Jim Jordan Slaps Former White House ‘Disinformation Czar’ With Subpoena After Requests Ignored

Zero Hedge | March 7, 2023

The former head of the Biden administration’s short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, Nina Jankowicz, was slapped with a subpoenaby the House Judiciary Committee on Monday.

Jankowicz, a huge fan of disinformation peddler Christopher Steele who cast doubt on the Hunter Biden laptop story, resigned from her position last May after the DHS ‘paused’ the disinfo organization. She previously served as a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, and advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry as part of the Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship. She also oversaw the Russia and Belarus programs at the National Democratic Institute.

Jankowicz also makes creepy Disney-themed songs in a fake British accent, leading to the nickname “Scary Poppins.”

Excess dementia deaths in Australia seems to have only one possible explanation

The chart below is from a Substack by Andrew Madry entitled Excess Dementia Deaths in Australia:

Excess dementia deaths (cumulative – cumulative) rose dramatically in 2021 starting at the time of the vaccine rollout and continued to diverge. If it wasn’t the vaccine, what was it?

There are only two causes that have been suggested:

  1. the safe and effective vaccine

  2. because people in nursing homes were denied hospital treatment.

We can see from the chart that a rapid increase in dementia deaths in June to July exactly coincides with the vax rollout for aged care.

Just a coincidence? Pretty unlikely I think. If you have an alternate hypothesis, it would have to fit the June/July timeframe for the biggest effect.

Dementia was listed in 3 of 150 serious adverse event safety signals for 18 and over that the CDC found in the VAERS database and it scored 52X in the X-factor analysis.

If you think it is not caused by the vaccine, I’m all ears because the data fits like a glove.

This wasn’t caused by COVID damaging people’s brain since there was no COVID in June/July 2021 when the excess dementia deaths rose dramatically:

COVID daily deaths in Australia didn’t start until after the vaccines were rolled out. So COVID couldn’t be the cause of the dementia deaths since there wasn’t anything going on during June/July 2021

Note, that officially, Australia only recognized 15 deaths from the vaccine in 2021. That’s preposterous. Whenever I do surveys, I find comparable numbers of people who die from COVID vs. the vaccine. Someone is lying to you. Do your own surveys.

Nobody can explain these dementia deaths if it wasn’t the vaccine. So the health authorities say the cause is “unknown.” Simple!

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Pandemic Treaty Will Usher in Unelected One World Government

WHO's Sordid History of So-Called Pandemics

  • February 6, 2023, the World Health Organization released a report by the director-general on the WHO’s review of amendments to the international health regulations (IHR). The IHR is what empowers the WHO to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC)

  • The proposed IHR amendments establish a global biosecurity architecture involving health surveillance, reporting and management — and we the public have no say in the matter

  • The amendments will be ready for adoption at the World Health Assembly in May 2024. A simple majority is required for the amendments to be adopted, after which they’ll come into force in 12 months

  • The second attempt to seize global control is through an international pandemic treaty with the WHO. The treaty would grant the WHO the sole power to make decisions relating to global biosecurity, including but not limited to the implementation of a global vaccine passport/digital identity, mandatory vaccinations, travel restrictions and standardized medical care

  • The treaty will supersede the laws of member states, including the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. Republican senators have introduced a bill that would require a Senate supermajority to approve the WHO treaty, but even this may not be enough. We need Congress to withdraw the U.S. from the WHO altogether and stop funding of the WHO

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In the Children’s Health Defense video above, aired February 11, 2023, host Dr. Meryl Nass interviews investigative journalist James Corbett about the global biosecurity agenda, the World Health Organization’s mishandling of global pandemics, and the two parallel processes currently underway that will effectively create a One World Government of unelected bureaucrats under the guise of global biosecurity. In a nutshell, the WHO is being installed as a de facto governing body for the global Deep State.

As reported by Nass, February 6, 2023, the WHO released a report by the director-general on the WHO’s review of amendments to the international health regulations (IHR). The IHR, adopted in 2005, is what empowers the WHO to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).

This is a special legal category that allows the WHO to initiate certain contracts and procedures, including drug and vaccine contracts. While the IHR already grants the WHO exceptional power over global health policy, under the current rules, member states must voluntarily consent to the WHO’s recommendations.

Under the new amendments, however, the WHO would be able to declare a PHEIC in a member state over the objection of that state, and failure to adhere to the WHO’s dictates in such a situation could have severe economic consequences.

As a whole, the proposed IHR amendments establish a global biosecurity architecture involving health surveillance, reporting and management — and we the public have no say in the matter.

We have no official avenue for providing feedback to the World Health Assembly, even though the amendments will give the WHO unprecedented power to restrict our rights and freedoms in the name of biosecurity. There’s not even a publicly available list of who the delegates are or who will vote on the amendments.

All we currently know is that the amendments will be ready for adoption at the World Health Assembly in May 2024.

A simple majority is required for the amendments to be adopted, after which they’ll come into force in 12 months. Member nations that disagree with the amendments have only 10 months to file a rejection or reservation.

While more than 300 amendments to the IHR have been proposed,

and there’s no telling which will stay and which will be tossed out, certain ones that are currently up for review are more crucial than others. Here are a few of the most egregious:

  • Permissiveness of conflicts of interest and bias are baked in — Under Article 9, the WHO can declare a public health emergency based on information from undisclosed sources.

    Those sources could include Big Pharma, WHO funders such as the Gates Foundation and the Gates-founded-and-funded GAVI Alliance, or any number of other players with conflicts of interest. The WHO’s risk assessments will also be based on the same type of flawed modeling and prognostication that so grossly exaggerated the risk of COVID-19.

  • Elimination of national sovereignty — Under Article 12, the director-general has unilateral power to declare a public health emergency and is not required to consult with the WHO Emergency Committee and/or the member state before doing so. So, the director-general replaces any and all national sovereign authority. The director-general can also impose sanctions on nations that refuse to follow its dictates.

  • Expansion of situations that constitute a PHEIC — A PHEIC is currently defined as an “extraordinary event” in one country that constitutes “a public health risk to other states through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a coordinated international response.”

    Amendments seek to expand and broaden this definition to include things like clusters of infection with potential but unverified human-to-human transmission. The actual risks of such clusters need not even be evaluated. What’s more, the proposed definition of a PHEIC does not specify that it must involve “severe” or “life-threatening” disease, so it could be invoked for just about anything.

    One of the amendments also suggests giving the director-general the ability to declare an “intermediate public health alert” when the situation doesn’t fully meet the PHEIC criteria. In such an event, the director-general and/or a regional WHO director would be able to declare a public health emergency of regional concern (PHERC).

  • Expansion of the WHO’s executive emergency powers to include:

    • Permanent biosurveillance capacities

    • The authority to allocate health products worldwide

    • The authority to develop regulatory guidelines for the fast-tracking of health products

    • The capacity to “counter the dissemination of false and unreliable information” about public health events, preventive strategies and pandemic countermeasures

    • The authority to develop “an interoperability mechanism for secure global digital exchange of health information,” i.e., a global health database to enable the implementation of vaccine passports

Once the amendments are adopted by the World Health Assembly, nations will have only a limited time — six months — to reject them. Any nation which hasn’t officially rejected the amendments will then be legally bound by them, and any attempt to reject them after the six-month grace period will be null and void.

The IHR amendments are just one part of the globalist cabal’s two-pronged attempt to create the foundation for a One World Government of unelected globalists. The second attempt to seize global control is through an international pandemic treaty with the WHO.

