Human lineage from Greece?

SUBHEAD: Fossils cast doubt on early human lineage originating in Africa.

By Will Dunham on 23 May 2017 for Ekathimerini.com -
(http://www.ekathimerini.com/218639/article/ekathimerini/news/fossils-cast-doubt-on-human-lineage-originating-in-africa)


Image above: Graecopithecus freybergi lived 7.2 million years ago in the dust-laden savannah of the Athens Basin. This view from Graecopithecus freybergi’ place of discovery, Pyrgos Vassilissis, to the southeast over the plain of Athens and under a reddish cloud of Sahara dust; in the background: Mount Hymettos and Mount Lykabettos. Illustration by Velizar Simeonovski. From (http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/anthropology/graecopithecus-freybergi-hominin-04888.html).

Fossils from Greece and Bulgaria of an ape-like creature that lived 7.2 million years ago may fundamentally alter the understanding of human origins, casting doubt on the view that the evolutionary lineage that led to people arose in Africa.

Scientists said on Monday the creature, known as Graecopithecus freybergi and known only from a lower jawbone and an isolated tooth, may be the oldest-known member of the human lineage that began after an evolutionary split from the line that led to chimpanzees, our closest cousins.

The jawbone, which included teeth, was unearthed in 1944 in Athens. The premolar was found in south-central Bulgaria in 2009. The researchers examined them using sophisticated new techniques including CT scans and established their age by dating the sedimentary rock in which they were found.

They found dental root development that possessed telltale human characteristics not seen in chimps and their ancestors, placing Graecopithecus within the human lineage, known as hominins. Until now, the oldest-known hominin was Sahelanthropus, which lived 6-7 million years ago in Chad.

The scientific consensus long has been that hominins originated in Africa. Considering the Graecopithecus fossils hail from the Balkans, the eastern Mediterranean may have given rise to the human lineage, the researchers said.

The findings in no way call into question that our species, Homo sapiens, first appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago and later migrated to other parts of the world, the researchers said.

"Our species evolved in Africa. Our lineage may not have," said paleoanthropologist Madelaine Böhme of Germany's University of Tübingen, adding that the findings "may change radically our understanding of early human/hominin origin."

Homo sapiens is only the latest in a long evolutionary hominin line that began with overwhelmingly ape-like species, followed by a succession of species acquiring more and more human traits over time.

University of Toronto paleoanthropologist David Begun said the possibility that the evolutionary split occurred outside Africa is not incongruent with later hominin species arising there.

"We know that many of the mammals of Africa did in fact originate in Eurasia and dispersed into Africa at around the time Graecopithecus lived," Begun said. "So why not Graecopithecus as well?"

Graecopithecus is a mysterious species because its fossils are so sparse. It was roughly the size of a female chimp and dwelled in a relatively dry mixed woodland-grassland environment, similar to today's African savanna, alongside antelopes, giraffes, rhinos, elephants, hyenas and warthogs.

The findings were published in the journal PLOS ONE.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Evolution becomes Conscious 1/5/13
Ea O Ka Aina: One time Through the Bottleneck 7/21/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Hobbits and Menehunes 5/9/09

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Sea Shepherd patrols Atlantic

SUBHEAD: In partnership with marines from Gabon the Sea Shepherd boarded and commandeered boat with illegal catch. 

By Peter Hammarstedt on 9 August 2016 for Sea Shepherd Global -
(http://www.seashepherdglobal.org/news-and-commentary/news/operation-albacore-results-in-detention-of-spanish-long-liner-in-sao-tome.html)


Image above: A 2006 photo of the Sea Shepherd ship "Bob Barker". From (http://teakdoor.com/world-news/115479-japan-wont-go-awhaling-year-cant-6.html).

On the 6th of August, the Spanish long-line fishing vessel Alemar Primero was boarded in waters belonging to the Central African island state of São Tomé and Príncipe by São Toméan authorities, assisted by Sea Shepherd crew and law enforcement officers from Gabon.

Although the long-liner was licensed to fish for 'tuna and similar species' inspections revealed that their fish holds were filled with sharks, predominately blue sharks that are classified as 'near-threatened' by the IUCN.

Many of the shark's fins had already been detached from their bodies, a suspected violation of the European Union Finning Ban (1185/2003) and its amendment (605/2013), which requires sharks to be landed with their Fins Naturally Attached (FNA).

São Toméan authorities ordered the long-liner to retrieve their fishing gear, release their catch and proceed to São Tomé for investigation. With four marines remaining on board for security, the long-liner was escorted to São Tomé by the Sea Shepherd vessel M/Y Bob Barker.

On the 7th of August, the Alemar Primero arrived in the fishing village of Neves where it will remain, pending investigations, while the M/Y Bob Barker resumes patrols.

Since April 2016, under the name Operation Albacore, Sea Shepherd has been assisting the Government of Gabon to tackle Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing by providing the use of the M/Y Bob Barker as a civilian offshore patrol vessel operating in Gabonese waters, under the direction of the Gabonese Government.

In August São Tomé and Príncipe partnered with Operation Albacore, sending two marines and one fisheries observer from São Tomé to join Sea Shepherd crew, Gabonese marines and Gabonese fisheries enforcement officers on board the M/Y Bob Barker, to further detect and deter IUU fishing in the Gulf of Guinea.

Sea Shepherd Global was established in 1977, Sea Shepherd is an international non-profit, marine wildlife conservation organization. Our mission is to end the destruction of habitat and slaughter of wildlife in the world's oceans in order to conserve and protect ecosystems and species.

Sea Shepherd uses innovative direct-action tactics to investigate, document, and take action when necessary to expose and confront illegal activities on the high seas. By safeguarding the biodiversity of our delicately-balanced ocean ecosystems, Sea Shepherd works to ensure their survival for future generations. For more information, visit: (http://www.seashepherdglobal.org)

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Nigerians rejecting Monsanto

SUBHEAD: Over five million Nigerians urge government to reject Monsanto GMO crops.

By Nika Knight on 29 March 2016 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/03/29/over-5-million-nigerians-urge-government-reject-monsanto-crops)


Image above: Nigerian farmers pose for a USAID photographer in 2010. "The health risk of the introduction of genetically modified maize into Nigeria is enormous considering the fact that maize is a staple that all of 170 million Nigerians depend on," argue a group of Nigerian non-profits. Photo by Ann Fleuret. From original article.

Monsanto is poised to begin planting genetically modified varieties of corn and cotton in Nigeria, provoking the outrage of millions. Non-profits representing teachers, farmers, artists, environmentalists, and others oppose Monsanto's efforts to bring GMO crops to Nigeria.

In response to the biotech behemoth's application for the release and marketing of the GMO crops in the West African nation, 100 non-profits representing over 5 million Nigerians on Monday presented the government with a formal objection (pdf).

The non-profits advocate for Nigerians from a wide swath of society—from teachers, pastors, and artists, to farmers, environmentalists, and domestic abuse survivors, among many others. The vast range of groups objecting to the Monsanto application, which was submitted last month, testifies to extent of the distrust toward genetically modified food in Nigerian society.

The groups "are particularly alarmed that [Monsanto's] application has come so close after the dismal failures of Bt cotton in Burkina Faso," wrote the environmental think tank Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), which played a central role in drafting and organizing the objection.
Bt cotton is a bollworm-resistant variety of GMO cotton invented and patented by Monsanto, and after the biotech seed decimated Burkina Faso's cotton industry that country decided this winter to phase it out of production.

Monsanto is requesting that Nigeria now allow it to be cultivated there, along with its so-called "Roundup Ready" version of weedkiller-resistant corn.

HOMEF director Nnimmo Bassey said, "We are totally shocked that [Monsanto's application] should come so soon after peer reviewed studies have showed that the technology has failed dismally in Burkina Faso. It has brought nothing but economic misery to the cotton sector there and is being phased out in that country where compensation is being sought from Monsanto."

