(Off-Guardian)—Sometimes it feels like writing for OffG has fallen into a recognizable pattern the last two years, one that could be best summed up “as ignoring the (mostly) fake stuff on the front pages and collating the real stuff on the back”.

Regular reminders that no matter who you vote for, or which side wins what war, the overarching agenda is still out there, eating and growing. Like the Blob or the Thing.

• Censorship? We all know that’s on the elite’s shopping list.
• Digital currencies? They’re still going.
• Digital ID? Absolutely on the cards.

And we’ll be returning to talk about all of them no doubt until they eats any more or we’re finally shut down (whichever happens first). But today we’re talking about eating the bugs. Not just the bugs though – goo too.

Everything in fact that academics and journalists have decided to group under the umbrella term “alternative protein” in headlines like this one, from Sky News:

Are alternative proteins going mainstream? This multimillion pound new project hopes so

This story is in response to the launch of the UK’s new National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre (NAPIC), a £38million research project co-founded with Imperial College London (of Covid modelling fame).

Professor Karen Polizzi of Imperial’s brand new “Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein” (yes, that Bezos) described the new initiative thus:

Transitioning to healthy, sustainable sources of protein is a pressing global challenge. The National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre will help facilitate this transition by supporting researchers and industry in all parts of the process from product design through to consumer acceptance. At Imperial, we will focus on developing economical, sustainable processes for producing newly discovered alternative proteins on a large scale.”

The “alternative proteins” that are the focus of this  research being…

edible proteins that are derived from sources other than animal agriculture: from plants such as cereals, legumes, tubers and nuts; fungi such as mushrooms; algae such as seaweed; insects; proteins derived via lab-grown microbial cells or fermentation; and lab-grown meat

Like I said:  bugs and goo – oh and some plants too.

What exactly is the appeal of the bugs and the goo  (and plants) as far as the overlords go? That’s a complex question, with a multi-faceted answer.

Part of me thinks they just like to see ordinary people humiliate themselves in the “I think we could get them to brush their tongues” model. But that’s just a theory, we can expound upon it another time.

Outside of sadism and other psycho-social motivations there are practical questions of profit and control. As we covered in our recent piece on genetically modified gene-edited food, intellectual property laws play a role.

An egg is an egg. Beef is beef. You can’t patent a cow or a chicken, and it’s quite difficult to prevent people keeping their own animals.

But when your product is a few thousand freeze-dried crickets ground into a powder (including their eyes, intestines and faeces), mixed with chemical preservatives, thickeners and artificial flavourings to mimic real meat… well, you can patent the hell out of that.

That’s part of the reason the edible insect market is expected to grow to ten times its current size in the next decade.

In one of those ever-so-timely coincidences, the announcement of the new research project has just so happened to accompany a full-court press on “alternative protein” propaganda.

Last week The Guardian ran a glossy advertisement interview with the CEO of Meatly, the lab grown meat company, where he claimed “Cultivated meat is safer, kinder, more sustainable”

The very next day The Guardian (again) reported on a “new study” that (shockingly) found “Plant-based meat alternatives are eco-friendlier and mostly healthier”.

Four days ago, another new study found proteins extracted from peanut shells could be used to supplement animal proteins.

Good Food Magazine thinks eating mealworms can cure diabetes. Medical journals are publishing pieces “investigating the health benefits of alternative proteins”

MSN is reposting articles from the Metro headlining: “Lab-grown meat is coming. Here’s why you might have no choice but to eat it”

Yahoo Finance tells us “Why Lab-grown meat is a win for the UK’s investment industry”

And it’s not just the UK. Obviously. It never is, just like prices don’t change at just one Walmart and the menu doesn’t change at just one MacDonald’s. Because globalism is already a reality, and your “national government” is just a  local branch of a multinational conglomerate.

In the US, the University of California is being pretty straightforward:

Good grub — why you should consider eating bugs

While Finland’s “Solein” company, which makes bacteria pancakes out of “air and sunlight”, has been “Generally Recognised as Safe” by the FDA (the next step, I suppose, would be being “generally recognised as food“).

Australia’s “next superfood” is Hoppa, a bag of powdered crickets. Next month, Melbourne will be playing host to AltProtein24, a conference for the promotion of “alternative proteins”.

Last week Singapore approved 16 different types of insects for human consumption. Singapore is also getting its own “Sustainable Protein Research Centre”, again funded by huge donations from Jeff Bezos.

The silver lining here is that, despite all these efforts, there’s a good possibility this will never work. Article after article highlights the problems of “consumer acceptance” or “public enthusiasm” or similar phrases meaning the same thing:

Most people don’t want to eat bugs.

Hence the propaganda, I suppose. I want to close by pointing out the truly hilarious modern irony of the story. The same outlets that are happily promoting the fact the elites want us to eat bugs and goo:

Are simultaneously calling it a crazy “conspiracy theory”:

We are quite literally in the age of doublethink.

But never mind, we’ll be OK as long as we keep refusing to eat ze bugs…or ze goo.

Traditional authority derives its power from long-standing customs and traditions, while charismatic authority is based on the exceptional personal qualities or charisma of a leader.

According to Weber, the legal-rational authority that characterises Western capitalist industrial society is based on instrumental rationality that focuses on the most efficient means to achieve given ends. This type of rationality manifest in bureaucratic power.

Weber contrasted this with another form of rationality: value rationality that is based on conscious beliefs in the inherent value of certain behaviour.

While Weber saw the benefits of instrumental rationality in terms of increased efficiency, he feared that this could lead to a stifling “iron cage” of a rule-based order and rule following (instrumental rationality) as an end in itself. The result would be humanity’s “polar night of icy darkness.”

Today, technological change is sweeping across the planet and presents many challenges. The danger is of a technological iron cage in the hands of an elite that uses technology for malevolent purposes.

Lewis Coyne of Exeter University says:

We do not — or should not — want to become a society in which things of deeper significance are appreciated only for any instrumental value. The challenge, therefore, is to delimit instrumental rationality and the technologies that embody it by protecting that which we value intrinsically, above and beyond mere utility.”

He adds that we must decide which technologies we are for, to what ends, and how they can be democratically managed, with a view to the kind of society we wish to be.

A major change that we have seen in recent years is the increasing dominance of cloud-based services and platforms. In the food and agriculture sector, we are seeing the rollout of these phenomena tied to a techno solutionist ‘data-driven’ or ‘precision’ agriculture legitimised by ‘humanitarian’ notions of ‘helping farmers’, ‘saving the planet’ and ‘feeding the world’ in the face of some kind of impending Malthusian catastrophe.

A part-fear mongering, part-self-aggrandisement narrative promoted by those who have fuelled ecological devastation, corporate dependency, land dispossession, food insecurity and farmer indebtedness as a result of the global food regime that they helped to create and profited from. Now, with a highly profitable but flawed carbon credit trading scheme and a greenwashed technology-driven eco-modernism, they are going to save humanity from itself.

The world according to Bayer

In the agrifood sector, we are seeing the rollout of data-driven or precision approaches to agriculture by the likes of Microsoft, Syngenta, Bayer and Amazon centred on cloud-based data information services. Data-driven agriculture mines data to be exploited by the agribusiness/big tech giants to instruct farmers what and how much to produce and what type of proprietary inputs they must purchase and from whom.

Data owners (Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet etc.), input suppliers (Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, Cargill etc.) and retail concerns (Amazon, Walmart etc) aim to secure the commanding heights of the global agrifood economy through their monopolistic platforms.

But what does this model of agriculture look like in practice?

