The Humanity Simulation

The Humanity Simulation.
The exploitative capitalist system wraps itself in a humanitarian guise. Exclusive reprint from "One Earth for All! Oneness versus the 1%".
By Vandana Shiva
[This article published on Oct 28, 2021 is translated from the German on the Internet, Die Humanitäts-Simulation | Rubikon.]

They toss coins into a begging bowl with their right hand and pull bills from the pockets of the poor with their left. The Gates model of philanthropic capitalism has little to do with charity and donations and all the more to do with profit, control and takeover. It is an economic model designed to favor profitable investments, politically aimed at greater power of disposition and the reduction of diversity. Powerful global players want to appropriate what is naturally given, monopolize it and make it economically exploitable. Competition is to be eliminated; democratic voice silenced. The Trojan horse with which this destructive agenda seeks to overrun all obstacles is called "aid".

At the 64th World Health Assembly in Geneva on May 16, 2011, Gates admitted that the foundation was funding research into vaccines and then acquiring patents on them. He said, "In terms of intellectual property, what we do is really quite simple: we fund research, and we ourselves or our partners create intellectual property, so that anything that is invented with the help of foundation money and goes to richer countries actually pays off."
Gates has donated money to fight the Ebola epidemic in Africa, and he, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) own patents on the Ebola vaccine. At the G-20 Summit in Hamburg on July 8, 2017, of all the world's diseases, Ebola was singled out, showing how much it sets the agenda for "development" funding.

The report Global Justice Now Warns:
Gated Development shows that the trend to include business in the fight against poverty and inequality is central to the priorities and funding of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF ). We believe this is far from a neutral charitable strategy, but rather an ideological commitment to promoting neoliberal economic policies and corporate globalization. Big business benefits directly from the foundation's activities, especially in the areas of agriculture and health, although it has been proven that business solutions are not the most effective.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is that despite its aggressive corporate strategy and extraordinary influence on governments, academics, and the media, there are no critical voices. Global Justice Now is concerned that the foundation's influence is so pervasive that many actors in international development who would otherwise criticize the foundation's policies and practices are unable to speak out independently because of the foundation's funding and patronage.

Gated Development further reports:
"A major problem with the focus on technology is that BMGF, along with other philanthropic foundations, continues to reshape aid policy away from prioritizing rights and equity toward technocratic 'authoritarian development.'"

For example, Bill Gates stated in his 2015 annual letter that the next 15 years will see major breakthroughs in poor countries "driven by innovations in technology-from new vaccines and more resilient crops to much cheaper smartphones and tablets-and innovations that help make these things accessible to more people."

A history: an illusion constructed by the 1 percent
"Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth" - George Orwell.
"The struggle of the people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting" - Milan Kundera.
Erasing, obliterating is an essential element in building the money machine and the illusion of democracy that helps keep the money machine going.

This includes the erasure of our diverse knowledge as well as our diverse economies, our diverse democracies and our diverse history. This, in turn, leads simultaneously to the erasure of the potential of our diversity, the possibility of coexisting in interdependence and cooperation and contributing to the common prosperity, to the common good. And it is also about the erasure of the memory of the violence of colonization, past and present. The violence is "naturalized" as progress, and the erasure that exists in every phase of colonization as "design." It erases the connection between the wealth and power of the colonizer and the poverty and marginalization of the colonized.

"Development" is part of this narrative based on Rostov's "stages of growth." It calls the poverty created by colonialism "underdevelopment" and offers further colonization through externally controlled and promoted "development" as a solution to that poverty.

Villainous Pieces
Among the most irresponsible experiments Gates pushes is geoengineering, which began as a military tool for weather modification and has been part of geostrategic warfare. It involves the deliberate alteration of weather and climate, i.e., interventions in the Earth's climate system. Techniques include solar radiation management (SRM) and other interventions in the Earth system under the guise of carbon dioxide reduction (CDR) or greenhouse gas removal (GGR).

Gates and other billionaires fund both geoengineering experiments and lobby governments to conduct these experiments on a global scale. As a Guardian report indicates, the U.S. government received requests for over $2 billion in geoengineering research from 2009 to 2010, but only spent about $100 million.

