash cans mounted on utility poles.) When I shared Charette’s report with an LA friend, he told me that the underground transformer 50 feet from his house exploded last April on a Saturday morning—a time he considered low-demand for electricity.
“Is it low-demand,” I wondered, “if a handful of neighbors charge their vehicles Friday night?”
“Our current grid,” BigBattery.com’s Eric Lundgren told me, “was not designed to have ten EVs chargers and ten air conditioners turn on at same time on one city block. It’s not designed to charge EV batteries on fast chargers.”
A few days after I talked with Eric, seven automakers announced they’ll collaborate to deploy 30,000 fast chargers around North America. These machines can recharge a drained EV in 30 minutes or less—while owners eat lunch or shop.
Who’s in charge of these chargers?
Grid safety
The electricity consumed by a business, household, appliance or electronic device is called power. Power is measured in kilowatt hours (kWh): the rate of flow times the amount of electricity consumed per hour.
A PE who evaluates substations before they go live explained to me that to deliver power safely, a utility determines the maximum kWh that a household requires; then, it provides correctly-sized wires and transformers. Designers always factor for future growth. Still, when an older house—let alone a dozen on one block—adds a major electrical load like an EV charger, the grid’s capacity probably needs to increase. The utility should recalculate the size of wires and transformers needed to manage and transmit power.
“Do they do this?” I asked.
“Probably not,” he said.
An increasingly complex grid
This PE added that rooftop solar systems contribute to the grid’s complexity. “Rooftop solar,” he explained, “moves power from the customer back to the transformer, back to the grid.”
The grid’s distribution system was not designed for this.
“Then,” he continued, “because solar power is a customer-controlled energy source, the utility no longer controls its power supply. Before homeowners covered their rooftops with solar panels, utilities should have studied how to make non-firm energy benefit firm energy. They should have studied the utility’s production pattern against the production pattern of customer-owned systems. They should have calculated the utility’s hourly cost of voltage control service, not just the cost of fuel.”
But they did not.
There’s more: Rooftop solar systems generate power mostly from 11am to 3pm on sunny days. But the greatest demand for power starts around 5pm, when people arrive home, turn on air conditioners, TVs, stoves—and EV chargers.
Peak demand for electricity and solar power generation do not match up. Since they provide intermittent power, solar (and wind) systems depend on fossil fuels or batteries for backup.
Yet other problems
I understand that manufacturing, operating and discarding gas-powered internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles ravage ecosystems.
But EVs are not clean, sustainable or zero-emitting, either. Not if we look past their tailpipes.
EVs depend on mining many more ores than ICE vehicles require. Mining and smelting ravage wildlife habitats, waterways, air and indigenous communities.
To make cars sold in the U.S. profitable, their raw materials (copper, lithium, quartz, tin, etcetera) must come from the U.S. (Therefore, expect increased mining in the U.S.—like at Thacker Pass, Nevada—not just in other countries and the deep sea.)
Gerry McGovern (author of Top Tasks, researcher of online meetings’ ecological impacts) reports that Ireland has turned its rural land into a green sacrifice zone and become one of the most mining-and-waste-friendly countries in the world.
Garbage
Different batteries have different constructs and chemistry. Tesla batteries are held together by “an almost indestructible polyurethane cement.” Nissan’s Leaf battery can take two hours to dismantle. Recycling batteries can release toxins and pose fire hazards. By 2035, we’ll have 150 million unusable, toxic EV batteries. If you own an EV, what will you do with your used battery—and its tires, computers and body?
Eric Lundgren considers recycling a last resort. “Still,” he thinks, “we should put old EV batteries in salt water, shred them to a black mass, extract the tin, cobalt, copper, manganese—and make new batteries.” While we don’t yet have enough waste to make this economically viable, soon enough, we will.
Increasing geopolitical conflicts
The International Energy Agency expects demand for lithium to grow 40-fold by 2030. Graphite, cobalt and nickel mining will grow 20-25 times. In mineral-rich Afghanistan, the eightfold rise in lithium’s market price around the time of the Taliban’s 2021 takeover has enticed Chinese mining entrepreneurs to partner with Taliban leaders.
For now, China makes about 79% of all lithium batteries.
EV batteries pose fire hazards
Because of their fire hazards, some companies will not ship EVs.
Firefighters typically extinguish a gas-powered vehicle fire with 300 gallons (113 liters) of water. One fire truck holds 500 gallons (1893 liters). Extinguishing an EV fire uses 20,000 – 30,000 gallons (76,000 – 113,562 liters) of water. Tesla advises firefighters to watch it for 24 hours, since, like trick candles, EV batteries can re-ignite.
After several General Motors’ Bolts caught fire in 2021, GM told EV owners to park vehicles outdoors immediately after charging and not to charge them overnight.
Electric bikes’ exploding batteries also cause deadly fires.
What we need now
An engineer once told me that since most energy is guzzled and most waste is emitted during manufacturing, keeping an old, gas-guzzling car in good repair harms ecosystems much less than buying a new one.
Meanwhile, at least two of my neighbors (who believed that EVs help, ecologically) have their own chargers. Who evaluated and monitors these chargers? To prevent our neighborhood’s transformers from dying quickly and/or exploding, should EV owners hire a PE to coordinate charging times? Should owners and non-owners confer with the utility about upgrading wiring and transformers? Who will pay for the upgrades?