Let us use Bayer’s digital platform Climate FieldView as an example. It collects data from satellites and sensors in fields and on tractors and then uses algorithms to advise farmers on their farming practices: when and what to plant, how much pesticide to spray, how much fertiliser to apply etc.

To be part of Bayer’s Carbon Program, farmers have to be enrolled in FieldView. Bayer then uses the FieldView app to instruct farmers on the implementation of just two practices that are said to sequester carbon in the soils: reduced tillage or no-till farming and the planting of cover crops.

Through the app, the company monitors these two practices and estimates the amount of carbon that the participating farmers have sequestered. Farmers are then supposed to be paid according to Bayer’s calculations, and Bayer uses that information to claim carbon credits and sell these in carbon markets.

Bayer also has a programme in the US called ForGround. Upstream companies can use the platform to advertise and offer discounts for equipment, seeds and other inputs.

For example, getting more farmers to use reduced tillage or no-till is of huge benefit to Bayer (sold on the basis of it being ‘climate friendly’). The kind of reduced tillage or no-till promoted by Bayer requires dousing fields with its RoundUp (toxic glyphosate) herbicide and planting seeds of its genetically engineered Roundup resistant soybeans or hybrid maize.

And what of the cover crops referred to above? Bayer also intends to profit from the promotion of cover crops. It has taken majority ownership of a seed company developing a gene-edited cover crop, called CoverCress. Seeds of CoverCress will be sold to farmers who are enrolled in ForGround and the crop will be sold as a biofuel.

But Bayer’s big target is the downstream food companies which can use the platform to claim emissions reductions in their supply chains.

Agribusiness corporations and the big tech companies are jointly developing carbon farming platforms to influence farmers on their choice of inputs and farming practices (big tech companies, like Microsoft and IBM, are major buyers of carbon credits).

The non-profit GRAIN says (see the article The corporate agenda behind carbon farming) that Bayer is gaining increasing control over farmers in various countries, dictating exactly how they farm and what inputs they use through its ‘Carbon Program’.

GRAIN argues that, for corporations, carbon farming is all about increasing their control within the food system and is certainly not about sequestering carbon.

Digital platforms are intended to be one-stop shops for carbon credits, seeds, pesticides and fertilisers and agronomic advice, all supplied by the company, which gets the added benefit of control over the data harvested from the participating farms.

Technofeudalism

Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece, argues that what we are seeing is a shift from capitalism to technofeudalism. He argues that tech giants like Apple, Meta and Amazon act as modern-day feudal lords. Users of digital platforms (such as companies or farmers) essentially become ‘cloud serfs’, and ‘rent’ (fees, data etc) is extracted from them for being on a platform.

In feudalism (land) rent drives the system. In capitalism, profits drive the system. Varoufakis says that markets are being replaced by algorithmic ‘digital fiefdoms’.

Although digital platforms require some form of capitalist production, as companies like Amazon need manufacturers to produce goods for their platforms, the new system represents a significant shift in power dynamics, favouring those who own and control the platforms.

Whether this system is technofeudalism, hypercapitalism or something else is open to debate. But we should at least be able to agree on one thing: the changes we are seeing are having profound impacts on economies and populations that are increasingly surveilled as they are compelled to shift their lives online.

The very corporations that are responsible for the problems of the prevailing food system merely offer more of the same, this time packaged in a  genetically engineered, ecomodernist, fake-green wrapping (see the online article From net zero to glyphosate: agritech’s greenwashed corporate power grab).

Elected officials are facilitating this by putting the needs of monopolistic global interests ahead of ordinary people’s personal freedoms and workers’ rights, as well as the needs of independent local producers, enterprises and markets.

For instance, the Indian government has in recent times signed memoranda of understanding (MoU) with Amazon, Bayer, Microsoft and Syngenta to rollout data-driven, precision agriculture. A ‘one world agriculture’ under their control based on genetically engineered seeds, laboratory created products that resemble food and farming without farmers, with the entire agrifood chain, from field (or lab) to retail in their hands.

This is part of a broader strategy to shift hundreds of millions out of agriculture, ensure India’s food dependence on foreign corporations and eradicate any semblance of food democracy (or national sovereignty).

In response, a ‘citizen letter’ (July 2024) was sent to the government. It stated that it is not clear what the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) will learn from Bayer that the well-paid public sector scientists of the institution cannot develop themselves. The letter says entities that have been responsible for causing an economic and environmental crisis in Indian agriculture are being partnered by ICAR for so-called solutions when these entities are only interested in their profits and not sustainability (or any other nomenclature they use).

The letter poses raises some key concerns. Where is the democratic debate on carbon credit markets. Is the ICAR ensuring that the farmers get the best rather than biased advice that boosts the further rollout of proprietary products? Is there a system in place for the ICAR to develop research and education agendas from the farmers it is supposed to serve as opposed to being led by the whims and business ideas of corporations?

The authors of the letter note that copies of the MoUs are not being shared proactively in the public domain by the ICAR. The letter asks that the ICAR suspends the signed MoUs, shares all details in the public domain and desists from signing any more such MoUs without necessary public debate.

Valuing humanity

Genuine approaches to addressing the challenges humanity faces are being ignored by policymakers or cynically attacked by corporate lobbyists. These solutions involve systemic shifts in agricultural, food and economic systems with a focus on low consumption (energy) lifestyles, localisation and an ecologically sustainable agroecology.

As activist John Wilson says, this is based on creative solutions, a connection to nature and the land, nurturing people, peaceful transformation and solidarity.

This is something discussed in the recent article From Agrarianism to Transhumanism: The Long March to Dystopia in which it is argued that co-operative labour, fellowship and our long-standing spiritual connection to the land should inform how as a society we should live. This stands in stark contrast to the values and impacts of capitalism and technology based on instrumental rationality and too often fuelled by revenue streams and the goal to control populations.

When we hear talk of a ‘spiritual connection’, what is meant by ‘spiritual’? In a broad sense it can be regarded as a concept that refers to thoughts, beliefs and feelings about the meaning of life, rather than just physical existence. A sense of connection to something greater than ourselves. Something akin to Weber’s concept of value rationality. The spiritual, the diverse and the local are juxtaposed with the selfishness of modern urban society, the increasing homogeneity of thought and practice and an instrumental rationality which becomes an end in itself.

Having a direct link with nature/the land is fundamental to developing an appreciation of a type of ‘being’ and an ‘understanding’ that results in a reality worth living in.

However, what we are seeing is an agenda based on a different set of values rooted in a lust for power and money and the total subjugation of ordinary people being rammed through under the false promise of techno solutionism (transhumanism, vaccines in food, neural laces to detect moods implanted in the skull, programmable digital money, track and trace technology etc.) and some distant notion of a techno utopia that leave malevolent power relations intact and unchallenged.

Is this then to be humanity’s never-ending “polar night of icy darkness”? Hopefully not. This vision is being imposed from above. Ordinary people (whether, for example, farmers in India or those being beaten down through austerity policies) find themselves on the receiving end of a class war being waged against them by a mega-rich elite.

Indeed, in 1941, Herbert Marcuse stated that technology could be used as an instrument for control and domination. Precisely the agenda of the likes of Bayer, the Gates Foundation, BlackRock and the World Bank, which are trying to eradicate genuine diversity and impose a one-size-fits-all model of thinking and behaviour.

A final thought courtesy of civil rights campaigner  Frederick Douglass in a speech from 1857:

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

This is a very concerning development because once the panic boat launches it’s very difficult to bring it back to harbor. We saw this with Covid Pandemic Panic Theater and we’re very likely going to see far worse gaslighting and fearmongering with Bird Flu if it’s allowed. This is why it’s so important to quash their narrative while it’s forming by alerting as many as possible to the machinations of the Globalist Elite Cabal. We might not be able to bring the panic boat back to harbor but we can sink it before it makes it all the way out to sea. Here’s Kit Knightly…

(Off-Guardian)—The bird flu narrative is constantly developing, so I figured it was time for an update. You know…to keep you all abreast of the chicken situation. Ba dum tss!