Bassey went on, "Since our Biosafety Act has only recently entered into force, what biosafety legislation was used to authorise and regulate the field trials in the past in accordance with international law and best biosafety practice?"

"Former President Goodluck Jonathan hastily signed the National Biosafety Management Bill into law, in the twilight days of his tenure in office. Further worrying is the apparent conflict of interests displayed by the Nigerian regulatory agencies, who are publicly supporting the introduction of GMOs into Nigeria whereas these regulators (the NAMBA) are legally bound to remain impartial and regulate in the public interest," HOMEF writes.

Nigeria isn't the only country where government officials expected to remain impartial lobby on behalf of corporate interests, of course. The entry of GMOs into Africa was one put in place and advocated for by U.S. State Department officials, as Common Dreams reported back in 2013.
The non-profits also point out in their objection that Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" corn requires the toxic Roundup herbicide whose core ingredient, glysophate, is known to be extremely harmful to human health and the environment.

The statement from HOMEF described the threats Monsanto poses to Nigerians' health, environment, and food system:

Monsanto’s application deceitfully provides no discussion on the potential risks of glysophate use to human and animal health and the environment. Apart from the potential of contaminating local varieties, the health risk of the introduction of genetically modified maize into Nigeria is enormous considering the fact that maize is a staple that all of 170 million Nigerians depend on.

The groups are urging the Nigerian government to reject Monsanto’s applications out of hand. They note with disquiet that there is a serious lack of capacity within Nigeria to adequately control and monitor the human and environmental risks of GM crops and glyphosate. Further there is virtually no testing of any food material and products in Nigeria for glyphosate or other pesticide residues, or the monitoring of their impact on the environment including water resources.

"Recent studies have linked glyphosate to health effects such as degeneration of the liver and kidney, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma," added Mariann Orovwuje, Friends of the Earth International’s food sovereignty co-coordinator. "That NABMA is even considering this application is indeed unfortunate and deeply regrettable, knowing full well about the uncontrolled exposure that our rural farmers and communities living close to farms will be exposed to."

Bassey, HOMEF's president, has advocated against the GMO industry for years, and spoke at length about his strong objections to biotech crops and the specific threats he believes they pose to African countries in an interview with SarahaTV back in 2013. Watch it here:


Video above: Nnimmo Bassey says "GMO Is The Next Big Threat To Africa". From (https://youtu.be/k8knVi8lHo8).


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Paris COP21 and Peace

SUBHEAD: We must remember that there will be no peace between people if we do not make peace with the Earth.

By Vandanah Shiva on 2 December 2015 for the Asian Age -
(http://www.asianage.com/columnists/paris-and-peace-155)


Image above: From (http://www.countercurrents.org/shiva061215.htm).

Land, water and agriculture-related conflicts are deliberately mutated into religious conflicts to protect the militarized agriculture model which has unleashed a global war against people.

Humanity stands at a precipice.

Merely 200 years of the age of fossil fuel has driven species and biodiversity to extinction, destroyed our soils, depleted and polluted our water and destabilized our entire climate system.

Five hundred years of colonialism have driven cultures, languages, peoples to extinction and left a legacy of violence as the basis of production and governance.

The November 13 Paris attacks have led to an escalation of violence in our way of speaking and thinking while dealing with a conflict. Paris has emerged as the epicenter of the planetary ecological crisis and the global cultural crisis.

From November 30 to December 11, movements and governments converge in Paris for COP21 — 21st Conference of Parties on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

COP21 is not just about climate change; it is about our modes of production and consumption which are destroying the ecosystems that support life on this planet.

There is a deep and intimate connection between the events of November 13 and the ecological devastation unleashed by the fossil fuel era of human history. The same processes that contribute to climate change also contribute towards growing violence among people. Both are results of a war against the Earth.

Industrial agriculture is a fossil fuel-based system which contributes more than 40 per cent of the greenhouse gases leading to climate change. Along with the globalized food system, industrial agriculture is to be blamed for at least 50 per cent of the global warming.

Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers are based on fossil fuels and use the same chemical processes used to make explosives and ammunition. Manufacturing one kilogram of nitrogen fertilizer requires the energy equivalent to two liters of diesel.

Energy used during fertiliser manufacture was equivalent to 191 billion litres of diesel in 2000 and is projected to rise to 277 billion in 2030. Synthetic fertilizer, used for industrial agriculture, is a major contributor to climate change — it starts destroying the planet long before it reaches a field.

Yet the dominant narrative is that synthetic fertilizers feed us and without them people will starve.

The fertilizer industry says that “they produce bread from air”. This is incorrect.

Nature and humans have evolved many non-violent, effective and sustainable ways to provide nitrogen to soil and plants.

For example, pulses and beans are nitrogen-fixing crops. Bacteria named rhizobia, which exists in the nodules of their roots, converts atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia and then into organic compounds to be used by the plant for growth.

Intercropping or rotating pulses with cereals has been an ancient practice in India. We also use green manures which can fix nitrogen.

Returning organic matter to the soil builds up soil nitrogen. Organic farming can increase nitrogen content of soil between 44-144 per cent, depending on the crops that are grown.

Organic farming not only avoids the emissions that come from industrial agriculture, it transforms carbon in the air through photosynthesis and builds it up in the soil, thus contributing to higher soil fertility, higher food production and nutrition and a sustainable, zero-cost technology for addressing climate change.

Ecologically non-sustainable models of agriculture, dependent on fossil fuels, have been imposed through “aid” and “development” projects in the name of Green Revolution. As soil and water are destroyed, ecosystems that produced food and supported livelihoods can no longer sustain societies.

As a result, there’s anger, discontent, frustration, protests and conflicts. However, land, water and agriculture-related conflicts are repeatedly and deliberately mutated into religious conflicts to protect the militarized agriculture model, which has unleashed a global war against the earth and people.

I witnessed this in Punjab while I was doing research for my book, The Violence of the Green Revolution, on the violence of 1984. We are witnessing this today, as conflicts which begin because of land degradation and water crises — induced by non-sustainable farming systems — are given the colour of religious conflicts.

Since 2009, we heard of Boko Haram while we missed the news about the disappearance of Lake Chad. Lake Chad supported 30 million people in four countries — Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Niger. Intensive irrigation for industrial agriculture increased four-fold from 1983 to 1994.

Fifty percent of the disappearance of Lake Chad is attributed to the building of dams and intensive irrigation for industrial agriculture.

As the water disappeared, conflicts between Muslim pastoralists and settled Christian farmers over the dwindling water resources led to unrest. As Luc Gnacadja, the former secretary-general of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, states about the violence in Nigeria, “The so-called religious fight is actually about access to vital resources”.

The story of Syria is similar. In 2009, a severe drought uprooted a million farmers who were forced to move into the city for livelihood. Structural adjustment measures, imposed by global financial institutions and trade rules, prevented the government from responding to the plight of Syria’s farmers.

The farmers’ protests intensified. By 2011, the world’s military powers were in Syria, selling more arms and diverting the narrative from the story of the soil and farmers to religion.

Today, half of Syria is in refugee camps, the war is escalating and the root causes of the violence continue to be actively disguised as religion.

Haber, the inventor of Zyklon B — a poisonous gas used in 1915 to kill more than a million Jews in concentration camps — was given a Nobel Prize in chemistry. American biologist Norman Borlaug received a Nobel Prize for Peace for the chemical-based Green Revolution that has only left a legacy of violence.

For me, COP21 is a pilgrimage of peace — to remember all the innocent victims of the wars against the land and people; to develop the capacity to re-imagine that we are one and refuse to be divided by race and religion; to see the connections between ecological destruction, growing violence and wars that are engulfing our societies.