[…]
Via https://katiesinger.substack.com/p/ev-chargers
China’s Rare Earths Export Curbs May Sink US Microchip Manufacturing
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 01.08.2023Chinese export controls on germanium and gallium have stepped into effect amid fears that this will mean more expensive microchips, solar panels, cars, and even weapons. More significantly, the restrictions threaten to sink the Biden administration’s ambitious domestic microchip manufacturing goals, says China-US trade expert Thomas Pauken II.
China’s rare earths restrictions officially stepped into force on Tuesday, with the measures, announced last month after Beijing said it needed to protect its “national security and interests,” expected to cause a sharp jump in the cost of an array of advanced manufactured goods, particularly electronics.
The export controls, which will require companies seeking to export the pair of rare earth metals to apply for licenses, come in retaliation to a long list of US hostile measures, including restrictions on the import of Chinese high-tech goods.
“This is just the beginning,” former Chinese Vice Commerce Minister Wei Jianguo said last month, warning that “China’s tool box has many more types of measures available” should Washington try to retaliate to the rare earths semi-ban.
China produces upwards of 80 percent of the world’s gallium, and 60 percent of its germanium, with experts predicting that it could take “generations” for the US to replace lost Chinese capacity.
The rare earths restrictions show that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s trip to Beijing last month to try to smooth over tensions clearly failed to get China to alter its position, with the Asian nation taking a harder line in retaliation to Washington’s tech and trade war, and attempts to box in Beijing in East Asia, earlier this year, starting by sanctioning US semiconductor giant Micron Technology in May.
Gallium and germanium are used in the manufacture of complex semiconductors, including chips with military applications, but also ordinary transistors, diodes, and other electronic components, for use in everything from smartphones and laptops to solar panels, vehicles, and medical equipment.
Move Could Sink Biden’s Semiconductor Scheme
“Obviously, these consequences are going to be devastating to US efforts to promote their manufacturing industry, to create these factories where they’re reshoring back home,” Thomas Pauken II, a veteran consultant and commentator on Asia-Pacific affairs, told Sputnik, referring to the $50+ billion push announced by the Biden administration last year to restore the US’ domestic electronics component manufacturing capabilities. “The thing is, you need these ingredients that are necessary for the chips and the semiconductors,” he said.
“So now I’m hearing that TSMC,” the Taiwan-based semiconductor giant, “is now having a rethink about doing their fab or semiconductor foundry that they were thinking about opening in Arizona. Also, there’s another story about Intel. They were going to open up this major chip manufacturing plant in Ohio, and now suddenly they’re saying, ‘Well, maybe we won’t open up this factory in Ohio because we lost all our Chinese customers. And because of these export controls we don’t have the ability to create all these chips,’” Pauken said.
US Caught Unprepared
Pauken believes the US and its allies may not have expected Beijing to go through with its rare earths export restriction threats, judging by the limited reporting on the matter, apart from specialized Washington-based think tanks warning about the “devastating impact” such export controls could have on the US, Europe, Japan, “and much of the world.”
“I think the real story is that the West maybe thought China was bluffing. Maybe they thought that China wasn’t being serious about these export controls. And now that they are starting to go into effect, they are realizing how destructive they can be. The fact of the matter is that the US has not done proper preparations to deal with the counter-sanctions or the counter-attacks led by China…They just thought that if they made all these announcements that they were going after China and all these other countries were following them, then somehow, China was going to wimp out, look scared, and then change their mind under the pressure. But in reality, what China has learned is that you cannot back down under peer pressure coming from Washington,” the observer said.
Pauken expects the export restrictions to put a “big hurt” on the global economy, but not so much on Beijing, which could even receive a boost to its domestic manufacturing industry as rare earths that once went to other countries will stay in China.
The expert stressed that if Washington were clever, it would “rethink” its China policy, and recognize that the get-tough approach to Beijing hasn’t been working, and won’t work, and has instead “been a disaster for the US economy.” Unfortunately, he added, “it doesn’t seem like the US has learned any lessons… so it seems as if they will just continue on with their anti-China legislation.”
“So basically it’s a case of if you’re tough to China, China will fight back just as tough. If you’re nice to China, then China will be nice. Right now, Europe decided they want to support the US and want to push back against China. So, of course, China is not only going after the US, but they’re also hitting Europe,” the observer said.
Options Limited
The escalating China-US tensions over rare earths has prompted US officials to begin a global search for alternatives, including Mongolia, a landlocked northeast Asian nation estimated to contain nearly 17 percent of global rare earths deposits.
“Mongolia is facing a generational opportunity. And that generational opportunity is a need for us to find critical minerals and rare earths in order to achieve our clean energy goals,” Under Secretary of State Jose Fernandez, who traveled to Mongolia in late June, recently told US media.
But it’s not as simple as investing in Mongolian rare earths production and extracting resources, Pauken said, pointing to the country’s landlocked status, and US efforts to irritate both of Mongolia’s neighbors, Russia and China.
“Obviously, you can’t go through Russia,” he said, citing anti-Russian sanctions. “So then they would have to go through China. And obviously, if Europe and the US decide to continue putting pressure on China, then they’re going to make it more difficult for the Mongolian miners to transport their products to the shipping ports,” the observer summed up.