Back in April the scare stories were about Bird Flu jumping from birds to cattle and from cattle to people, and how – as a result – we should stop eating red meat.

Things have moved on since then. May has been a busy month for bird flu watchers. Back on May 9th it was reported that 70 people in Colorado were being “monitored” for the disease following “potential exposure”, but no details on the exact nature or method of exposure were ever released.

Another poultry worker, this time in Michigan, became the second official US case on May 21st. There are now fears that Bird Flu may have spread to the food supply, after it was found in a “condemned dairy cow”.

Four days ago, Forbes reported a “new study” claiming “Drinking Infected Milk Could Spread Disease”. While NPR is warning that “limited testing leaves safety questions unanswered” regarding raw, unpasteurized milk.

But it’s not just cows we have to worry about now. The Atlantic is worried about pigs, with Katherine Wu calling them “The Bird-Flu Host We Should Worry About”

Just today the Telegraph reported that a “slight evolution” in the H5N1 influenza strain has allowed it to “adapt to mammalian hosts”.

One ecologist told phys.org that infections in dairy cows are just “the tip of the iceberg”, and that mammals all over the globe are infected.

It’s spreading outside America too. The world’s third human case was supposedly an Australian child recently returned from travelling in India, alongside that two Victorian farms have reported cases of a different strain.

Naturally, China is going along with it, reporting their own fatality due to a third strain of bird flu earlier today. So that’s the problem chuntering along at a decent pace. How’s the solution coming along? An article in MedicalXPress discusses the “ethical considerations” for various bird flu interventions.

New vaccines – both for chickens and humans – are being developed with Covid-like efficiency. The human shot is of course mRNA based.

Reuters reports that the US, UK, EU and Canada are all “taking steps to acquire or manufacture H5N1 bird flu vaccines”. Some nations are already considering mandating all poultry farm workers take the shot when it becomes available.

As you can see, things are moving pretty fast – almost all of these stories are from just the last three or four days. I predicted in my recent article that bird flu was the main contender for “the next pandemic”, and it looks like that’s where we’re headed.

The good news is that the human cases caused a surge in the value of Moderna and BioTech’s stock. Isn’t that nice?

Of course, that will be nothing compared to the riches that will start pouring in when the new Bird Flu vaccines get emergency approval.

Sound off and join the fight by subscribing to the End Medical Tyranny Substack.

They are far from alone in covering this. Back in March, Sky News was asking: “Next pandemic is around the corner,’ expert warns – but would lockdown ever happen again?”

On April 3rd, the Financial Times asked something similar: “The next pandemic is coming. Will we be ready?”

Less than an hour ago, the Daily Mail invited us inside “the world’s deadliest cave that could cause the next pandemic”.

Just two days ago a professional panic spreader wrote for CNN:

The next pandemic threat demands action now!!!

OK, I added the exclamation points, but they are very much implied in the original text. So, while Iran and Israel rattle their sabres on the front pages, I thought we should take a look at the quieter back pages to see what we can learn, and help us predict how “the next pandemic” will unfold.

WHAT IS “THE NEXT PANDEMIC”?

I mean…I feel like that’s fairly self-explanatory. Seriously though, it’s the one they’ve been predicting from pretty much the moment Covid started. First it was going to be monkey pox – sorry MPox – but that fizzled.

Of course by “pandemic”, we really mean “psy-op”, because nothing about the next pandemic will be any more real than the last pandemic. Hell, given the leaps forward in AI technology, it could be considerably less real next time. We don’t know any of the details yet, but there’s enough vague coverage to tease out some guesstimates.

WHAT DISEASE WILL THEY USE?

Probably the most important question. We already mentioned monkey pox, but that doesn’t look likely anymore. Right now they are mostly talking about “disease X” – a term which caused a little panic in certain sections when it first appeared on the scene – but that isn’t some top secret gain of function super disease, it’s literally a place holder name.

And it’s a placeholder name which does its job, for the time being.

After all, they don’t really need an actual name yet, any more than they need an actual disease, they just need the idea of a disease to hold over people’s heads while they construct the legislative rules of their health-based tyranny. Indeed, the vagueness “Disease X” provides is helpful, as it keeps the legislation vague too.

“Pandemic Treaty” will hand WHO keys to global government

That said, they will likely want and/or need to produce an actual disease at some point. When that time comes around, it will almost certainly be another respiratory disease, because they are easy to “fake” using pre-existing endemic diseases and their uniform symptoms.

The prime candidate is bird flu, which has been slow-boiling in the news for two years now and has recently got a big uptick in coverage due to it allegedly passing to people from cows.

The UN reports “pandemic experts” are “concerned over avian influenza spread to humans”. Just yesterday, Jeremy Farrar of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that “[the] threat Of Bird Flu spreading to Humans is a great concern”

Prompting gleefully sensationalist headlines like this from the Daily Star:

New pandemic ‘expected’ as human-to-human bird flu of ‘great concern’ to WHO

Bird flu is a convenient pick because it enables them to push their health tyranny and their food transition at the same time. They can claim that dairy, beef, chicken and eggs have become “dangerous” as an excuse to ration them or at least force scarcity while they drive the prices up.

They will then push the idea that veganism and/or lab grown meat “prevents pandemics”. Something they’ve been claiming since at least 2021. The Daily Mail reported just a few hours ago:

H5N1 strain of bird flu is found in MILK for first time in ‘very high concentrations,’ World Health Organization warns

The downside to bird flu is that it’s hard to work the climate change angle into the narrative, so maybe they’ll go with something else.

WHEN WILL IT HAPPEN?

Probably not until the winter, I would guess January 2025 at the earliest, for two reasons:

1. They need it to be flu season so they can co-opt normal seasonal deaths into their “pandemic” narrative.
2. I think they’ll want to wait until after the “big election year” is over so there are fresh governments in place.

That second point is not just a hunch, but based on the article from Sky I mentioned above. It asks “would lockdown ever happen again?”, and an “expert” answers [emphasis added]:

…if another lockdown was needed, the current Tory government would either have to minimise scandals over their own rule-breaking – or change hands completely to keep the public on board. If we had a new government, people would be far more likely to have faith in them because they would be less likely to say, ‘it’s the same bunch as before – why should we do it again?’

Which I think is correct.

That would also explain the raft of sudden political resignations – including Covid stars Angela Merkel and Jacinda Ardern – which swept the world in Covid’s wake. They were aware then, and are still aware now, their players were spent and they needed a fresh roster before coming back for the second leg.

So, elections first – with all the nonsense that entails – then maybe the “next pandemic”.

HOW WILL IT BE DIFFERENT FROM “COVID”?

Any future pandemic psy-op will be unlikely to follow the covid pattern beat-for-beat, for one thing the Covid narrative spent itself before achieving everything it was meant to achieve.

You can bet the farm that, in the four years since, there have been working groups and researchers poring over the pandemic data to figure out what went wrong and how they can fix it next time.

There seem to be three recurring themes.

1. Vaccines not lockdowns There will be a focus on securing vaccines rather than lockdowns. Indeed, part of the whole “aw shucks lockdowns were damaging who’d have thunk it” rigmarole is about setting up the dynamic that “next time” we need to do anything we can to avoid lockdowns.

The media are (finally) admitting lockdown is worse than “Covid”…but why?

