Twitter Alert

 I saw this article in my Twitter feed this morning. Figure 1 shows a screenshot.

Figure 1: screenshot from Twitter feed

I thought I'd follow the link attached as so I clicked on it, only to be greeted by the following Twitter warning shown in Figure 2:

Figure 2: screenshot of Twitter's warning

Knowledge is a dangerous thing and Twitter has recognised that if you go to this site you may become more knowledgeable! So what is on this potentially unsafe site? Here's the article's headline:

Land Dispossession and Imperialism Repackaged as ‘Feeding the World’

You can click on the link to read the full article but it concludes:

The web that global capitalism weaves in a quest to seek out new profits, capture new markets and control common resources (commonwealth) is destroying farmer livelihoods, the environment and health under the bogus claim of ‘feeding the world’. Those farmers who survive the profiteering strategies of dispossession and imperialism are to become incorporated into a system of contract farming dictated by global agri-food giants tied to an exploitative food regime based on market dependency and corporate control. A regime that places profit ahead of biodiverse food security, healthy diets and the environment.

There are some interesting links within the article: one is to a article in GRAINS, "a small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems". The article is titled Barbarians at the barn: private equity sinks its teeth into agriculture. Here is an excerpt:

Private equity is only one class of investors taking control of assets in the food and agriculture sphere – from farmland to grain terminals to meat processing plants to food delivery – and transforming realities for farmers, fishers and workers. But it is a powerful class. Though its operations are opaque and barely accounted for, private equity as a sector has grown enormously since the 2008 financial crisis and is becoming more concentrated. It is also becoming increasingly present in the global South.

This trend is part of broader process by which the world of finance – banks, funds, insurance companies and the like – is gaining control over the real economy, including forests, watersheds and rural people's territories. This is called financialisation. Apart from uprooting communities and grabbing resources to entrench an industrial and export-oriented model of agriculture, it is shifting power to remote board rooms occupied by people with no connection to farming, much less local concerns, and who are merely in it to make money.

All of this is quite disturbing and part of an overarching plan to destroy small farmers and drive farmers off the land into smart cities or, if they remain, they remain as serfs. 

There is a good article in grain.org about the growing influence of RCEP:

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is a proposed mega-trade agreement that involves 10 countries of Southeast Asia and six of their trading partners. If adopted, it will be the biggest trade deal in the world. RCEP will not just change rules on the export and import of goods and services; it will change how governments decide on rights to land and who has access to it. Therefore, it has the potential to increase land grabbing across Asia – already a huge problem in this region. The implications are far-reaching, with millions of farmers' and fisherfolks' livelihoods at stake in RCEP member countries where the population is struggling to feed itself.

Whether the mega-trade deal goes ahead or not, the trend seems unstoppable. The barbarians are indeed at the barn.

Morgellons Disease

I was watching a BitChute video on biological warfare and one of the comments caught my attention:

Already happening in the UK, they are spraying Morgellons on us from planes. I've had them for a while. The way to get rid of them is bathe in baking soda and boron and drink colloidal silver. Most people have them but they just don't know it. They affect your immune system and keep you in fear. My body rejected them and they started jumping out of my face. I guess Im one of the lucky ones for working this shit out and removing them. 

I was immediately curious as to what morgellons were as I'd never heard the term before. A conservative, mainstream site WebMD had this to say:

Morgellons is a controversial and poorly understood condition in which unusual thread-like fibers appear under the skin. The patient may feel like something is crawling, biting, or stinging all over. Some medical experts say Morgellons is a physical illness. Others suggest it is a type of psychosis called "delusional parasitosis," in which a person thinks parasites have infected their skin. Your doctor may call it an "unexplained dermopathy," which means a skin condition that occurs without a known reason. Other medical professionals have dubbed the condition "fiber disease."

Morgellons Disease Symptoms

Unpleasant skin sensations are the main complaint. People with Morgellons may also complain of:

• Feeling like bugs are crawling all over the skin
• Burning or stinging sensations under the skin
• Intense itching
• Skin sores that appear suddenly and heal slowly
• Sores that leave very red (hyperpigmented) scars
• Some patients report thread-like fibers stuck in the skin.

