The Political Risks Of Mandating EVs For Everyone

   EV are fantastic toys for rich people who have everything else and need to feel good "saving the planet" while staying put in their comfortable lifestyles. 

 For everybody else they are too expensive, have a limited use and range, cost a fortune to repair and belong to a dystopian future of smart cities where your every move is monitored. 

 How could we get so much so wrong so fast?   

Authored by Mark P. Mills via RealClear Wire,

This essay is based on the opening remarks delivered at a recent SOHO Forum Debate on electric vehicles.

If we could imagine a time machine bringing to New York City, an American citizen from the 19^th century, odds are the one thing that would seem the most amazing about our time would be the proliferation of the personal automobile. Big buildings, big cities, roads, nighttime illumination would all be imaginable, even if different looking and greater in scale. But the one thing radically different about modern daily life is the convenience and freedoms that come from a car.

Yes, that 19^th century citizen would probably be puzzled by people staring at glowing rectangles in their hands. In fact, the personal computer and the personal car are co-equal in their transformative impacts. MIT historian Leo Marx put it well when he wrote that: “To speak . . . of the ‘impact’ of ... the automobile upon society makes little more sense . . .than to speak of the impact of the bone structure on the human body.”

The centrality of the car in the social and economic structure of society is evidenced by how citizens have voted with their pocketbook. A car is the single most expensive product that 98% of consumers ever purchase. Over 90% of American households own or have access to a car. Average household spending on personal mobility is the second biggest expense after mortgage or rent.

And there’s nothing to the trope that the rising generations will abandon automobiles. A recent MIT analysis found Millennials exhibit no difference in “preferences for vehicle ownership” and in fact drive more miles per year than Boomers. As for Gen Zs, the share of cars bought by that cohort has increased five-fold in the past five years.

Finally, to finish framing why cars matter, let’s consider what used to be called telecommuting, Zooming and remote working, especially following the epic exodus caused by the destructive Lockdowns of 2020. Surveys show the lockdowns accelerated a trend that was already underway, one of a huge swath of Americans moving to suburbs or rural areas. It’s a trend that invariably leads to a greater need for cars and distances driven.

Now come politicians in a dozen states—and the EPA via a creative exercise of regulatory authority—with plans to to ban the right to purchase a car with an internal combustion engine, the kind of car that 98% of Americans own, and the kind of car that 98% of average-incomed Americans still buy. The goal of the bans is not, we’re told, to deny any citizen the ability to own or afford a useful car. Instead, as everyone knows, it is in service of the goal to cut carbon dioxide emissions by mandating the use of so-called zero-emission electric vehicles. EVs for all. The process of “transitioning” to EVs for everyone, everywhere, we’re also told will be painless because EVs are inevitably taking over the entire automobile market because they are—it is said—simpler, better, and easier to use, and “cleaner.”

And now the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) promises a gusher of money to induce that transition. Let’s stipulate the obvious – one doesn’t need subsidies and mandates to convince people and businesses to buy products that are inherently radically better and cheaper.

But, assuming that the inflationary legislation isn’t reversed by a future Congress, the IRA’s push for an energy transition will deploy $2 to $3 trillion, (when it’s fully ‘costed’ to include unfunded mandates and in-perpetuity subsidies), half of which will be for EVs and related infrastructures. You can buy a lot of obeisance with that kind of money. With so much money combined with political mandates and PR momentum, we should not be surprised to find no auto maker dare avoid genuflecting to the grand vision of an all-EV future. But money can’t buy a change in the laws of physics and underlying engineering realities.

The ostensible inevitability, the enthusiasm, the subsidies, and the mandates for EVs are anchored in three claims:

• That EVs will radically reduce global CO2 emissions.
• That EVs are cheaper and easier to fuel because, well, you can “just plug them in,” and
• That EVs will soon be cheaper than conventional cars because they are inherently simpler.

All three of these claims are simply wrong.

Start with the core claim that “they’re simpler.” Yes, conventional cars have complex thermo-mechanical systems. Engines and automatic transmissions are made from hundreds of components, although mated with a very simple fuel system, a tank holding a liquid with a one-moving-part pump. EVs, inversely, have a simple motor made from a few parts. However, the EV fuel tank is a complex electrochemical system made from hundreds, sometimes thousands of parts including a cooling system, sensors, safety systems, and a boatload of power electronics. EVs aren’t simpler, they’re just differently complex.

The illusion of EV simplicity has relevance to the strike underway by the United Autoworkers Union. EVs do not entail less labor to build, but instead shift where the labor takes place. The data show that, overall, while about 80 people are employed per 1,000 conventional cars produced, Tesla, the world’s biggest EV maker—for now—employs about 90 people per 1,000 cars produced per year.

Seem strange? Consider just the labor to make the two different drive trains. Again, take Tesla and specifically its trend-setting Nevada “gigafactory” where public data shows about 8 people are employed per 1,000 EV drivetrains produced – that’s electric motor plus battery. The combined employment at conventional engine and transmission factories is just 4 people per 1,000 drivetrains. That’s the inverse of the EV labor argument. And there’s more to the labor story, realities that have implications for emissions and costs.

Look upstream at the primary materials sent to the factories to fabricate the vehicles. Steel and iron make up about 85% of the weight of a conventional car. That upstream supply chain requires less than one person per 1,000 vehicles produced. Meanwhile, most of the weight of an EV is found in more exotic, so-called energy minerals, from copper and aluminum to, obviously, lithium, and also nickel, cobalt, manganese, and rare earths like neodymium. That upstream supply chain employs roughly 30 people for every 1,000 EVs. Of course, all that labor is elsewhere since the mines and refineries are not in America.

But before turning to cost and emissions implications of the upstream realities, we need to address the claim that EVs are simpler to fuel.

It’s obvious that the imagined all-EV future requires on-road fast-charging. First, the total labor to deliver the same energy to EV fueling stations is greater than it is for the gasoline infrastructure… something that will necessarily, ultimately impact costs. But setting that aside (and that’s a lot to set aside), the lie of the simpler-to-fuel is in the nature of electrical engineering for fast-charging batteries. The so-called superchargers offer, instead of overnight fueling, 80% charge in 30 to 40 minutes. This is only fast if it’s not compared to the 3 to 4 minutes it takes to fill up a gasoline tank. Long refueling times will translate into long lines at EV fueling stations as well as the need for five to 10 times more charging ports than fuel pumps.

That won’t be convenient, simple, or cheap. Each supercharger costs two to three times more than a gasoline pump. And, because superchargers necessarily operate at 100 times the power level of an overnight home-charger, that translates into staggering requirements for grid infrastructure upgrades. Today roadside fuel stations have the electric demand of a 7-Eleven; but convert those to EV fueling station and every one of them will have the electric demand of a steel mill – and highways will need thousands of them.

Enthusiasts are either unaware of or profoundly naïve about the time and cost challenges of all that. The naivety extends in particular regarding the materials demands for the quantities of copper needed for all the wires and transformers that will be required to replace cheap steel pipes and tanks. And the metal demands of the electric infrastructure will necessarily be piled on top of an unprecedented increase in demand for metals and minerals to fabricate the EVs.

While copper is the long pole in the tent, it is only one of the mineral challenges. The realities of costs and emissions for EVs is dominated by a simple fact: a typical EV battery weighs about 1,000 pounds to replace the fuel, and the tank weighing together under 100 pounds.  That half-ton battery is made from a wide range of minerals including copper, nickel, aluminum, graphite, cobalt, manganese, and of course, lithium. And to get the materials to fabricate that half-ton battery requires digging up and processing some 250 tons of the earth somewhere on the planet. Those numbers, it’s important understand, are roughly the same no matter what the specific battery chemical formulation is, whether it’s lithium nickel manganese, or the popularly cited lithium iron phosphate.

And yes, that EV tonnage should be compared to the combined tonnage of metals and the weight of the oil used to produce and fuel a conventional car. Even if you compare those numbers, over a 10-year lifespan of both kinds of cars the EV still entails a ten-fold greater extraction and handling of materials from the earth, and far, far more acreage of land disturbed and, unfortunately, often polluted.

The astronomical quantity of materials needed for EVs has led proponents to claim that there are, after all, enough minerals on the planet and there’s nothing to worry about. And anyway, they say, we can recycle to reduce the monumental materials requirements. But recycling will be irrelevant for a long time since manufacturers claim EV batteries will last a decade. That means there won’t be anything significant available to begin recycling until the early 2030s, long after the world has had to face up to the biggest expansion of global mining in history.