Right now, it looks like the WHO Pandemic Treaty may also be ratified at the World Health Assembly in May 2024, if it gets the two-thirds majority it needs to pass.

The WHO is seeking permanent and unilateral power to make pandemic decisions for the world, and the proposed treaty is the vehicle that would allow this.

It will grant the WHO the sole power to make decisions relating to global biosecurity, including but not limited to the implementation of a global vaccine passport/digital identity, mandatory vaccinations, travel restrictions and standardized medical care. Importantly, the treaty will supersede the laws of member states, including the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Even if centralizing biosecurity were a good idea, which it’s not, the WHO would not be at the top of the list of organizations to be charged with this task, seeing how its “curriculum vitae” is a long list of failures and scandalous conflicts of interest.

For example, the WHO didn’t publicly admit SARS-CoV-2 was airborne until the end of December 2021, yet scientists knew the virus was airborne within weeks of the pandemic being declared. The WHO also ignored early advice about airborne transmission.

The fact that the WHO has installed Dr. Jeremy Farrar, former head of the Wellcome Trust, as its chief scientist is yet another sign that the WHO’s health recommendations will be far from trustworthy. As previously reported, Farrar was one of the key figures in the coordinated cover-up of the origin of SARS-CoV-2,

along with Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Overall, the WHO is woefully unqualified to make health decisions for the whole world. But with this treaty in place, member nations will be subject to the WHO’s dictates even if citizens have rejected such plans using local democratic processes. In short, every country that signs onto the WHO’s pandemic treaty will voluntarily give up its sovereignty and the bodily autonomy of all its citizens to one of the most corrupt organizations on the planet.

As noted by Francis Boyle, a bioweapons expert and professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law:

“Both [the IHR amendments and the treaty] are fatally dangerous. Either one or both would set up a worldwide medical police state under the control of the WHO, and in particular WHO Director-General Tedros.

If either one or both of these go through, Tedros or his successor will be able to issue orders that will go all the way down the pipe to your primary care physicians.”

Aside from the fact that this treaty will eradicate the national sovereignty of member states, a core problem is that it simply cannot work. The whole premise behind this pandemic treaty is that “shared threat requires shared response,” but a given threat is almost never equally shared across regions.

Take COVID-19 for example. Not only is the risk of COVID not the same for people in New York City and the outback of Australia, it’s not even the same for all the people in those areas, as COVID is highly dependent on age and underlying health conditions.

“The WHO intends to eliminate individualized medicine and provide blanket rulings for how a given threat is to be addressed, and this can only result in needless suffering and loss of individual freedom.”

The WHO insists that the remedy is the same for everyone everywhere, yet the risks vary widely from nation to nation, region to region, person to person. They intend to eliminate individualized medicine and provide blanket rulings for how a given threat is to be addressed, and this can only result in needless suffering — not to mention the loss of individual freedom.

Eventually, the WHO will probably implement a universal or “socialist-like” health care system worldwide, as part of The Great Reset. While a WHO-based universal health care system is not currently being discussed, there’s every reason to suspect that this is part of the plan.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has previously stated that his “central priority” as director-general is to push the world toward universal health coverage.

And, considering the WHO changed its definition of “pandemic” to “a worldwide epidemic of a disease,”

without the original specificity of severe illness that causes high morbidity,

just about anything could be made to fit the pandemic criterion. As mentioned above, some of the IHR amendments also further broaden the scope of the situations in which a public health emergency might be applied.

The WHO’s “One Health surveillance” initiative, which is part of the pandemic treaty, also signals where this is really headed. As explained by The Epoch Times:

“One Health is a concept that has been embraced by the United Nations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Bank, and other global organizations.

‘The term originally meant a way of seeing human and animal health as linked — they sometimes are — so that you could improve human health by acting more broadly,’ [public health physician and former WHO epidemic policy staffer David] Bell said.

‘It has become hijacked and now is used to claim that all human activities, and all issues within the biosphere, affect health, and are therefore within Public Health’s remit.

So public health can be deemed to include climate, or racism, or fisheries management, and this is being used to claim that addressing carbon emissions is a health issue and therefore a health ’emergency.'”

The pandemic treaty is also redefining human rights into a set of collective rights that are centered on public health. The Epoch Times continues:

“The accord presents human rights as ‘health equity, through resolute action on social, environmental, cultural, political and economic determinants of health.’

In line with that concept, countries such as Austria went so far as to criminalize the refusal to take the COVID vaccine. Within the United States, places that included New York City mandated vaccine passports for access to public spaces, dividing its residents into a privileged vaccinated class and a second-tier unvaccinated class.

However, others see human rights not in terms of collective health but rather as individual rights, including such things as personal sovereignty, the ability of individuals to make their own choices, the right of people to have a voice in medical decisions that affect them, free speech, and freedom of movement and assembly.

Following World War II and the state-control ideologies of fascism, national socialism, and communism, ‘it was realized that there has to be a fundamental understanding that individuals are sovereign,’ Bell said.

Human rights declarations after the war emphasized that, even during times of crisis, ‘we are born with rights, we’re all equal, and those rights are inviolable. That is being very much watered down or wiped away in order to do this [treaty].'”

It’s important to realize that the WHO’s pandemic treaty will radically alter the global power structure and strip you of some of your most basic rights and freedoms. It’s a direct attack on the sovereignty of its member states, as well as a direct attack on your bodily autonomy.

The treaty is basically the gateway to a global, top-down totalitarian regime where human rights as we understand them will no longer exist. Biosecurity will be the justification for an international vaccine passport, which the G20 just signed on to, and that passport will also be your digital identification.

That digital ID, in turn, will be tied to your social credit score, personal carbon footprint tracker, medical records, educational records, work records, social media presence, purchase records, your bank accounts and a programmable central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Once all these pieces are fully connected, you’ll be in a digital prison, and the ruling cabal — whether officially a one world government by then or not — will have total control over your life from cradle to grave.

The WHO’s pandemic treaty is what sets off this chain of events, as it will have the power to implement vaccine passports globally once the treaty is signed. The WHO will also have the power to mandate vaccines, standardize medical care and issue travel restrictions.

As reported by The Epoch Times,

there’s great confusion about whether or not the U.S. government can bind the country to treaties and agreements without the consent of the Senate (as required under the Constitution), and whether international accords can circumvent or supersede the Constitution.

As currently written, there’s no doubt both the IHR amendments and the pandemic treaty are intended to nullify the U.S. Constitution, as the U.S. would have to comply with the WHO’s recommendations, even if such recommendations violate Constitutional rights. The Epoch Times reports:

“The zero draft concedes that, per international law, treaties between countries must be ratified by national legislatures, thus respecting the right of their citizens to consent.

However, the draft also includes a clause that the accord will go into effect on a ‘provisional’ basis as soon as it’s signed by delegates to the WHO and would, therefore, be legally binding on members without being ratified by legislatures.

‘Whoever drafted this clause knew as much about U.S. constitutional law and international law as I did, and deliberately drafted it to circumvent the power of the Senate to give its advice and consent to treaties, to provisionally bring it into force immediately upon signature,’ Boyle said.

In addition, ‘the Biden administration will take the position that this is an international executive agreement that the president can conclude of his own accord without approval by Congress and is binding on the United States of America, including all state and local democratically elected officials, governors, attorney generals, and health officials’ …

Increasingly, the Biden administration is looking toward international agreements to do what it can’t achieve through Congress.

Most recently, having failed to increase corporate taxes in Congress, the Biden administration entered into an international agreement with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

to set minimum tax levels on all corporations within signatory countries.