The report states that Professors David Keith of Harvard University and Ken Caldeira of Stanford University received over $4.6 million from Gates to administer the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (FICER). The report goes on to say that Professor Keith, according to his declaration of financial interests, receives an undisclosed sum from Bill Gates each year and is president and majority owner of Carbon Engineering, a geoengineering company founded in 2009, in which Gates and another private investor, Murray Edwards, are said to hold large stakes - together more than $10 million.

The Guardian explains that another Edwards company, Canadian Natural Resources, has plans to invest $25 billion to turn bituminous sand found in northern Alberta into barrels of crude oil. Caldeira says he receives $375,000 a year from Gates, owns a patent on carbon capture and works for Intellectual Ventures, a private geoengineering research firm partly owned by Gates and run by Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer of Microsoft.

As Diana Bronson of ETC (Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration) says in the Guardian:
"There are clear conflicts of interest among many involved in the debate. What's really troubling about this is that the same small group that is looking at high-risk technologies that will geo-engineer the planet is at the same time trying to determine the discussion around international rules and regulations. We can't put the fox in charge of the henhouse."

Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Charles Stuart University and author of Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering writes in his blog for The Guardian:
"The eco-clique is lobbying for a huge injection of public money into geoengineering research. It dominates virtually every study of geoengineering. It is present at almost all expert consultations. It provided the lead advisors in parliamentary surveys and congressional investigations, and its views will in all likelihood dominate the deliberations of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is addressing the scientific and ethical controversy over geoengineering for the first time."

Bill Gates has committed at least $4.5 million of his own money to study methods that could alter the stratosphere by reflecting solar radiation and brightening ocean clouds. Intellectual Ventures has applied for patents on techniques to geoengineer the stratosphere. Along with officials from that organization, Gates applied for a patent in 2008 to mitigate hurricanes by mixing surface and deep ocean water.

Gated Development reports:
"A recent report by The Lancet and University College London concluded that climate change is 'the greatest global health threat of the 21st century.'"

Instead of focusing on pollution and anthropogenic factors driving climate change, the assumption is that the problem with climate disruption is that the sun is shining on the Earth.

All geoengineering solutions to climate change are simplistic and non-ecological, focusing on blocking the sun, either by reflecting sunlight back through mirrors in the sky or by creating artificial volcanoes or spraying aerosols.

But the sun is not the problem. Fossil fuels and the fossil fuel-based industrial system, and especially industrial agriculture, are the problems. The sun is essential because without it there would be no photosynthesis, no life, no food.

Climate change is not just global warming, to which mechanistic "global cooling" through life-destroying geoengineering experiments may be the answer. The climate crisis is a disruption of the Earth's processes that regulate climate. The result of this disruption is climate chaos and extreme and unpredictable events.
Geoengineering will only exacerbate this disruption.
In a paper presented at a geoengineering conference on ethics, Jane Long, director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States, cautions:
"We need to be wary of special interests (and) be sure that decisions are not influenced by parties who could make significant sums of money by deciding to change the climate, especially if they use protected intellectual property."

When our age is called the Anthropocene, it refers to the power of humans to severely disrupt the Earth's ecological processes. But it would be arrogant and irresponsible to claim that this power to disrupt gives a few privileged humans the right to usurp Earth's resources, processes, and systems, negating the creativity, self-organization, and diversity of living things and life systems. Nature is more than a human construct or an object for human manipulation and short-term benefit. No, it is the creative force of the universe. To be alive is to live in the ecocene.

I refer to as the Ecocene both the ecological process of the Earth and the biosphere that shapes, nurtures and sustains life, and the growing awareness among humans that we are citizens of the Earth, part of the Earth community. It includes the awareness that the Earth has rights and that we have a duty to care for it, its creatures and our fellow human beings. And it includes correcting and overcoming the errors, false assumptions and limitations of the mechanistic mind.

I have deliberately avoided calling our time the Age of the Anthropocene, because an anthropocentric worldview has caused much of the ecological destruction of our time. To continue to place humans at the center of thinking is to perpetuate human hubris. Moreover, anthropocentrism goes hand in hand with ethnocentrism and the paradigms that emerged in the West with the advent of colonialism, industrialism, and capitalism. The rule of the 1 percent is a hyper-anthropocentrism that excludes not only the rights of all non-human beings, but also those of most humans.