As for the underlying geological resources to supply the suite of energy minerals: Of course there are enough of all those on planet Earth, and even in America. That’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is that the data show that, overall, the mines operating and planned can’t supply even a small fraction of the 400% to 7000% increase in demand for minerals that will be needed within a decade to meet the ban-the-engine goals. What’s relevant is that the IEA has told us we’ll need hundreds of new mega-mines, and that it takes 10 to 16 years to find, plan and open a new mine. You can, as they say, do the math on that.

The need to supply astonishing quantities of battery materials is also where we find the core problem with the claims for big EV emissions and cost savings.

Since over 70% of the price of an EV battery comes from the costs of just buying the basic materials needed – that means the future price of EVs is dominated by the future costs of those basic materials and is dependent on guesses about the future of foreign mining and minerals industries, not the labor and automation prowess at domestic assembly plants. Over the past half-dozen years, the often-cited long-run, rapid decline in battery costs has slowed dramatically. And now prices have increased some 20% since 2021. So far, that’s with EVs still under 10% of total vehicle production. We’re still in early days of minerals demands.

And it’s with the acquisition of key materials where we find flaws with the core claims for emissions. The energy used and thus emissions from producing a pound of copper, nickel, and aluminum, for example, is two to three times greater than for steel. The numbers are higher for the other minerals. Importantly, as researchers at the Argonne National Labs have pointed out, relevant data for all the battery materials “remain meager to nonexistent, forcing researchers to resort to engineering calculations or approximations.”

That means every emissions claim is a rough estimate or an outright guess based on averages, approximations, assumptions, or aspirations. There are huge variables and uncertainties in the emissions from energy-intensive mining and the processing of minerals used to make EV batteries. The simple fact is that no one knows how much CO₂ emissions will decline as materials production rises to build more EVs.  And all of the key variables point to higher, not lower, emissions in the future.

The energy used to obtain a pound of metal depends on the size, nature, and location of the mine. For copper, that number can vary at least two-fold, and for nickel by three-fold. Getting accurate information is complicated by the fact that 80%–90% of relevant minerals are mined and refined outside the U.S. and E.U. and will be for a long time regardless of subsidies. And, since China refines 50%–90% of the world’s suite of energy minerals for EVs, it’s relevant that its grid is two-thirds coal-fired—and will be for a long time.

There is a dishonesty at the center of all the facile claims about big EV emissions reductions. In fact, nearly all studies making emissions claims are worse than guesses, the estimates frequently cherry-pick low numbers for what’s really happening upstream. A meta-study of 50 different technical studies found the estimates of emissions varied by over 300%. And, worse, that analysis exposed the fact that most emissions claims were based on assuming use of a small 30 kWh battery. That’s one-third the size of batteries actually used in most EVs. Triple the battery size and you triple the upstream emissions – and you triple the demand and thus price-pressure for the minerals.

Upstream minerals emissions not only offset the savings from not burning gasoline but, as the demand for battery minerals explodes, the net emissions savings shrink and could even vanish. Reasonable, even likely scenarios will lead to EVs causing a net increase in global emissions. Geologists have long documented that ore grades have been and will continue declining. That’s because global ore grades are declining – for the non-cognoscenti, that means for each new ton of mineral there’s a steady and unavoidable increase in the quantity of rock dug up and processed. A decrease of just 0.4% in copper ore grade will require seven times more energy to access the copper. 

Unlike cars with internal combustion engines, it’s impossible to measure an EV’s CO₂ emissions. And, unlike cars where those emissions are the same wherever or whenever the car is made or used, EV emissions vary wildly depending on how it’s made and where it’s used. While, self-evidently, there are no emissions while driving an EV, emissions occur elsewhere—not only upstream before the first mile is ever driven, but also when the vehicle is parked to refuel. The latter, emissions from the grid, is also far more complex than simplistic forecasts assume. Real-world emissions from charging depend on precisely where and exactly when it’s done. The refuel emissions can vary from near zero on a sunny day in some states and, in other states and times, to the same or more than would have come from burning gasoline.

None of this means that the lithium battery doesn’t deserve a pivotal place in history. Its invention was consequential for many reasons, nearly all of which have little to do with EVs. Nor do the inconvenient complexities of mining and grids mean there won’t be many more EVs in the future. Today’s fleet of nearly 20 million EVs globally—notably half of which are in coal-burning China—will doubtless balloon to hundreds of millions of EVs on global roads in the coming couple of decades. But even such dramatic growth would mean that EVs would by then account for barely 15% of all consumer vehicles, and far tinier share of industrial and commercial vehicles.

By way of analogy, the future of EVs in land transportation ecosystems will end up echoing, in market share terms and for similar operational reasons, the role of helicopters in aviation. Helicopters offer very different and, in many applications, far more useful even essential features compared to conventional fixed-wing aircraft. That’s why there’s a very significant $60 billion a year global market for helicopters. Even so, helicopters are only 15% of the overall global aircraft market. While helicopters, like EVs, are useful for a large number of applications, one would no more expect all aviation to use helicopters than for all drivers to use EVs.

The realities of physics and engineering mean that politicians pushing for an all-EV future run a high risk. Quite aside from the eventual discovery that EVs will disappoint with only a tiny impact on global CO₂ emissions, the bigger impacts will come as consumers find vehicle ownership costs and inconveniences both escalating. That will lead to unhappy voters motivated by the key underlying reality: A car is the single most expensive and critical product used by the overwhelming majority of citizens.

Mark P. Mills is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, author of the 2023 report, Electric Vehicles for Everyone? The Impossible Dream, and author of the 2021 book (Encounter Books), The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s. Mark is also part of RealClearEnergy‘s BrainTrust.

Updates will be on Telegram in October

  As I will be traveling next month, I will only update my Telegram channel for a while. 

4th Turning at https://t.me/fourth_turning

 Link to Telegram

  Username: @Philjy

 

The Valorization Of The Tyrants

  "War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength" 

1984 by George Orwell

  We are almost there, unfortunately.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

This is surely one of the strangest twists in official narratives in perhaps hundreds of years. The bad guys have been christened as the good guys, and the good guys have been purged, deplatformed, canceled, and demonized.

It’s a turn of events none of us could have imagined back in 2020. It cries out for an explanation. I truly fear knowing the answer as to why.

Just consider the fate of former New Zealand Prime Jacinda Ardern.

She locked down her country, trampling all rights of the people under the guise of controlling the spread of a virus. You could not go to church. You could not be unmasked. You could not leave the country and return. No one could travel there without official permission.

As bad as the United States and Europe were during this period, New Zealand was worse, and it was backed up by speech controls. Anyone protesting the policies was risking everything. And when the vaccine came along, Ardern outright said it: the people who get it will have rights but those who do not will not. It was a new biomedical caste system.

Eventually, the country did open. Now speakers decrying the whole period are attracting audiences in the thousands, and Ardern is widely unpopular. Her successor who continues to defend all this despotism is under a cloud and also deeply unpopular. The tables have completely turned. Of course the virus came anyway, as it must, so the junta that did this has turned their attention to climate change, the defense of censorship, and the escalation of the Russia/Ukraine war.

Five years ago, anyone would have supposed that a leader that acted this way would live in shame. I certainly assumed so. My supposition is that Ardern had made horrific misjudgments and would be widely decried as a confused tyrant. She would live out her days in disrepute, surely.

The opposite has happened. She is now the subject of celebratory biographies. She is lauded by mainstream media. She addressed the United Nations last year in a speech that was an open call for a new global censorship regime. True, the fact-checkers disagree with this interpretation. Instead she was merely calling out “the weaponization of free speech societies and platforms by misinformation agents.”

Oh.

In any case, in my imagination, I could not have dreamed up a specimen of error and tyranny more deserving of devaluing than Jacinda Ardern. Everything she did during the COVID era flies in the face of values that the West has held for almost a thousand years since the Magna Carta.

But I was wrong. Completely. I underestimated just how broken the world is. Instead of being disgraced, she is enjoying not one but two fellowships at Harvard University where she enjoys massive prestige and adoration by faculty, staff, and students. To me, this seems like the Twilight Zone—an ending to the story that I could not have imagined. Are we supposed to be against segregation, house arrest, forced medical treatments, locking people in nations, and censorship? I thought at least we would agree on that much. Apparently not. Apparently, it is the opposite. Everything that I believed was deprecated is exalted and all the public virtues I believed we extolled are now denounced.