While Republican lawmakers said the agreement has ‘no path forward’ toward approval as a treaty, provisions written into the agreement allow foreign countries to tax U.S.-based corporate profits as a punitive measure if senators don’t approve it.”

Fortunately, the U.S. Senate is not entirely clueless about the ramifications of this treaty, and 17 Republican senators, led by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., have introduced a bill to thwart the WHO’s power grab.

The “No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act,”

introduced February 15, 2023, would require a Senate supermajority (two-thirds or 67 senators) to pass the pandemic treaty.

Additional sponsors of the bill include Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa; Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn.; John Barrasso, R-Wyo.; Mike Lee, R-Utah; Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.; Rick Scott, R-Fla.; John Hoeven, R-N.D.; Marco Rubio, R-Fla.; Ted Cruz, R-Texas; Steve Daines, R-Mont.; Thom Tillis, R-N.C.; Tom Cotton, R-Ark.; Mike Braun, R-Ind.; Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala.; Roger Marshall, R-Kan.; and Katie Britt, R-Ala.

However, according to Boyle,

an expert on international laws and treaties, even this bill might not be enough to protect us were President Biden to sign the treaty. The reason for this, Boyle explains, is because the treaty is written “specifically to circumvent the Senate-approval process.”

A far more effective strategy, he says, would be for Congress to withhold its annual contributions to the WHO — and then withdraw the U.S. from the WHO altogether. I believe it may be worth supporting all of these strategies. So, please, contact your representatives and urge them to support the No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act,” to withhold funding for the WHO and, ultimately, support U.S. withdrawal from the WHO.

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World Wide Web: Whom Was It Designed to Catch?

internet surveillance and censorship

By: Tessa Lena

  • Amid attacks on the First Amendment, Missouri v. Biden could be one of the most important civil rights lawsuit of our times

  • While today’s obnoxious surveillance and censorship are new, they are a feature of the Internet, not a bug

  • Internet (originally ARPANET) was born out of a Pentagon surveillance and counterinsurgency project

  • It was implemented by ARPA, a DoD research agency that we know as DARPA

  • The effort to change the public perception of the internet from a military surveillance project to a promised utopian land of opportunity took about twenty years and a lot of work — and it worked like a charm — but the surveillance has always remained at the center of what the internet is about

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It’s 2023. In the past three years, we’ve all experienced the creepy, ugly, surreal censorship of the “post-COVID” kind. True, “soft” censorship has been around for some time — but now it’s marching proudly, in heavy military boots, and it’s claiming to exist for our own good. Censorship is here to save “our democracy.” Yep, thanks, makes sense.

First Amendment? Well, yes — but the state is “outsourcing” censorship to private companies, commandeering the process of censorship behind the scenes — and pretending to be uninvolved much like a kid whose homework was eaten by the dog.

At a time like this, we are also wondering about the elephant in the room — the question of how separate have the state and the corporate powers have really been pre-2020? Were they separate? Was it a delusion? We will get to that in a bit — but, philosophy aside, the First Amendment is none the less legally binding, so let us first look at the important First Amendment legal case happening right now.

Recently, I interviewed brave attorney Jeff Childers, who in 2021 won an important case against mask mandates in Alachua County in Florida — and whom we know and love for his Substack “Coffee & Covid.” One of the things we talked about was the legal case against government censorship, Missouri v. Biden.

Tessa Lena Talks to Attorney Jeff Childers

According to Jeff, Missouri v. Biden could be the most important civil rights lawsuit of our times. Here is a Coffee & Covid article on the subject:

“The States of Missouri and Louisiana filed the case on May 5th, 2022. At the time, the states were represented by Solicitors General Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry, respectively.”

“The plaintiffs argue that the government both DIRECTLY censored Americans and especially, INDIRECTLY censored them through bullying, bribing, hectoring, nagging, and setting up one-way “partnerships” with big tech companies like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.”

“Although the list of defendants subsequently expanded — greatly expanded — here’s the original much shorter list from the first complaint. All these folks were sued in their official capacities: Joe Biden, Jen Psaki, Vivek Murthy, Xavier Bacerra, the Department of HHS, Anthony Fauci, NIAID, CDC, Alejandro Mayorkas, the Department of Homeland Security, Jen Easterly, the CISA, and Nina Jankowicz.”

“For some reason, you’ve heard a LOT about the Twitter files, but not much about the Missouri files: the most damning evidence about how the federal government has been weaponized against Americans has fruited from the incredible efforts of the Missouri v. Biden team. The plaintiffs’ investigators have unearthed evidence of government-sponsored censorship starting well before the pandemic.”

“For example, we now know that since 2018 — before the pandemic — parts of the federal government regularly met with the social media platforms to control ‘disinformation.’”

Now, let’s go down the rabbit hole. To me, it’s funny and not funny to think about the interwoven Russian doll of state and corporate mob-like control — even under the best of political conditions — and certainly under the conditions we face today. You peel one layer of domination — and instead of the true freedom you were craving, you find another.

You painstakingly peel the next one, hoping for freedom this time, but then you discover yet another layer of domination, under a different logo. It’s like when the Soviet Union finally crashed when I was a kid, and — on its ruins — the children of the communist leaders became the oligarchic leaders of the land.

And so, in our good hearts, we hope that state authorities will protect us from excessive corporate greed, and we hope that free market will protect us from the state boot — but then we look closely, and we realize that we were born into a world run by a collection of mobs — state and corporate mobs of different kinds — and that we are very lucky citizens when we are not in the crossfires of mob wars and can go about our daily lives without being stomped.

To me, this realistic observation was a moment of great humility and existential clarity. This is how this world is right now. It doesn’t have to be this way — but this is how it has been for centuries on end, and I need to do my job and be effective and honest in the world just how it is.

That said, as we’ve all felt viscerally, the past three years have been particularly obscene. The “freedom” branding is seemingly no longer important to the ones in high chairs. They are no longer afraid to be viewed as dictatorial freaks. I think it is fair to say that those in high chairs tend to seek maximum control at all times — but prior to COVID, they had to at least pretend to respect our right to free speech — and now we are being treated to “war time” muzzling (the pun is intended, yep).

And since the Internet is the place where a lot of speech is censored, it is instructive to look at where the cyber beast came from. Is the censorship of today a bug — or a feature, perhaps?

Personally, I am a big fan of Yasha Levine’s book, “Surveillance Valley,” even though later on, our views on COVID did not coincide. Yasha’s book describes the counterinsurgency and surveillance underbelly of the internet really well.

Yasha Levine: The Internet’s Secret Military History

The Internet came out of a 1960s Pentagon project called ARPANET. ARPANET was a counterinsurgency, communications, and surveillance project developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and based on the idea of “Great Intergalactic Network,” a futuristic-sounding term coined by J. C. R. Licklider, nicknamed “Lick.” Lick was an American psychologist and computer scientist and one of the “founding fathers” of interactive computing.

We all know ARPA as DARPA, the creepy DoD agency behind the Operation Warp Speed. ARPA was originally formed in response to the shock of being “beaten” by the USSR in space after the USSR launched its Sputnik in 1957.

The agency was intended to protect the United States from the Soviet nuclear threat from space. It was designed as a lean Pentagon agency that would be almost like a management company, overseeing advanced military research projects but contracting a lot of their work out to private companies.

In the words of Ray Alderman, “in February 1958, reacting to the Russian lead in space technology, Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) inside the Department of Defense (DoD). The original mission was to stay ahead of our enemies and prevent future technological surprises like Sputnik.

