Category: essay

Alternative approaches to combat respiratory viruses – freedom from the failing corporate-induced orthodoxy of the early 2020s

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Faced with ongoing risks from Covid-19, as well as future pathogens, all responsible citizens have an interest in what actions might combat respiratory viruses in future. That is whether actions are in addition to, or instead of, the approaches that have largely failed since 2020, despite the hiding of that fact by government authorities and mass media. Low levels of awareness about complementary or alternative approaches to combatting respiratory viruses has meant that many people assume that anyone critiquing the orthodoxy on Covid-19 must have less concern for public health, rather than being more concerned about it. Such lack of awareness is due to the corporate takeover of medicine, government, media and the digital sphere, which is hiding relevant expertise while promoting false moral narratives to elicit disdain towards people with heterodox views. Despite the resultant vilification, some experts have been so concerned about public health that they have been assessing whether other approaches might work better, as well as having fewer negative impacts on health and wellbeing. As I am often asked what I suggest would be a smarter response to the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as future epidemics, I am summarising some of my understanding in this essay.  

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Should scientists moonlight as ideologues?

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This is an edited excerpt from Chapter 7 of ‘Breaking Together’ where I get a bit technical on the nature of the scientific method and how unscientific some natural scientists and other experts have become when they discuss our societal predicament. Listen to the whole of this chapter on “recognising collapse and cultural decay” for free on Soundcloud. The release coincides with the availability of the paperback from the Schumacher Institute. Further ordering info follows at the end of this excerpt.

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Much of the discussion about risks and processes of societal collapse involves arguments about what people think is useful to believe, or how they wish to feel about the future. Such discussion is about people’s own identities and worldviews, involving lots of assumptions and logical fallacies. It can get quite nasty and resort to demonisation of individuals, condemned for being too negative. However, returning to the basics of scientific method can help to cut through this ‘noise’.

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Why we must ALL challenge authoritarian views in green politics

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Lancaster University academic, John Foster: “Forcefully transformative government… would have to be authoritarian…” “…if [Dr] Bendell wants to send GH [the Green House UK thinktank] an argued objection to what I said in my piece, GH will publish it along with a response from me. This is too important an issue not to encourage responsible debate on it.”

The following in an edited excerpt from the chapter “resisting the fake green globalists” in the book “Breaking Together: a freedom-loving response to collapse.” I am sharing it here in response to the Green House think tank supporting the views of the academic John Foster, which I quote further below. They invited a more substantive dialogue than possible on twitter. That seems appropriate as the thinktank claims to be “leading the development of green thinking in the UK” and has influential people on its board. The concepts I mention in this excerpt, and the evidence for them, are argued in detail elsewhere in the book, which is currently available as paperback/hardback/kindle, and will be available as a free epub download from The Schumacher Institute (TSI) from July 10th 2023 (as TSI always notes, these views are the author’s not the institute’s).

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Getting more serious about food system breakdown

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Combativeness and moral disdain pervades recent public discussion of environmental problems. It is not just one ‘side’ that resorts to such tactics. Take food and agriculture as an example. Some people speculate that eco-totalitarians will successfully force us to eat bugs and goo, whereas others oddly claim that anyone defending farmers is a far right extremist, obstructing the technological salvation of humanity and life on Earth. The AI generated image above is poking fun at the piety that’s in an unnecessarily binary discussion – as if we must all be steak lovers or steak haters, food tech fanatics or small farm purists. The famous climate activist Greta Thunberg has not descended into those silly binaries. Which is good, as they are unhelpful when we need a plurality of ideas on what to do about the unfolding breakdown of global food systems, as I chronicle in detail in Chapter 6 of my book “Breaking Together”. This blog coincides with the release of that chapter as a free audio (it is also available free from my University). 

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Atlas Mugged

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The following is an extract from the book ‘Breaking Together: a freedom-loving response to collapse’, where I discuss the potential meanings of the ‘Kintsugi Atlas’ image on the book’s cover.