It’s not just Ardern. The whole tiny but global junta that imposed all these policies seemed to be enjoying a glorious send-off by the entire establishment, even though they have been 100 percent wrong about everything. Fauci’s successor is Fauci II, and same with Walensky’s successor at the CDC. And the media propagandists who for three years lied to the public about lockdowns, masks, school closures, and shots are now writing books that are calling people like me the bad guys!

I almost cannot imagine that this has happened and I cannot fathom why.

As another example, the New York Times op-ed page has carried an amazing and very long article by Yoel Roth, the former chief censor of Twitter 1.0 before he was summarily fired by Elon Musk. The Times let him tell his tale of woe on how oppressed and beaten down he is merely for enforcing trust and safety. He was only doing his job to stop online lies!

The Twitter Files revealed that the company was obeying government priorities and blocking and throttling content that took issue with COVID policies, questions surrounding election integrity, and vaccine effectiveness. Roth, in cooperation with federal agencies, set himself up as the arbiter of truth and arguably distorted information flows based on his personal bias.

Like Ardern, I might have expected that he would retire from public life and deploy his considerable communication for a small company somewhere. But I was wrong again. Instead he holds a coveted position at the University of Pennsylvania and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

For that matter, Anthony Fauci himself is enjoying a comfy sinecure at Georgetown University.

This is not just about how high-end academia has become a haven for woke politics, censorship, and wildly pro-statist thinking across the board. That battle seems to have been won by the bad guys perhaps two decades ago. The problem is much larger. It has to do with the entire academic, corporate, political, and deep-state establishment that was heavily involved in imposing a despotic turn for the entire globe.

They are right now in the business of protecting their own, trolling the rest of us by granting awards and honors to the absolute worst offenders of core Western values. It’s like the world has been turned upside down. As grim as I believed the lockdowns that began in March 2020 were, and as much as I expected some terrible economic and cultural fallout from that period, I never would have imagined that the lockdowners and mandaters would be riding high at 42 months of this.

And at the very same time, the purges of the people who were right all along are continuing at a furious pace. Every day, we observe sneaky attacks on the greatest champions of basic liberties on which I thought everyone agreed back in 2019. Every unflattering bit of personal information on the resistors is fair game, amplified by the media, and then realized in the form of demonetizations by Big Tech, the courts, and the professional circuit generally.

The battle lines are very clear and only one side stands for the rights and liberties for which humanity worked for a millennium. The other side stands for controls, impositions, divisions, surveillance, censorship, degrowth, and corporate cartelizations. Can someone explain to me why we are supposed to think that the bad guys are now the good guys? In short, how can we account for the valorization of tyrants?

Dr. Steven Greer just exposed everything about UFO’s and it's... Completely bogus! (Video - 18')

  A doctor well educated, plenty of facts, interesting subject and complete nonsense.

  Carl Sagan who spent a lot of time exploring controversial subjects famously said that you should keep you mind open but not so wide that the brain falls off. And likewise later that the bigger the claim, the bigger the proof necessary to validate it. 

  Here we have a claim that there is a deep state (This is not controversial anymore), that UFO have been retrieved (This would require some indisputable proof to be believed. How many times primitive tribes in the Amazon forest have succeeded in shooting down a plane?) and that unheard of technologies have been developed out of these crafts. (So black budgets, black technologies, black everything but no leaks whatsoever. Boeing and the other companies mentioned never ever tried to use any of these strange technologies in their latest planes or missiles. How unlikely is that?)

 Then when you listen carefully, you hear a lot of far off "zero point" energy and other completely speculative technologies sounding strait out of a 1960 SF book and which may just as well be. Add some Tesla conspiracy to that and you can be certain that the nice doctor is talking nonsense.

 Reality is unfortunately more simple: We have plenty of credible witnesses and some pictures which strongly hint that there is indeed something mysterious behind the UFO phenomenon. When people see some lights in the sky behaving strangely, it is probably often just that indicating a mistaken understanding. But when pilots describe very precisely some strange crafts such as a silvery sphere in a transparent cube for example, we are clearly facing a mystery.

 Personally, I believe that the main reason most governments are not telling everything they know is simply because they don't know that much. More precise testimonies which do exist would simply make this fact more conspicuous. 

 UFO are beyond our grasp. We can and should try to study the phenomenon in particular by looking at it with statistical tools. Distribution of observations, types of crafts and effects, etc... but in the end we won't make much progress. Imagine a Roman finding a microchip. He could do nothing with it since he would not be able to observe it nor if he could understand what he is seeing. And that's just 2000 years of progress. Any being able to visit our planet (if it is what it seems to be) must have technologies which likewise are far beyond our grasp and understanding.

 

How To BRAINWASH Yourself For Success & Destroy NEGATIVE THOUGHTS! | Dr. Joe Dispenza (Video - 33')

  This is slightly different than the previous video which explained how our world may in fact be a virtual one but likewise it explores the importance of perception and the fact that how you perceive the world around you may influence you own body reality whereas the virtual world concept presuppose that it influences the world itself. 

  It is a little less controversial although just as ground breaking. I find this concept much easier to accept because it is far easier to grasp than reality perception through quantum mechanics. But the end result is quite similar: Here the concept is that we create our reality in our own mind whereas in the other video it is within a simulated reality. The two are not exclusive. Simply amazing.

Is Reality Real? - This One Idea Might Change Your Entire Life | Donald Hoffman (Video 2h43')

  This is a very, very long video but if even some of the ideas discussed are correct, then yes, it can change completely how you see you own life. 

  What is reality? What is consciousness? Could we live in a virtual world? 

  A few years ago I would have dismissed the idea right out of hand. Now, I am not so sure anymore. Quantum reality is little more than statistical probability collapsed into one perceived reality and we can now prove that our observations do change reality both in space AND in time. This is mind boggling unless you accept that what we perceive is... a local construct of reality. A virtual world in other words. Stunning!

 PS: I completely disagree with their concept of consciousness and a few other things but still find the video mind boggling and interesting. Likewise, you do not need to agree with the discussion to entertain and be interested by the concepts presented.

The Great Taking. Chapter 1. Is this for real?

  Is this even possible? Faced with a complete collapse of the financial system, I agree that this is possible. What would YOU do? (if you could do something about it.)

  What would I do? Isn't preserving yourself a basic tenet of life? The odds may be low but I also think some people are ready to put all their chips on the table. (If they are ready to go nuclear and that is the alternative then it almost looks sane.)

  In all likelihood, 2024 will be the year. 

What is this book about? It is about the taking of collateral, all of it, the end game of this globally synchronous debt accumulation super cycle. This is being executed by long-planned, intelligent design, the audacity and scope of which is difficult for the mind to encompass. Included are all financial assets, all money on deposit at banks, all stocks and bonds, and hence, all underlying property of all public corporations, including all inventories, plant and equipment, land, mineral deposits, inventions and intellectual property. Privately owned personal and real property financed with any amount of debt will be similarly taken, as will the assets of privately owned businesses, which have been financed with
debt. If even partially successful, this will be the greatest conquest and subjugation in world history.

We are now living within a hybrid war conducted almost entirely by
deception, and thus designed to achieve war aims with little energy
input. It is a war of conquest directed not against other nation states
but against all of humanity.

Private, closely held control of all central banks, and hence of all
money creation, has allowed a very few people to control all political
parties, governments, the intelligence agencies and their myriad front
organizations, the armed forces, the police, the major corporations,
and of course, the media. These very few people are the prime movers.
Their plans are executed over decades. Their control is opaque. When
George Soros said to me, “You don’t know what they can do,” it was
these people to whom he referred. Now, to be absolutely clear, it is
these very few people, who are hidden from you, who are behind this
war against humanity. You may never know who they are. The people
you are allowed to see are hired “face men” and “face women.” They
are expendable.

One might seek comfort in thinking that this must be crazy; nothing
like this has ever happened before . . . but it has. The precedent for
the intent, design and horrific execution of such a plan can be found
by examining the early 20th century, the period of the great wars and
the Great Depression. The proclaimed “Great Reset” now in progress,
however, includes major innovations, which will allow unprecedented
concentration of wealth and of power over humanity through depriva-
tion. How might it come to pass that you will own nothing, as so boldly
predicted by the World Economic Forum? It certainly is not about the
personal convenience of renting.