ARPA’s initial focus was on missiles. Later in 1958, the money for missiles and space programs was transferred to another new agency, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). ARPA then changed their mission to long-range advanced military problems like the Defender missile defense program, early warning radar, and satellite detection of nuclear tests by the Russians.”

“ARPA was part of the Pentagon, a bureaucratic rats nest of inter-service rivalries and politics. The Air Force was broken-off from the Army and the CIA were created in September 1947, NSA was created in November 1952, and NASA was created in 1958. ARPA worked on projects for all these groups but was stuck inside the Pentagon.

In 1972, it was renamed DARPA, changed back to ARPA in 1993, and then back to DARPA again in 1996 … The director of DARPA reports to the Secretary of Defense just like the military services.”

ARPA was formed under the Defense Secretary Neil McElroy, who was thrust into his important government role straight out of his prior role of the President of Proctor & Gamble, a role in which he pioneered the format of “soap operas,” melodramatic television series designed with the primary goal of selling household products to housewives.

Here are two Time Magazine covers: One is of Neil McElroy of Proctor & Gamble, and the other one is of Neil McElroy, the Defense Secretary.

two Time Magazine covers

So here’s that. Soap operas and (D)ARPA were born under the auspices of the same man! “After leaving the Pentagon [in 1959], McElroy returned to Procter & Gamble and became chairman of the board.” Oh, and according to Wikipedia, when ARPA was just founded, it was “headed by Roy Johnson, a vice-president of General Electric.”

Siri, forgive me my politically incorrect question but can you please remind me … what is the definition of fascism? And, Siri, when positions of corporate and state powers are routinely held by the same folks, should we call it “fascism,” “mob,” or simply “a standard, time-proven policy of revolving doors”? Help me out, Siri! Remember that George Carlin joke where he said that there was a big club that we were not members of. Siri, should I laugh?

In the words of Yasha Levine, “McElroy was a businessman who believed in the power of business to save the day.” In November 1957, he pitched ARPA to Congress as an organization that would cut through government red tape and create a public-private vehicle of pure military science to push the frontiers of military technology and develop “vast weapon systems of the future.”

Today, we think of “public private partnerships between stakeholders” as a signature talking point of the CIA-originated World Economic Forum. But it’s a strategy that’s been implemented before.

Due to internal competition and the fear that other military agencies felt over having their budget cut, ARPA was almost defunded just a couple of years after it was founded. But then it was “reborn” as an agency focusing on counterinsurgency efforts. According to NPR (back at the time when they were occasionally telling the truth):

“There was a bureaucratic war in the Pentagon. And the military services – the Army, Navy and Air Force – got their programs back. So you suddenly had, you know, it’s 1959, this agency isn’t even two years old and it’s left without its main mission and sort of adrift at sea.”

“What DARPA had at the time was a man who eventually rose to be deputy director. And his name was William Godel. He was actually not a scientist or a scientific manager. He was an intelligence operative who’d been put at DARPA in the early days to represent the interests of the spy community, of the intelligence community.

And so he looked at this young agency that now didn’t really have a mission. And he thought, well, maybe we can mold this agency around the strategic threats that I see. And he looked out at the world.”

“And for him, the space race was mostly a psychological game. You know, it was public relations. The threat of nuclear Armageddon, no matter how big a threat, was not a likely scenario.

He had had a lot of experience in Asia, particularly Southeast Asia. And he looked at countries like the Philippines and particularly the Vietnam. And he thought the most likely way the United States would confront the Soviet Union would be through the sort of proxy wars, where the United States would have – would back regimes fighting Communist insurgencies. And he thought we could take DARPA to Vietnam.”

ARPA became heavily involved in the military action in Vietnam even before the “official” Vietnam war began. ARPA tried to solve a number of military challenges related to guerilla and psychological warfare. For example, it was very actively involved in the development of deforestation chemicals. The list of toxic chemical included the infamous Agent Orange and a number of other substances: Agent White, Agent Pink, Agent Purple, Agent Blue.

In the words of Yasha, “the chemicals, produced by American companies like Dow and Monsanto, turned whole swaths of lush jungle into barren moonscapes, causing death and horrible suffering for hundreds of thousands.”

ARPA was also involved in the strategic effort of placing cutting-edge sensors in the area, under Project Igloo White. The sensors were shot from above and designed to detect sound, vibration, and urine. “Igloo White was like a giant wireless alarm system that spanned hundreds of miles of jungle.” In Yasha’s opinion, the sensors were far less effective in real life than they were in theory as the guerilla Vietnamese found ways to work around them or set off “false alarms.”

“The Pentagon started throwing money at social and behavioral scientists, hiring them to make sure America’s “counterinsurgency weapon” always hit its target, regardless of the culture in which it was being fired. Under William Godel, ARPA became one of the main pipelines for these programs, helping to weaponize anthropology, psychology, and sociology and putting them in the service of American counterinsurgency.”

“ARPA doled out millions to studies of Vietnamese peasants, captured North Vietnamese fighters, and rebellious hill tribes of northern Thailand. Swarms of ARPA contractors — anthropologists, political scientists, linguists, and sociologists — passed through poor villages, putting people under a microscope, measuring, gathering data, interviewing, studying, assessing, and reporting.

The idea was to understand the enemy, to know their hopes, their fears, their dreams, their social networks, and their relationships to power.”

Most of that work was done by the RAND Corporation, under an ARPA contract.

“In one major effort, RAND scientists studied the effectiveness of the Strategic Hamlet initiative, a pacification effort that had been developed and pushed by Godel and Project Agile and that involved the forced resettlement of South Vietnamese peasants from their traditional villages into new areas that were walled off and made “safe” from rebel infiltration.”

“Another study in Thailand, carried out for ARPA by the CIA-connected American Institutes for Research (AIR), aimed at gauging the effectiveness of applied counterinsurgency techniques against rebellious hill tribes — practices such as assassinating tribal leaders, forcibly relocating villages, and using artificially induced famine to pacify rebellious populations.”

Going back to Godel, according to the New York Times, Sharon Weinberger, the author of “Imagineers of War” who had access to his unpublished memoir courtesy of his daughter, “paints him as not only the driving force in this story — ‘more than any other ARPA official,’ she writes, he ‘shaped the agency’s future’ — but also a colorful character.

His house was filled with gadgets straight out of James Bond’s Q lab. He traveled the world with cash-stuffed briefcases and, in connection with that, was sentenced to five years in prison on fraud-related charges in the mid-1960s. After leaving ARPA, he ran guns to Southeast Asia. Some suspected he was a security risk.”

Here we have it again. The very agency that founded the internet — and that has also been at the heart of Operation Warp Speed — was shaped by a shady character who loved messing with people’s heads and thought of himself as being above the law. A mob is a mob is a mob.

The New York Times article continues: “It was Godel who turned ARPA into a forum for ideas that were ‘completely screwball,’ in Weinberger’s words, but got funded anyway because they were ‘bold and scientifically interesting.’

These included a plan to control Vietnamese villages through mass hypnosis, an acoustic sniper-detection system (which produced 5,000 false positives in field tests), an interplanetary spaceship powered by thousands of nuclear explosions and a magnetic force-field to repel incoming Soviet warheads, among others.”

By the way, do you think the crazies have abandoned their ambitions at mass hypnosis? Just a thought for 2023.

Cybernetics came out of the MIT. It was developed by the MIT professor Norbert Wiener. According to Yasha Levine, Wiener was a child prodigy and a mathematical genius with poor social skills. Life is full of irony, and so Yasha notes that Wiener, who was of a Jewish German descent, got married to Margaret Engemann, a big admirer of Adolf Hitler who was making their daughters read Mein Kampf and took pride of the fact that her family in Germany was “free of Jewish blood.”