Lockdowns will become a threat rather than a fact.

“We HAVE to mandate vaccines, because the economy can’t afford another lockdown.”

“Take the vaccine, you don’t want to have another lockdown do you?”

So there will be more testing, more masks and more vaccine mandates…and/or quarantine camps for the unvaccinated. And if they DO have lockdowns, they will be entirely blamed on the “anti-vaxxers”, of course.

2. Speed speed speed The main failing of the Covid narrative was that it ran out of steam. By the time the vaccines rolled out in early 2021 the pandemic fatigue was already setting in. And by the time the third boosters and fourth waves were in the headlines nobody really cared.

The propaganda blitzkrieg of early 2020 was arguably the greatest and most wide-reaching misinformation campaign of all time – and it was almost overwhelmingly effective. But it slowed, stalled, stopped and staled.

Next time, they know now, they need to be faster. Bill Gates said as much at the 2022 Munich Security Conference. They need to get the disease out the deaths up and vaccines in before people even realise what happened.

Hence the “100 day vaccines” plan. As the ever-reliably-hysterical Devi Shridar writes for the Guardian:

most governments are working towards the 100-day challenge: that is, how to contain a virus spreading while a scientific response, such as a vaccine, diagnostic or treatment, can be approved, manufactured and delivered to the public.

The “100 Day Mission” is the brainchild of CEPI, the Gates and WHO-backed NGO. Its main aim is to make it possible to produce new vaccines for previously unknown pathogens in 100 days.

In the US, the target is 130 days from pathogen discovery to nation-wide vaccine coverage.

It should go without saying that real, reliable, “safe and effective” vaccines cannot be produced in 100 days. Whatever they make, sell and force you to inject in that time…it won’t be a vaccine

Reality Check: “100 day vaccines” are NOT possible.

3. Free Speech is Dangerous. The slow development of the narrative post-2020 may have hindered the health tyranny agenda, but it was the independent media that really hurt it. The impromptu network of dissident experts, independent researchers and social media movements spread “misinformation” faster than the powers-that-be could fact-check it.

We have seen perpetual messaging about the dangers of “misinformaion and disinformation” since then, including prominently at the most recent DAVOS summit earlier this year, where it was labelled one of the “three greatest dangers” facing the planet.

Last week, a UK Parliamentary Committee published “recommendations” headlined:

Government should learn lessons from pandemic to improve communications and counter misinformation

Only a few days ago, Gordon Brown was quoted in the news “warning” that:

“fake news’ risks preparations for next pandemic”

Which heavily implies they will move to counter this “fake news” before the “next pandemic” begins.

WILDCARD PREDICTION: The multipolar angle. Whatever form the “next pandemic” takes, they will likely avoid the monolithic messaging of 2020, where total global conformity to “the message” was one of the real telltale signs of deception. Next time prepare for countries like India, China and Russia to forge their own pandemic strategy – focusing on some new treatment or technology that the West refuses to endorse.

There are no sources to back this one, yet. It’s just a gut feeling.

So what am I officially predicting for the “next pandemic”?

1. It will won’t be launched until after the major elections this year, because they want new politic faces untarnished by Covid
2. It will likely be bird flu or some other respiratory disease, launched in the winter to hijack the real flu season again
3. The chosen disease will fit into one or more pre-existing agenda – either impacting food or originating from some forced “climate change” connection or both
4. They will move faster, producing “vaccines” in 100 days to stop people getting wise to the deception as they did with Covid
5. They will try and avoid lockdowns, but use them as a threat to enforce vaccine mandates more rigorously
6. They will clamp down harder on “mis- and dis-information” before launching the new narrative.
7. The next pandemic will have a multipolarity angle to establish a fake binary

That’s how I see it. Feel free to bookmark this post for future reference.

Even if I’ve guessed the details wrong here, there’s no question they are planning to roll out another pandemic at some point in near future. A covid sequel that learns from past mistakes.

While, in some ways, it will likely be worse than Covid was – the good news is that this time we can be ready for it.

At a hearing in Strasbourg, the European Court of Human Rights found the government of Switzerland had violated the women’s human rights by “failing to do enough” to combat the alleged effect of ‘man-made climate change’.

Calling it a “decision that will set a precedent for future climate lawsuits“, Reuters reports:

The European Court of Human Rights’ ruling, in favour of the more than 2,000 Swiss women who brought the case, is expected to resonate in court decisions across Europe and beyond […] The Swiss women, known as KlimaSeniorinnen and aged over 64, said their government’s climate inaction put them at risk of dying during heatwaves. They argued their age and gender made them particularly vulnerable to such climate change impacts.

The report goes on to add [emphasis mine]:

The verdict in the Swiss case, which cannot be appealed, will have international ripple effects, most directly by establishing a binding legal precedent for all 46 countries that are signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights

This case is far from an isolated example. It’s part of an ongoing and widespread legal campaign to associate human rights with the spurious climate change agenda.

Famously, a group of Portuguese teens have been attempting to sue 32 countries for years (it used to be 33, but they dropped Ukraine from the list of defendants when it became expedient to do so).

EHRC “Youth Climate Case” could see courts forcing policy on nation-states

It seems likely neither the Portuguese teens nor the Swiss seniors represent genuine grassroots activism. They are heavily backed by corporate-supported NGOs like Avaaz, the Climate Litigation Network and others. And this tells its own story.

In Strasbourg, the ECHR is already hearing six further “climate change vs human rights” cases (not including the Portuguese teens case which was recently rejected on a technicality).

Other countries from Brazil to South Korea to Australia have similar cases in front of their national courts.

Just last week the Indian Supreme Court found that Indian citizens have a ‘right to be free from the adverse effects of climate change’, a truly bizarre finding that seems dangerously vague.

Those are just the current cases, with this decision in Strasbourg we can likely expect an avalanche of new ones, as Reuters observes, it will “embolden more communities to bring climate cases against governments.”

It’s not hard to see the purpose of this legal campaign.

Generally, supra-national courts handing down legal decisions impacting multiple countries is a way of creating quasi-global legislation in all but name.

For example, as Reuters notes, this single court case representing just 2000 people from one small country effectively forced the creation of a “binding legal precedent” in all 46 signatories of the ECHR, with a combined population of over 700 million people.

More specifically, by tying climate change to human rights governments can justify enforcing increasingly strict climate change policies, while simultaneously making it appear that the judiciary are forcing their hand.

Now they can effectively claim “You’ve got to switch to an electric car, or you’re infringing other people’s human rights”, but also, “don’t blame us our hands are tied by judges”.

It also enables a propaganda campaign of escalating divisive language, mirroring the vaccinated vs unvaccinated messaging during the “pandemic”.

Remember how we were told, “the unvaccinated are filling ICUs and making another lockdown more likely”? Well, in the future, that will become “climate change deniers are violating your human rights by refusing to use a smart meter”.

Perhaps the most concerning aspect of this case is this phrase, repeated everywhere [emphasis added]:

Human rights violated by Swiss inaction on climate

Previously, rights violations have been generally considered active rather than passive. The idea you can violate someone’s rights through “inaction” sets the precedent that courts can – and should – compel action to “protect” the rights of others.

A very slippery slope. After all, if states and governments can be compelled to act, so can individuals.

The fact that the agenda has not sent out a second wave of horror and fear propaganda is also rather telling to these folks. Where is the next pandemic? What happened to Covid’s diabolic never-ending run of mutations, what happened to Monkey Pox? What happened to Disease X?