With the collapse of each financial bubble and the ensuing financial
crisis, a story is rolled out which should now be familiar to you. It goes
like this: All of us are at fault. We just wanted too much, and we were
living beyond our means. And now, our collective greed has caused this
terrible global crisis. The “Authorities”, the “Regulators” had struggled
mightily to protect us from our own “animal spirits”, their great and
elaborate efforts having been demonstrated through decades of work.
Despite their good intentions, however, they failed, and can’t be blamed
(or prosecuted) for that. After all, we are all to blame. In any case, let’s
look forward. The financial system must be restarted, so that we can
provide credit to you again, create jobs and get the economy growing,
whatever it takes!

This time, what it will take is all of your property, or what you thought
was your property. Here is your Central Bank Digital Currency deposited
on your smart phone, so that you can buy milk. Noblesse Oblige!
Money is an extremely efficient control system. People order them-
selves upon money incentives, and thus difficult, dangerous and energy
intensive overt physical control need not be employed broadly. But the
money control system breaks down at the end of a monetary “super
cycle”, with collapse in the Velocity of Money (Velocity, or VOM). This
is a multi-decade process.

Velocity is the number of times that a unit of currency is spent to buy
goods and services in a period of time. This is measured by comparing
the value of all goods and services produced in a period of time (Gross
Domestic Product, or GDP), with the value of all cash and deposits
which can be used nearly as easily as cash (Money Supply).

Velocity = GDP

Money Supply

Thus, Velocity × Money Supply = GDP. Lower Velocity results in lower
GDP.

Milton Friedman was an economist noted for the study of monetary
history. In his book A Monetary history of the United States, 1867-1960
[1], co-authored with Anna Schwartz, we find the following observation:
[W]e know enough to demonstrate rather conclusively that . . .
velocity [of money] must have declined sharply from 1880 to
World War I . . .

Collapse in VOM is exactly what was unfolding from the 19th century
and leading up to the Great War. Within a few years, the Russian,
Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires ceased to exist, as did the
Qing Dynasty. The German economy was destroyed. Then followed the
Great Depression, the Second World War, and the slow collapse of the
British Empire. No populations were unscathed. There were no winners.
Or were there?

While there was widespread deprivation, selected banking interests took
the collateral of the thousands of banks which were forced to close,
as well as of a great many people and businesses large and small—the
indebted. In the U.S., gold held by the public was confiscated. But most
importantly, closely held secretive private control of central banks and
money creation was maintained, as was the aforementioned control
over society’s key institutions, including political parties, governments,
intelligence agencies, armed forces, police, major corporations, and
media.

The heirs to this control position have known for many decades that
such a collapse in VOM would come again. They have been preparing.
For them, it is an absolute imperative to remain in control through
the collapse and “Great Reset”; otherwise they risk being discovered,
investigated and prosecuted. They are not doing it for us. There is no
noble purpose.

We are now living within a replay of this monetary phenomenon, i.e., a
profound decline in VOM, which began when Velocity peaked in 1997.
This was coincident with onset of a major global financial crisis, known
as the Asian Financial Crisis, and it was followed within a few years by
the Dot-Com Bubble and bust.

Throughout this period, I was managing long/short equity hedge funds,
and I developed the insight that the Federal Reserve was influencing
the direction of financial markets (this was considered conspiracy
theory, even by my partners). At that time, it was done through Open
Market Operations conducted by the New York Fed using repurchase
agreements on treasury securities.

I began, systematically, following the rate of growth in M3, the broadest
measure of money at the time (which is no longer published). I studied
what was unfolding incrementally, and I saw that in individual weeks
new money created was more than 1% of annual U.S. GDP. This was
when it first occurred to me that the Fed was getting less “bang for the
buck”, in that GDP was not responding to money creation. This meant
that the velocity of money was inverting, and that money growth was
now much higher than any GDP growth. The money being created was
not going into the real economy, but it was driving a financial bubble
with no relationship to underlying economic activity. I understood
this, not with hindsight, but in near real-time. If I could know it, Alan
Greenspan and the people he worked for knew it, too. So why did they
do it? If something does not make sense, it is necessary to change one’s
perspective and aim for a larger understanding. Crises do not occur by
accident; they are induced intentionally and used to consolidate power
and to put in place measures, which will be used later.

By the 4th quarter of 1999, when the Dot-Com Bubble was reaching
extremes, I saw that the money supply was being increased at more
than a 40% annual rate. I knew that this meant that the Velocity of

Figure I.1 Annual velocity of money, from 1900 to 2021. Source: Hoisington
Management.

Money was collapsing. Such a collapse occurs when the economy is not
growing despite very high rates of money creation.
Please observe the extremely important chart in Figure I.1, which was
prepared by Hoisington Management. For once, one can see a true
underlying determinant of the sweep of history.

Profound decline in VOM lead to the Financial Panic of 1907, which was
used to justify the establishment of the Federal Reserve System. The
Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress in the quiet days before
Christmas, 1913. Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated six months
later.

Following a brief recovery in VOM during the Great War, it collapsed
further, leading up to the closure of banks and the confiscation of gold
in 1933. VOM recovered somewhat into the Second World War, and
then collapsed to a low in 1946, unprecedented until now.
VOM has now contracted to a lower level than at any point during the
Great Depression and world wars. Once the ability to produce growth
by printing money has been exhausted, creating more money will not
help. It is pushing on a string. The phenomenon is irreversible. And so,
perhaps announcement of the “Great Reset” has been motivated not
by “Global Warming” or by profound insights into a “Fourth Industrial
Revolution”, but rather by certain knowledge of the collapse of this
fundamental monetary phenomenon, the implications of which extend
far beyond economics.

Something has been planned for us, but not for the reasons you have
been given. How might we come to know something about the inten-
tions of the planners? Perhaps, by examining their preparations?

Here's The Climate Dissent You're Not Hearing About Because It's Muffled By Society's Top Institutions

  Now that we are entering the darker age of censorship it will be more and more difficult to find articles criticizing the manufactured consensus. Eventually it will be impossible. AI will make sure of that with or without keywords. Anjoy a dose of rebelliousness while you still can!

Authored by John Murawski via RealClear Wire,

As the Biden administration and governments worldwide make massive commitments to rapidly decarbonize the global economy, the persistent effort to silence climate change skeptics is intensifying – and the critics keep pushing back. 

This summer the International Monetary Fund summarily canceled a presentation by John Clauser, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who publicly disavows the existence of a climate “crisis.” The head of the nonprofit with which Clauser is affiliated, the CO2 Coalition, has said he and other members have been delisted from LinkedIn for their dissident views.  

Meanwhile, a top academic journal retracted published research doubting a climate emergency after negative coverage in legacy media. The move was decried by another prominent climate dissenter, Roger Pielke Jr., as “one of the most egregious failures of scientific publishing that I have seen” – criticism muffled because the academic says he has been blocked on Twitter (now X) by reporters on the climate beat. 

The climate dissenters are pressing their case as President Biden, United Nations officials, and climate action advocates in media and academia argue that the “settled science” demands a wholesale societal transformation. That means halving U.S. carbon emissions by 2035 and achieving net zero emissions by 2050 to stave off the “existential threat” of human-induced climate change. 

In response last month, more than 1,600 scientists, among them two Nobel physics laureates, Clauser and Ivar Giaever of Norway, signed a declaration stating that there is no climate emergency, and that climate advocacy has devolved into mass hysteria. The skeptics say the radical transformation of entire societies is marching forth without a full debate, based on dubious scientific claims amplified by knee-jerk journalism.  

Many of these climate skeptics reject the optimistic scenarios of economic prosperity promised by advocates of a net-zero world order. They say the global emissions-reduction targets are not achievable on such an accelerated timetable without lowering living standards and unleashing worldwide political unrest.  

“What advocates of climate action are trying to do is scare the bejesus out of the public so they’ll think we need to [act] fast,” said Steven Koonin, author of “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.”  

“You have to balance the certainties and uncertainties of the changing climate – the risks and hazards – against many other factors,” he adds. 

These dissenters don’t all agree on all scientific questions and do not speak in a single voice. Clauser, for example, is a self-styled “climate denialist” who believes climate is regulated by clouds, while Pielke, a political scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and Bjørn Lomborg, the former director of the Danish Environmental Assessment Institute, acknowledge humans are affecting the climate but say there is sufficient time to adapt. The dissenters do, however, agree that the public and government officials are getting a one-sided, apocalyptic account that stokes fear, politicizes science, misuses climate modeling, and shuts down debate.  