Unwitting Coup: Was Covid Response a Coup by Western Intelligence
Michael P Senger
From an early date, commentators have noted that the response to COVID had all the look and feel of a coup attempt. The masks, the slogans, the symbols, the lies, the sudden inversion of long-cherished norms and values, the mindless acceptance of information from nefarious sources like the World Health Organization and China. Something was seriously off, and it all seemed so obvious.
Thus, one overarching question always lingered over the response to COVID. How were officials able to implement such destructive, totalitarian policies across the western world without intelligence authorities stepping in to stop them?
A detached review of the evidence leads to a chilling answer—though in hindsight, perhaps the only one that was ever really possible. Quite simply, the reason the western intelligence community never stepped in to stop this illiberalism is that virtually all the most illiberal aspects of the response to COVID lead directly back to the western intelligence community itself.
Reviewing the EvidenceThe western intelligence community was behind the birth of “social distancing” as public health policy via Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher—operatives with deep ties to the highest levels of the intelligence and biosecurity communities—through their work on biodefense policy during the Bush administration. In what may be the mother of all COVID coverups, Hatchett and Mecher’s story that “social distancing” was based on a 14-year-old’s science project, as told through the New York Times and celebrity author Michael Lewis, appears to be nothing but an elaborate cover story for the fact that the concept was lifted directly from China’s longstanding policy of “lockdown” during SARS in 2003.
The intelligence community either planned or was in attendance at nearly all the pandemic simulations that began being held on a semi-annual basis beginning with Dark Winter in 2001. Current Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines was personally present and sat directly beside China’s CDC Director at the Event 201 simulation of a coronavirus pandemic which took place just weeks before COVID was revealed.
Michael Callahan, the federal government’s chief virus intelligence expert, told National Geographic that he began tracking the novel coronavirus in November 2019, and he was the US government’s only confirmed contact in Wuhan during the initial lockdown in January 2020. Upon returning from Wuhan, Callahan’s testimony was key to throwing the federal government into a state of emergency and the widespread adoption of mechanical ventilators which proved to be deadly. The federal government’s first impressions of COVID thus came from the western intelligence community via Callahan.
Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger, one of America’s highest-ranking intelligence officials in 2020, arguably played the most important role of any individual in the initial months of the response to COVID, unilaterally ratcheting up alarm about COVID in the White House beginning in January 2020 and advocating mask mandates, quarantines, and shutdowns all based on his own sources in China, while breaching protocol on several occasions. Pottinger was also behind the appointment of White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx, and he selected Birx for this role as a “public health security advisor” as early as November 2019, the same time that Callahan began tracking the new coronavirus. Having been installed in the White House, Birx then went on to be the chief force orchestrating lockdowns across the United States.
The origin of the online videos of Wuhan residents falling to their deaths which went viral all over the world in early 2020 is disputed. The videos were carefully edited, suggesting a sophisticated state-sponsored disinformation campaign, and they directly contradicted the reality of what we now know was taking place in China at the time, suggesting the Chinese Communist Party either created or at least approved of them. However, the videos were generally released through Chinese dissident groups that claimed to be hawkish toward the CCP and thus also had the approval of the western intelligence community. While some of these were most likely CCP controlled opposition groups, regardless, the western intelligence community green-lit the dissemination of these videos.
The propaganda story about Li Wenliang, the eye doctor who was supposedly punished for warning his friends about an incidence of pneumonia in Wuhan in December 2019, appears to have in fact been invented by the venerated CCP propaganda outlet Beijing Youth Daily weeks after the events supposedly occurred. However, just days after being invented by the CCP’s propaganda machine, this absurd tale about Li Wenliang was featured in many of the western world’s most elite media outlets, including the New York Times, BBC, Foreign Policy, the Financial Times, and countless others, and it continues to be touted as true in elite policy circles to this day. This story, too, thus had the approval of the western intelligence community.
Prior to the lockdown of Lombardy, Italy, in February 2020, virtually no one in the world was publicly advocating or hoping that China’s lockdowns would come to be adopted as global policy. Yet in his book, Italy’s health minister Roberto Speranza recalls that he was well aware the concept of lockdown came from China and that the decision to adopt this policy in Lombardy was made based on information from Stefano Merler. A look at Merler’s work reveals that he spent 2020 stamping information from China as “science,” effectively running a propaganda laundering operation on behalf of the CCP. Yet Merler had also been praised by Bill Gates and was part of the western biodefense network. In 2013, Merler had authored Containing the accidental laboratory escape of potential pandemic influenza viruses; it appears the western biosecurity community deputized Merler for just this purpose in 2020. This decision for Italy to copy China’s lockdown policy thus appears to have been condoned by the western intelligence community as well.
Days after the lockdown of Lombardy, the WHO released a report gushing about China’s lockdown measures, telling the world, “China’s uncompromising and rigorous use of nonpharmaceutical measures to contain transmission of the COVID-19 virus in multiple settings provides vital lessons for the global response.” As Assistant Director General Bruce Aylward reported, “What China has demonstrated is, you have to do this.” Apparently the western intelligence community either failed to notice or tacitly approved of this bizarre act of sycophancy to the CCP as well, rubber stamping China’s lockdowns into global policy.