We must remember that there will be no peace between people if we do not make peace with the Earth.

• Vandana Shiva is the executive director of the Navdanya Trust

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The School of Globalism

SUBHEAD: The Middle East / North Africa / Central Asia war zone is steadily combusting.

By James Kunstler on 6 April 2015 for Kunstler.com-
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-school-of-globalism/)


Image above: Fierce fighting and a Saudi-led bombing campaign against Houthi rebels that have killed many civilians. From (http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/yemen-crisis-saudis-bomb-targets-bid-weaken-shiite-rebels-n330771).

"…we may be headed into a world where capital is abundant, deflationary pressures are substantial and demand could be in short supply for quite some time.”
—Lawrence Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury

Professor Summers must be reading Ben Bernanke’s new blog. Or maybe he’s writing it for walking-around money. At $250,000 a pop for making a speech, Mr. Bernanke can certainly afford to pay high-toned hacks to polish his spin-o-nomics.

Raillery aside, Mr. Summers’ utterance provokes some pretty fundamental questions: what exactly is this world we’re heading into, and what exactly does that capital consist of?

It is, first, a world of unraveling globalism. So many people who should know better — members of the supposed thinking class who have suspended their thinking — swallowed Tom Friedman’s dictum that globalism was here to stay, a permanent new feature of the human condition. File that idea in the dead letter office, along with Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History.

With the help of competitive central bank racketeering, desperate nations have propelled themselves from financial disorder to geopolitical turmoil and history marches on — lately to the ululations of gleeful beheaders. Friedman’s flat world was predicated on a dominant and sound American polity, and we’ll have neither in that world Mr. Summers says we’re moving into.

In fact the first condition was predicated on the second: that America would continue to dominate the global economy because its polity was sound. We have clearly blown that by rigging together a corrupt troika of banks, market swindlers, and captive eunuch officials who expanded the financial sector of the economy from 5 percent to more than 40 percent, largely by pillaging the middle class and destroying the basis of their income.

The USA set the tone for 21st century magical finance, in which “wealth” was “created” by digital accounting fraud. The effects at home are visible on our landscape of suburban hyperwaste and decrepitating older towns and cities.

One might say the main effect of the 50-year-long Friedman globalism orgy was the schooling of other nations in American-style financial fraud. Surely China has now surpassed the USA, considering the structural perversities of their banking and government relations.

They really don’t have to account to anybody, including themselves, and the numbers they publish must be even more fantastical than the junk statistics produced by the US BLS. Europe has been a star pupil and only a few months ago announced a Quantitative Easing (fake capital creation) program as ambitious as America’s have been. Japan, of course, is just marking time until it quietly slips away and goes medieval.

Global disintegration has advanced furthest, not surprisingly, in the fragile band of regions most strung out on the primary commodity: oil. The Middle East / North Africa / Central Asia war zone is steadily combusting, and there is no sign of resolution across the whole of it, only the promise that conflict will get worse.

Saudi Arabia was the cornerstone of that district, and the senile Saudi leadership finds itself in peril as its military pretends to support splintering Yemen. The other Arabian princes of other non-Saud clans must be watching the spectacle with wonder and nausea. When Arabia blows up, that will truly be the beginning of the end.

The foregoing leads to that other original question: what is that “capital” we’re counting on? I’d propose that it doesn’t exist. It is a figment engraved on the hard drives of the world, a ghost that haunts the people still in charge of that disintegrating global economy.

There is still wealth in the world, but a lot less than people such as Larry Summers say there is.

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Roaming the Rift

SUBHEAD: Studies show that indigenous sacred sites have higher rates of biodiversity than surrounding areas.

By Editor on 24 March 2015 for the Christensen Fund -
(https://www.christensenfund.org/2015/03/24/roaming-rift-development-pastoralists-northern-kenya/)


Image above: Intact traditional institutions can support sustainable land management practices. From original article.

The road leading to the settlement of Loiyangalani from South Horr is rough, hacked through a merciless landscape of crumbling volcanic rock, baking in the equatorial sun. There is scarcely a plant in sight as our pick-up truck jostles and squeaks over a rise and the enormous Lake Turkana comes into view, a turquoise gem of fresh water stretching into the horizon.

Then a herd of goats blocks our way. Impossibly, it seems, the animals are fat and healthy, enjoying a feast invisible to the untrained human eye, a nutritious buffet of roots, grasses and shrubs hiding between rocks and below ground. Navigating the rocky terrain as nimbly as his animals is a sure-footed Turkana herder. He regards our moaning, dusty vehicle with what seems like pity as we turn to descend toward the shore of the largest desert lake in the world.

When seen from above, the vast expanse of Northern Kenya appears as a painted mosaic of desert ecosystems from green to brown, hot to cool, moist to dry. This part of the African Rift Valley is home to dozens of pastoralist tribes including the Borana, Gabbra, Turkana, Wayu, Samburu, Rendille, El Molo and more.

Some who fly over this place, however, claim to see an under-populated territory ripe for large-scale energy and tourism developments, for fenced-off ranches and other projects that flout the fragile ecological economy of these rangelands.

“This place is so special to us because it is a vast land where we can graze our animals without any problems,” says Alice Lesepen, a Rendille woman and representative of the Merigo Cultural Group of Marsabit County. “They might say that most of our land has not been occupied. But according to the ecological nature of our pastoral lifestyle, we feel that we have been occupying the land.”

“We are here, and we are supposed to be involved in whatever is to be done on our lands.”


Image above: A view of an El Molo village on the shore of Lake Turkana.From original article.

The Irony of the Commons

East of Lake Turkana on the edge of the Chalbi desert, two large vultures cautiously hop across a dusty road to inspect a sun-dried cow carcass. It’s the kind of image that government and NGOs seize upon to support the narrative that pastoralism here is not sustainable; that drought and climate change are devastating the people and that what’s needed is a raft of externally-driven investment in alternative land use including irrigation, parks and conservation and the development of Las Vegas-style resort cities to promote a tourism-based cash economy.

“People have tried a lot of things here using a top-down way of thinking, disregarding what the people already know,” says Dr. Hassan Roba, the African Rift Valley Program Officer for The Christensen Fund. “The problem is that people with good intentions oversimplify the issues and reduce the complexity of the system. ‘The pastoralists need water’, they say, so they dig wells everywhere, but that doesn’t seem to work. ‘They need grass for their animals’, they say, so NGOs want to reseed the rangeland by planting grasses at an impossible scale, ignoring the rich seed bank in the rangeland soils.”

Dr. Roba tells the story of a well-meaning NGO that came to Northern Kenya and donated Toggenburg dairy goats to a pastoral village. The pastoralists became disappointed with their new goats, however, which they described as exceedingly lazy and unable to deal with the scorching desert sun, unlike their selectively-bred and highly-adapted Galla goats. Sadly, the introduction of the exotic goats will likely dilute the gene pool of the indigenous Galla, reducing the community’s resilience to drought and other shocks.

“Pastoralists normally don’t dig wells in the desert, they migrate to their good water points and maintain the grazing balance on their seasonal rangelands,” says Dr. Roba. “The people have accumulated over the years immense knowledge about the rangelands and about how they should be managed, and their indigenous animals are resilient and can thrive in the desert if their movements are not constrained.”

Droughts are normal and don’t devastate communities when the system is allowed to work, says Dr. Roba, who has collaborated for nearly a decade with pastoralist peoples to integrate their local knowledge systems with scientific approaches to landscape management. He talks about Garret Harding’s famous ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, a pillar of developmentalist philosophy, which Dr. Roba says is flat wrong in this part of Kenya when culture is strong.

“When the people are allowed to be pastoralists what we have is a successfully managed commons. When there are institutions, culture and traditional governance in place to determine when and where to graze and how to give incentives and to punish for misuse, then it is not tragic.”