They also say it is a troubling sign for scientific integrity that they are systematically sidelined and diminished by government funding agencies, foundation grant-makers, academic journals, and much of the media. Delving into their claims, RealClearInvestigations reviewed a sampling of their books, articles, and podcast interviews. This loose coalition of writers and thinkers acknowledges that the climate is warming, but they typically ascribe as much, if not more, influence to natural cycles and climate variability than to human activities, such as burning fossil fuel.  

Among their arguments:  

• There is no climate crisis or existential threat as expressed in catastrophic predictions by activists in the media and academia. As global temperatures gradually increase, human societies will need to make adjustments in the coming century, just as societies have adapted to earlier climate changes. By and large, humans cannot control the climate, which Pielke describes as “the fanciful idea that emissions are a disaster control knob.” 

• Global temperatures are increasing incrementally, and have been for centuries, but the degree of human influence is uncertain or negligible. Climate skeptics themselves don’t agree on how much humans are contributing to global warming by burning fossil fuels, and how much is caused by natural variability from El Niño and other cycles that can take centuries to play out. “The real question is not whether the globe has warmed recently,” writes Koonin, “but rather to what extent this warming is being caused by humans.” 

• Rapidly replacing fossil fuels with renewables and electricity by mid-century would be economically risky and may have a negligible effect on global warming. Some say mitigation decrees – such as phasing out the combustion engine and banning gas stoves – are not likely to prevent climate change because humans play a minor role in global climate trends. Others say mitigation is necessary but won’t happen without capable replacement technologies. It’s unrealistic, they say, to force societies to rely on intermittent energy from wind and solar, or wager the future on technologies that are still in experimental stages.   

• The global political push to kill the fossil fuel industry to get to “net zero” and “carbon neutrality” by 2050, as advocated by the United Nations and the Biden administration, will erase millions of jobs and raise energy costs, leading to a prolonged economic depression and political instability. The result would be that developing regions will pay the highest price, while the biggest polluters (China and India) and hostile nations (like Russia and Iran) will simply ignore the net-zero mandate. This could be a case where the cure could be worse than the disease.  

• Despite the common refrain in the media, there is no evidence that a gradually warming planet is affecting the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, storms, droughts, rainfall, or other weather events. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has expressed low confidence such weather events can be linked to human activities. Still, “it is a fertile field for cherry pickers,” notes Pielke.  

• Extreme weather events, such as wildfires and flooding, are not claiming more human lives than previously. The human death toll is largely caused by cold weather, which accounts for eight times as many deaths as hot weather, and overall weather-related mortality has fallen by about 99% in the past century. “People are safer from climate-related disasters than ever before,” statistician and author Bjørn Lomborg has said. 

• Climate science has been hijacked and politicized by activists, creating a culture of self-censorship that’s enforced by a code of silence that Koonin likens to the Mafia’s omerta. In her 2023 book, “Climate Uncertainty and Risk,” climatologist Judith Curry asks: “How many skeptical papers were not published by activist editorial boards? How many published papers have buried results in order to avoid highlighting findings that conflict with preferred narratives? I am aware of anecdotal examples of each of these actions, but the total number is unknowable.” 

• Slogans such as “follow the science” and “scientific consensus” are misleading and disingenuous. There is no consensus on many key questions, such as the urgency to cease and desist burning fossil fuels, or the accuracy of computer modeling predictions of future global temperatures. The apparent consensus of imminent disaster is manufactured through peer pressure, intimidation, and research funding priorities, based on the conviction that “noble lies,” “consensus entrepreneurship,” and “stealth advocacy” are necessary to save humanity from itself. “One day PhD dissertations will be written about our current moment of apocalyptic panic,” Pielke predicts.  

• The warming of the planet is a complicated phenomenon that will cause some disruptions but will also bring benefits, particularly in agricultural yields and increased vegetation. Some climate skeptics, including the CO2 Coalition, say CO2 is not a pollutant – it is “plant food.”  

Curry, the former Chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, expresses a common theme among the climate refuseniks: that they are the sane, rational voices in a maelstrom of quasi-religious mania.  

“In the 1500s, they used to drown witches in Europe because they blamed them for bad weather. You had the pagan people trying to appease the gods with sacrifices,” Curry said. “What we’re doing now is like a pseudoscientific version of that, and it’s no more effective than those other strategies.’ 

The climate change establishment occasionally concedes some of these points. No less an authority than the newly appointed head of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has urged the climate community to cool its jets: “If you constantly communicate the message that we are all doomed to extinction, then that paralyzes people and prevents them from taking the necessary steps to get a grip on climate change,” Jim Skea recently said to German media. “The world won’t end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees [centigrade]. It will however be a more dangerous world.”  

In testimony before the Senate Budget Committee in June, Pielke said human-caused climate change is real and “poses significant risks to society and the environment.” But the science does not paint a dystopian, catastrophic scenario of imminent doom, he added.  

“Today, there is general agreement that our current media environment and political discourse are rife with misinformation,” Pielke testified. “If there is just one sentence that you take from my testimony today it is this: You are being misinformed.” 

Still, the overwhelming impression conveyed is one of impending disaster, with the menace of global warming rhetorically upgraded in July by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to “global boiling.” Climate scientists announced in July that the planet is the hottest it’s been in 120,000 years, an old claim that gets recycled every few years. Meanwhile, three vice-chairs of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of mass starvation, extinction, and disasters, saying that if the temperature rises 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels, “children under 12 will experience a fourfold increase in natural disasters in their lifetime, and up to 14% of all species assessed will likely face a very high risk of extinction.”  

Many of these predictions are based on computer models and computer simulations that Pielke, Koonin, Curry, and others have decried as totally implausible. Koonin’s book suggests that some computer models may be “cooking the books” to achieve desired outcomes, while Pielke has decried faulty scenarios as “one of the most significant failures of scientific integrity in the twenty-first  century thus far.” Curry writes in her book that the primary inadequacy of climate models is their limited ability to predict the kinds of natural climate fluctuations that cause ice ages and warming periods, and play out over decades, centuries, or even millennia.  

Another critique is the use of computer models to correlate extreme weather events to multi-decade climate trends in an attempt to show that the weather was caused by climate, a branch of climate science called climate attribution studies. This type of research is used to bolster claims that the frequency and intensity of heat waves, floods, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events could not have happened without climate change. An example is research recently cited by the BBC in an article warning that if the global temperature rises another 0.9 centigrade, crippling heat waves that were once exceedingly rare will bake the world every two-to-five years.  

One question looms: Does a warming climate contribute to heat records and heat waves, such as those that were widely reported in July as the hottest month on record and taken as overwhelming proof that humans are overheating the planet? The United States experienced extreme heat waves in the 1930s, and the recent spikes are not without precedent, climate dissenters say. Pielke, however,  concedes that IPCC data signal that increases in heat extremes and heat waves are virtually certain, but he argues that the societal impacts will be manageable.  

Koonin and Curry say that the global heat spikes in July were likely caused by a multiplicity of factors, including an underwater Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic explosion last year that increased upper atmosphere water vapor by about 10%, a relevant fact because water vapor acts as a greenhouse gas. Another factor is the warming effect of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, which has shifted to an active phase recently.  

Koonin says that greenhouse gas emissions are a gradual trend on which weather anomalies play out, and while it’s tempting to confuse weather with climate, it would be a mistake to blame July’s heat waves on human influence.  

“The anomaly is about as large as we’ve ever seen, but not unprecedented,” Koonin explained on a podcast. “Now, what the real question is, why did it spike so much? Nothing to do with CO2 – CO2 is … the base on which this phenomenon occurs.” 

Climate dissent comes with the occupational hazard of being tarred as a propagandist and stooge for “Big Oil.” Pielke was one of seven academics investigated by a U.S. Congressman in 2015 for allegedly failing to report funding from fossil fuel interests (He was cleared). A New York Times review of Lomborg’s 2020 book, “False Alarm,” described it as “mind pollution.” 

Climate advocates see climate skepticism as so dangerous that Ben Santer, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, publicly cut ties with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory two years ago after the federal research facility invited Koonin to discuss his skeptical book, “Unsettled.” Santer, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, said allowing Koonin’s views to go unchallenged undermined the credibility and integrity of climate science research. For similar reasons, the IMF postponed Clauser’s July presentation so that it could be rescheduled as a debate.  