In March 2020, hundreds of thousands of social media bots began touting China’s lockdown policy on Twitter using nearly identical language. Given these bots heaped praise on China while denigrating every other country in the world, including the United States, it’s long been quite clear that this was a CCP disinformation campaign. That said, these bots were permitted to perform their function and, incredibly, their pro-lockdown posts were not deleted from Twitter until well into 2021. Even as far back as 2014, millions of bot posts touted “lockdown”—specifically using the Chinese term instead of the western term of “social distancing”—in response to Ebola in Sierra Leone, and those bot posts remain intact to this day. These massive disinformation campaigns were allowed to take place and the posts were able to stay up for years despite social media being tightly monitored by the western intelligence community throughout this period.
As soon as lockdowns began, dissenting opinions were censored, with one prominent example being the censorship of Aaron Ginn for his original anti-lockdown article in March 2020. Worse yet, Twitter under its prior management gave prestigious “blue checks” to ridiculous users like nutritionist Eric Feigl-Ding, who sowed COVID hysteria on an almost daily basis from the earliest possible date. Even top scientists on the political left who generally supported lockdowns were so troubled by Ding as to jointly call him out as a charlatan. Yet astonishingly, Twitter ignored these bipartisan calls to rein Ding in and instead featured him prominently in its exclusive “COVID-19 experts” section. In light of revelations in the Twitter Files and Missouri v. Biden, we now know that the western intelligence community was steering these decisions on COVID by major social media platforms.
When the response to COVID began, the public health establishment, in accordance with its longstanding guidance, did not initially recommend masks. Weeks later, this guidance abruptly changed, and masks were mandated across the western world. Both Pottinger and Birx pushed for masks inside the White House based on their own information and experience from China. Simultaneously, Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy Howard launched a bewilderingly-successful campaign to reverse the CDC’s longstanding mask guidance and push for mask mandates all across America—also based on information from China. The western intelligence community, through Pottinger and Birx, and perhaps through Tufekci and Howard, thus instigated this shift in masking guidance.
The intelligence community was also heavily involved in the development and push for COVID vaccines, with Michael Callahan and others playing leading roles in “Operation Warp Speed.”
The western intelligence community may also be behind some of the most prominent controlled opposition to the official response to COVID. Nearly every leading intelligence official in 2020 has endorsed the theory that COVID came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and Matt Pottinger was instrumental in the initial push for that theory. One of the most prominent public advocates of the “lab leak theory,” Jamie Metzl, is a former member of the White House National Security Council. Some of the other most prominent public advocates of the lab leak theory have either now or in the past been directly employed by Sandia National Laboratories; Sandia National Laboratories was instrumental in the birth of “social distancing” as public health policy during the Bush administration.
Most importantly, the western intelligence community holds the keys to any serious investigation into any of these events. All over the world, across professions, citizens have been depending on the idea that if there was anything corrupt or rotten about the response to COVID, the western intelligence community would step in. Of course, that won’t happen, because as the above record makes clear, they’re the ones who planned it.
[…]
It explains why some leaders like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson who weren’t initially keen on lockdowns have always seemed so confused; it seems the information they were being fed by the intelligence community on COVID may have been deliberately misleading.
[…]
Via https://www.michaelpsenger.com/p/the-unwitting-coup-was-the-response
The Rise of India’s Maratha Empire
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Episode 22 The Mughals and Marathas
A History of India
Michael Fisher (2016)
Alamgir, son of Shah Jahan and also known as Aurangzeb, was the sixth emperor of the Mughal Empire, ruling from July 1658 until his death in 1707. Under the skilled leadership of Alamgir’s famous general Shivaji, the Mughal empire eventually spanned most of the Indian subcontinent.
Alamgir was an orthodox Sunni Muslim, who regarded hunting, music, painting and poetry as frivolous. He also restored restraints on Hinduism and levied a tax on Hindu festivals. He only destroyed the temples of rebellious provinces and helped fund temples in regions that remained loyal to his regime.
In addition to fighting more or less continuous guerilla warfare in various Hindu regions, he also struggled to put down a Sikh* rebellion in the Punjab. The Sikhs eventually established their own independent state in the early 18th century.
Alamgir spent the last 26 years of his life fighting the Marathas in Deccan, while struggling with continuous raids by the British and Portuguese navy, as well as pirates, on his western coast. As the emperor had no navy, he was virtually helpless to prevent them raiding his merchant ships and coastal cities.
The Marathas started as independent Hindu farmers who attracted many followers after sacking the prosperous city of Sarat (in Gujarat). Alamgir’s campaigns against them were largely unsuccessful. Towards the end of his life, the empire’s growing indebtedness (owing to continual war) led to increasing political fragmentation. When he couldn’t pay his generals, they became warlords and began keeping tax revenues for themselves.
In 1674 Maratha leader Chhatrapati Maharaj carved out his own independent kingdom from sultanate of Bijapur and proclaimed himself emperor of the Maratha Empire. Renaming himself Shivaji, he replaced Persian with Barati as the official language. By the time of his death in 1680, he ruled over 50,000 square miles, enabling the Marathas to remain the predominant rulers in Deccan.
The Maratha generals eventually became the predominant ruling force in the Delhi region, as well. As such, they engaged in three major wars against the British (1775-1782, 1803-1805 and 1817-1818). The British victory in the final war ended the Marathas’ dream of controlling all of India.