Wiener published his scientific ideas on in a 1948 book called “Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.”

“In simple terms, he described cybernetics as the idea that the biological nervous system and the computer or automatic machine were basically the same thing. To Wiener, people and the entire living world could be seen as one giant interlocking information machine, everything responding to everything else in an intricate system of cause, effect, and feedback.”

“He predicted that our lives would increasingly be mediated and enhanced by computers and integrated to the point that there would cease to be any difference between us and the larger cybernetic machine in which we lived … the book excited the public’s imagination and became an instant best seller.

Military circles received it as a revolutionary work as well … Cybernetic concepts, backed by huge amounts of military funding, began to pervade academic disciplines: economics, engineering, psychology, political science, biology, and environmental studies.”

“Ecologists began to look at the earth itself as a self-regulating computational “bio system,” and cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists approached the study of the human brain as if it were literally a complex digital computer.

Political scientists and sociologists began to dream of using cybernetics to create a controlled utopian society, a perfectly well-oiled system where computers and people were integrated into a cohesive whole, managed and controlled to ensure security and prosperity.”

“This intermeshing of cybernetics and big power was what caused Norbert Wiener to turn against cybernetics almost as soon as he introduced it to the world. He saw scientists and military men taking the narrowest possible interpretation of cybernetics to create better killing machines and more efficient systems of surveillance and control and exploitation.

He saw giant corporations using his ideas to automate production and cut labor in their quest for greater wealth and economic power. He began to see that in a society mediated by computer and information systems those who controlled the infrastructure wielded ultimate power.”

“After popularizing cybernetics, Wiener became a kind of labor and antiwar activist. He reached out to unions to warn them of the danger of automation and the need to take the threat seriously. He turned down offers from giant corporations that wanted help automating their assembly lines according to his cybernetic principles, and refused to work on military research projects.”

“He was against the massive peacetime arms buildup taking place after World War II and publicly lashed out at colleagues for working to help the military build bigger, more efficient tools of destruction.

He increasingly hinted at his insider knowledge that a “colossal state machine” was being constructed by government agencies “for the purposes of combat and domination,” a computerized information system that was “sufficiently extensive to include all civilian activities during war, before war and possibly even between wars,” as he described it in The Human Use of Human Beings.”

“Wiener’s vocal support of labor and his public opposition to corporate and military work made him a pariah among his military contractor–engineer colleagues. It also earned him a spot on J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI subversive surveillance list. For years, he was suspected of having communist sympathies, his life documented in a thick FBI file that was closed upon his death in 1964.”

Weiner’s path reminds me of Joseph Weizenbaum, another computer scientist at MIT who created the first “chatbot,” Eliza. After creating Eliza as an interesting computer science research project, he saw that his ideas were being used irresponsibly and vocally objected to it — but at that point, his objections were largely ignored. There is a documentary made about him that I highly recommend. It’s called “Plug and Pray.”

ARPANET, the computer network that eventually became the Internet, was born when the scientists figured out a way for computers of different models, all located in different places, to talk to each other.

The very first ARPANET node, powered by the IMPs (“interface message processors,” a special type of computing device), went live in October 1969, linking Stanford to UCLA. By the end of 1971, more than fifteen nodes existed. And the network kept growing.

According to Yasha Levine, in 1969, “activists from Students for a Democratic Society at Harvard University got their hands on a confidential ARPA proposal written by Licklider.” The long document outlined the creation of a joint Harvard-MIT ARPA program that would directly aid the agency’s counterinsurgency mission. It was called the Cambridge Project.

“Once complete, it would allow any intelligence analyst or military planner connected to the ARPANET to upload dossiers, financial transactions, opinion surveys, welfare rolls, criminal record histories, and any other kind of data and to analyze them in all sorts of sophisticated ways: sifting through reams of information to generate predictive models, mapping out social relationships, and running simulations that could predict human behavior.

The project emphasized providing analysts with the power to study third-world countries and left-wing movements. Students saw Cambridge Project, and the bigger ARPANET that plugged into it, as a weapon.”

Six years later, on June 2, 1975, NBC correspondent Ford Rowan “appeared on the evening news to report a stunning exposé.” He told the viewers about ARPANET, the military communications network used to “spy on Americans and share surveillance data with the CIA and NSA.”

“The Army’s information on thousands of American protesters has been given to the CIA, and some of it is in CIA computers now … This network links computers at the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, more than 20 universities, and a dozen research centers, like the RAND Corporation …

The government is now using this new technology in a secret computer network that gives the White House, the CIA, and the Defense Department access to FBI and Treasury Department computer files on 5 million Americans.”

Following the NBC reporting, there was an uproar, the responsible parties reluctantly promised to delete the data they had amassed — but according to Yasha, they stalled and stalled and then most likely just kept the data anyway — and in the meanwhile, the world moved on.

The transformation of the public opinion on the ARPANET — from viewing it as a source of surveillance and control to perceiving it as a magical ticket to utopia — took almost two decades — and I think it is very logical to assume that the transformation took place with the guiding hand of the very people who sought to continue using the network for surveillance and control.

One personality who played a famous role in popularizing “personal computing,” as a liberation tool was Stewart Brand.

Notably, John Markoff, author of “Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand” “notes that leftists who met Brand assumed he was working with the CIA, an accusation that could be rated as indirectly to literally true, depending on the circumstances (later in life Brand would work alongside the CIA doing scenario planning).”

Brand had a short-lived formal military career, then allegedly changed his mind, and, “less than a year into his two-year commitment, Brand got permission (‘magically,’ Markoff writes) to leave early and study art in San Francisco, where he rented a houseboat.”

According to Yasha, Brand “took a lot of psychedelic drugs, partied, made art, and participated in an experimental program to test the effects of LSD that, unknown to him, was secretly being conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency as part of its MK-ULTRA program.”

In the 60s, he made a name for himself for being an environmentalist of sorts. He became extremely well-known for his iconic Whole Earth Catalogue, catering to those who wanted to escape from the ills of society, form communes, and live on land. (Was he “greenwashing,” too?)

Back in 1972, as a journalist, Brand penned a famous Rolling Stone article, “SPACEWAR,” in which he portrayed the people working at ARPA as subversive and attractive hippie types, as opposed to dangerous military men. Later on, he romanticized “hackers” and greatly contributed to the romantic notion of the internet as a land of freedom, opportunity, and all things good.

“In the early 1980s, after the commune dream collapsed, he cashed in his counterculture cred and turned the utopian ideals of the New Communalists into a marketing vehicle for the sprouting consumer computer industry,” Yasha writes.

It is interesting that as life progressed, Brand became an open proponent of nuclear energy, genetic engineering and geoengineering — all the things that the WEF — the organization to which he is seemingly no stranger, also likes. Meanwhile, here’s what Yasha has to say about Brand’s computer evangelism:

“He gathered around himself a crew of journalists, marketing types, industry insiders, and other hippies-turned-entrepreneurs. Together, they replicated the marketing and aesthetics that Brand had used during his Whole Earth Catalog days and sold computers the same way he once sold communes and psychedelics: as liberation technologies and tools of personal empowerment.

This group would spin this mythology through the 1980s and 1990s, helping obfuscate the military origins of computer and networking technologies by dressing them up in the language of 1960s acid-dropping counterculture. In this rebranded world, computers were the new communes: a digital frontier where the creation of a better world was still possible.”