Another critique: scientists arbitrarily forcing the facts to fit a prescribed catastrophic narrative, often by ignoring plausible alternative explanations and relevant factors. That’s what climate scientist Patrick Brown said he had to do to get published in the prestigious journal Nature, by attributing wildfires to climate change and ignoring other factors, like poor forest management and the startling fact that over 80% of wildfires are ignited by humans. Brown publicly confessed to this sleight-of-hand in a recent article in The Free Press.  

“This type of framing, with the influence of climate change unrealistically considered in isolation, is the norm for high-profile research papers,” Brown wrote. “When I had previously attempted to deviate from the formula, my papers were rejected out of hand by the editors of distinguished journals, and I had to settle for less prestigious outlets.” 

These frustrations serve as a reminder that the world has entered what the United Nations and climate advocates call the make-or-break decade that will decide how much the Earth’s temperature will rise above pre-industrial levels. This decisive phase is “unfolding now and will intensify during the next several years,” according to Rice University researchers. “Accordingly, what happens between now and the late 2020s, in all likelihood, will fundamentally determine the failure or success of an accelerated energy transition.” 

In response to this call for global action, political leaders in Europe and North America are vowing to reengineer their societies to run on wind, solar, and hydrogen. In this country, California is among a dozen states that have moved to ban the sale of new gasoline-engine cars in 2035, while states like Virginia and North Carolina have committed to carbon-free power girds by mid-century.  

In the most detailed net-zero roadmap to date, the International Energy Agency in 2021 identified more than 400 milestones that would have to be met to achieve a net-zero planet by mid-century, including the immediate cessation of oil and gas exploration and drilling, and mandated austerity measures such as reducing highway speed limits, limiting temperature settings in private homes, and eating less meat.  

In the IEA’s net zero scenario, global energy use will decline by 8% through energy efficiency even as the world’s population adds 2 billion people and the economy grows a whopping 40%. In this scenario, all the nations of the world – including China, India, Russia, and Saudi Arabia – would have to commit to a net-zero future, generating 14 million jobs to create a new energy infrastructure. Nearly half the slated emissions reductions will have to come from experimental technologies currently in demonstration or prototype stages, such as hydrogen, bioenergy, carbon capture, and modular nuclear reactors. Reading this bracing outlook, one could almost overlook the IEA’s caveat that relying on solar and wind for nearly 70% of electricity generation would cause retail electricity prices to increase by 50% on average and destroy 5 million jobs, of which “many are well paid, meaning structural changes can cause shocks for communities with impacts that persist over time.”  

A critique of the IEA’s scenario issued this year by the Energy Policy Research Foundation, a think tank that specializes in oil, gas, and petroleum products, warned of “massive supply shocks” if oil supplies are artificially suppressed to meet arbitrary net zero targets. The report further stated that “if the world stays committed to net zero regardless of high costs – the recession will turn into an extended depression and ultimately impose radical negative changes upon modern civilization.” (Disclosure: The report was commissioned by the RealClearFoundation, the nonprofit parent of RealClearInvestigations.) 

Already, societies have fallen behind their emissions reduction targets, and it’s widely understood that fast-tracking net zero is an unattainable goal. Transforming existing energy infrastructures within several decades would require installing the equivalent of the world’s largest solar farm every day, according to the International Energy Agency. Carbon-free energy accounts for only 18% of total global consumption, and fossil fuels are still increasing, according to a recent analysis. The IEA reported this year that investments in oil exploration and drilling have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, while global coal demand reached an all-time high last year. Globally nations are spending more on clean energy than on fossil fuels, but fossil fuels are still vital to economic growth; for instance, the IEA noted that 40 gigawatts of new coal plants were approved in 2022, the highest figure since 2016, almost all of them in China.  

“We live in this world of exaggerated promises and delusional pop science,” Vaclav Smil, the University of Manitoba environmental scientist and policy analyst, told The New York Times last year. “People don’t appreciate the magnitude of the task and are setting up artificial deadlines which are unrealistic.” 

A government push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by cutting back on livestock farming has led to public protests in the Netherlands, a conflict over resources that Time magazine predicts will spread elsewhere: “This may be just the beginning of much wider global unrest over agriculture. Scientists say dealing with climate change will require not just gradual reform, but a rapid, wholesale transformation of the global food system.”  

Climate dissidents say what happened in the Netherlands is a foretaste of the political backlash that is inevitable when net-zero policies start becoming implemented and people have to travel across state lines to buy a gasoline-powered car.  

“The urgency is the stupidest part of the whole thing – that we need to act now with all these made-up targets,” Curry said. “The transition risk is far greater than any conceivable climate or weather risk.” 

To Koonin, these challenges indicate that the catastrophic climate narrative will collapse when put to the test of practicality and politics. The more sensible route, he said, is a slow-and-steady approach.  

“There’s going to be a deep examination of science and the cost-benefit issues,” he said. “We will eventually do the right thing, but it’s going to take a decade or so.” 

John Murawski reports on the intersection of culture and ideas for RealClearInvestigations. He previously covered artificial intelligence for the Wall Street Journal and spent 15 years as a reporter for the News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) writing about health care, energy and business. At RealClear, Murawski reports on how esoteric academic theories on race and gender have been shaping many areas of public life, from K-12 school curricula to workplace policies to the practice of medicine.

France’s rejection in French-speaking Africa punishes 12 years of betrayal

  Understanding the turmoil in the Sahel region and the revolt against France.

by Thierry Meyssan

Nothing happens by chance in politics. The French don’t understand why French-speaking Africans suddenly reject them. They console themselves by accusing Russia of dark machinations. In reality, they are only reaping the rewards of what they have sown over the last 12 years. This has nothing to do with colonialism or Françafrique and everything to do with putting the French army at the service of U.S. strategy.

Voltaire Network | Paris (France) | 12 September 2023

Deutsch ελληνικά Español français italiano Nederlands norsk Português русский

Faced with the wave of regime changes in French-speaking Africa, the French media are stunned. They can’t explain the rejection of France.

The old refrains about colonial exploitation are unconvincing. For example, Paris is exploiting Niger’s uranium, not at market price, but at a ridiculously low one. However, the putschists have never raised this argument. They’re talking about something else entirely. Accusations of Russian manipulation are no more credible. Firstly, because Russia doesn’t seem to be behind the putschists in Mali, Guinea, Burkina-Faso, Niger or Gabon, but above all because the evil far predates their arrival. Russia only arrived in Africa after its victory in Syria, in 2016, whereas the problem dates back to at least 2010, if not 2001.

As always, what makes the situation unreadable is forgetting how it came about.

Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States assigned a role in Africa to its vassal, France. The aim was to maintain the old order there, while waiting for AfriCom to settle in, and for the Pentagon to extend to the dark continent the destruction of political institutions it was already carrying out in the "wider Middle East". [1] Gradually, Republican politics gave way to tribal politics. From one point of view, this was an emancipation from heavy French aid; from another, it was a formidable step backwards.

In 2010, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, probably on Washington’s advice, took the initiative to settle the Ivorian conflict. While the country was riven by tribal conflict, an operation led first by ECOWAS, then by Barack Obama’s cousin [2] Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, attempted to negotiate the departure of Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo. Their problem is not Gbagbo’s authoritarian regime, but the fact that he has transformed himself from a submissive CIA agent into a defender of his nation. Paris intervened militarily after the presidential election to arrest Gbagbo - allegedly to stop genocide - and replace him with Alassane Ouattara, a long-standing friend of the French ruling class. Laurent Gbagbo was subsequently tried by the International Criminal Court, which, after an interminable trial, recognized that he had never committed genocide and that France was therefore not justified in intervening militarily.

In 2011, President Nicolas Sarkozy, advised by Washington, committed France to Libya. Once again, the official aim was to stop a genocide committed by a dictator against his own people. To lend credibility to this accusation, the CIA, which was behind France’s actions, organized false testimony before the Human Rights Council in Geneva. In New York, the United Nations Security Council authorized the major powers to intervene to stop the massacre, which did not exist. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev turned a blind eye. U.S. President Barack Obama wanted AfriCom to finally begin operations in Africa, where he did not reside, as his soldiers were still stationed in Germany. But at the last minute, AfriCom’s commander refused to fight against Muamar Gaddafi alongside the jihadists who had fought his comrades in Iraq (the US military still hasn’t admitted the CIA’s double game of supporting the jihadists against Russia, often to the detriment of Westerners). Barack Obama therefore called on NATO, forgetting that he had previously promised not to mobilize it against a Southern country. Nevertheless, Muamar Gaddafi was tortured and lynched, and Libya was dismembered.However, the Libyan Arab Jamahariya, which was not at all a dictatorship but a regime inspired by the French socialists of the 19th century and the Paris Commune, was the only African force aiming to unite Arabs and blacks. Gaddafi wanted to liberate the continent as he had liberated his compatriots from Western colonialism. He was even preparing to pilot, with IMF Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a common currency for several African states. His fall awakened his enemies. Blacks were once again massacred by Arabs, even if they were Libyan nationals, and reduced to slavery, under the insensitive eyes of the Western victors. The poor African states economically supported by Libya collapsed, starting with Mali [3]. Arab jihadists, brought to power in Tripoli by NATO, supported certain Tuaregs against blacks in general. The problem gradually spread to the whole of Sahelian Africa.