* Sikhism, drawing on both Hindu traditions and Islamic monotheism, arose as a separate religion in the 16th century
Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.
https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/366254/366215
August 1, 2023
Wind Energy’s Dirty Secret: Deforestation of the Amazon and Devastation of Indigenous Communities
Booming demand for balsa wood, used to make turbine blades for wind energy, is ravaging Amazon forests and indigenous communities — in the name of “green power.”
By Joseph Mercola, DO, FACNStory at a glance:
The rapid expansion of wind energy has led to increasing demand for windmills and balsa wood to build them.The tropical tree is facing exploitation and being cleared from Amazon forests, causing potentially more environmental problems than the windmills it creates can solve.Wind turbine blades can be up to 328 feet (100 meters) long; each blade requires 150 cubic meters of balsa wood, which is several tons.China is a major consumer of balsa wood, purchasing 85% of Ecuador’s exports in 2020.The Open Democracy video, “A Green Paradox,” documents how the rush for balsa wood to create “green” wind energy has destroyed local indigenous communities and decimated ecosystems.Balsa, a tree that’s native to South America, is a coveted resource. Growing up to 98 feet (30 meters) and ready for harvesting in just three to four years from planting, balsa holds the promise for high profits for those who grow them.
Adding to its value, balsa wood is flexible and light yet very strong, making it an ideal material for manufacturing bridges, skis, boats and wind turbine propellers.
In an ironic tragedy, however, the rapid expansion of wind energy has led to increasing demand for windmills and balsa wood to build them.
Now, the tropical tree is facing exploitation and being cleared from Amazon forests, causing potentially more environmental problems than the windmills it creates can solve.
Rush for balsa wood causes devastating deforestation
Wind turbine blades can be up to 328 feet (100 meters) long. Each blade requires 150 cubic meters of balsa wood, which is several tons.
With demand on the rise from Europe and China, “balsa fever” set in, particularly in Ecuador, the No. 1 exporter of balsa wood, which produces 75% of the global market.
Prices of balsa wood have also skyrocketed, rising 30% from 2015 to 2019, when balsa wood worth $219 million was exported from Ecuador.
China is a major consumer of balsa wood, purchasing 85% of Ecuador’s exports in 2020.
In the Open Democracy video above, you can see how the rush for balsa wood to create “green” wind energy has destroyed local indigenous communities and decimated ecosystems.
In June, the Achuar Nationality of Ecuador declared that it would not allow deforestation to obtain balsa wood in its territory.
In a social media post, they wrote, “Don’t make any investment, even if you cut down balsa you won’t be able to extract it, it won’t be sold.”
However, indigenous leaders bowed to pressure in some communities nonetheless, allowing loggers to retrieve the wood.
According to Open Democracy:
“It’s a decision that has caused pain, rejection and division among families and has had consequences for the ecosystem of the islands and for the river itself. The balseros bring alcohol, drugs and prostitution, and pollute the extraction sites with plastics, cans, machinery, gasoline and oil spills.
“They abandon used chains from their chainsaws. They eat the turtles and chase away the parrots, toucans and other birds that feed on the flowers of the balsa trees. The breakdown of ecosystems by illegal deforestation has profound impacts on the balance of local flora and fauna, which will never recover.”
The demand for balsa to construct more wind turbines has even led to a black market, in which the wood is being harvested without appropriate permits, leading to further environmental damage.
According to a report from the Universidad de Navarra:
“China requires so much balsa wood because it is implementing a plan for the construction of wind turbines in order to increase its own production of clean energy and rely less on coal, and with the goal also to position itself globally in the sector, as it has done with photovoltaic panels.
“In order to achieve the goals of the plan, the Chinese government has subsidized a large number of Chinese producers for the purchase of tons of balsa wood, which has boosted demand so much that it has also led to farmers in Ecuador producing it illegally, without official permits, and generating a black market.
“This black market is causing serious environmental problems, such as contributing to the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest to plant balsa and exploit it, so that communities living in the Amazon have been severely affected by the booming demand for such timber.”
Further, China declared in December 2020 that it intended to increase its use of wind and solar power by fivefold by 2030.
Wind turbines pose a ‘green paradox’
One of the cornerstones of the Green New Deal is the end of U.S. fossil fuel consumption in less than a decade.
Efforts are underway to install wind turbines on every U.S. coastline in order to generate enough power to run close to 10 million homes.
But the call for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by using “clean” energy sources — like wind, solar and geothermal avenues — to meet 100% of U.S. power needs ignores the pitfalls of these “green” alternatives.
One study, for instance, found that meeting U.S. electricity demand using wind would require turbines to cover 12% of the continental U.S.
The Manhattan Institute reported:
“The land area of the continental United States is about 2.9 million square miles (or 7.6 million square kilometers). Twelve percent of that would be about 350,000 square miles (or 912,000 square kilometers). Therefore, merely meeting America’s current electricity needs with wind would require an area more than twice the size of California, which covers about 164,000 square miles (424,000 square kilometers).”
This isn’t even taking into account the ecosystems and local communities being destroyed by deforestation for balsa wood. It’s a “green paradox” of sorts, “solving” one environmental dilemma only to create another.