Of course, Brand was not the only person to shape the rosy perception of the digital worlds. And of course, we’ll never know for sure if he truly believed the hype — or whether he was on a mission of another sort.

In any case, the cultural transformation was “grafted” successfully. In 1984 (!!), Apple made its famous, linguistically upside down ad — and here we are today, living our lives inside what has always been a counterinsurgency and surveillance tool.

A philosophical question: is the internet none the less useful to us? Of course it is. I am typing this on the computer, after all. But the devil is always in the detail, isn’t it?

The man who was responsible for the privatization of the interne was Stephen Wolff, a military man who worked on ARPANET. The privatization was done through the National Science Foundation, a federal agency created by Congress in 1950.

In early 1980s, NSF ran a small network connecting computers at a few research universities to ARPANET. NSF wanted to connect a broader pool of universities to the network and to expand it beyond the military and computer science research use. Wolff’s task was to oversee the building and management of the new educational network, NSFNET. The first reiteration of NSFNET was launched in 1986. Yasha writes.

“In early 1987, he and his team … hashed out a design for an improved and upgraded NFSNET. This new network, a government project created with public money [emphasis mine], would connect universities and be designed to eventually function as a privatized telecommunications system. That was the implicit understanding everyone at NSF agreed on.”

The NSFNET was supposed become a two-tier network. The top layer was going to be a national network, a high-speed “backbone” that spanned the entire country. The second layer was going to be made up of smaller “regional networks” that would connect universities to the backbone. Instead of building and managing the network itself, the NSF decided to outsource the network to private companies.

“The plan was to fund and nurture these network providers until they could become self-sufficient, at which point they would be cut loose and allowed to privatize the network infrastructure they built for the NSFNET.”

“The most important part of the system, the backbone, was run by a new nonprofit corporation, a consortium including IBM, MCI, and the state of Michigan. The second-tier regional networks were farmed out to a dozen other newly created private consortiums. With names like BARRNET, MIDNET, NYSERNET, WESTNET, and CERFNET, they were run by a mix of universities, research institutions, and military contractors.”

“In July 1988, the NSFNET backbone went online, connecting thirteen regional networks and over 170 different campuses across the country …

The network stretched from San Diego to Princeton — snaking through regional network exchange points in Salt Lake City, Houston, Boulder, Lincoln, Champaign, Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and Ithaca and throwing out an international transatlantic line to the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva. The network was a huge success in the academic community.”

“The privatization of the Internet — its transformation from a military network to the privatized telecommunications system we use today — is a convoluted story. Wade in deep enough and you find yourself in a swamp of three-letter federal agencies, network protocol acronyms, government initiatives, and congressional hearings filled with technical jargon and mind-numbing details.

But on a fundamental level, it was all very simple: after two decades of lavish funding and research and development inside the Pentagon system, the Internet was transformed into a consumer profit center.”

“Businesses wanted a cut, and a small crew of government managers were all too happy to oblige.

To do that, with public funds the federal government created a dozen network providers out of thin air and then spun them off to the private sector, building companies that in the space of a decade would become integral parts of the media and telecommunications conglomerates we all know and use today — Verizon, Time-Warner, AT&T, Comcast.”

According to Yasha, the privatization was done in a dubious if not fraudulent manner. The consortium that managed the “backbone” network (that was legally limited to educational institutions) split into two legal entities, and then the for profit legal entity started selling “internet” services to commercial entities — even though the underlying physical “internet” infrastructure was the same one used by the nonprofit educational network.

(So it’s kind of like Comirnaty, in a way, a magical potion that was authorized by the FDA but was nowhere to be found.)

“In short, the NSF directly subsidized the MCI-IBM consortium’s national business expansion. The company used its privileged position to attract commercial clients, telling them that its service was better and faster because it had direct access to the national high-speed backbone.”

“NSFNET contractors began fighting for control of this untapped and growing market as soon as Stephen Wolff gave them the green light to privatize their operations — that’s what the fight between providers like PSINET and ANS was all about. They were licking their chops, happy that the government bankrolled the network and even happier that it was about to get out of the business. There was a lot of money to be made.”

“Aside from interindustry wrangling, there was no real opposition to Stephen Wolff’s plan to privatize the Internet — not from NFSNET insiders, not from Congress, and certainly not from the private sector. Cable and phone companies pushed for privatization, as did Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

In 1995, the National Science Foundation officially retired the NSFNET, handing control of the Internet to a handful of private network providers that it had created less than a decade earlier. There was no vote in Congress on the issue. There was no public referendum or discussion. It happened by bureaucratic decree.”

“A year later, President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a law that deregulated the telecommunications industry, allowing for the first time since the New Deal nearly unlimited corporate cross-ownership of the media: cable companies, radio stations, film studios, newspapers, phone companies, television broadcasters, and, of course, Internet service providers.”

“A handful of powerful telecommunications companies absorbed most of the privatized NSFNET providers that had been set up with funds from the National Science Foundation a decade earlier.

San Francisco Bay Area’s regional provider became part of Verizon. Southern California’s, which was part-owned by the military contractor General Atomics, was absorbed by AT&T. New York’s became part of Cogent Communications, one of the largest backbone companies in the world.”

“The backbone went to Time-Warner. And MCI, which had run the backbone along with IBM, merged with WorldCom, combining two of the biggest Internet service providers in the world.

All these mergers represented the corporate centralization of a powerful new telecommunications system that had been created by the military and ushered into commercial life by the National Science Foundation. To put it another way, the Internet was born.”

While the Internet was formally privatized, the surveillance aspect hung around. It hung around — through funding, through personal connections, through mentorship, through nudging, through providing a guiding hand toward the “desired” direction of research, through pressure, and of course through secret programs, some of which were later exposed. I think “some” is a key word.

For instance, Google’s Larry Page’s graduate advisor at Stanford (a school that was “awash in military cash”) was Terry Winograd, “a pioneer in linguistic artificial intelligence who had done work in the 1970s at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, a part of the bigger ARPANET project.

In the 1990s, Winograd was in charge of the Stanford Digital Libraries project, one component of the multi-million-dollar Digital Library Initiative sponsored by seven civilian, military, and law enforcement federal agencies, including NASA, DARPA, the FBI, and the National Science Foundation.”

Unsurprisingly, Larry Page’s PhD first research paper published in 1998 “bore the familiar disclosure: funded by DARPA.” “And just like old times,” Yasha writes. “DARPA played a role. Indeed, in 1994, just one year before Page had arrived at Stanford, DARPA’s funding of the Digital Library Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University produced a notable success: Lycos, a search engine named after Lycosidae, the scientific name for the wolf spider family.”

And when Google itself became huge, capitalizing on their secretive practice of all-pervasive data collection that allowed them to compete successfully in the “search” field — they shamelessly waved in our faces their carefully crafted image of benevolent nerds saving the world. “Don’t be evil,” they said. And many believed.

I remember that time well. Just some ten years ago, as a musician, I was involved in “anti-Big Tech activism” — complaining about Google’s predatory ways and transhumanism, and writing stories trying to draw attention to what was going on — and no one cared. People just liked Google. It was convenient to like Google. The media kissed up to them like they were kings, and regular citizens didn’t mind being surveilled as long as the services were convenient to use.

It’s very understandable. We are all focused on the everyday. And this is how long-term military planning work. Today, we can look around and say that they’ve done a pretty damn good job. Everything is online, the dependence is huge — and it is much harder to live the digital prison today than it was to never enter it decades ago. Can we learn from that?