Yet, unable to learn from these crimes, French President François Hollande organized a new regime change in Mali. In March 2012, as President Amadou Toumani Touré’s term of office drew to a close and he was not standing for re-election, a group of U.S.-trained officers overthrew him, without being able to explain their action. He interrupted the current presidential campaign and appointed Dioncounda Traore as "transitional president". This sleight of hand was endorsed by ECOWAS... now chaired by Alassane Ouattara. Unsurprisingly, transitional president Dioncounda Traore called on France for help in fighting the jihadists who were attacking him. Paris’ idea was to station troops in Mali so as to be able to attack Algeria, its real target, from the rear. This was "Operation Serval". Aware that they were next on the list, the Algerian generals cracked down hard on a hostage-taking by jihadists at the In Amenas oil site. In so doing, they discouraged France from intervening against their people.

No problem! France reorganized its forces, calling it "Operation Barkhane". The French army was placed at the disposal of its American overlord. Everything was organized by AfriCom, still stationed in Germany. French troops, now backed up by members of the European Union (Denmark, Spain, Estonia, the United Kingdom, Sweden and the Czech Republic), destroyed the targets indicated to them by AfriCom. In this formerly French region, the French military had good contact with the local population, whereas the Americans faced a language barrier.

At this stage, the first observation is that operation Barkhane, regardless of its results, was not legitimate. True, it was officially a question of the West containing the jihadists, but any Sahelian understands that it is these same Westerners who created the jihadists in the region by destroying Libya. And that’s not all.

The planning of the Sahel War, on May 11, 2022, in Morocco sparked the current wave of coups d’état in French-speaking Africa. Only Morocco is not directly endangered, since it is to host US troops.

Let’s take a step back. Let’s remember that all this began with the Pentagon’s determination to destroy African political structures with AfriCom, just as it had begun to destroy those of the "wider Middle East" with CentCom. On May 11, 2022, the US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the Straussian Victoria Nuland, convened a meeting in Morocco of the 85 states participating in the coalition against Daesh. She announced the next step in the program: the jihadists are re-forming Daesh in the Sahel. They have weapons, officially destined for Ukraine. Soon, the whole region will be one huge inferno [4]. In November, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari confirmed the massive influx of US weapons into the hands of jihadists in the Sahel and the Lake Chad basin, initially destined for Ukraine.

It was in the face of this existential risk that the soldiers of Mali, Burkina-Faso and Niger took power to defend their people.

It’s important to understand that for years, African leaders have been complaining about France’s support for the jihadists it is supposed to be fighting. The point is not to blame the French military, but the role of its secret services working for the United States.

Right from the start of Operation Serval, Syrian jihadists complained that France had abandoned them in favor of their Sahelian counterparts. And President François Hollande had to hold back his troops until the Qatari instructors of the Malian jihadis withdrew. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov discussed the matter with his French counterpart Laurent Fabius, who replied with a laugh: "It’s our realpolitik!

A sanctuary of al-Qaeda military camps was formed between the towns of Ghat (near the Algerian border) and Sabbah (close to Niger) in the Fezzan desert of southern Libya. According to the very serious Canard enchaîné, these jihadist academies were organized by the British and French secret services.

Choguel Kokalla Maïga’s interview with RIA-Novosti

Three years ago, on October 8, 2021, Mali’s Prime Minister, Choguel Kokalla Maïga, gave an interview to RIA Novosti [5] that has been widely picked up and commented on throughout the region, but not in France, where no one but our readers know about it.

According to Yaou Sangaré Bakar, Niger’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Cooperation and Nigeriens Abroad, who wrote to the Security Council (Ref. S/2023/636), last month French agents freed terrorists who had been prisoners. They were rounded up in a valley in the village of Fitili (28 km northwest of Yatakala), where a planning meeting was held with the aim of attacking military positions in the tri-border area. Sixteen terrorist leaders were apprehended in three operations, including two in Niger and one in Mali.

In passing, Yaou Sangaré Bakar’s letter raises important questions about the role of ECOWAS [6], questions which are not new and have been raised since the change of regime in Côte d’Ivoire. This international institution has just imposed sanctions against Niger and mobilized troops to restore constitutional order. But the ECOWAS statutes do not authorize it to impose such sanctions, any more than the UN Charter authorizes it to take military action against one of its members.

The cases of Guinea and Gabon are somewhat different. They are not Lake Chad or Sahel states. They are not yet under threat. Their militaries first rebelled against authoritarian regimes, that of Alpha Condé in Guinea and Ali Bongo in Gabon. Both refused to relinquish power against the wishes of their populations. But the putschists in both countries were quick to blame the French military presence. Simply because they can safely predict that the French army will not defend the interests of the Gabonese, or even the French, but only those of Washington.

War is prepared years in advance. Today, the United States is transferring weapons in the shadow of the conflict in Ukraine. Tomorrow, it will be too late.

Against this backdrop, it is surprising to hear French President Emmanuel Macron preaching the defense of constitutional order. On the one hand, because all these states are in immediate danger, and on the other, because by placing the French army at the service of the ambitions of US leaders, he himself has betrayed his own Constitution.

WHO Global Takeover Advances to Final Stages

  This is unbelievably nefarious and we have only months to react to this! (See the timeline at the end.)

By Dr. Joseph Mercola

September 16, 2023

In this September 1, 2023, Highwire interview,¹ Dr. Meryl Nass, a biowarfare and epidemics expert, exposes the threat posed by the World Health Organization’s pandemic treaty and the amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHRs), which add to and further strengthen the WHO’s powers under the treaty. The WHO’s One Health agenda is also part of this power grab.

Nass also recently published an article, “The WHO’s Proposed Treaty Will Increase Manmade Pandemics,”^2,3 in which she reviews the history of biological warfare and the role of gain-of-function research, where we are right now, and what the globalists’ plan for our future is. It’s imperative everyone understand what the plan is, because we can only stop it by rejecting it en masse.

Nass Persecuted by Lawless State Medical Board

But first, Nass provides an update on her personal situation. In January 2022, the Maine medical board suspended Nass’ medical license for spreading “COVID misinformation” and prescribing ivermectin. They also ordered her to undergo a psychological evaluation by a board-selected psychologist.⁴ Nass refused.

As she points out in the interview, “misinformation” refers to information that may be mistaken or inaccurate, but being wrong is not a crime — no matter how badly government wants you to think it is.

We have the First Amendment — freedom of speech — for a reason. Government does not have the legal right to suppress our speech, and the medical board is a state government agency. So, by censoring doctors like Nass and punishing them for speaking their minds and sharing medical and scientific data, they are actually the ones breaking the law.

Nass didn’t, because there’s no law against sharing information, even if it is suspected of being incorrect, or can be proven to be wrong. And, in this case, the board is actually punishing her for sharing truths.

So, in mid-August 2023, Nass sued the Maine medical board, and every board member in their personal capacity, for violating her free speech rights.⁵

“Telling me that I can’t talk about the vaccine or I can’t talk about the treatment of COVID or masks or distancing, even when the things that I was saying were based on published medical literature, that is a First Amendment violation,” Nass said in a statement.

“The state government and the federal government are not allowed to restrict the speech of people. So we are looking for a jury trial to see whether the Board of Licensure in Medicine is guilty of a malicious, political prosecution and targeting of me.”

The Plan in Broad Strokes

So, what is the globalists plan for our future? Summarized into as few words as possible: global dominion by the few and total control of the masses.

As explained by Nass, the COVID pandemic showed us that the technocratic cabal has control over most if not all Western governments. World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab has even bragged about how his Young Global Leaders have “penetrated” governments of the world.⁶

The technocratic cabal also has control over the bureaucratic structure of the WHO. Eighty-five percent of the WHO’s funding comes from private entities, most of which is earmarked for specific programs. “So, the WHO is already owned by private interests,” Nass says.

