The Prediction Games
They hide a secret control agenda
At the beginning of every new year, we engage in an a prehistoric ritual: predicting what the year will bring. We may no longer be searching the entrails of cows for clues, but we still rely on more sophisticated methods like data analytics. Governments increasingly hire expensive consultants who promise to deliver control over some aspect of the future. The fact is, prognostication is a revered and also, lucrative business model. Especially if you go in for the gloom and doom variety. Some may scoff, pointing out that Reality is far too complex for anyone to call it. But that’s not the point. The point is to release an idea into the bloodstream of the body politic and watch how even totally wrong prognostications can have a deep and lasting effect on how we think about things. While bringing respect and endless rewards to the originator.
A master of the doom and gloom prognostication game is Paul Ehrlich, now in his nineties, who has been warning us about the ‘population bomb’ in the book with the same name since 1968.
Wikipedia reports that the original edition of The Population Bomb began with this dire prediction:
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...[22]
Ehrlich argued that the human population was too great, and that while the extent of disaster could be mitigated, humanity could not prevent severe famines, the spread of disease, social unrest, and other negative consequences of overpopulation.
Ehrlich further states that he still endorses the main thesis of the book, and that its message is as apt now as it was in 1968.[18]
Most disturbing is this:
In 2018, he emphasized his view that the optimum population size is between 1.5 and 2 billion people.[30] In 2022, he was a contributor to the "Scientists' warning on population," published by Science of the Total Environment, which estimated that a sustainable population would be between 2 and 4 billion people.[31]
Fast forward to today, when an entire generation of well meaning, worried wokesters, environmentalists and politicians believes this insane idea. It just doesn’t seem to matter that reality has proven Ehrlich, whose name means ‘honest’ in German, completely wrong. By not accepting that he was wrong, that there was a deep bug in his thinking process, Ehrlich deserves to be dismissed as a fake scientist. Why? Actual scientists admit when their predictions do not pan out and begin again. But he never has.
So it’s rather odd that in spite of all that, he is one of the founders of the entire environmental movement. His name and his ideas are everywhere. How could this have happened? Ehrlich began as a tenured professor of entomology specializing in butterflies but eventually became a very successful author. Carson invited him on his show no less than 20 times. He parlayed a humdrum Ph.D. on bugs from a middling university in Kansas into a career of disaster prediction that has defined the entire environmental movement to this day. Whatever else he might be, Ehrlich is clearly a brilliant self-promoter. Just look at all the awards he has amassed:
· The John Muir Award of the Sierra Club
· The Gold Medal Award of the World Wildlife Fund International
· A MacArthur Prize Fellowship
· The Crafoord Prize, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and considered the highest award given in the field of ecology
· ECI Prize winner in terrestrial ecology, 1993
· A World Ecology Award from the International Center for Tropical Ecology, University of Missouri, 1993
· The Volvo Environmental Prize, 1993
· The United Nations Sasakawa Environment Prize, 1994
· The 1st Annual Heinz Award in the Environment (with Anne Ehrlich), 1995[50]
· The Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, 1998
· The Dr. A. H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences, 1998
· The Blue Planet Prize, 1999
· The Eminent Ecologist Award of the Ecological Society of America, 2001
· The Distinguished Scientist Award of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, 2001
· Ramon Margalef Prize in Ecology of the Generalitat of Catalonia, 2009[51]
· Fellow of the Royal Society of London 2012[1]
· 2013 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology
Which raises the urgent question, why did so many eminent and educated people fall for his crazy schtick?
Perhaps we just love to ponder how bad we are and how we will pay for our sins. In a secular society, that is clearly weird but it’s the only explanation I can think of. That old-time religion which insists we are deeply flawed, sinful creatures that need to repent, is still with us. In fact, we all feel guilty about what we are doing to Mother Earth. Ehrlich and his predictions have fallen on fertile emotional ground. Though false, they are driving political life all over the globe. The dangerous Net Zero idea is its deformed child. The forced ‘re-education’ of farmers in the west is its stepchild. The attack by governments in collusion with big tech companies on individual freedom is its final, most sinister end. It makes perfect sense: Since we are so intrinsically bad, we need well-meaning overlords to save us from ourselves. That is the unstated but implied message, and I am convinced that its effectiveness is due in large part to Ehrlich and his tribe of environmental gloomsters. Everyone is government knows that scaring people is the easiest way to get stuff done, and the ongoing pandemic chaos is a potent reminder of just how effective an idea that is. Indeed, there are many people who believe that the pandemic was ‘designed’ to get rid of the ‘surplus population’.
BTW, that phrase goes all the way back to a famous economist and pessimist, William Malthus, who, just like Ehrlich, made scary—and false—predictions about humanity’s terrible fertility problems and strongly influenced British public policy regarding the poor. Brittanica online has a short bio on this eminent forerunner of population bomb scaremongering, also known as Malthusianism:
Thomas Malthus, in full Thomas Robert Malthus, (born February 13/14, 1766, Rookery, near Dorking, Surrey, England—died December 29, 1834, St. Catherine, near Bath, Somerset), English economist and demographer who is best known for his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and that betterment of humankind is impossible without stern limits on reproduction. This thinking is commonly referred to as Malthusianism.