But when the local institutions begin to break down and the fences go up, and the deep knowledge maintained in the beautiful songs about cattle grazing and sacred watering holes starts to erode, that’s when Harding’s tragedy starts to take hold, as a crowd of struggling people pounces on what’s left of their ancestral lands. That is why one of the best things that funders can do is support culture and traditional institutions, because by helping the culture to thrive we can bring integrity and resilience to the system. It’s about identity, and resource use is cultural and landscapes and animals are sacred which means that they are taken care of and if the people are culturally alive then they will respect the traditional law as the elders lay it down, and they will respect the elders.

That’s where Dr. Hussein Isack comes in, a Gabbra man with a deep love for the cultures of Northern Kenya and a passion for the rights of pastoralists.


Image above: Goat herd in the shade of a tree. From original article.

Kivulini and The Cultural Solution

On a cool desert morning at the humming oasis of Kalacha, not far from where the vultures eyeballed the dehydrated roadside cow, Dr. Hussein brings us to meet the Quri Tura family, who welcome us for hot tea in camel’s milk. It’s a nourishing brew with a sweet and smoky flavor. As the sun rises in the sky the women and kids are busy collecting milk from the goats while the men prepare to milk the camels. For Dr. Hussein it is a scene awash in the traditional wealth of his people: Camels and goats and open land, fresh water burbling out of the desert floor, traditional Gabbra houses and children and the stories and sacred knowledge that enable humans to thrive in a place that can appear as hostile to people not from here.

Dr. Hussein’s connection with the Gabbra – and with the many other cultures throughout Northern Kenya – is remarkable, and he is welcomed as a respected elder wherever we go. He is perhaps best known around here as the Director of Kivulini Trust, a key ally of The Christensen Fund, which is well described by a paragraph from their website:

“We draw on the wisdom inherent in our communities’ traditional cultural systems and practices, and believe in their power to shape their own destiny – in order to create sustainable livelihoods and inspire the protection and celebration of their rich cultural and natural heritage.”

Indeed, Dr. Hussein and his colleagues at Kivulini know how to celebrate. A stone’s throw from the Quri Tura clan’s houses are Kivulini’s regional offices and the site of the Kalacha Cultural Festival, a multi-day annual event that brings together tribes from around Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia to dance and sing and share food and knowledge. It’s a wild celebration that fosters cross-cultural understanding and respect; instills pride and injects energy into culture and reminds young men and women that they have a purpose, that they still have culture.

That is the core of Kivulini’s strategy: to strengthen cultural and community cohesion within and among the Indigenous Peoples of Northern Kenya so that they can identify and articulate choices; so that they can proudly stand together to face the economic and political forces that are gathering on their ancestral rangelands.

This requires celebrating and supporting language, music, dance, animals, food, crafts and tradition, for within these things lives the best option for a resilient human existence on this hot and dry part of the planet. So in addition to supporting festivals and cultural exchanges, Kivulini gives strategic small grants to community groups to back their efforts not just to survive, but to thrive.

Bouncing around in a beat-up Land Cruiser for days on end to bring affinity and support to the most remote communities in Kenya is what makes Dr. Hussein and Kivulini unique. Kenya may be the African poster child for foreign aid, but you won’t find many representatives of the BINGOs (big international NGOs) out on these lonely Northern roads.


Image above: Young men who are goat herders. From original article.

Cross-Border Biocultural Connections

The monotonous lava landscape of Northern Kenya is broken by desert towns like North Horr, a dusty oasis where people stroll from shadow to shadow, hiding from the sun in the shady shapes of one-story mud and wood structures, electricity poles and acacia trees. Horr, meaning water, is the main attraction of this place, a deeply important historical stopping point for generations of pastoralists passing through on their seasonal movements to green pastures and sacred sites. The surrounding rangelands consist of parched patches that suddenly flash green when the rain comes. But precipitation is highly variable – some places may not see rain for two or three years – and when rain finally comes it does not fall uniformly, so the mobility of pastoralists is paramount. To put livestock and people into areas bounded by borders and politics is to create a dangerous trap.

“This is not a static region and fodder and rain are not controllable,” says Dr. Hassan Roba. “It’s patchy, and the idea is to put pressure evenly on resources and to remain flexible within the system. Pastoralists know this and they are inherently flexible. But now they are dealing with people who want to control the system in a static way and make it mechanical, and then it breaks. That’s when you get catastrophe.”

That’s why the people have always moved. And during the dry season many Gabbra herders bring their animals north across what is now the border with Ethiopia to the trusty watering points near the sacred hills, and in the wet season the nutrient fluxes shift south, and the Borana pastoralists in Ethiopia cross the border to access the green grasses on the sprawling rangelands in Kenya. But these days disagreements and political rivalries make the pilgrimage to pastoral resources more difficult. Trust is eroding and getting herds to pasture has become risky business. Some pastoralists now carry guns.

Helping to keep the peace in the far North is AJEMA, the Arda Jilla Ecosystem Management Association, a pastoralist community group near Mount Forole that facilitates peaceful cross-border movements, connections and collaboration. Supported by Kivulini Trust, AJEMA works to demarcate sacred sites, convenes dialogue of cross-border stakeholder groups, enables tracking of wildlife and prevention of poaching, and promotes peaceful coexistence on both sides of the border.

Kivulini works with many groups like AJEMA, Indigenous Peoples who are learning how to assert their culture and are working to normalize the pastoralist way within the modern state. A key player in this fight further south is Waso Trustland Project, a scrappy association based in Isiolo County where outsiders are coming in to ‘buy’ grazing land from sellers with often fraudulent claims to the land.

Led by community organizer Liban Golicha, a peoples’ diplomat with the trust of elders and politicians alike, Waso Trustland works to protect pastoralists’ land rights and ensure fair resource distribution. With drought and land grabs sparking more cattle rustling and conflict in the region, there is a lot of work to be done.

“The big changes are coming,” says the Merigo Cultural Group’s Alice Lesepen, whose resolve is as solid as the new tarmac road being laid mere meters from her family’s compound. “So it is good for us to maintain our culture for our young ones to know and understand better where they are from.”


Video above: Sights and Sounds of Northern Kenya. From (https://youtu.be/lpfVbZPV4sI).


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Corporations vs. Communities

SUBHEAD: Let Bill Gates, the CIA and Big Ag Corporations run food production in Africa. What could go wrong?

By Morten Thaysen on 27 March 2015 for New Internationalist Blog -
(http://newint.org/blog/2015/03/27/wsf-and-gates/)


Image above: "Free Seeds". Campaigners protest outside the meeting of the Gates Foundation and USAID. Global Justice Nounder a Creative Commons Licence. From original article.

This week the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID (a CIA front) hosted a meeting in London with big agribusinesses to discuss strategies to increase corporate control over seeds in Africa. The location of the meeting was secret. So was the agenda. Attendance was strictly invite-only and nobody who even came close to representing African small farmers was invited.

Meanwhile, farmers and food sovereignty activists met at the World Social Forum in Tunis to discuss their solutions to the problems of our food system. These two meetings represent not just two different types of meeting – a closed, secretive meeting of the powerful versus an open, democratic meeting of grassroots activists – but also two radically different paths for the future of our food. One is based on corporate control and would generate vast profits for a small elite; the second is centered on sustainable, democratic, local food production.

As often was the case in colonial times, the corporate agenda in Africa is today often disguised as paternalistic benevolence. Friendly sounding projects such as the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa, backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the DfID (Britain’s Department for International Development) supported New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition promise to eliminate hunger by creating the conditions that will bring new corporate technologies and more big business investment to African agriculture.

On the face of it, that all sounds very good. So why this level of secrecy for the meetings about the projects? Samwel Messiak, a Tanzanian food campaigner I met in Tunis, tells a very different story of the corporate agenda for Africa’s food. He told me that in Tanzania the New Alliance has helped corporations ‘buy’ land off local communities without their consent and without paying them compensation.