According to the WHO, the reason the COVID pandemic got so bad is because nations failed to cooperate. Hence, the reasoning goes, we need an international treaty that centralizes pandemic response powers to the WHO. The problem, of course, is that most nations did follow the WHO’s irrational and unscientific recommendations. Its ineptitude — whether intentional or not — is what destroyed economies and resulted in needless deaths.

Based on the current treaty draft and proposed IHR amendments, it’s clear that mRNA-based vaccinations will be mandatory under the WHO’s power structure, and these vaccines will be made in 100 days rather than 10 years by skipping human trials and shaving safety and efficacy testing down to the bare bones.

The WHO will also decide which medications can be used in medical emergencies, and which you cannot have. In other words, the WHO director-general will decide the health care for every person in every member state, and your local doctor will be required to follow his edicts. You’ll have no medical freedom or bodily autonomy anymore.

Nations will also be forced to implement massive nationwide biosurveillance programs to identify potential pathogens with pandemic potential. This will include swabbing and testing humans, domesticated animals, farm animals, wildlife, farms, factories, wastewater and more, and the chances of finding a pathogen with pandemic potential if searching for it in every nook and cranny of the world are 100%.

The WHO director-general will then have the sole authority to declare a pandemic, or even potential pandemic, at which point all decision-making powers fall under the WHO. However, there are no standards that must be met before a public health emergency can be declared.

The way these documents are written, the director-general can even act on what amounts to hearsay. He doesn’t have to have proof that a pandemic is imminent or in progress. He can act on suspicion. Even more disturbing, the treaty will be in force all the time, so the director-general doesn’t even need to declare an emergency. He will have the authority to dictate public health even when there’s no pandemic. That’s how far-reaching this treaty is.

Nations will also be required to surveil and censor social media. The WHO’s narrative will be the only one allowed. YouTube has already implemented this policy, even though the treaty is not even in place yet.

The History of Biological Warfare and How We Got Here

Nass also reviews the history of biological weapons and why we’re in a situation now where most of the pandemics that have occurred are basically the result of biological weapons development.

In 1969, President Nixon announced the U.S. would end its offensive biowarfare program. This was a strategic rather than altruistic move, because the U.S. was far ahead of other nations when it came to chemical and nuclear weapons. By banning biological weapons, which are relatively simple and inexpensive to create, the U.S. would gain a strategic advantage on the global stage.

Nixon initiated the first global treaty to prevent the creation and use of biological weapons in 1972. The Biological Weapons Convention took effect three years later, in 1975. However, in 1973, genetic engineering was discovered, which suddenly allowed the U.S. to gain a technological advantage that would allow us to make better and more precise biological weapons.

The problem with the Biological Weapons Convention is that there’s no enforcement. To be effective and verifiable, a nation needs to be able to challenge another nation and have the right to carry out inspections, and add sanctions in cases of noncompliance. But this enforcement method was not included, and the U.S. has blocked all efforts to add enforcement articles to the treaty since 1991. So, as explained by Nass:⁷

“Under the guise of preparing their defenses against biowarfare and pandemics, nations have conducted ‘dual-use’ (both offensive and defensive) research and development, which has led to the creation of more deadly and more transmissible microorganisms. And employing new verbiage to shield this effort from scrutiny, biological warfare research was named ‘gain-of-function’ research.”

SARS-CoV-2, for example, appears to be the direct result of gain-of-function research. As noted by Nass, it has “unusual homologies (identical short segments of nucleotides) to human tissues and the HIV virus, which may have caused or contributed to the late autoimmune stage of illness, an impaired immune response and ‘long COVID.’”

As such, SARS-CoV-2 is a biological weapon. David Martin, Ph.D., has also done many interviews, speeches and lectures exposing COVID-19 as a biological warfare crime.

Video Link

Are We Funding Public Health or Bioweapons Development?

As noted in Nass’ article, funding for natural epidemics, such as seasonal influenza, has been lumped together with biodefense funding, which hides the cost of our nation’s bioweapons development, because in reality, “biodefense” is “bioweapons development.”

And, while bioweapons development is dangerous and violates the international treaty, biodefense is useless and a complete waste of money, so it’s a lose-lose proposition for taxpayers.

In March 2023, former CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield testified before Congress stating that gain-of-function research had never, to his knowledge, resulted in a single beneficial drug, vaccine or therapeutic.⁸

In other words, while they conduct this research under the guise of “defense,” all gain-of-function research is biological weapons research and has no beneficial public health applications.

The pandemic treaty promotes the proliferation of biological weapons, and opens the door wide to biological weapons research and testing. It will take us in the opposite direction of where we need to go to prevent future pandemics.

The WHO treaty makes matters even worse by requiring member nations to look for pathogens with pandemic potential, and when they find them, to share them, and any research done on them, with everyone else.

So, the WHO treaty quite literally promotes the proliferation of biological weapons, and opens the door wide to biological weapons research and testing. This will also remove the ability to cast blame on any particular nation for starting a pandemic (read unleash a biological weapon), as everyone is working with the same pathogens.

The treaty also requires nations to eliminate administrative hurdles to gain-of-function research on pathogens with pandemic potential, when we really need far more stringent regulations on this type of work, if we’re going to engage in it at all.

So, the WHO treaty will move us in the complete opposite direction of where we actually need to go if we want to prevent future pandemics. To prevent them, we need to stop gain-of-function research, because that’s the greatest pandemic threat out there.

Pandemic Preparedness Is a Smokescreen

Similarly, the idea that the world can prepare ahead of time for a global pandemic is “a smokescreen behind which lies a fascist approach to social management,” Nass writes. She adds:⁹

“There’s no known way to prevent pandemics, and the methods that governments are spending money on are actually going to make this problem a great deal worse.

The concept of a ‘response’: withholding cheap, available generic drugs in favor of the warp speed development of patentable drugs and vaccines, which will undergo minimal testing and have no liability, is another disaster in the making.”

Our Health Agencies Are Selling Us Out

Importantly, the U.S. government — including our health agencies — have been central in developing and writing these documents, which strips us of our sovereignty as a nation, bodily autonomy as a people, along with freedom, human rights and democracy in general.

Indeed, the IHR amendments specifically remove the need to respect “human rights, dignity and freedom of persons” during public health emergencies. This deletion did not go unnoticed, however, and after severe criticism, language “guaranteeing” human rights was inserted into the latest draft (the Bureau draft) of the pandemic treaty.

The bottom line is, our health agencies are not protecting us. They’re controlled by private, globalist interests, and they’re selling us out.

We also see this in the way the U.S. health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration refused to course correct once it became clear that the COVID shots were not preventing infection or transmission, and were causing historically high rates of injuries.

Instead, they doubled down and imposed mandates, and started fiddling with database algorithms to hide the extent of injuries and deaths. Likewise, the WHO is working on an international vaccine passport, even though the entire premise for it has been eliminated. If the shots don’t prevent infection or transmission, then what good does proof of “vaccination” do?

Same with the masks. No matter how much scientific evidence was thrown at them, health authorities refused to admit that masks don’t work and pushed for wearing two or three masks instead. And what can we say about the worldwide recommendation to treat only advanced-stage infection? It’s medicine 101 to treat a condition as early as possible, especially when it comes to infections.

As noted by Nass, “There can be no question about it: Our health agencies are guilty of malfeasance, misrepresentation and deliberate infliction of harm on their own populations.”

All the basic rules of medicine were tossed out during COVID, and under the pandemic treaty, common sense and basic medical facts will be ousted forever. Nass goes through much more in her article, so I urge you to read it¹⁰ in its entirety.

The Timeline

The IHR amendments will only require a 50% vote of whoever is in the room at the time of the vote, which will take place at the World Health Assembly’s annual meeting, May 22 through 24, 2024.¹¹ The amendments will take effect 10 months later for any nation that does not opt out.

Nations that have not officially opted out will then be bound by the new terms laid out in the amendments. The pandemic treaty will also be voted on during that meeting. It will require two-thirds vote in favor by the members that are in the room and will go into effect as soon as 30 nations have ratified it.

Thirty days after that, the treaty will go into effect for all the nations that have signed on. Any nation that has not signed the treaty will be excluded from its terms. Those who sign the treaty must wait three years before they can get out.