Yes, all this could still happen, but it seems there have been more false starts—starts that didn’t go anywhere. But if so, you would think they wouldn’t have put them out there just to not have them continue. It’s been rather weird, like an electrical storm you see on the horizon with its threatening lightning strikes, but it never gets close enough to warrant closing the cellar door.

How about CBDCs? And the Digital IDs? You hear a lot about these, but nothing that is concretely happening to implement them. Is it happening in other places? Australia? Germany? The UK? Of course, a lot is said about it, on YouTube, and in alt media. Lots of talking heads, but how imminent is it? Actually, I won’t dwell on this, I have no doubt all of this is coming, but has the dragon been wounded? Even a little bit? Has this march into oblivion been slowed down?

Maybe there is no wounding of the general juggernaut of world rule by the schmucks who are claiming power. Although even that sacrosanct organization may have suffered from shell damage. Wasn’t DAVOS not all that they expected this past year? Hasn’t there been some pretty obvious whiplash from some leaders in their little club? How about the UN and the “sustainable development” circus? How is that going?

Anyway, I digress. Although the health of the world agenda, including all of these projects I mention, are all part of it, Covid, and pandemics in general, are the specific topics of this article.

I don’t buy any of this talk of victory for a New York minute. This is like cancer, you can’t claim victory until it is ALL gone, every last scrap of it. Remissions are nice, but if you’ve still got cancer in your body somewhere, it is only a time-out. I feel that this is similar. Even if one cell survived, it would start multiplying again and wouldn’t stop until it was big and gnarly and spitting out all the garbage this monster has been known to spit out. So, I don’t buy it…but…

Is it possible that at least one battle was won? Maybe, but just because they have pulled the troops back doesn’t mean they didn’t still take the city and got essentially what they stormed in for. I may still say that is a possibility. I mean, what did they want as a consequence of their Covid campaign? Did they want 100% compliance, with billions of sheep bowing down to them? Did they want everyone locked up in their own little cage, ala 1984, each of us in a squalid apartment with just a giant TV in the middle of it so Big Brother could blab at us all day long? If that is true, then indeed the psyop failed, because they didn’t get that—at least not yet.

But what if they got this: a toxic injection placed in billions of people worldwide that will kill untold millions over the course of about 20 years? Not only that, but the injection will render another untold millions sterile. Do the math here: how many people would need to be sterilized over 20 years to reduce the population worldwide by 1 billion? 2 billion? What other havoc could such a death jab wreak? What untold horrors are yet to overcome us? Your guess is as good as mine. Think zombies here, think soulless ghouls, think humans with no empathy, think lost humanity.

And that’s just the physical consequences. What about the psychological success they have had with the Covid campaign? Sure, many participants have shot them the bird regarding more boosters, and have ignored more threats of losing jobs over vaccine resistance. Sure, the courts have ruled in Canada that the illustrious leader here performed a no-no with his reckless enactment of the Emergency Act, and as a result, lawsuits are flowing into the courts. Does all this mean that no one fell for the psychological operation? That no one was mentally affected by the lockdowns, the masks, the closure of schools, churches, and other institutions? Does it mean that we have all recovered from the trauma of those three years, and mentally and emotionally we are just back to square one—all normal again?

If anyone reading this knows anything about hypnosis, they probably understand what hypnotic suggestion is all about. It is real, folks. What has been altered subliminally in our unconscious minds could be quite formidable. We are being programmed for better performance in future projects the agenda has in store for us. Most of the shrews reading this are safe from this brainwashing (hopefully) because we closed our eyes during the deadly meteor storm perpetrated by the fear-mongering agenda (watch The Day of the Triffids to understand that reference!) But those out there who got caught up in it and drank the delayed-reaction Kool-Aid—are all like sleeper spies from the Cold War, soon to be re-activated at some future date to continue complying with TPTB’s bidding.

Here I go again. I am supposed to be entertaining the possibility that the Covid psyop failed, not suggesting evidence to prove its great success. Sorry. Well, maybe it didn’t go as well as they wanted it to go. It does seem there was a lot more gas in the tank and that they could have pushed it a bit further than they did. They were doing pretty well, but they just fizzled out. Maybe they did expect more people to get vaxxed, maybe that was a disappointment. They sure looked like they were going for the whole enchilada with all their “you’ve GOT to get vaccinated!!” hoopla. Maybe they got too much pushback from us shrews. So many angry shrews showed up pretty quickly. And the shrews that were already on the scene, who were not surprised with all these shenanigans to begin with, just got louder and louder. Sure, not many sheep flipped, but some did. Their booster campaign is floundering (in my opinion, only because they turned the heat down, or off entirely).

So maybe they did get nicked a bit. Maybe a few arrows penetrated the armour, and they backed off a step or two. Maybe we did surprise the bastards with our resolve, tenacity, wit, and refusal to play the game.

But then again, maybe not.

Writer Ted Reece notes that the general rate of profit has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s. By late 2019, many companies could not generate enough profit. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cashflows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent.

Professor Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University has described how closing down the global economy in early 2020 under the guise of fighting a supposedly new and novel pathogen allowed the US Federal Reserve to flood collapsing financial markets (COVID relief) with freshly printed money without causing hyperinflation. Lockdowns curtailed economic activity, thereby removing demand for the newly printed money (credit) in the physical economy and preventing ‘contagion’.

According to investigative journalist Michael Byrant, €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the crisis in Europe alone. The financial collapse staring European central bankers in the face came to a head in 2019. The appearance of a ‘novel virus’ provided a convenient cover story.

The European Central Bank agreed to a €1.31 trillion bailout of banks followed by the EU agreeing to a €750 billion recovery fund for European states and corporations. This package of long-term, ultra-cheap credit to hundreds of banks was sold to the public as a necessary programme to cushion the impact of the pandemic on businesses and workers.

In response to a collapsing neoliberalism, we are now seeing the rollout of an authoritarian great reset — an agenda that intends to reshape the economy and change how we live.

SHIFT TO AUTHORITARIANISM

The new economy is to be dominated by a handful of tech giants, global conglomerates and e-commerce platforms, and new markets will also be created through the financialisation of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the notion of protecting the environment.

In recent years, we have witnessed an overaccumulation of capital, and the creation of such markets will provide fresh investment opportunities (including dodgy carbon offsetting Ponzi schemes)  for the super-rich to park their wealth and prosper.

This great reset envisages a transformation of Western societies, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance. Being rolled out under the benign term of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the World Economic Forum (WEF) says the public will eventually ‘rent’ everything they require (remember the WEF video ‘you will own nothing and be happy’?): stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ and underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.

Climate alarmism and the mantra of sustainability are about promoting money-making schemes. But they also serve another purpose: social control.

Neoliberalism has run its course, resulting in the impoverishment of large sections of the population. But to dampen dissent and lower expectations, the levels of personal freedom we have been used to will not be tolerated. This means that the wider population will be subjected to the discipline of an emerging surveillance state.

To push back against any dissent, ordinary people are being told that they must sacrifice personal liberty in order to protect public health, societal security (those terrible Russians, Islamic extremists or that Sunak-designated bogeyman George Galloway) or the climate. Unlike in the old normal of neoliberalism, an ideological shift is occurring whereby personal freedoms are increasingly depicted as being dangerous because they run counter to the collective good.

The real reason for this ideological shift is to ensure that the masses get used to lower living standards and accept them. Consider, for instance, the Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill saying that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. And then there is Rob Kapito of the world’s biggest asset management firm BlackRock, who says that a “very entitled” generation must deal with scarcity for the first time in their lives.

At the same time, to muddy the waters, the message is that lower living standards are the result of the conflict in Ukraine and supply shocks that both the war and ‘the virus’ have caused.