World Environment Day 2017 was marked by U.S. President Donald Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. What does Trump's arrogance mean for international commitments to protect the Earth, for a future based on environmental justice, for sowing the seeds of Earth democracy? Environmental laws at the national level were created in the 1970s to protect the Earth from harm and, because we live on the Earth, to protect humans from harm as well.
In 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the international community adopted two important environmental principles - the precautionary principle and the polluter pays principle - and signed two legally binding treaties: the CBD and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).

Both treaties were shaped by the emerging ecological sciences and the deepening ecology movement. One was a scientific response to ecological pollution from fossil fuels. The second was a scientific response to genetic pollution from GMOs and the erosion of biodiversity from the spread of industrial, chemical-intensive monocultures. Three years after Rio, the UN Leipzig Conference on Plant Genetic Resources concluded that 75 percent of biodiversity has disappeared due to the Green Revolution and industrial agriculture. Interdisciplinary science and democratic movements provided the impetus for international environmental law. Science and democracy continue to be the forces that challenge the dire threat to the earth posed by corporate greed.

Climate change is all about reducing emissions and developing strategies for adaptation. Biodiversity conservation is about biosecurity and adopting and promoting practices that preserve biodiversity.

One project that illustrates both the superficiality of Gates' ideas and his desire to control nature and society - or have a machine do it for him - is the Big History project, to which he has reportedly contributed tens of millions of dollars. The project is inspired by videos produced by Australian professor David Christian that Gates watched while exercising on his treadmill. Christian's videos are not about history, but about replacing human history with a linear, technocratic vision of a society based on genetic determinism. There are no people in Christian's depiction of history, no cultures, no colonization, no corporations, no billionaires running an economy for the 1 percent. Big History is nothing more than a mechanistic, reductionist, technocratic narrative of power and control. It is a history to create a future for the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent. It is the rewriting of history for Big Money. As Katherine Edwards writes in her article Why the Big History Project is funded by Bill Gates:
" ... the most alarming aspect is not the content of what Gates and Christian are proposing, but the fact that someone with no background in history or education happens upon an idea on the treadmill one morning, and soon the education of thousands of children is remodeled. It's to be brought into line with its latest fad - because of the enormous economic power it wields."

In the UK, state education is rapidly following the U.S. model, becoming increasingly commercialized and divorced from democratic accountability. Local authority schools are being offered bribes by brokers to become academies, and the Department for Education has refused to ban for-profit state schools. Recently, we saw a minister of education draft a history curriculum on a whim. Maybe next time it will be an unelected billionaire.

Bill Gates has an extremely limited vocabulary - "innovation," "technology," and "investment." It reveals how his imagination is shaped by power and control, by money and technology.
Diverse voices and opinions are at the heart of freedom and democracy. When people are free, they have a voice. When societies are democratic, their voices are heard. When societies become undemocratic, voices are suppressed and silenced. Big Money threatens democracy by silencing people's diverse voices, by controlling and manipulating the news, the media, and consequently public opinion.

One story is the rewriting of history, the falsification of reality, the suppression of the real voices of real people to create a resonating space for artificially created, digitally controlled narratives.

This text is excerpted from the book "One Earth for All! Oneness versus the 1%" by Vandana Shiva.
Vandana Shiva is a scientist, author of more than 20 books, environmental activist and advocate for food sovereignty and earth democracy. Her pioneering work in traditional agriculture and women's rights, particularly in the Global South, has brought about a fundamental cultural shift in the way the world views these issues.
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When Everything Collapses
Only by connecting with the earth can we get through this time.
By Kerstin Chavent
[This article published on Oct 28, 2021 is translated from the German on the Internet, Wenn alles zusammenbricht | Rubikon.]

Volcanoes are erupting all over the world. The Pacific fire belt is in turmoil. The earth is quaking and spewing. People are seething, too. The attempts to turn us against each other are becoming more and more massive. It is time to let out the pent-up anger. Let's spit out the heavy chunks and digest the rest. Not violence and aggression against others is the solution, but individual acts of liberation that allow us to come to our center and find a new balance. In this way we can connect with the earth and together with it weather the coming storms.