This is because the corporate agenda of AGRA and the New Alliance threatens to move control of land and seeds into corporate hands. The push for corporate engagement in Africa’s agriculture also has a strong focus on producing cash crops for consumption in richer parts of the world (a practice started in colonial times) which, if anything, provides less food for people living locally. It seems strange that a supposedly charitable organization such as the Gates Foundation is involved in this agenda; it seems they have swallowed the idea that only the market can provide for our needs.

In a very different setting from the corporate meeting in London, an alternative vision for our food is forming. In a packed room at the World Social Forum in Tunis, farmers and food sovereignty campaigners discussed a radically different food system.

Farmers and campaigners from across the world shared examples of how agriculture can provide livelihoods for farmers and food for local communities, and can be a central part of women’s liberation: women are taking a leading part in food production in most places. There is powerful evidence that organic farming practices and local seeds used by small-holder farmers are able to produce more food on less land and with less water than industrial agriculture.

Agribusinesses are putting small-scale farmers under pressure everywhere. But representatives from places like Chile, Senegal, Bangladesh and Italy told the meeting how farmers are showing how local communities can take back control of their food systems to provide healthy and affordable food. It was inspiring to experience how unified farmers and campaigners from different places are in their fight for democratic control of our food. As we chanted at the end of the meeting: ‘The people united will never be defeated.’

In 2015 it shouldn’t be a radical notion to want to move beyond colonialism and make sure farmers can keep control of the resources needed to grow food to feed their communities. So it is more important than ever that we stand with small farmers across the world to defend their right to control their own land and their own seeds and our right to healthy local food.

• Morten Thaysen works in Global Justice Now’s communications team and is an activist with Fuel Poverty Action and Reclaim the Power. He tweets as @viabank Find out more about Global Justice Now’s food sovereignty campaign.

The April 2015 issue of New Internationalist focuses on Monsanto, with "Total Control - is Monsanto Unstoppable?"- the biotech giant that says its mission is to help feed the world – with GM food. How worried should we be?


Image above: "Total control - is Monsanto unstoppable?"Campaigners protest outside the meeting of the Gates Foundation and USAID. Global Justice Nounder a Creative Commons Licence. From original article.



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USA's "regime change" days over

SUBHEAD: As a weapon of international deception America is finding that "regime change" isn't working anymore.

By Ben Tanosborn on 22 March 2015 for Tanosborn Online -
(http://www.tanosborn.com/columns/2015/regime-change-us-failing-weapon-international-deception)


Image above: Graphic for article titled "The USA Creates Terrorists to Overthrow Governments in the Third World, Arab and Muslim Countries!" From (http://12160.info/profiles/blogs/the-usa-creates-terrorists-to-overthrow-governments-in-the-third).

For years, Winston Churchill’s famous quote, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried,” has served as Americans’ last word in any political discussion which requires validation of the US government, no matter how corrupt or flawed in its behavior, as the best in the planet, comparatively or by default.

Never mind the meaning that Mr. Churchill had intended back in 1947, or how the international political panorama has changed during the past seven decades.

These remarks were made by Britain’s prime minister before the House of Commons a few months before there was a changing of the guards in the “Anglo-Saxon Empire” as the Brits gave away their colonial hegemony in favor of the super-influential economic and military power represented by the United States.

And that was symbolically marked by Britain’s relinquishing its mandate in Palestine, and the creation of Israel.

Such reference to democracy in the quote, explicitly defining it as a “government by the people,” basically applied to Britain and the United States at the close of World War II; but such condition has deteriorated in the US to the point where the “common people” no longer have a say as to how the nation is run, either directly or through politicians elected with financial support provided by special interests, undoubtedly expecting their loyalty-vote.

Yet, while this un-democratization period in our system of government was happening, there were many nations that were adopting a true code of democracy, their citizens having a greater say as to how their countries are governed.

Recognizing such occurrence, however, is a seditious sin for an American mind still poisoned by the culture of exceptionalism and false pride in which it has been brainwashed.

And that’s where our empire, or sphere of influence, stands these days… fighting the windmills of the world, giants that we see menacing “American interests,” and doing it under the banner of “for democracy and human rights.”

Such lofty empire aims appear to rationalize an obscene military budget almost twice as large as those of Russia, China, India and United Kingdom combined! Americans, representing less than 5 percent of the world’s population, are footing a military bill almost twice as large as that expended by half of the world’s population.

If that isn’t imperialistic and obscene, it’s difficult to image what other societal behavior could be more detrimental to peace and harmony in this global village where we all try to co-exist.

Empires and global powers of the past most often resorted to deposing of antagonistic foreign rulers by invading their countries and installing amicable/subservient puppet rulers.

The United States and the United Kingdom, perhaps trying to find refuge, or an excuse, in their democratic tradition, have resorted to regime change “manipulations” to deal with adversary governments-nations. [Bush43’s Iraq invasion stands as a critical exception by a mongrel government: half-criminal (Dick Cheney-as mentor), and half-moronic (George W. Bush-as mentee).]

Regime change has served the United States well throughout much of the Americas from time immemorial; an endless litany of dictators attesting to shameless in-your-face puppetry… manipulations taking the form of sheer military force, or the fear of such force; bribery of those in power, or about to attain power – usually via military coup; or the promise of help from the Giant of the North (US) in improving economic growth, education and health.

 Kennedy’s 1961 Alliance for Progress proved to be more political-PR than an honest, effective effort to help the people in Latin America… such program becoming stale and passé in Washington by decade’s end; the focus shifting in a feverish attempt to counter the efforts by Castro’s Cuba to awaken the revolutionary spirit of sister republics in Central and South America (Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua…).

After almost two centuries of political and economic meddling in Latin America under the Monroe Doctrine (1823) banner, much of it involving regime change, the US is finally coming to terms with the reality that its influence has not just waned but disappeared. Not just in nations which may have adopted socialist politics, but other nations as well.

The United State's recent attempt to get other regional republics to label Venezuela (Maduro’s leftist government) as a security threat not only met with opposition from the twelve-country Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) but has brought in the end of an era. It’s now highly unlikely that secretive efforts by the CIA to effect regime change in Latin America will find support; certainly not the support it had in the past.

To Washington’s despair, similar results, if for other reasons, are happening throughout North Africa and the extended Middle East; certainly not the results the US had hoped for or anticipated from the revolutionary wave in the Arab Spring, now entering its fifth year. It is no longer the flow of oil that keeps Washington committed to a very strong presence in the Middle East. It is America’s Siamese relationship with Israel.

But if regime change is no longer an effective weapon for the US in Latin America or the Middle East, the hope is still high that it might work in Eastern Europe, as America keeps corralling Russian defenses to within a holler of American missilery.

Ukraine’s year-old regime change is possibly the last hurrah in US-instigated regime changes… and it is still too early to determine its success; the US counting on its front-line European NATO partners to absorb the recoil in terms of both the economy and a confrontational status now replacing prior smooth relations.

Somehow it is difficult to envision an outcome taking place in Ukraine which would allow the United States a foothold at the very doorsteps of Russia; something totally as inconceivable as if China or Russia were contemplating establishing military bases in Mexico or any part of Central America or the Caribbean.

The era of using regime change as a weapon of mass deception may have already ended for the United States of America… and hopefully for the entire world

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There will be a reckoning

SUBHEAD: Lester Brown delivers stark warning over dust bowl conditions spreading over Africa and Asia.

By John Queally on 25 February 2015 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/02/25/there-will-be-reckoning)


Image above: A satellite captured a 2001 dust storm swirling over China. The storm eventually crossed the Pacific and reached the United States. Photo by NASA. From original article.