The net-zero carbon emissions agenda will help legitimise lower living standards (reducing your carbon footprint) while reinforcing the notion that our rights must be sacrificed for the greater good. You will own nothing, not because the rich and their neoliberal agenda made you poor but because you will be instructed to stop being irresponsible and must act to protect the planet.

NET-ZERO AGENDA

But what of this shift towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and the plan to slash our carbon footprints? Is it even feasible or necessary?

Gordon Hughes, a former World Bank economist and current professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, says in a new report that current UK and European net-zero policies will likely lead to further economic ruin.

Apparently, the only viable way to raise the cash for sufficient new capital expenditure (on wind and solar infrastructure) would be a two decades-long reduction in private consumption of up to 10 per cent. Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war; even then, never for more than a decade.

But this agenda will also cause serious environmental degradation. So says Andrew Nikiforuk in the article The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics, which outlines how the green techno-dream is vastly destructive.

He lists the devastating environmental impacts of an even more mineral-intensive system based on renewables and warns:

“The whole process of replacing a declining system with a more complex mining-based enterprise is now supposed to take place with a fragile banking system, dysfunctional democracies, broken supply chains, critical mineral shortages and hostile geopolitics.”

All of this assumes that global warming is real and anthropogenic. Not everyone agrees. In the article Global warming and the confrontation between the West and the rest of the world, journalist Thierry Meyssan argues that net zero is based on political ideology rather than science. But to state such things has become heresy in the Western countries and shouted down with accusations of ‘climate science denial’.

Regardless of such concerns, the march towards net zero continues, and key to this is the United Nations Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development Goals.

Today, almost every business or corporate report, website or brochure includes a multitude of references to ‘carbon footprints’, ‘sustainability’, ‘net zero’ or ‘climate neutrality’ and how a company or organisation intends to achieve its sustainability targets. Green profiling, green bonds and green investments go hand in hand with displaying ‘green’ credentials and ambitions wherever and whenever possible.

It seems anyone and everyone in business is planting their corporate flag on the summit of sustainability. Take Sainsbury’s, for instance. It is one of the ‘big six’ food retail supermarkets in the UK and has a vision for the future of food that it published in 2019.

Here’s a quote from it:

“Personalised Optimisation is a trend that could see people chipped and connected like never before. A significant step on from wearable tech used today, the advent of personal microchips and neural laces has the potential to see all of our genetic, health and situational data recorded, stored and analysed by algorithms which could work out exactly what we need to support us at a particular time in our life. Retailers, such as Sainsbury’s could play a critical role to support this, arranging delivery of the needed food within thirty minutes — perhaps by drone.”

Tracked, traced and chipped — for your own benefit. Corporations accessing all of our personal data, right down to our DNA. The report is littered with references to sustainability and the climate or environment, and it is difficult not to get the impression that it is written so as to leave the reader awestruck by the technological possibilities.

However, the promotion of a brave new world of technological innovation that has nothing to say about power — who determines policies that have led to massive inequalities, poverty, malnutrition, food insecurity and hunger and who is responsible for the degradation of the environment in the first place — is nothing new.

The essence of power is conveniently glossed over, not least because those behind the prevailing food regime are also shaping the techno-utopian fairytale where everyone lives happily ever after eating bugs and synthetic food while living in a digital panopticon.

FAKE GREEN

The type of ‘green’ agenda being pushed is a multi-trillion market opportunity for lining the pockets of rich investors and subsidy-sucking green infrastructure firms and also part of a strategy required to secure compliance required for the ‘new normal’.

It is, furthermore, a type of green that plans to cover much of the countryside with wind farms and solar panels with most farmers no longer farming. A recipe for food insecurity.

Those investing in the ‘green’ agenda care first and foremost about profit. The supremely influential BlackRock invests in the current food system that is responsible for polluted waterways, degraded soils, the displacement of smallholder farmers, a spiralling public health crisis, malnutrition and much more.

It also invests in healthcare — an industry that thrives on the illnesses and conditions created by eating the substandard food that the current system produces. Did Larry Fink, the top man at BlackRock, suddenly develop a conscience and become an environmentalist who cares about the planet and ordinary people? Of course not.

Any serious deliberations on the future of food would surely consider issues like food sovereignty, the role of agroecology and the strengthening of family farms — the backbone of current global food production.

The aforementioned article by Andrew Nikiforuk concludes that, if we are really serious about our impacts on the environment, we must scale back our needs and simplify society.

In terms of food, the solution rests on a low-input approach that strengthens rural communities and local markets and prioritises smallholder farms and small independent enterprises and retailers, localised democratic food systems and a concept of food sovereignty based on self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and regenerative agriculture.

It would involve facilitating the right to culturally appropriate food that is nutritionally dense due to diverse cropping patterns and free from toxic chemicals while ensuring local ownership and stewardship of common resources like land, water, soil and seeds.

That’s where genuine environmentalism and the future of food begins.

Some of us of course checked the weather networks to see what was coming but fewer do that these days. Weather reports now are too much full of conspicuous adjectives to startle you into a green panic over the state of the world and we grow tired of the drama. In the old days we’d say it was a funny day and then carry on doing whatever it was we did without a bit of consternation.

We will adapt. We always have. At the end of the day, what are you going to do about it anyway? But a cold day without power is time for tea and reading and pensiveness. A comfort kind of day. Those are the best. Particularly if the book is good.

Unfortunately I was trying to read C.J. Hopkin’s Rise of the New Normal Reich. It did not go well. It hasn’t gone well every time. The book apparently is excellent but it just terrifies me and I can’t read it beyond a few paragraphs at a time. I feel obligated to read this book because I know the price being paid by the author and that tells us more than probably the book could ever tell us.

Just like the covid pandemic, it is the reaction that terrifies. For Hopkins it is the summonings by the powers-that-be, the judicial legal terrorism on a person with an opinion. The return of book burnings… One step away we are. One little step. Although some would say we’re already there.

And knowing all this it feels like a kind of betrayal to be having such a difficult time reading this. It is Hopkin’s usual brilliance. I feel like I have to personally apologize to him for being so cowardly about reading it. What if what they say this book is about is true? And do I want to know? I’ve reached that stage. The Do I Want To Know stage of it all. Somewhat like checking on the weather. We just don’t want to know. For now. At least for now. Just let it all happen and carry on.

But that won’t do of course. Not for fools like us. Whether we were born fools or became fools it doesn’t much matter anymore. If we are the fools or the prophets, we can’t even know. With our horses all saddled up and frantically holding on to the reins we tilt at windmills perhaps or maybe we are not tilting at all. Maybe we are making a difference. We don’t much know.

For now the best that we can do is specialize in our horror. And if reading Hopkin’s is a problem for me, finding my specialty in the horror is even worse. I zip-line through headlines and stories and news events like a firefly on amphetamines, ablaze unpredictably with righteous rage and deadening sadness and routinely flabberghasted but still flying. Corruption? War? Freedom of speech? AI? Inflation? Which one indeed.

I’ve quite given up trying to find the positive in any of this—Climate change e.g. could make Canada the world’s bread basket or won’t it be nice to see India as the world’s new superpower after all they’ve been through. Or something equally trite and positive, those two words being synonymous these days. In many ways you can only be one or the other—frantically flying or brightly ridiculous. The two narratives. Only the two. There are no others. So they say. In between you are a target or you are lost. Make your stand. Pick your side. Sitting on the fence only gives you a sore bum. Bastards judging. Always pushing. Are you with us or against us? Hell if I know. I don’t want to know. I’ve explained that already.

But I can say there is one thing that bothers me and that I want to know the answer to. I am uncertain on what to think.