And then there is PRISM — a program, revealed by Snowden, that gave the NSA (and the FBI) a back door to the servers of all major tech companies. Yasha’s “Surveillance Valley” touched upon PRISM as well:

“PRISM resembles traditional taps that the FBI maintained throughout the domestic telecommunications system. It works like this: using a specialized interface, an NSA analyst creates a data request, request, called a “tasking,” for a specific user of a partnering company.

A tasking for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and other providers is routed to equipment [‘interception units’] installed at each company. This equipment, maintained by the FBI, passes the NSA request to a private company’s system. The tasking creates a digital wiretap that then forwards intelligence to the NSA in real time, all without any input from the company itself.”

“Analysts could even opt-in for alerts for when a particular target logs in to an account. Depending on the company, a tasking may return e-mails, attachments, address books, calendars, files stored in the cloud, text or audio or video chats and ‘metadata’ that identify the locations, devices used and other information about a target.

The program, which began in 2007 under President George W. Bush and which was expanded under President Barack Obama, became a gold mine for American spies.”

There we have it. Privacy was never meant to be. The current development with censorship and surveillance is a feature, not a bug. And the internet — as fun as it is — is a continuation of Steven Newcomb’s “System of Domination,” and the System of Domination is real.

It turns out — again — that the world is run by a bunch of bold mobsters playing military games with our lives. In the post-2001 world, their games, previously happening on the background, became more visible to a regular citizen in the West.

And then in 2020, those games came straight to our backyard in the form of dictatorial COVID measures, paternalistic surveillance and moralizing, unhinged censorship, and so on. They came to our backyard in 2020 with a full boot, but the seed was planted long ago, when many were asleep.

All this is obnoxious, and tragic, and painful — but there is always a silver lining in everything that life brings. We are not helpless bystanders. Like Jeff Childers said in his interview, realistically, we may not be able to directly counter Klaus Schwab or the WEF (I believe that the higher powers will take care of them in due time). But even though there is little we can do about the WEF or the central bankers’ CBDC, we are not helpless. There are things we can do.

We can refuse to be afraid. We can use these times to try to understand the world. We can refuse to betray our brothers and sisters. We can focus on our immediate surroundings, on the things that we have the power to change, and we can change the world together, little by little, over time, with courage and passion, from the ground up. “Local, local, local” is something that speaks to me a lot.

After all, the villains, in their military planning, plan far ahead — sometimes, hundreds of years ahead (like Google saying that they hope to have their really perfect AI in 300 years — that’s long-term planning, I would say).

This really is an existential battle — yes, a challenge, but also chance of remembering who we are, an opportunity to part with our past delusions and to grow our souls for real, with spiritual dignity and without fear.

To find more of Tessa Lena’s work, be sure to check out her bio, Tessa Fights Robots.

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Documentary: High Mowing Organic Seeds for a New Food System

  • High Mowing Organic Seeds has become one of the only companies producing organic seeds from organically grown plants

  • Their mission is to grow organic seeds that came from an organic source that have high disease and insect resistance, high yield and that produce high-flavor crops

  • They now grow over 600 heirloom, open-pollinated and hybrid seeds, including vegetables, fruits, herbs and flowers, for home gardeners and commercial growers

  • Ninety-five percent of the acreage of organic vegetable farms are planted with conventional seeds

  • Choosing organic seeds is important for avoiding pesticides and growing the heartiest, most resilient plants

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Editor’s Note: This article is a reprint. It was originally published January 11, 2020.

Tom Stearns, who has both an entrepreneurial spirit and a desire to get back to the roots of where his food comes from, started saving seeds when he was 18 years old. The drive to connect to the source of his sustenance in the most direct way possible led him to begin exploring how to grow seeds.

“Growing food wasn’t enough,” he said in an episode of “Growing a Greener World,” a PBS series. “I was curious about the growing seeds and saving seeds part of it.” It’s an aspect of food production that many people overlook, yet it’s among the most important.

Growing a Greener World creator and host Joe Lamp’l makes a good point in that you can buy a seed or seedling and raise it organically with care, without any pesticides or other chemicals. And you can call it organic — but is it really? Not many people think about the seed that starts their plants, but Stearns did — deeply.

As he began his hobby of saving seeds, he realized he was saving more than he needed, and some of the varieties weren’t commercially available. With a desire to share the unique seeds with others, he packaged them up in small envelopes, learned about germination tests to ensure the seeds would grow and sold $2,000 worth of seeds in the first year.

“It was from those humble beginnings, 28 varieties planted in his own backyard, that one of the leading seed companies in the United States was born,” Lamp’l said.

In 1997, Stearns’ second year in the organic seed business, he grew 50 varieties and sold $8,000 worth of seeds. The year after that it grew to $18,000 in sales, then $34,000 — while still very much a hobby business.

Clearly there was a strong demand for organic seeds from people eager to know where their food, including the seeds, comes from, and by Year Four, Stearns reached a decision point regarding what he saw as a clear demand for high-quality, organic seeds.

The company continued to take off from there, becoming a half-million-dollar company by Year Seven or Eight. “And we had just barely gotten out of hobby stage at that point,” Stearns said. The company’s name, High Mowing Organic Seeds, has roots in northern Vermont, a hilly region that once centered on an agricultural term known as “high mowing.” The company noted:

“When the early European settlers came to New England, they brought with them their livestock-based agriculture. The practice of mowing hayfields and storing winter feed was well-established, and became even more important when they encountered the long winters in northern New England.

But instead of calling such a field a “hayfield” like we do today, they called it a “mowing”. These fields, or mowings, were usually further identified by a descriptor referring to location: the “back mowing” was behind the farm, the “low mowing” was in the valley, and the “high mowing” was up on the hilltop.”

High Mowing Organic Seeds has become one of the only companies producing organic seeds from organically grown plants. Most seed companies don’t even grow their own seeds, which made High Mowing Organic Seeds stand out even more from its competitors, as it grows all of its seeds.

Similar to going to a farmers market to meet the farmer behind the food, this back-to-its-roots seed company allowed people to see where their seeds were coming from — going back to the source of their sustenance.

The company now has 60 acres of land, which is about the length of 40 football fields. Their mission is to grow organic seeds that come from an organic source; that have high disease and insect resistance; that have a high yield; and that produce high-flavor crops.

They now grow over 600 heirloom, open-pollinated (seeds that are pollinated by insects, birds, humans, wind or other natural mechanisms) and hybrid seeds, including vegetables, fruits, herbs and flowers, for home gardeners and commercial growers.

What’s more, Stearns notes in the film that choosing organic seeds is very important, as while there are rules regarding chemical usage for commercial food crops, they’re more lax when it comes to growing conventional seeds, which technically aren’t a food product:

“When you’re growing food conventionally, there are rules about all the different chemicals you can use and not use. When you’re growing seeds conventionally, there’s also rules, but there are a lot more chemicals that are allowed.

So seed crops get sprayed with a lot of things, because it’s not a food crop, so it’s not going to translate into that risk for people, but of course it’s still poisons in the environment. So when you grow seeds organically, you don’t have those poisons, and it’s a major reduction of them compared to the conventional comparison.”

Neonicotinoids are one such example. A majority of soybean, corn, canola and sunflower seeds planted in the U.S. are precoated with these insecticides,

which have been shown to threaten the entire food chain, having toxic effects on pollinators such as bees as well as invertebrates, birds and other wildlife.

For instance, researchers tested how exposure to these chemicals influenced the behavior of migrating songbirds.

Birds that ingested realistic amounts of neonicotinoids had reduced feeding and accumulation of body mass and fat stores, leading to delayed departure from stopover sites that could affect breeding and population levels.