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The matter of the collapse of industrial consumer societies is not only extremely inconvenient for those of us who are enjoying its conveniences, but also deeply challenging philosophical and spiritually. After a few years of soul searching about aspects of our culture that are implicated in this tragic situation, I arrived at the paradox of our desire to ‘be someone’ and help each other. One way of describing this paradox is with Greek Myth. The image on the cover of this book is an adaptation of the oldest surviving statue of Atlas, a character from Greek mythology. From the 2nd Century before the Christian Era, it depicts him straining to hold up an orb, which in the contemporary era has been widely misunderstood to represent planet Earth. That misunderstanding may have begun in the year 1585 with the use of the word Atlas by Flemish cartographer Gerhardus Mercator, to describe his collection of maps of the world. On the inside cover of his book, there was a drawing of Atlas having removed the orb from his shoulders and mapping it in his hands.[1] With her famous book ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Ayn Rand may have misconstrued the orb as representing our world, and therefore used it to symbolise the weight of the world’s problems (such as parasitic bureaucrats) on otherwise strong and free people.[2]

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Evidence and theory for how monetary collapse has been made inevitable

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“At 8:30 p.m. on 23 March 2020, then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a stay-at-home order effective immediately, backed up by the subsequent regulation three days later. The stated aim was to “flatten the curve” of the rate of infections. So, he launched the slogan “Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives” and said that the lockdown would be reviewed every three weeks. This was unprecedented and came as a surprise to the public. But a week earlier, on March 17th, the Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey wrote to the chancellor Rishi Sunak outlining a similarly unprecedented measure, which would direct tens of billions of pounds directly to large corporations:

“The new Covid-19 Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF) will provide funding to businesses by purchasing commercial paper of up to one-year maturity, issued by firms making a material contribution to the UK economy. It will help businesses across a wide range of sectors to bridge across the economic disruption that is likely to be associated with Covid-19, supporting them in paying salaries, rents and suppliers, even while experiencing severe disruption to cashflows. The Bank will implement the facility on behalf of the Treasury and will put it into place as soon as possible.”

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No wealth but life – pig style

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Have you ever wondered where the term ‘piggy bank’ came from? Like me, some of you probably saved your spare coins in them when children. I didn’t give it a second thought until I stumbled across an actual living piggy bank in Bali. Midway through a cycling tour, we had stopped in a traditional village, and invited into a family compound. It was the kind where multiple generations all live in small houses next to each other, with a temple at the front, and some animals at the back. That is where I saw pig sty with a half dozen pigs. “The older women here don’t like putting money in a bank, so they buy a pig and feed it as their way to save,” my guide told me. A sensible store of value, I thought, especially with interest rates so low at the time. After the trip, I looked up the origin of the term piggy bank. Some historians guessed the name came from jars being made of a clay that was sometimes called ‘pygg’ in Germany and England, and that was the theory on Wikipedia at the time (it was 2015). But I had seen in the Indonesian national museum a piggy bank that was around 400 years older than when the word pygg was being used in Europe for a type of clay. Maybe I am a bit strange, but the piggy bank origin story had me. I dug deeper to discover that the earliest known pig-shaped money containers date to the 12th century in Indonesia.[i]

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ChatGPT can’t pass an experiential knowledge exam

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Because artificial intelligence software does not have real world life experiences to draw from, there should be no worry about its implications for academic assessment.

I see from my LinkedIn network that many academics are discussing what the implications from artificial intelligence could be for assessing their students. ChatGPT has even passed an MBA exam! Reading about this I was entirely unconcerned. Should I be? My lack of concern stems from how I have been designing courses and setting assignments for nearly 20 years. But rather than assume that my assessments are immune from the misuse of artificial intelligence, I thought to write up my approach and see if fellow academics can see any potential problems. If not, then hopefully me sharing my approach will be of use to others.

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As Covid is here to stay – an excerpt from Breaking Together, forthcoming 2023

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Some of the research I have been doing over the past 3 years for my forthcoming book on societal disruption and collapse seems too urgent to sit on until June this year. The poor state of public discussion about the Covid pandemic is a reason why I am sharing a section from Chapter 5 of the book. I believe my approach reflects how research analysts like myself used to approach matters of public concern before discussions became polarized (and somewhat hysterical) during the pandemic. I hope more of us will take that approach in future and then be heard, rather than shadow banned and demonised by people who used to behave better.

“As Covid is here to stay, it is worthy of some closer consideration of its impacts on society.

With a relatively low infection fatality rate in the near term, the initial impacts of the disease itself do not constitute a threat of societal collapse. However, at the time of writing, pathways have been identified for how the pandemic could contribute to such a collapse. The first of these is the nature of the virus itself and how it could turn out to be causing long-term damage to health and vitality, as well as suppressing immunity in general and even being carcinogenic. The second of these pathways is the currently uncertain longer-term effects of some novel vaccines, which have already been associated with significant negative health effects. Then there are the wider effects of the policy responses including massive disruption to government finances and the authoritarian turn of mainstream media, big technology platforms, and sections of the general public, as well as the backlash against all of that – together creating a combustible mix. As this is such a polarized and polarizing topic it’s rare that the relevant information is brought together in one place, so I will briefly attempt that here so that the nature of the risk from Covid can be appreciated. 

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