According to Open Democracy:
“Wind energy has already become a key aspect of global strategy and is set for further expansion in the coming years. But there are downsides to this boom. The deforestation pressure on balsa has been brutal for the Amazonian Indigenous people of Ecuador, while the pressure on regions in Europe to host new wind farms brings with it conflict.
“This has created a green paradox. We need to decarbonize the global economy as soon as possible, and wind energy is a central part of that equation. However, this form of renewable energy will not be ethical or sustainable until every component involved is guaranteed not to cause further harm to the planet and its people.”
How the green pact could destroy Amazonian communities
The Green New Deal (Green Agenda), “Build Back Better,” the Fourth Industrial Revolution (the transhumanist movement) and The Great Reset, officially introduced by World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab and then-Prince Charles in June 2020 — all exist to further and facilitate the implementation of Agenda 21.
Agenda 21 (Agenda for the 21st Century) is the inventory and control plan for all land, water, minerals, plants, animals, construction, means of production, food, energy, information, education and all human beings in the world.
The European Green Deal is more of the same — introduced by the European Commission in December 2019 to, in part, replace fossil fuels with “cleaner” energy sources.
But as Open Democracy noted, “As a result of the 2019 pact, the financial outlook for renewables, including wind power, boosted the number of wind farm construction projects in Europe, and added to China’s wind rush.”
[…]
Forests destroyed, birds killed — how green is wind energy?
Wind energy has become a poster child for the Green New Deal and its move toward green, sustainable energy. But the fact remains that virtually all mass-scale methods — whether it be for food, energy, or otherwise — have significant downsides, wind energy included.
Logging Amazon rainforests to create massive wind turbine propellers is the opposite of sustainable. Meanwhile, birds and bats — many species of which are already endangered — are suffering. It’s estimated that 600,000 to 949,000 bats, and up to 679,000 birds, are killed annually by wind turbines in the U.S.
But the number of wind turbines has increased significantly since these estimates were calculated, which means many more are probably affected. Areas, where wind farms are built, are also in peril, as the giant structures have a significant socio-economic impact.
[…]
Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/amazon-deforestation-wind-energy-cola/
Public Benefit or Big Profits for Big Telecom? Here’s What’s Really Driving the 5G Rollout
Proponents of 5G say the technology will address the “digital divide” by increasing online services to the underserved — but critics say 5G is a marketing move the telecommunications industry is using to put their equipment up everywhere and strip away regulatory oversight.
Telecom companies promote 5G, the “next generation wireless network technology,” as being faster and able to handle more connected devices than the 4G LTE network. And they assure consumers the result will be increased access for underserved communities that lack reliable internet connectivity.But critics — including Theodora Scarato, executive director of the nonprofit research and education group Environmental Health Trust — said the 5G rollout is more about corporate greed than it is about helping people access fast and reliable internet.
5G uses higher frequencies on the electromagnetic radiation (EMR) spectrum than prior wireless technologies and, according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), can operate in these radiofrequency (RF) bands: low-band (less than 1 GHz), mid-band (1 to 6 GHz), high-band (24 to 95 GHz) and unlicensed bands (5.9, 6 GHz and above 95 GHz).
Scarato told The Defender that 5G is a marketing term used to promote promises about “bridging the digital divide” when what’s really being marketed is the deregulation of the wireless industry.
“I see it as a corporate land grab. That’s what it is,” she said.
The wireless industry creates and uses the hype around 5G to install their equipment faster and more cheaply, Scarato said. They do this by convincing public officials that communities need this technology and that the established public review processes are too slow and must be streamlined, to allow companies to deliver the technology rapidly and with little oversight.
5G push prioritizes profits over people
What this means for the wireless industry is that they are able to expand their infrastructure without having “to deal with all the people,” Scarato said.
It’s people — from the perspective of the wireless industry, she said — that are the “roadblocks to getting your equipment up because people don’t like it. It’s ugly. [They worry about] the radiation, the fire risk. All of these reasons why people want a more responsible placement for this equipment can be pushed aside when you just change the rules.”
Kim Mack Rosenberg, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) acting general counsel, said, “It is critical that we dig below the surface to try to understand the motivation of corporations in expanding 5G networks.”
Rosenberg told The Defender:
“While companies tout that 5G allows for greater connectivity, more reliability and helps to close the digital divide, the bottom line is, in many respects, the actual bottom line for telecom companies and related industries.
“5G creates the potential for extraordinary profits, hence the push for more and more deregulation. However, deregulation carries with it significant risks.”
Scarato pointed out that over half the states in the U.S. have legislation in place that allows them to fast-track approval of 5G and small cell technology.
“Policies at every level of government, local, state, and federal are loosening — fast-tracking — and allowing corporations to put their equipment up really close to where we live, work and play,” she said, adding that public officials put forward such legislation by reasoning that, “Well, we have to have this new technology, so we have to make it easier for companies.”
CHD, joined by a coalition of community and environmental groups — including Fiber First LA — that is advocating for safe technology in March sued Los Angeles County in California for adopting amendments that allowed the fast-tracked proliferation of wireless infrastructure without due process and without residents’ right to appeal.
Brenda Martinez, Los Angeles County resident and activist with Fiber First LA, said that for years she has witnessed public officials, such as the county board members, “use lower income community’s needs to push the agenda of Big Telecom.”