It is the vindictive glee. I do not like vindictive glee. (I do not like green eggs and ham either but that is neither here nor there except to remind me of book burnings and how sad I feel about the attack on Dr. Seuss.) I want to understand whether it is fair to condemn such ugliness? This “see—I gotcha!” thing out there now with so many of the so-called conspiracy theories proving true and parliamentarians leaping nastily on each other and pundits red smug with spiteful delight. The finally vindicated being vindictive.

My instinct is to condemn it because how can it be that anyone can take pleasure in another’s pain or shame even if they’ve done such damage to us all? But mostly there is the fear that lingers with that forgiving approach: the fear that those at least motivated to change the world with vengeance on their perceived enemies will give up. Even if they are ugly in their attack, at least they are doing something which motivated if only by their anger might change the direction of all of this nonsense. Because it is nasty nonsense now and directions must change. We are flailing in hell. Only the brave-hearted and persistent and single-minded will find their way through it all.

So if it is vindictiveness that makes you fight for peace, then who is anyone to condemn? Doesn’t the ends justify the means in this case?

But isn’t that what the bad guys are doing? My way or the highway. Come hell or high water the Agenda must go on. Despite the legal suits. Despite the farmers and the truckers protests. Despite elections. Despite the suffering and pain of the mooing herds. Despite the truth leaking out like sour whiskey from a broken bottle. We then become them. And was that the only way? I do not know.

For if all these peaceful means do not sway the Agenda, then what is next?

And for some it does not matter who is winning, as long as there is the divisiveness. It is that which we had facing us mooing herds to overcome. It was not the enemy so much. Is it even possible to find a bridge to each other anymore? In this world? I do not know. I only know that it is our only hope. For peace at least. Peace amidst the ruins is better than war in utopia. Somebody else’s idea of utopia anyway because one person’s utopia is another person’s ruins. We should already know that by now.

But this is as dark a topic as can be on which many things can be said and outside the warmth creeps on tender toes in the snow and promises us Spring. On that we can take hope.

Peace. Here. Now.

…and of course the earworm:

Gamaleya Center Director Alexander Gintsburg has called on Russia to develop genetic vaccine prototypes in anticipation of future public health crises.

To avoid another Covid-like pandemic, it is necessary to create a “national collection” of vaccine preparations designed to counter the “characteristics of possible pandemic pathogens”, Gintsburg said in an interview with TASS. Vaccine formulas can be “developed and created using certified and tested technology. Currently in our country such technology … is the technology used to make Sputnik V, that is, the technology of genetically engineered adenoviral vectors,” he explained.

The rapid deployment of vaccine preparations will play a crucial role in fighting a “possible pandemic pathogen, or ‘Disease X’ as they call it in Davos”, Gintsburg said, referring to recent discussions at the World Economic Forum about the arrival of a hypothetical “Disease X”.

The lead scientist behind Sputnik V told TASS that the Covid pandemic had demonstrated how safe and effective vaccines could be created not in decades, but in as little as five months. Ideally, vaccines should be administered to the public 1 to 1.5 months in advance to stop future pandemics from ravaging the population and the economy, Gintsburg said.

Despite Gintsburg’s confidence in his genetic vaccine formula, the Russian government has declined to disclose the results of Sputnik V’s “tested technology”. In January 2022, Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Health Protection Alexei Kurinny filed a complaint to the Prosecutor General’s Office about the Ministry of Health’s unwillingness to release Sputnik V’s clinical trial results.

The ministry defended its decision by explaining that data about Sputnik V’s safety and efficacy was “confidential and contains information constituting a commercial secret.”

In October 2023, the State Duma Committee on Health Protection rejected a proposed bill authored by Kurinny that would have required drug makers to publish the final results of clinical trials.

In the same month, Gintsburg revealed that Sputnik V was no longer effective against Covid and that the drug’s formula would have to be updated.

TASS reported last week that close to 300,000 doses of the updated vaccine have been shipped to Russia’s regions.

Gamaleya is also developing an updated Covid vaccine for adolescents. On Tuesday, Gintsburg announced that no adverse reactions had been identified while testing the new drug on children ages 12-17.

Under new rules adopted last year by the Russian Ministry of Health, modifications to Sputnik V can receive authorization after being tested on “50 healthy volunteers”. The approval process takes between 16-38 days.

Russian authorities have spoken openly about their intention to continue producing and distributing Sputnik V. In October 2022, Kirill Dmitriev, the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), the main financer of Sputnik V, said RDIF was ready to produce and distribute new versions of the vaccine within two to three months after the appearance of new mutations.

Dmitriev, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader (Class of 2009), worked for Goldman Sachs and McKinsey & Company before taking the reins at RDIF in 2011.

About the Author

Riley Waggaman is your humble Moscow correspondent. He worked for RT, Press TV, Russia Insider, yadda yadda. In his youth, he attended a White House lawn party where he asked Barack Obama if imprisoned whistleblower Bradley Manning (Chelsea was still a boy back then) “had a good Easter.” Good times good times. You can subscribe to his Substack here, or follow him on twitter or Telegram.

“‘Biocomputer’ combines lab-grown brain tissue with electronic hardware”

“A system that integrates brain cells into a hybrid machine can recognize voices”

“Brainoware: Pioneering AI and Brain Organoid Fusion”

Scientists are trying to inject human brain tissue into artificial networks because AI isn’t working quite as well as we have been led to think. AI uses a horrendous amount of energy do its kind of parallel processing, while the human brain uses about a light bulb’s worth of power to perform similar feats. So, AI designers are looking to cannibalize some parts from humans to make artificial networks work as efficiently as human brains. But let’s put the fact of AI’s shortcomings aside for the moment and examine this new cyborg innovation.

The breakthrough in biocomputing reported by Hongwei Cai et al. in Nature Electronics involves the creation of a brain organoid. That is a ball of artificially-cultured stem cells that have been coaxed into developing into neurons.

The cells are not taken from someone’s brain—which relieves us of certain ethical concerns. But because this lump of neurons does not have any blood vessels, as normal brain tissue does, the organoid cannot survive for long. And so ultimately, the prospect of training organoids on datasets does not seem practical, economically speaking, at present.

But that is not going to stop this research.  The drive to seamlessly integrate biology and technology is strong.  But can it be done?  And why do so many research scientists and funding agencies assume it’s possible?

TRANSHUMAN HOPES

Underlying the hopes of a transhumanist is a philosophy of materialism that follows a logic something like this: living systems are composed of matter and energy: the interactions of all matter and energy can be represented in code, and the material used to create biohardware should be irrelevant and can be synthetic.

With such founding assumptions, transhumanists are confident they can learn to upgrade biological “hardware” with non-biological materials, and reprogram biological “software,” after cracking its “code,” and mix and match with electronics to augment human capabilities.

When researchers integrate brain tissue into an artificial network setup, they treat it as if it were the hardware they’re used to working with. They see each neuron as being either on or off—firing or not—like an electronic switch, and they see the dendrites connecting to other neurons like wires.

They see stronger connections between neurons as being “weighted,” in a statistical sense, through differential repeated interactions.

Not incidentally, if such minded people were to exercise their influence in education, they would treat students like neural networks that can be programmed by rote memorization, and they would assume that they could better trigger the targeted response by simply applying rewards and punishments. This technique produces automatons, not critical thinkers. But that’s another essay.

ORGANOIDS MIGHT HAVE A DIFFERENT KIND OF INTELLIGENCE

If researchers think of living systems as digitized computers, they are going to have trouble with their organoids. What if neurons process information very differently from the way that artificial neural nets do?  What if neurons communicate with each other by propagating bioelectric waves through a medium? and what if, when they fire, it’s like rain drops creating concentric rings in a pool of water, with the clashing concentric rings creating interference patterns? What if it’s complicated?

