THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

The Gates Foundation has been out and about, promoting vaccination. With a backlash from parents cautious about the increasing amount of vaccines being given to children, they have also seemingly started to put advertorial pieces in magazines like the New Yorker. Rather than persuade people, however, I’d argue that these kinds of advertorial journalism, funded by big foundations, actually work to alienate people from the causes they are advocating. The piece about vaccines that ran in the New Yorker is a mixture between the fine, old fashioned public service announcements crossed with a bit of authoritarianism: “Vaccinate your kids immediately, (stupid) parents.” Before this, the New Yorker also ran a piece about the Bill Gates and his new interest in recycled water. The piece then cleverly mixes up Monsanto’s bio-engineering, implying that both water recycled from sewage, and genetically modified seeds, inspire unreasonable disgust in people even when they are both perfectly safe. ...

A few months ago, my boss, a young Australian woman with a very cool approach towards life, showed up at work and said: “I hope none of you are pregnant.” We all looked at her enquiringly. “If so, you should know that my two year old daughter has just been diagnosed with chicken-pox.” Apparently pregnant women should stay away from chicken-pox patients. Later, when she was dropping me off in her car, I asked her why she hadn’t vaccinated the child. She said she’d been about to, but the child got the disease before she could get her shots. Then she said: “You know, I was talking to a friend of mine, and she said: getting this disease is like getting rid of bad karma. Its not a bad thing—it cleanses the body of bad toxins.” I nodded. It appeared, on a metaphysical level, to make sense. I have a document of my immunization record. In it, I see my parents gave me my shots: the MMR, the DPT, and the BCG shots. I also got the polio vaccine. Despite this, however, I came down with mea...

People, in case your local media failed to inform you, here’s the news: the New World Order just ended today. The balance of power just shifted to Eurasia, and its going to be a new and hopefully more peaceful century. Italy joined the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank yesterday (March 17th, 2015), followed by France and Germany. England has also decided to join, despite vociferous opposition from the USA. The USA’s ostentatious reason is that China doesn’t have the capacity to run a bank of this stature, because its culture is too corrupt and it doesn’t have the capacity to monitor corruption. And, it says, China will use this opportunity to consolidate itself as a global power, since it would have inordinate say in the workings of the bank. All of these are valid concerns. The only problem with these arguments, though, is that the Third World’s big powers, long cut out of the decision-making processes of the World Bank and the ADB, has now come into their own. They are raring t...