On the verge of retirement, noted environmentalist and celebrated systems analyst Lester Brown has a dire warning for the world he has spent more than half a century advising on issues of food and energy policy: there is no end in sight for the interrelated scourge of climate change, global poverty and hunger.

In fact, according to Brown, in several vulnerable areas around the world, the situation may be about to go from very bad to much worse.

"We are pushing against the limits of land that can be plowed and the land available for grazing and there are two areas of the world in which we are in serious trouble now," said Brown, who founded both the Worldwatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute, in an interview with the Guardian's environment correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg.

“One is the Sahel region of Africa, from Senegal to Somalia," explained Brown. "There is a huge dust bowl forming now that is actually stretching right across the continent and that dust bowl is removing a lot of top soil, so eventually they will be in serious trouble."

At some point soon, he added, "there will be a reckoning" in those regions.

According to this NPR report from November, based on the work of the Earth Policy Institute, the dust bowl conditions forming in northern Africa and across central Asia are already having dire consequences:

In China, dust storms have become almost an annual occurrence since 1990, compared to every 31 years on average historically. In northern China and Mongolia, two large deserts — the Badain Jaran and the Tengger — are expanding and merging, often swirling together in massive sand storms when strong winds blow through each spring. The Gobi desert is also growing, inching ever-closer to Beijing as the grasslands at its edges deteriorate.
Meanwhile, in the Sahel region of Africa, millions of acres are turning to desert each year in countries including Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger and Nigeria. Dust from Chad's Bodele Depression been traveling the globe for many centuries — in fact, scientists think it helped make the Amazon fertile. But the amount of dust blowing out of West Africa has increased in the last 40 years. Dust clouds from the Sahara can affect air quality as far away as Houston, and may even harm Caribbean coral reefs.

According to Brown, as the situation worsens in these areas, the impacts will likely be much worse than they were in the United States during the 1930s. "Our dust bowl was serious," Brown explained to Goldenberg, "but it was confined and within a matter of years we had it under control ... these two areas don’t have that capacity."

The warning over soil erosion and the unsustainable farming practices that currently dominate large swaths of the planet have been on the mind of ecologists and agricultural experts for decades. As the threat of global warming has entered the public debate, the stakes have only intensified.

Brown was among the first and most thorough minds to set attention on the threat of planetary climate change, devoting an entire series of books—collectively titled Plan B—which assess and put forth solutions to the approaching crisis. The most recent edition is Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.

However, in a statement last month, Brown announced that he would officially retire later this year and wind down the Earth Policy Institute following the publication of his next book, The Great Transition: Shifting from Fossil Fuels to Solar and Wind Energy.

"After careful consideration of my life at 80 years," announced  Brown in the statment, "and with profound appreciation to my staff, collaborators and supporters, I have decided to step down as president of the Earth Policy Institute and end its work as of July 1, 2015."

Brown continued, "I believe the Earth Policy Institute has accomplished what we set out to do when we began in 2001, and now it is time for me to make a shift and no longer carry the responsibility of managing an organization. I plan to continue to research and write on issues that I believe I can add to in some meaningful way."

Speaking with Goldenberg, Danielle Nierenberg, who joined Worldwatch in 2001 and went on to co-found her own institute, Food Tank, said the world owes much to Brown for his decades of work and unique vision.

"He’s the godfather of merging environmental and food issues," said Nierenberg. "If you are talking about food and the environment, everybody looks to Lester Brown."

As the world continues to grapple with the catastrophes spurred by our own human development, Brown wrote this in the introduction to Plan B 4.0: "The question we face is not what we need to do, because that seems rather clear to those who are analyzing the global situation.

The challenge is how to do it in the time available. Unfortunately, we don't know how much times remains. Nature is the timekeeper but we cannot see the clock."

He continued, "The thinking that got us into this mess it not likely to get us out. We need a new mindset."

The last question society should ask, he concluded, is whether or not what needs to be done is considered possible.

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US pushing GMOs on Africa

SUBHEAD: U.S. is "assisting" African nations to produce biosafety laws that promote its GMO Big Ag interests.

By Andrea Germanos on 23 February 2015 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/02/23/us-offering-its-assistance-push-gmos-africa-report)


Image above: A woman processing millet in Senegal.  Photo: Kevin Sharp/flickr/cc). From original article.

The U.S. government and multinational corporations have capitalized on African nations' voids in regulatory frameworks to push genetically modified (GM) crops, standing to gain lucrative corporate profits while decimating food sovereignty, a new report states.

Released Monday from the African Centre for Biosafety and commissioned by environmental network Friends of the Earth International, Who benefits from GM crops? The expansion of agribusiness interests in Africa through biosafety policy (pdf) looks at how U.S. interests have used the mantra of addressing food security to push these crops despite local opposition.

"The U.S., the world's top producer of GM crops, is seeking new markets for American GM crops in Africa," stated report author Haidee Swanby. "The U.S. administration's strategy consists of assisting African nations to produce biosafety laws that promote agribusiness interests instead of protecting Africans from the potential threats of GM crops."

That opening exists, Friends of the Earth explains, because most African nations don't have biosafety laws on the safe handling of GM crops (or GMOs), and such laws can be crafted to either promote the crops or to promote a rigorous safety assessment of them.

But "the U.S.A. stance is that GM crops offer important technological advances in agriculture that can significantly increase crop production and that they pose no risks." So when representatives of U.S. interests offer assistance, it is to "craft [regulatory systems that] are most likely to have an absolute minimum of regulation, creating attractive environments for agribusiness investors."

Another part of the "strategy has been to pursue the development of strong intellectual property rights regimes, in order to give investors confidence with respect to returns on their investments," the report states.

One example noted in the report is an initiative called the Water Efficient Maize for Africa project (WEMA), which is implemented in South Africa, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique.
Monsanto has partnered with the initiative, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Howard G. Buffet Foundation have pledged $47 million for it.

It is is ostensibly aimed at boosting food security with drought- and insect-resistant maize, but the report says Monsanto is using the project to do field trials and ultimately gain approval of a new maize, rather than taking the standard commercial route for approval, thereby paving the way for new markets for the crops. The report also points to questions about the efficacy of the drought-resistance trait.

Among the problems civil society groups see with the WEMA plan are that it ignores existing (non-GMO) drought tolerant crops, gives control of food systems to the private sector, and diverts funding and support away from in-place, farmer-led resilient agricultural systems.

The report concludes that those African nations who might be tempted by GMO promises should look at what happened in South Africa, where, after 16 years of such crops being cultivated, GMOs have failed to meet the promises of improved food security.

"The South African experience confirms that GM crops can only bring financial benefits for a small number of well-resourced farmers. The vast majority of African farmers are small farmers who cannot afford to adopt expensive crops which need polluting inputs such as synthetic fertilizers and chemicals to perform effectively," Swanby stated.

Real assistance from foreign donors, the report states, would come by "craft[ing] policies for the wellbeing of Africans rather than the wellbeing of foreign corporations and their shareholders."

As Swanby and Mariann Bassey Orovwuje from Friends of the Earth Nigeria write in an op-ed published Monday, "African farmers have a lot to lose from the introduction of GMOs; the rich diversity of African agriculture, its robust resilience and the social cohesion engendered through cultures of sharing and collective effort could be replaced by a handful of monotonous commodity crops owned by foreign masters."

Despite the corporate mantra of GMOs being able to feed a growing population, Swanby and Bassey Orovwuje stress: "African social movements have pointed out that skewed power relations are the bedrock of hunger in Africa."

The solution lies instead, Friends of the Earth says, with agroecology—which food justice organization Food First describes as "both a science and movement" that "works to decentralize power and promote equity and ecological resilience in our food systems." GM crops, in contrast, are part of the problem.

Friends of the Earth is among those heading to the first International Forum on Agroecology beginning Tuesday in Mali.