People with Morgellons sometimes complain of other symptoms, which may include:

• Hard time paying attention and concentrating
• Extreme fatigue
• Hair loss
• Joint and muscle pain
• Nervous system problems
• Tooth loss
• Sleep problems
• Short-term memory loss

Morgellons Disease Risk Factors

In the past, few doctors had heard of Morgellons. But in response to scattered reports, the CDC worked together with several other health care agencies to investigate this condition. Most reports came from California, Texas, and Florida, although patients have been seen in all 50 states. The CDC study found that Morgellons is most likely to affect middle-aged white women. Many of the patients in the CDC study showed signs of being obsessively concerned about health problems in general. This is called somatic concerns. About half of the people in the study had other health problems, including depression and drug abuse.

Controversial Diagnosis

The question of whether Morgellons is a disease or a delusion has prompted debate and new research in recent years. The CDC states that the condition is not caused by an infection or anything in the environment. The CDC study also included a lab analysis of skin fibers in Morgellons patients. The analysis showed that these fibers were mostly cotton, such as typically found in clothing or bandages.

Well, we certainly can't trust the CDC, sometimes dubbed the Center for Disease Creation to get to the bottom of this as they may well have a nefarious hand in its creation and dissemination. We need to look elsewhere to find out what might be going on. However, the WebMD article leaves with the clear impression that the condition is probably imaginary, with most sufferers being depressed, drug-dependent or suffering from psychosis. Geez, the fibers are even made of cotton that has been obviously been shed by clothing or bandages. Nothing to see here, let's move on. The tone of the article really goads me into further investigation. 

A very detailed study was published in February of 2018 titled History of Morgellons disease: from delusion to definition in Clinical, Cosmetic and Investigational Dermatology. In this study, the cotton fiber myth is exposed:

Histological studies have shown that filaments in Morgellons Disease (MD) tissue are not textile fibers, but are biofilaments produced by human epithelial cells and stemming from deeper epidermal layers, upper dermal layers, and the root sheath of hair follicles. MD cutaneous filaments are predominantly composed of keratin and collagen, as determined by histological studies, and appear to be produced by activated keratinocytes and fibroblasts. The base of filament attachment to epithelial cells demonstrates nucleation that is continuous with that of surrounding epithelial cells, indicating that the filaments are of human cellular origin.

This is a very detailed and comprehensive study and quotes 124 references. Here are its conclusions:

The history of MD has taught us that scientific evidence must be carefully considered before a disease is written off as a purely psychiatric disorder. Delusional disorder is a diagnosis of exclusion that requires clinical judgment, and all underlying causes for delusional symptoms need to be ruled out before jumping to erroneous conclusions. Medical practitioners continue to consider MD a delusional disorder, although studies have shown that MD is strongly associated with spirochetal infection. According to the best-available scientific evidence, MD should be considered a dermopathy associated with tick-borne disease. Further study of the genetics, pathogenesis, and treatment of MD is warranted. 

According to this MedicineNet, "a spirochete is a microscopic bacterial organism in the Spirochaeta family that has a worm-like, spiral-shaped form and wiggles vigorously when viewed under a microscope. Treponema pallidum, the cause of syphilis, is a particularly well-known spirochete." So the rigorous scientific study suggests that the disease is real enough and may be caused by a tick-borne sphirochete. Let's now review a personal account from a sufferer.

On PDFDrive we find Nancy's Morgellons Blog (uploaded in 2011) which begins with her saying:

This little book is offered for one purpose only: to present my personal overview from experience with Morgellons Disease and to provide one point of reference for the thousands of other sufferers who are trying to endure this disease.  

Nancy goes on to write:

It needs to be stressed that there is a connection between Morgellons and Lyme Disease. Over 90% of Morgellons sufferers are tested and found to have Lyme Disease. My treating physician is an expert on Lyme and feels that the Lyme precedes Morgellons. The Lyme attacks and diminishes the Immune System/white blood cells and then the parasites are not held in abeyance inside and begin to attack the rest of the body.

Nancy's little e-book is 40 pages in length and is mostly full of treatment options that she has personally applied to her condition. This would be invaluable of course to anyone suffering from the disease. Her experience is nightmarish and a reminder of the damage that Lyme Disease can cause to the immune system. The weakened immune system seems to set the stage for the onset of Morgellons Disease in some people. It is a disease that is becoming more common and needs to be identified as early as possible. At least I now know a little more about it.