Researchers in my field, Biosemiotics, are now asking such questions.  And in their vision of brain activity, neurons are not just connected as if with wires, but are coordinated with each other by virtue of their shared milieu. When a human brain has a thought, three dimensional bioelectric waves wash over the tissue, creating virtual connections — groups affected by the wave become momentarily coordinated. I don’t think there is an analogous process going on in an artificial neural network, where fluidity is only a metaphor and the structure of the setup is a lot more brittle and fixed.

An incredibly complex system like an organoid cannot be understood better by thinking of it in terms of a less complex system like a circuit board. Each neuron has the benefit of billions of years of evolution; environmental conditions can trigger DNA to produce a variety of proteins for all sorts of uses. Each cell has complex little organelles (that are descended from free-roaming protist creatures!) to handle the processing of all sorts of different signals from the outside. Each cell has receptors and little ion-gated pores that filter signals.

But I’m not a bio snob. Computers are incredible tools in the hands of people.  But can/should digital computers be tools inside the heads of people or can/should brain tissue be incorporated into digital computers?

BRAINOWARE: HOW IT WORKS

The setup for the invention described in the Nature Electronics article is remarkably simple. The organoid is placed on 2D high-density multielectrode array (MEA), which emits electric pulses, to which the organoid neurons respond by producing their own electrical patterns. This device has been dubbed, “Brainoware,” and it can recognize voices.

First, voice recordings are made and digitized into a 2D pattern that can be modeled on the 2D MEA. This digitized voice model is the input used to stimulate the brain organoid, which, in turn, outputs a pattern that reflects both the voice model and the internal structure of the organoid’s own dynamics. The neurons stimulate and are stimulated by other neurons in a non-linear fashion, that is, some features maybe be dampened, others amplified.

The above illustration of the setup is from the actual article, not from a pre-school reader version of the article.

The experiment was declared a success when, after training, the organoid had improved its ability to distinguish the vowel sounds of a male speaker from seven other male and female speakers. Prior to training, the setup could distinguish the speaker about 51% of the time, and after training, it was about 78% accurate.

BUT WAIT!

Before we get too excited about this success of finally merging man and machine, using enslaved brain cells to build a computer that can eavesdrop on our conversations, I note that over twenty years ago, a very similar experiment was done with a perturbed bucket of water performing a similar role as the brain organoid.

In that experiment, the water was used to distinguish between voice recordings of the words, “One” and “Zero,” with an error rate of only 1.5%. Below is a picture of these researchers’ three–dimensional models of the spoken words.

It is my opinion that the Brainoware researchers are not using the full potential of a neuron, if a bucket of water can “process” information better than a brain organoid. It’s a bit like using Shakespeare’s collected works as a doorstop.

In “Pattern Recognition in a Bucket,” Chrisantha Fernando and Sampso Sojakka note that similar experiments on have been done at the Unconventional Computing Laboratory, run by the devilishly charming Andy Adamatzky at the University of the West of England, Bristol UK. For many years now, Adamatsky has used chemicals (forming reaction-diffusion waves) and slime mold to do computation and act as memory reservoirs.

WHAT IS A COMPUTER RESERVOIR?

I had to look this up.  Reading computer science papers is—for me, a philosopher of science who originally started out in literary theory—reminiscent of reading Jacqueses Lacan and Derrida; there is a lot of unnecessarily opaque terminology covering up rather mundane statements.

I gather that a reservoir can be any kind of physical system that is made of individual units that can interact with each other in non-linear ways, and these units must be capable of being changed by the interaction. Even a bucket of water can function as a reservoir, apparently. Miguel Soriano explains it this way in “Viewpoint: Reservoir Computing Speeds Up,”

Reservoirs are able to store information by connecting the units in recurrent loops, where the previous input affects the next response. The change in reaction due to the past allows the computers to be trained to complete specific tasks.

Hope that helps.

Reservoirs are also referred to as “black boxes” because the researchers don’t know (or don’t have to know) the complex dynamics that go on while transforming the input into the output. I reckon that, because every spoken word is never quite the same twice, a non-linear system must process that sound so that it captures an essence of what it is and can identify the same word again and again in very different contexts.

Computer Redesign?

Science Fiction is often ahead of actual research.  In the movie Ex Machina, the femme fatale robot has an artificial brain that is made out of gel, not silicon chips and electronic switches. She might have come out of Adamatsky’s unconventional computing lab.

One of my colleagues, J. Augustus Bacigalupi, proposed a computer redesign called Synthetic Cognition back in 2012, based on an understanding that biological information processing looks a bit more like this:

than this:

Bacigalupi envisioned a terrain emerging in the medium between neurons and imagined that the intersections of diffusing signals, the interference, could itself be harnessed as a useful signal. He suggests that such a different approach would make computers much more efficient insofar as they would naturally integrate multiple signals for free.

Since that early hardly-watched lecture on Synthetic Cognition (while TED talks by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT Media Lab—who thinks we will soon be able to ingest digitized Shakespeare as a pill—get a lot more views), Bacigalupi has gone on to specialize in Biosemiotics, writing papers with me and our mutual colleague, Don Favareau, like their latest one in the Journal of Physiology.

A dozen years ago Bacigalupi saw cyborgs in our future if we used his proposed new technology that would be able to harness what’s special about brain organoids and slime mold.

But the integration of man and machine faces banal challenges, like rotting organic matter and inflammation of cells in contact with the various chemicals of electronic devices.

There is a reason why most of Elon Musk’s Neuralinked primates didn’t make it. A similar issue here is the unintended (we hope!) side-effects of synthetic pharmacological interventions, which are the bane of that industry. You see, biological cells tend to make interpretations of signs, not strict decryptions of code. Such flexibility allows adaptive creativity to happen, as well as terrible, unpredictable outcomes, for example, various autoimmune diseases.

Even relatively simple transhuman tech, like pacemakers and hip replacements can, in some people, provoke allergic reactions to metals.

And I don’t see the point of cannibalizing biology so that computer scientists can make robots pass the Turing Test better.  I do see, for example, NASA’s Artemis team using redesigned technology to create better robots, whose proprioception avails itself of a fluid medium capable of generating interference patterns that help orient it while it explores the lunar surface. Imitating the way biological organisms process information to make better, more reliable and efficient tools, seems common sense.

But I don’t see the point of making tools seem human—or of mixing human and electronic parts.

COMPUTER SLAVES

As Ian McEwan makes clear in his 2019 novel, Machines Like Me, the point of making a humanoid robot is to use it as a sex toy and a dishwasher. The drive to dehumanize people into cyborgs or to humanize robots probably grows out of the fact that it is no longer considered okay to enslave ordinary humans (or spouses).

I suspect that those who want a humanoid computer want a perfect mate, who knows everything about the master, can anticipate his every thought and move, and responds accordingly.  Such perfection in a mate does not allow it to express its own opinions or come up with its own goals and purposes.

It is worth going beyond the hype of headlines to explore these issues further.  We can learn a lot about ourselves in doing so. I lead a monthly webinar called We Are not Machines through IPAK-EDU where my students and I explore these kinds of issues.

Despite some concerted efforts to terrorize us, I do not believe we are about to be replaced in the workforce (only the shit jobs will go) and I don’t believe computers will be capable any minute now of taking over and turning us into workerborgs or batteries.

You are amazing just as you are, with your wonky neurons and your viscous brain.  And if we perfect our external tools and use them wisely, we can be even better.