Another eye-opening fact revealed by Stearns is that 95% of the acreage of organic vegetable farms is planted with conventional seeds. This isn’t necessarily by choice, as the organic seed industry is still in its infancy, which means there isn’t always enough to go around or the correct varieties aren’t always available.

In fact, half the vegetables grown today have no commercial sources — you have to get them through seed trades.

High Mowing Organic Seeds is trying to bring more organic seed varieties to organic farmers, which they say makes a major difference compared to using conventional seeds. Stearns states in the film:

“If you’re producing a seed organically for organic farms, it’s going to be better adapted for those conditions.

So when you’re planting a certain crop, you can do it when the weather and the soil conditions are favorable for that crop, so that you don’t need to come in with some ‘rescue’ chemical to help solve an issue that you shouldn’t have in the first place if you are paying attention to those things.”

Conventional seeds used on organic farms are not bred for the conditions in which they’re being grown, which means you’re missing out on the full potential of the organic crop. So why aren’t more companies growing organic seeds?

It’s a very different process from growing plants for food, as it requires them to stay in the ground for much longer. This means they’re even more susceptible to damage from diseases and pests, which conventional growers use chemicals to ward off.

High Mowing Organic Seeds is focused on growing seed varieties that can grow in varied conditions across the U.S., varieties that will be hearty, robust and resilient in changing climates. They grow seeds thoughtfully, carefully selecting for plants that are slower to bolt and more resilient to stress. Bolting is defined as the rapid shift in a plant’s growth from leaf production to flower and seeds. It’s a process that many gardeners are eager to slow down.

The company removes plants that are quick to bolt, which is a sign that the plant may be less tolerable to stress. Paul Betz, sales manager, explains why this selection process makes a difference in the resulting plants’ tolerance to stress:

“If you think about what the plant is doing when it’s bolting … the plant feels threatened, so that plant translates into “life is getting a little bit tough, and so it’s time to make some seeds.

And so if you can do anything to reduce the stress that the plant is under, that will prolong how long it grows before it starts to bolt. And your job as a gardener is to create the easiest environment for the plant to grow in.”

Stearns believes growing seeds organically and focusing on the health of soil and water are keys to rebuilding an entire food system:

“This new food system that we need to create needs to think deeply about how we take care of the soil, the water, the air, what tools we use, what types of seeds we use, what the nutrition is that goes into the soil, and then into the food and then into people.

And so this new food system that I feel to be a part of changing through these seeds is something that I think has a global effect and a global requirement. If we don’t try, we’re losing our capacity to grow food here …

It is the single biggest way that we engage with this Earth, and we are doing it wrong. There’s no arguments about that among people. We just need the courage to figure out the new ways of doing it.”

Toward that end, High Mowing donates over 100,000 seed packets annually to community gardens, school gardens, church gardens, food bank gardens, summer camps, seed libraries and disaster relief groups, helping to spread organic seeds across the U.S.7

While there’s increasing focus on the importance of growing food crops organically, it all starts with a seed. So, in addition to asking where your food comes from, remember to ask where the seed that grows that food came from as well.

If you garden, seeking out high-quality organic seeds will help you produce the most robust plants and healthiest food. Another alternative, however, is to save seeds from your own plants. When you save seed from your own best performing plants, on your land and in your own ecosystem, you gradually develop varieties better adapted to your own soil, climate and growing conditions.

Large seed suppliers rarely “rogue” the fields to pull out inferior or off-type plants, so the open-pollinated seeds they sell have inferior specimens in the mix. High Mowing is one of the rare seed companies that does do this, but you can also select your own seed for uniformity and quality.

You can control the gene pool for optimal germination, ripening time, flavor, storage, disease resistance and color. After a few seasons, more and more of your plants will have all of your personally selected traits.

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The information on this website is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical advice. It is intended as a sharing of knowledge and information from the research and experience of Dr. Mercola and his community. Dr. Mercola encourages you to make your own health care decisions based upon your research and in partnership with a qualified health care professional. The subscription fee being requested is for access to the articles and information posted on this site, and is not being paid for any individual medical advice.

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Scott Ritter explains to the Health Ranger that the West won't be able to stop Russia's advanced nuclear missiles and hyperglide vehicles

Image: Scott Ritter explains to the Health Ranger that the West won’t be able to stop Russia’s advanced nuclear missiles and hyperglide vehicles

(Natural News) Western powers are trumpeting the claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin is sick and dying; is losing the war in Ukraine; and will soon run out of weapons and manpower to continue his fight against the West. Former United Nations (UN) weapons inspector Scott Ritter, however, says otherwise.

In a powerful interview with Mike Adams, the Health Ranger – be sure to watch below – Ritter explains in detail how Russia actually has the upper hand in all this. America’s military stands no chance, he says, against Russia’s advanced nuclear missiles and hyperglide vehicles, which are much more powerful than anything the West currently has in its arsenal.

“The United States since 1992 has treated Russia as a defeated enemy, and we have sought to keep them down,” Ritter explains to Adams on his “Health Ranger Report” program. “We succeeded in doing that for 10 years under Boris Yeltsin – a new president came in, Vladimir Putin, who wasn’t going to play that game, and we’ve been trying to get rid of Putin ever since.”

“We do that by trying to destabilize Russia, and one of the key aspects of destabilizing Russia was to expand NATO to Russia’s border to include stripping away Ukraine from a Russian spear of influence, knowing that this would provoke a confrontation with Russia.”

(Related: Learn more about what transpired to cause Russia to transition from a “special operation” in Ukraine to a full-scale “demilitarization” of Ukraine.)

The U.S. and NATO “miscalculated,” Ritter says

According to Ritter, this is a fight the West thought it could win, easily. The reality, though, is that Russia flipped the script and is actually now winning the war while the West wobbles on the verge of collapse.

Brighteon.TV

“We miscalculated,” Ritter says about the U.S. and NATO’s efforts. “The Russian economy is doing well, and getting better. Europe’s economy, on the other hand, isn’t doing well. And the last time I went to the supermarket and looked at food prices, we’ve got some issues too.”

What began as a localized conflict in Ukraine has also since spread to the rest of the world, hence all the talk about World War III. The U.S. and NATO are poking the Russian bear, to the detriment of the West.

Because they are now using Ukraine as a proxy to fight Russia, the West is escalating the situation into a global conflict, and “surprise, surprise: we’re not doing well,” Ritter warns.

“It’s a year into the conflict and the fact is the Russians have mobilized successfully; they have positioned their military on the battlefield in a manner which will lead to victory over Ukraine – Ukraine has been propped up by American taxpayer dollars and NATO weaponry.”

For revealing all of this and more, Ritter landed himself on two separate blacklists, one of which is a propaganda outlet that operates right out of the office of the presidency in Ukraine.

“The Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), a unique name because it’s purely a propaganda outlet of the office of the president in Ukraine, so they work directly for Volodymyr Zelensky,” Ritter says.

“This is an office that was created by the U.S. State Department actually, funded by U.S. taxpayers, and they take anybody who speaks out in a manner that opposes the narrative being pushed by the Ukrainian government, by the U.S. government, by the mainstream media, if you dare challenge this, then you get put on this list, it’s a blacklist, they call you a Russian propagandist, they call you an information terrorist, they call you a war criminal, and the idea is to have you canceled.”

Be sure to watch the full interview above. You will also find the latest news about the escalating skirmish between Russia and the West at RussiaReport.news.

Sources for this article include:

Brighteon.com

NaturalNews.com