Martinez — a fellow with CHD’s EMR program — told The Defender that before the COVID-19 pandemic, the telecommunication companies offered only fiber optic (wired) connection, which is faster than wireless internet, to more affluent areas of LA.
“Lower-income communities were stuck with wireless — which is more profitable to the telecom industry and more expensive for the people,” she said.
During the pandemic, lower-income communities experienced “very expensive internet fees, scams from telecom and faulty hot spots … despite the fact that we had thousands of new antennas and cell towers popping up,” Martinez said. “I hope everyone can see now that those bills being pushed so hard are not for the benefit of their constituents.”
The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce in May advanced seven bills that lawmakers said are intended to streamline and speed up the deployment of wireless infrastructure, including 5G, across the country.
Odette Wilkens, a technology attorney for more than 20 years, said the deployment of wireless infrastructure such as 5G — rather than fiber optics, which she claims is a safer, superior technology — is likely to exacerbate, not solve, the digital divide and will serve the interests of the wireless industry, not the interests of U.S. citizens.
Wilkens, who also is president and general counsel for Wired Broadband Inc., a nonprofit that advocates for hard-wired high-speed internet, told The Defender:
“The phrase ‘reducing regulatory barriers’ is being used as a euphemism to erect barriers against local government and residents, to take away their right to hearings and their right to be heard.
“In fact, regulations are designed to protect local government power and residents’ health, safety and welfare, and to preserve residents’ right to due process.”
5G rollout ‘outrageous’ for ignoring harms
The infrastructure being installed as part of the 5G rollout not only carries 5G frequencies but may also include 2G, 3G and 4G, Scarato noted. “So when you get a 5G small cell in front of your house, it might be called that — but until you actually look at the technical specs, it could be a variety [of frequencies],” she said.
Small cells are individual wireless transmitters distributed roughly every 100-450 meters that can be mounted on utility poles or other structures, such as a fence. Before 5G, most wireless networks were built using a system of macro transmitters in the form of cellular towers. The 5G network uses both cellular towers and small cells.
Rosenberg said deregulation not only carries the general inherent risk of decreased oversight, but it also opens the door for other risks, too.
“There are serious human health concerns with 5G, safety concerns regarding animals and the environment, and privacy and cybersecurity risks, among others,” Rosenberg said. “As is the case with many industries, we are wise to not accept at face value that expansion of 5G networks and access to these networks is good for us.”
Dr. David Carpenter, environmental health sciences professor at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY), said it is “outrageous” that the U.S. government is allowing the rollout of 5G without any research to document that it is not harmful.
Carpenter — who received his doctor of medicine degree from Harvard Medical School and now directs the University at Albany’s Institute for Health and the Environment — told The Defender, “The 5G rollout is of benefit to industry, not to the public, and is causing major harm to everyone.”
He added:
“It is known that 5G doesn’t travel so far and is easily blocked by rain, leaves and other physical barriers, so the telecommunication companies are placing these mini cell towers in urban areas in front of every sixth to eighth house.”
According to industry experts interviewed by the Environmental Health Trust, 5G antenna radiation is emitted as a concentrated rather than a diffused beam, with output power 20 to 35 times more than 4G, Scarato told The Defender.
Carpenter said 5G is being rolled out without any input or approval from the public.
Consensus is building on 5G dangers
Meanwhile, at least 430 scientists and doctors have signed the “5G Appeal” which calls for an immediate ban on 5G because it “will substantially increase exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF), that has been proven to be harmful for humans and the environment.”
Additionally, thousands of medical doctors have called for an “immediate moratorium on 5G, wireless smart metering and any other new RF emissions,” as well as the “establishment of public safety limits to be biologically protective against adverse health effects.”
A July 2021 report, “Health impact of 5G,” requested by the European Parliament concluded that the commonly used frequencies of 450 to 6,000 MHz are probably carcinogenic for humans and clearly affect male fertility with possible adverse effects on the development of embryos, fetuses and newborns, Scarato pointed out.
Carpenter said, “It is still uncertain how dangerous 5G by itself is since the higher frequency EMFs are more easily blocked than those from 3 and 4G, which we know can penetrate the brain and the body, causing cancer, cognitive dysfunction and the syndrome of electromagnetic hypersensitivity.”
[…]
Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/5g-rollout-harm-regulation-profit/
Infant Vaccines Linked to Increase in All-Cause Mortality
By Angelo DePalma, Ph.D. Developed nations requiring the most neonatal vaccine doses tend to have the worst childhood mortality rates, according to a peer-reviewed study published July 20 in Cureus Journal of Medical Science.
“Health authorities emphasize that vaccines save lives,” lead author Neil Miller told The Defender. “Yet our data suggests that when developed nations require two versus zero neonatal vaccine doses, or many versus fewer vaccines during infancy, there may be unintended consequences that increase all-cause mortality.”
Miller, director of the Institute of Medical and Scientific Inquiry in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has been researching this topic since the early 2000s. In a 2011 paper with the same co-author — Gary S. Goldman, Ph.D., an independent computer scientist — they showed that developed countries requiring the most vaccine doses for infants had the least favorable infant mortality rates.
In 2021, they replicated those results using updated data, and earlier this year, they responded to critics of their findings.