The earth is shaking. Storms sweep through the land, water falls from the sky in masses, fires consume the fertile land. La Palma, Iceland, California, Hawaii, Russia, USA, Japan, Mexico, Chile, Italy, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Nepal, Tibet, India, Croatia, Malta, ... all over the world volcanoes have awakened (1). The images are impressive. It is as if the innermost part of the earth is coming out in bloody, red-hot chunks. Nothing can stop the lava flows, nothing can prevent the cloud towers and stop the ash rain. Everything that opposes the eruption is destroyed. Earth, fire, water, air - the elements unleash their power. When they erupt, man can only bend.

We may fiddle with the weather and use climate change as an opportunity to reach deep into our toolbox, but we are powerless against the liberating elements. We may try to save the Great Barrier Reef by artificially generating clouds, or we may try to preserve the Netherlands with dams - anyone who has ever looked into the crater of an erupting volcano understands the unbridled power pulsing out of the planet. Given the images that drone footage provides us, only an insane mind could imagine that it could dominate nature and dominate life.

The earth is showing its teeth to us, so to speak. Enough! The planet is plundered, the seas overacidified, the atmosphere widely destroyed.

Silently the trees have fallen, the lakes have dried up, the animals have perished. They have let it happen to them, just as most people do not protest when freedom, dignity and life are taken from them. In some places on earth, however, it is boiling. The fire belt around the Pacific Ocean has awakened. Mightily it roars and groans from the depths of the earth. The craters break open like ulcers and open the way for what wants to come out.

Unleashed
As a child of this earth, I feel deeply connected to these events. Storms sweep through me as well. The water, of which my organism is largely composed, is in turmoil. Within me I feel a fire burning, making its way through my body. Like the earth, I am stirred to my very core. I feel shocked, shaken, stunned.

These are chaotic times, inside and out, outside and in. It erupts inside me like volcanoes: For heaven's sake, what is happening here right now!!!? Man, how can you allow the living to be buried and sacrificed to the Fourth Industrial Revolution? Are you out of your mind? How can you be so gullible, so ignorant, so indifferent, to think that what is happening is a coincidence and an attempt to protect life? How can it be that you so stubbornly refuse to recognize the perfidious plan, as if there had never been geostrategists, cadres and communities of interest (2)?

What prevents you from developing the courage to become fully informed? How can you be so unconcerned about the victims of the measures, the vaccine deaths and the vaccine victims? How can you measure things with such double standards? Do you have to be in your own way first? Must you first see what you have done to your children and those you love? How can you continue to close your eyes and ears and be satisfied that at least you haven't lost your job and are allowed to go to the movies and the gym?

Hypocritical
And me, where do I go with my anger, my questions, my bewilderment? What do I do when someone sits across from me again, quickly changing the subject when I tell them I can no longer teach and participate in public life?

How do I act toward those who talk about how there are too many of us on this planet, and at the same time advocate mass vaccination? I don't understand. If we really are too many, then it would be downright desirable that as many of us as possible disappear, wouldn't it?

If we are too many, why seal off the whole planet to protect people? Why go to such lengths to ensure that standoff rules are followed, to get people to put on their masks and get vaccinated? If there were too many of us, then it wouldn't be bad if there were a few hundred million less of us, would it? Then it would be a good idea to put a virus into the world that kills as many of us as possible. And the too many that are left, they get the shot.

If there are too many of us, then it would be good if as many as possible become infertile and die. If we are too many, then camps and wars and famines are also good. If we are too many, then the Holocaust was also a good thing, and the Gulag, because they did, after all, rid the planet of millions of people. Yes, if we are really too many, then I can only hope that no ruler, no decision-maker has yet caught on to what so many are thinking.

The measure is full
That's not how I put it, as I sit in the romantic glow of lanterns in convivial company and eat snails. Likewise I do not suggest that one could select two or three in each family, which one kills for the good purpose. Maybe the black sheep? Or rather the old and those who are sick and weak anyway? But those who talk about us being too many are all vaccinated, as are the members of their families, and obviously have no desire to clear the field. I realize that by their "too many" they do not mean themselves and their own families, but the others.