It is a forum that Ibrahim Coulibaly, a leader of the National Coordination of Peasants Organizations (CNOP) in Mali, said "will bring practical responses, that will lead to concrete solutions on how agroecology can save the planet from hunger and climate change."

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"Ebola" - a bad horror movie

 SOURCE: David Ward (ward.david7@gmail.com)
 SUBHEAD: How much more like a bad pandemic horror movie is this so-called “Ebola crisis” going to get?


By Melissa Melton on 3 October 2014 for Activist Post -
(http://www.activistpost.com/2014/10/the-handling-of-this-ebola-crisis-is.html)

Image above: Photo from Chopper 5 tweet (@wfaachannel8) showing how Ebola vomit at Dallas apartment building was cleaned up - with a power washer spraying it into the street where a woman walks in open sandals. From original article.

We hate to be the one to state the obvious (again), but how much more like a bad pandemic movie is this so-called “Ebola crisis” going to be allowed to get?

Yes. “Allowed.” The word was chosen carefully here. Why?

Let’s start back at in oh, let’s go with June, back when Ebola first began murdering people in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Somewhere between 300 and 400 people had died, and the news was still fit for little more than the ticker tape at the bottom of the screen on most 24/7 networks. Barely anyone was even paying attention. People shrugged it off with little fanfare and the apathetic attitude of, “Well, that’s just what happens in Africa sometimes…”

The death toll continued to rise. Ebola continued to openly spread. No travel restrictions between borders were put in place. No air travel bans were instituted. No nothing. Finally officials had to call it — this Ebola outbreak was the deadliest in known human history. So what did that change?

Not much. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the situation was “totally out of control” and “one of the most challenging Ebola outbreaks ever.” So challenging in fact, that they rushed to action by… calling a meeting .

Meanwhile, more people died. The virus continued to spread. The healthcare system in these African nations was finally — not surprisingly — overwhelmed. 

No one in the mainstream press bothered to mention the fact that biowarfare researchers from Tulane University and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Fort Detrick had just so happened to have been over in the Ebola hot zone countries, propagating cultures of different types of Ebola viruses (and Marburg virus and Lassa virus and Dengue virus and West Nile virus and yellow fever virus and chikungunya virus) in labs in the years leading up to this outbreak.

Here’s one of the scholarly articles published from that research just this past July in the CDC’s journal Emerging Infectious Diseases .

In it, the researchers conclude, “PRNT is the laboratory standard for immunologic assays… In the ebolavirus PRNTs, we did not include the newest discovered ebolavirus, Bundibugyo virus, which cross-reacts with EBOV [Ebola virus] in immunoassays. Ebolavirus infections in Sierra Leone might be the result of Bundibugyo virus or an ebolavirus genetic variant and not EBOV.”

By the way, there are five types of Ebola virus and the newest strain is named Bundibugyo, or Ebobun for short. The U.S. government actually holds a patent on this strain — US 20120251502 A1 , for “Human Ebola Virus Species and Compositions and Methods Thereof” related to the Bundibugyo version of the virus.

Jon Rappoport was one of the few alternative journalists who actually reported on this:

The research program, occurring in Sierra Leone, the Republic of Guinea, and Liberia—said to be the epicenter of the 2014 Ebola outbreak—has the announced purpose, among others, of detecting the future use of fever-viruses as bioweapons. Is this purely defensive research? Or as we have seen in the past, is this research being covertly used to develop offensive bioweapons?
and

Why do we have reports that the government of Sierra Leone has recently told Tulane researchers to stop this testing?

Why indeed.

Once Ebola got out of control enough that the doctors, nurses and aid workers in those countries began dying of it regardless of all medical precautions taken including bleach baths and full body protective gear, two Americans were infected. So what did our government do?

The State Department spent an astounding $5 million and made a big huge PR deal, with the lapdog establishment media in lock step, to deploy a jet complete with a special Aeromedical Biological Containment System that looked more like a bunch of plastic sandwich bags quilted together with twisty ties to fly these people — a male doctor and a female nurse — back to America for (experimental) treatment.


These two Ebola-infected Americans were handled with what appeared to be the utmost caution. Helicopter video from news outlets shows medical teams decked out in full-body protective gear to bring these people into the hospital for treatment… except.

Except in the first instance, there was an unprotected cameraman snapping away just a few feet from the infected doctor as he got out of the ambulance to walk into the hospital. In the instance of the nurse, the crew suited up to wheel her in on a gurney, and another guy in protective gear stood watch on the sidewalk, seemingly to block if off from the public, but take a look for yourself:

A completely unprotected man with a cell phone is just standing there while they are wheeling this lady in and they don’t do anything about it. They seemingly don’t even bother to tell him, “Hey buddy, you might want to get off this sidewalk, we’re dressed like this for a reason and that reason is we’re bringing in a patient infected with the highly infectious, deadly Ebola virus. So ya know… You might want to go talk on your cell phone somewhere else for a minute…just to be safe.” Instead he’s right there and they do nothing.

By August, the governments of these African nations began declaring medical martial law and the people there started just abandoning their dead in the streets for fear they too would be dragged off to a treatment center as a precaution where they might end up contracting Ebola if they didn’t already have it. 

In fact, many Africans believe the Ebola outbreak is a government conspiracy . Which government? The United States, specifically the Department of Defense. In fact, on September 9th, Dr. Cyril Broderick published an article on the front page of Liberia’s Daily Observer titled, "Ebola, AIDS Manufactured by Western Pharmaceuticals, US DoD?" subhead, "Scientists Allege" .

Martial law declarations continued full force. Civil liberties were suspended. Soldiers in some places were instructed to shoot people on sight if they tried to leave the Ebola hot zone. Homes were searched door-to-door, and people were rounded up and forced into treatment centers.

Fast forward to September, when rates of infection had increased to the point that an average of five people are now infected with Ebola every hour there. Now officials are estimating that some 1.4 million people could be infected by the end of January.

This is the level we’re at. And now, the U.S. government has done pretty much everything it can to not stop Ebola from coming here (considering we’ve actually shipped it in multiple times). In fact, it’s as if they did everything they could to ensure it would get here at some point. Now, for the first time in the history of the disease, an Ebola patient has been diagnosed here on American soil in Dallas, Texas, the first nation in the world outside of the continent of Africa to do so.

As our government continues to tell us to stay calm, and they have it all “under control” just like in every Hollywood blockbuster where they don’t have anything under control at all ( The Stand or Outbreak , anyone?) complete with continued reassurances that the safety protocols are sound, those protocols have already failed with Ebola Patient Zero Thomas Eric Duncan. 

The man went to the hospital suffering Ebola symptoms and reported to the nurse he had just come back from Liberia six days prior, so what did they do? They just sent him home with some antibiotics, where he had contact for several days with a bunch of people including five school children from four different Dallas area schools who continued to attend public school for at least two days afterward . Public school: the place where germs and mucous membranes go on romantic dates.

Regrettably, they say it was all just a case of bad communication.

Now health officials have gone door-to-door in Dallas searching for anyone who had contact with Ebola Patient Zero and forced these family members into quarantine under a control order, after Duncan was rushed back to the hospital in an ambulance, but not before vomiting on the sidewalk outside his house. 

No official sanitation was done, but the family is forced to stay there anyway, forced to give blood draws and be on mandatory standby for any other medical tests and examinations public health officials deem necessary on demand or they will face criminal charges .

  The hour-to-hour account of what happened leading up to Duncan’s official Ebola diagnosis does not bode well that the virus has been contained at all. Some 100 people have likely come in contact with him at this point at least . He left Liberia on September 19th and he went through Brussels and Dulles Airport in D.C. before finally arriving in Dallas on the 20th. 