In their latest study, Miller and Goldman expanded the scope of their earlier analyses to consider the effects of two vaccines — hepatitis B and tuberculosis — both typically given soon after birth.
The study calculated the effect of these shots on mortality rates for neonates (up to 28 days post-birth), infants (up to 1 year old), and children under 5. Analyses were all based on separate data from 2019 and 2021.
Mortality data and vaccine schedules were collected from UNICEF, the World Health Organization and national governments.
Nations were categorized by the number of neonatal vaccine doses (zero, one or two) mandated for newborns to determine if statistically significant differences existed in mortality rates for the three age groups.
After applying standard statistical analyses to the data, the study found a strong association between vaccinations and rates of neonatal, infant and under-5 mortality for both years studied.
“Our findings would be considered moderate correlations which are statistically significant,” Miller said. The correlations are positive, meaning that the more vaccine doses given, the higher the mortality.
“In these circumstances health authorities expect to see negative correlations, that is, a decline in mortality with more vaccine doses. So, any statistically significant positive correlation is a genuine concern,” Miller said.
Miller calculated a highly significant difference of 1.28 deaths per 1,000 live births in the mean infant mortality rates between nations not giving their neonates any vaccine doses, and those requiring vaccination against both hepatitis B and tuberculosis.
For each reduction of six vaccine doses administered during infancy, the infant mortality rate improved by approximately one death per 1,000 live births.
A hallmark of good science is the good-faith openness to test one’s conclusions, a practice Miller and Goldman followed here. To validate their conclusions, the researchers applied 18 different statistical analyses to the data. This is like using several different camera angles to confirm whether a tennis ball hit the line or was out.
Seventeen of 18 statistical treatments confirmed the original conclusion that the more vaccines given, the higher the infant and early childhood mortality rates.
Neonatal deaths and all-cause mortality
In most nations, more than half of all infant deaths (within the first year) occur during the neonatal period (the first 28 days of life), and about 75% of those deaths occur within one week after birth when hepatitis and tuberculosis vaccines are administered.
Deaths occurring during the neonatal period have a disproportionately high impact on the reporting of infant and under-5 mortality rates, but the longer after vaccination the deaths occur, the less likely physicians are to associate them with vaccines given right after birth.
“Hepatitis B and tuberculosis vaccines given shortly after birth, when the immune system is immature and the newborn’s weight is low, may increase vulnerability to serious adverse reactions and deaths that ultimately contribute to higher mortality rates moving forward,” Miller said.
Globally, the top causes of premature death in the under-5 population are premature birth complications, trauma during birth, pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria. These statistics are heavily skewed by developing countries, where hygiene, nutrition, medical care and record-keeping are not up to best-in-class standards.
In the U.S., accidents and homicides are the main causes of infant and early childhood mortality. The leading medical causes for death in infants and children under 5 are developmental and genetic conditions and the consequences of premature birth.
According to Miller:
“Premature birth and low birth weight are common causes of neonatal death, but since vaccines are administered within 24 hours of birth, when these factors are most relevant, it is possible that some of these deaths were precipitated by birth-dose vaccines.
“However, since cause-of-death classifications associated with infant vaccination do not exist, doctors and coroners are compelled to misclassify and conceal vaccine-related fatalities under alternate cause-of-death classifications.”
Relying on all-cause mortality instead of “vaccine-induced injury” — or some other subjective assessment of the cause of death — greatly reduces what is termed “diagnostic bias.”
While considerable uncertainty may exist regarding why someone died, the death itself is not in question.
Miller discussed some of these potentially confounding factors in an earlier paper on vaccines and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), published in 2021 in Toxicology Reports. That study identified SIDS and “suffocation in bed” as common misclassifications: of all reported SIDS cases post-vaccination, 75% occurred within 7 days after the shots.
What does it all mean?
Although using all-cause mortality data reduces many sources of bias, it considers only inputs and outputs, in this case, vaccine doses and death. It ignores everything that happens before the dose and between the shots and death.
This means some unknown factor may be at work causing vaccinated children to expire.
But the positive correlation between vaccine doses and mortality is most easily explained by the conclusion that the number of lives saved by preventing deadly infections is fewer than the lives lost from increased susceptibility to other serious health threats.
Miller’s study also found that vaccines administered shortly after birth correlate more strongly to infant mortality than to neonatal mortality.
This suggests that the negative effects of early vaccinations may be delayed, perhaps by predisposing children to adverse reactions to shots given later, or to other health threats.
Studies have shown that vaccinated low-weight infants have an increased risk of developing life-threatening apnea — sudden, unexplained breathing cessation, especially during sleep. In an earlier investigation of 30 SIDS incidents, the authors found that apnea preceded death by an average of eight weeks.
“This might explain why vaccines administered during the neonatal period are more highly correlated with deaths that occur in the post-neonatal period,” Miller said.
Miller concluded his study with a plea to health authorities worldwide to reconsider mandatory childhood vaccination schedules:
“Vaccine policymakers have an obligation to determine the full impact of their current vaccination schedules on deaths from any cause. More safety research is needed on the number of childhood vaccines that are administered concurrently, cumulatively, and the sequence in which they are given, to confirm they are providing the intended effects on child survival.”
[…]
Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/infant-vaccines-all-cause-mortality/
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