I take refuge in a heavy red wine and a game of arithmetic. I had once heard that the entire human race could fit into the country of Austria. Since I'm not ace at math, I whip out my smartphone. Austria has about 84,000 square kilometers. That makes about 84,000,000,000 square meters. So 84 billion. No eight billion people live on Earth at this point in time. That fits. It means that all of humanity would even still have freedom of movement in Austria, while the remaining 194 countries would be completely deserted.

It is not understood that I do not want to call all people to emigrate to Austria, but that our environmental, economic and health problems are not a question of quantity, but of quality. People make fun of me with mockery. Once again I feel alone. The number of those with whom I resonate on the same wavelength remains small. It is a great challenge to my composure and tolerance not to harden here or to feel like a victim, a misunderstood outsider who is at best not taken seriously and at worst kicked to the sidelines.

Time to say goodbye
The silence, the indifference and ignorance, the rejections and defamations, the denunciations and betrayals hit me harder than the actions. My heart is gripped by a deep sorrow, my soul suffers. I feel: I did not protect myself enough. I wanted to keep myself open to everything. Now my limits have been reached. I don't want them in my life, this contempt, this cynicism, this calculation, and I call upon the elements that make up my body for help.

I imagine fresh air flowing through me, clear water washing away what is stale, brackish, putrid, and the earth carrying me, despite everything. I hand over to the fire everything that is dead in me and do not carry it around with me any longer. I go out into nature and scream, roar like a tiger, stamp my feet like an angry child, shake like a wet dog. So it breaks out of me, the dark heaviness, and makes way for a promising emptiness.

It is like coming home. I go towards the people who are ready for real encounters, people who don't hide, people who don't believe that we are too many. With these people, freedom is possible.

The silence has an end. What we have not dared to say for so long can now be said. No one sneers or makes cynical remarks when we formulate our truth. We don't have to fight for the word and we listen to each other with respect and goodwill.

This may not be for everyone. For those who wish to remain in their fear, let it be so. Let everyone bet on the horse he thinks is best. Everyone has the right to be wrong and to make his own experiences. Let us learn not to judge ourselves for it. Let's say goodbye to each other in all friendship and choose the partners with whom we are ready to move on and learn how another life is possible.

New bonds
I choose the people who do not think that humanity is finished anyway, that man is nothing but a more or less defective machine, a danger to his neighbor, a nothing that goes to nothing. For me, the time has come to leave behind us the inhuman thoughts and the regulations and laws that have arisen from them and to step into a higher consciousness in which such devaluations and judgments no longer have a place. It is a time in which we live what we did not dare to live.

In it, truth and love are liberated, which we have long spoken, if at all, only with pointed lips and furrowed brow. Now they can unfold. Like phoenixes rising from the ashes, they give us the courage to stand up for them. We are ready. Now is the time to act. When things get noisy, let's not fight each other, but let's go to our hearts. Let's connect with each other, heart to heart, and like the stars in the sky, join together to form a picture for others to follow.

Let us follow our breath. It leads us to Mother Earth. It helps us to root ourselves in her. Let us feel the movement of the earth within us and not resist it. Let us accept it like the ship accepts the waves on the wild ocean. Let us endure them. Like us, our planet is in the process of separating from that which makes it sick and weak.

The increased volcanic activity and the shifts in Earth's tectonic plates, the meteors and solar storms are making sure we stay tuned. Let's stay awake, let's not fall asleep. Let us have confidence. We find confidence in our center, where we are in balance. Let us believe in it. Let us feel it. Let us remember those who have gone before us and imagine how they stand by us now. In this way, we can set ourselves in motion as one organism, for our own good and for the good of all concerned.
Sources and Notes:

(1) https://earthquakes.volcanodiscovery.com/?L=1
(2) As a reminder, an interview with financial expert Ernst Wolff: https://auf1.tv/aufrecht-auf1/ernst-wolff-im-interview-welche-minderheit-uns-lenkt-und-was-sie-will/

Kerstin Chavent is an author and language teacher living in the South of France. Published in German so far are "Die Waffen niederlegen", "Das Licht fließt dahin, wo es dunkel ist", "Krankheit heilt" and "Was wachsen will muss Schalen abwerfen". It was her experience with cancer that led her to write. Her themes are dealing with illness, raising awareness of creative potential, and awakening consciousness in a changing world. Read more on her blog, "Conscious: Being in Transition."