Who actually remembers every person they came in physical or close contact with in a week (the same week they are coming down with Ebola and in serious condition)? Who can remember every time they coughed or sneezed and where that cough or sneeze took place and around whom? They claim the man wasn’t exhibiting any symptoms until two days before his first trip to the hospital on September 26th, but no one can say for sure what moment this man became truly infectious.

Two of Duncan’s three flights — that’s right, three — were on United Airlines, but the company says there is “zero risk of transmission” on their flights, regardless of the fact that A) that is simply an impossible thing to state with absolute certainty, and thus, inherently untrue, and B) the only thing there is zero of in regards to commercial airplanes and Ebola transmission is the number of airline cabin cleaning standards  which is zero .

There are only 19 level 4 bio-containment beds in this country, but that’s okay, because the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency now proudly admitting their very own Ebola patient, put out a press release claiming that Ebola patients can be safely treated at any hospital with little risk as long as the CDC’s protocol is followed (the same protocol that already wasn’t followed in Dallas ).

And about that vomit outside Duncan’s apartment? Here’s the cleaning crew — wearing nothing more than jeans and a couple t-shirts — pressure washing it off the sidewalk and right down the storm drain:

Do baseball caps count as protective headgear? And look at that lady in the lower left hand corner. She appears to be about to walk right through the runoff in what, sandals?

Real “level 4″ stuff, right? Oh, and as of today, the same health officials who had quarantined Duncan’s family in his apartment still had yet to sterilize it after he had been there for at least a week. Via The New York Times :

In the latest indication, state and local authorities confirmed Thursday that a week after a Liberian man fell ill with Ebola in Dallas, and four days after he was placed in isolation at a hospital here, the apartment where he was staying with four other people had not been sanitized and the sheets and dirty towels he used while sick remained in the home. County officials visited the apartment without protection Wednesday night. [emphasis added]

“Without protection?” Without protection ? In God’s name, why? Why even take that chance?? 

What in the hell going on here? So which is it? A $5 million Aeromedical Biological Containment System jet and hazmats? Or will t-shirts, ball caps, and a complete failure to do even a basic disinfection job on the places that have been knowingly contaminated with the virus suffice?

Did we forget to mention that now a Dallas paramedic has come out to say he drove the ambulance the Ebola patient was transported in without anyone bothering to tell him it was used to transport an Ebola patient (who at the time had not been officially diagnosed yet)? As Mac Slavo of SHTFplan wrote, “It is not known how many paramedics drove the ambulance during the 48 hour period or how many patients were transported.”

…yeah.

  By definition, “Under control” is the last phrase anyone should call this situation.

In fact, this is every stupid horror movie on pandemic virus outbreaks ever, compounded by an all new level of fail. When we watch these films, many of us get frustrated at the sheer idiocy displayed by the actors onscreen as things continue to get worse by the minute because of the casts’ own actions written into the script to be stupid and we as viewers declare that, “People would never be this dumb in real life,” and that’s why it’s a movie, right?

Wrong. This is happening right here, right now and while we’re all screaming at the people in charge to run out the front door as the serial killer looms behind them (slow as it has been coming on all these months), they’re apparently waving their arms and yelling “Come and get me psychopath! I’m right here!” as they run in slow motion (more like casually jog) up the stairs instead.

Don’t worry though; now the Council on Foreign Relations is saying that Obamacare may hold the key to saving us Americans from Ebola. Yippee!

Oh, and the U.S. Department of State has issued an alert about traveling to the Ebola-ravaged African countries. NOT A WARNING mind you, an alert. Just to allow the agency to clarify that difference for you, “We issue a Travel Warning when we want you to consider very carefully whether you should go to a country at all.” (Something most of us wouldn’t want to do if people are dropping dead in the streets from Ebola and martial law has been declared, just by the way). For a mere alert, however, they say, “We issue a Travel Alert for short-term events we think you should know about when planning travel to a country. ” 

That’s right. Ebola might outlast the war in Ukraine or even Syria, but you don’t need to consider very carefully if you want to even go to these Ebola-stricken, martial law controlled countries in Africa at all right now…you just might want to “know about” the fact that OH BY THE WAY, YOU COULD DIE FROM EBOLA IF YOU GO THERE RIGHT NOW.

Also, the government has no plans to cancel any flights from Guinea, Sierra Leone or Liberia according to the White House press secretary (even though that’s how the first guy got here undetected) because, well, that just makes too much sense. So, yeah. Be “alerted” and get your tickets today. They’re probably even on sale.

In the meantime, the CDC keeps fidgeting on exactly how Ebola is transmitted…mostly because they can’t say anything definitive with 100% surety and they know it.

  First, the CDC removed the phrase “contaminated air” from their Ebola information webpage on August 4th. Then on September 22nd, the CDC updated the agency’s question and answer page on Ebola transmission to include a section on what happens if an Ebola patient coughs or sneezes on you (not whether or not the person vomits, by the way. Coughing and sneezing aren’t symptoms of Ebola, but vomiting is. 

All of these produce bodily fluids which can transmit the disease). Prior, the agency held steadfast to the idea that one absolutely has to have direct physical contact in order to catch Ebola. They have now admitted this is not true.

Now an NBC Cameraman has caught the disease, and he was behind the camera wearing a bunch of protective gear, just as many of the doctors and medical staff treating the infected who later became infected themselves also wore protective gear and took precautions. If it’s not airborne, how exactly are all these people still getting infected?

Well…our health agencies aren’t entirely sure. First they said it’s possibly bats, and they claim person-to-person it has to be direct bodily contact…but it’s definitely not airborne, right? Nope. No way. They’ll never say it even if it is. 

And viruses never mutate (even as the United Nations has now declared that the longer this Ebola outbreak lasts, the more chance the highly infectious, deadly virus has to mutate and become airborne, something that would be globally devastating). Hey, if a mosquito bites someone with Ebola, draws blood, then flies off to bite someone else? Well, that question has yet to be answered too…

Still, when the CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden appeared on CNN recently with Dr. Sanjay Gupta to discuss how the disease is transmitted, Frieden failed to address the CDC’s new coughing and sneezing addendum, and then actually managed to contradict himself in less than two minutes live on air:

You can tell by the big fat (creepy) smiles this was supposed to be a cutesy, reassuring exchange for the masses, but it went bad pretty quick. Here’s a partial transcript (the particular clip begins at 5:44ish in the video above, emphasis added below):

Dr. Thomas Frieden, CDC director [standing right next to CNN's Sanjay Gupta]: Well actually, Sanjay and I, if one of us had Ebola, the other would not be a contact right now. Because we’re not in contact. Just talking to someone is not a way to get infected. It’s not like the flu, not like the common cold. It requires direct physical contact.

CNN host Michaela Pereira: But if he sneezes on you, it’s a different story.

Sanjay Gupta: I think there’s a utility here because we’re having this conversation but I am within 3 feet of you. Wouldn’t I be considered a higher risk? My understanding reading your guidelines, sir, is that within 3 feet or direct contact — if I were to shake your hand, for example — would both qualify as being contact.

Frieden: We look at each situation individually and we assess it based on how sick the individual is and what the nature of the contact is. And certainly if you’re within 3 feet, that’s a situation we’d want to be concerned about. But in this case, where we haven’t hugged — we haven’t shaken hands — we have not had any contact that would allow either of our body fluids to be in contact with the other person.

Gupta: So, to Michaela’s point, the reason we talk about coughing and sneezing not being a concern — if you were to have coughed on me — you’re saying that would not be of concern?

Frieden: We would look at that situation very closely…

Sure they would… sure they would.

• Melissa Melton is a co-founder of TruthstreamMedia.com, where this first appeared. She is an experienced researcher, graphic artist and investigative journalist with a passion for liberty and a dedication to truth. Her aim is to expose the New World Order for what it is — a prison for the human soul from which we must break free.

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