Number 33, Truman and the Bomb

One might think that the topic of 33 might be more suitable for my Mathematics blog but I don't want to treat 33 in purely mathematical terms here and so I'm posting this to my Alternative Media blog. I'd originally posted it to my Pedagogical Posturing blog but I later thought that it should be included here as well. There's a great deal that can be said about the 33 in a non-mathematical context but I want to limit this post's scope by just focussing on Truman and the atomic bomb. Let's begin with Trinity.

Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, conducted by the United States Army on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project. The White Sands Proving Ground, where the test was conducted, was in the Jornada del Muerto desert about 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range. The only structures originally in the vicinity were the McDonald Ranch House and its ancillary buildings, which scientists used as a laboratory for testing bomb components. Source. See Figure 1.

Figure 1: Source

So here is our first encounter with 33 in the form of the latitude, 33° N (rounded down to the nearest degree), at which the first atomic test took place. Next we look at the latitudes of the two Japanese cities on which atomic bombs were unleashed. Hiroshima is located at a latitude of 34° 23' N and Nagasaki at 32° 46' N, making for an average of 33° 35' N. Thus we have our second encounter with 33 in the form of the average latitude (again rounded down to the nearest degree) of the two targeted cities. See Figure 2.

Figure 2

Next we'll turn our attention to the person who authorised the bombings. This was of course Harry S. Truman who was the 33rd president of the United States. Now it's getting a little spooky because here we have our third encounter with the number 33 as we count the number of the presidents since George Washington. However, we're not yet finished with Truman.

On October 19, 1945, Truman was given the 33rd degree of the Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite for the southern jurisdiction. He is the only President to have received this distinction, which he considered with satisfaction to be the culmination of his Masonic career. Source.

Definitely spooky and this marks our fourth encounter with 33 surrounding Truman and the atomic tests. On January 20th 1945, Truman became the 34th president but when he was given this Masonic rank he was still the 33rd president. It's interesting to note that Truman regarded himself as the 32nd president when he took office:

Any official list of presidents will show Harry Truman as the 33rd President of the United States. Not everyone agrees with this, however. The most notable dissenter as to the number assigned to the Truman administration was none other than Harry Truman, himself.

Truman, who was not averse to sharing his thoughts on any subject, disagreed with counting Grover Cleveland’s two non-consecutive terms. “If you count the administrations of Grover Cleveland twice because another President held office between Cleveland’s first and second term,” said Truman, “you might try to justify the designation of me as thirty-third President. But then why don’t you number all the second terms of other Presidents and the third and fourth terms of President Roosevelt, and where will you be? I am the thirty-second President.”

Despite this argument, the official proclamation, dated April 13, 1945, issued by President Truman on the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt referred to Roosevelt as the thirty-second president. Source.

Was Harry trying to be disingenuous? Perhaps. The facts are clear however, and Harry as the (official) 33rd president of the United States authorised the detonation of the first atomic bomb on American soil at the 33rd degree of latitude and later authorised the dropping of atomic bombs on two Japanese cities: one on the 34th degree of latitude and the other on the 32nd degree of latitude, making for an average of 33 degrees. Later that same year he would become a 33rd degree Mason.

The following quote, from Jacques R. Pauwels, author of The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, is a fair assessment of what Truman really was up to: 

Sixty-five years ago, Truman did not have to use the atomic bomb in order to force Japan to its knees, but he had reasons to want to use the bomb. The atom bomb enabled the Americans to force Tokyo to surrender unconditionally, to keep the Soviets out of the Far East and – last but not least – to force Washington’s will on the Kremlin in Europe also. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated for these reasons, and many American historians realise this only too well.

So Harry murders hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, is awarded the highest honour in Freemasonry later in the year and slept well at night for the rest of his life I presume. So it goes. 

Truman found time to relax and rest in his post-presidential years. He was never far from his favourite bourbon and enjoyed clanking glasses with the old friends, political allies, and dignitaries who came through Independence. While his health permitted, he took regular walks around town. He traveled some, including a 1953 auto trip to New York during which a policeman stopped him on the Pennsylvania Turnpike for making an illegal lane change. It was Truman's only attempt at a long drive after leaving the presidency. Harry S. Truman died on December 26, 1972, of old age rather than any specific sickness. Source.