Scrooge, in A Christmas Carol, uses the term ‘surplus population’ as an excuse for his inhumane treatment of poor old Cratchett. The Ghost of Christmas Past reminds Scrooge of it to his eventual discomfort. Which means that even Dickens had understood the moral dangers of the Malthusian theory that humanity will simply keep replicating like bacilli in a petri dish, forever, until we eat up the entire planet. By putting it into this famous tale, he was sending a message to his readers. Interestingly, it was only a moral conversion that enabled Scrooge to become fully human and simply treat those closest to him with kindness and generosity. It took the pandemic to make me see this aspect of the movie with Alastair Sims as Scrooge. Dickens was nothing if not a great social critic of Victorian England. We could use another literary giant like him because the current upheavals can only be captured fully in the novel.
I hope I have convinced you that predicting stuff is a lucrative and long standing racket in western society. And we now have an updated version. While we have become understandably suspicious of ideas emanating from our woke universities, we do listen to smart, good looking and rich CEOs, like Musk. He appears to be one of the good guys, come to clean out the stinking stables of corruption and collusion with the FBI at Twitter. And good for all of us that he had the balls to do that. But there are other CEOs, whose agenda is not social justice but something slightly more sinister.
Kamran Khan, CEO, BlueDot
Allow me to introduce Kamran Khan, a man of wealth and taste. He recently published a classic piece of doom and gloom prognostication in a respectable Canadian publication, Macleans Magazine, which publishes an annual list of predictions by prominent people. The title: We’re due for another global health emergency. Note that he doesn’t call it a pandemic, as Gates does when he makes the exact same prediction.
Of course, Khan has the right credentials. Here he modestly describes himself:
I am an infectious disease physician. I also run a company called BlueDot that tracks and forecasts outbreaks using analytics.
That is true. It’s just not as innocent as he makes it sound. Rebel News discovered through freedom of information requests that it was his company, BlueDot, that collaborated with the Canadian government to track and trace what people were and were not doing during the pandemic. Illegally, of course, and without their consent or knowledge.
The article he wrote for Macleans is a gem, right up there with Malthus and Ehrlich in the art of fearmongering and false predictions.
He claims that Canada is at serious risk of attracting another virus because of our porous land border with the US and our hyperconnectedness to the globe. I guess we should simply shut down all movement if we want to be ‘safe’. In addition, he argues that the new virus will likely arise from damaged ecosystems or in slums. Or wet markets because that is where Covid-19 began, according to him. I guess he hasn’t been paying attention to all those eminent scientists who now think that Covid-19 began in a gain of function lab and escaped or was released from the Wuhan Institute of Technology. Aside from that little slipup, he echoes Mr Ehrlich: if we don’t listen to him and buy his magic bullet analytics, we’re going to be very sorry.
In other words, he is pushing an agenda and also, what is surely the vilest business case in history: identify a new disease, virus or what have you and then profit from it. It’s pure genius and as such is likely not going away. Too many people like Khan (Pfizer, anyone?) are gleefully rubbing their hands at the huge profits to be made while ‘saving people’. It just doesn’t get any better. He and his technology will make us all safe:
Ultimately, if we want to create a more resilient world, we need to get faster, smarter and better coordinated. ….We have to be able to detect the early signs of danger, understand the risks and mobilize responses that are commensurate with the situation at hand.
If we don’t, we may find ourselves back in the middle of an outbreak, and much sooner than we ever imagined. (my bolding)
He is promising us another pandemic, coolly and without apology. And if you think this isn’t a brilliant business model, think again. Have a quick look at the BluDot website which proves that they will never run out of handy dandy new diseases and viruses to terrorize you with:
https://bluedot.global/blog/?topic=new-research
I don’t have to point out to my readers the egregious public health failures of the Trudeau and other western governments while actually tracking people and their viruses. The awful failure of the ‘safe and effective’ vaccines. Also, why is it that all of a sudden, techies are allowed to dictate what used to be the terms of a free society. The terms of informed consent. And the fact that Khan is an infectious disease physician doesn’t give him the right to decide when we should be tracked, tagged, and vaccinated like so many cattle. But that is clearly his fever dream. Instead of practicing actual Medicine, he is practicing something far more lucrative: fearmongering.
Note that nobody of his ilk or any of the public health officials in Canada or anywhere else, ever talk about working WITH the population to make it healthier without drugs or vaccines. Such ideas are clearly crazy. WE the people are too stupid to be trusted with anything like our own health or own bodies. God forbid that we make up our own tiny minds. No, Khan will take up that burden and make the world safe for virus-based businesses.
Sorry, I wasn’t going to make you feel bad all over again. But there is one upside from all this: The history of Malthus and Ehrlich is a warning to us. Lies, disaster predictions and the like belong into the dustbin of history and should be fingered for what they are: government instruments of control.
Here is the good news: you don’t have to buy Khan’s prediction for the New Year and the New improved Pandemic 2.0
You can tell him and all the Green doomsayers to stuff their predictions back into the stinking entrails from which they came. Because we no longer live in ancient times, and trying to ‘predict the future’ with digital entrails is as futile and dangerous as it has always been. The Future will arrive and carry us with it and neither Mr Khan nor our corrupt government will be able to control it. ‘Control’ at this scale is a delusion. If we value our freedom, we all have to resist its siren call.